Tag: statesman

  • In conclusion

    The littlest cheese truck!
    Child and tiny truck. Missing: one tooth.

     

    As every summer ends in New Braunfels I always lament that I didn’t go swimming enough or that I didn’t go tubing or enjoy all the fun, outdoorsy stuff there is to do here. By October, I’m full-on bitter about the cooling weather and how it means no more swimming.

    I somehow forget that I’m not really that outdoorsy and that even though I love swimming, I hate being out in 105-degree heat and get cranky if the air conditioner doesn’t stay well below 77 degrees in the house.

    This summer is different because instead of somehow feeling like I lost the time due to summer lethargy, it’s actually been jam-packed with activity for me and for the whole family. There’s been more travel than I’ve done since before the kids were born, the conclusion of something I’d been working on for a while (or at least the next phase of work on it), a door opening for a new site that I had been wanting to write for but that I hadn’t been able to commit time to and, honestly, the best summer I’ve had with my girls yet.

    That’s been kind of of the showstopper around here. Several times a week my wife and I will exchange a look as our daughters are calmly playing together or doing something completely new and we’ll say, “They’re getting bigger.” They’re growing up. They’re not babies or even toddlers. Our Lilly turned 6 a few weeks ago. Only a few days later she lost her first tooth (no worries; it was painless and she didn’t even notice it was gone until I pointed out the gap). As I write this, she’s completed her first week of 1st Grade. Her sister, the curly-haired wild child, is still destructive and prone to bursts of turbo energy that exhaust us all, but she has also grown sweeter and kinder and more in love with us and her sister than I could have hoped.

    She’ll make a huge fuss about taking something to school (a toy, a paper with writing on it, anything) and after giving up on trying to convince her she shouldn’t, I’ll find out that she only wanted to take the item to school to show it to her favorite teacher because she can’t keep something she loves to herself and wants to share.

    This summer we got to take the girls to Disney World, we were able to make a beach trip, Lilly went on a bunch of field trips with her older-kids daycare to places I’ve never even seen, I went to Las Vegas for my first work trip in a very long time (more on that in a bit), my wife did some work traveling and I attended my 20-year high school reunion. We sold our damn Austin house, relieving years of stress.

    I haven’t been tubing yet (there’s still time!) but as Labor Day approaches and the summer winds down, I don’t feel like I missed much. In fact, I feel like I’m ready for things to calm down and conclude. It was a great summer, but not for all the reasons I usually expect.

    Double decker shopping

    Work writing

    A really busy couple of weeks at work. Here’s what was in the paper and online.

    Sam Killermann, one of the working-at-coffee-shop experts I spoke to for my story. Photo by Deborah Cannon / Austin American-Statesman
    Sam Killermann, one of the working-at-coffee-shop experts I spoke to for my story. Photo by Deborah Cannon / Austin American-Statesman

     

    Digital Savant columns:

     

    Sony SmartWatch

     

    Digital Savant Micro features:

    Other random stuff:

    A lengthy blog review of the Leap Motion controller.

    A silly blog post suggesting new names for Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

    A blog post about a new Austin-based video commenting tool called FrameBuzz.

    Las Vegas

    Work trips are super stupid-boring, so I won’t subject you to the details of a trip I took for Vegas, but I’ll just say that because of the nature of my beat and the nature of working at a newspaper with a limited travel budget, I don’t take a lot of trips to cover stories outside of Austin.

    Since last year, when it was announced that South by Southwest Interactive would be doing a conference in Las Vegas, my then-editor and I assumed I would go, but even a few months before the event in August, I still had my doubts that I would actually go. Things have been so busy this summer that I began to like the idea of just not going but when my editors approved my travel plans, I started to get excited about it again.

    I’m so glad I went. Not only where there plenty of things to write about before the SXSW V2V, as the Vegas conference was called, but I had a lot more fun there than I was expecting, a combination of knowing a few people from Austin and other places that I got to hang out with, a really upscale venue with killer hotel rooms (The Cosmopolitan) and an overall laid back and accommodating vibe that wasn’t as crazy or as hectic as the SXSW I’m used to in March in Austin. No matter how wild things might get or how late I stayed out, I didn’t have to worry about a 45-minute drive home, which is always in the back of my mind at SXSW Interactive.

    As I tried to make clear in my stories, there’s a lot of change happening in downtown Las Vegas and techies are beginning to take notice that there might be some big opportunities there (MyStatesman version here).

    As for what I actually wrote, I did a Digital Savant column about how the event came together and a Sunday business story about the Downtown Project aspects that helped draw SXSW to Las Vegas.

    After the event was over, I did a wrap-up of the overall event. (MyStatesman version here.)

    I also shot a video at V2V that was expertly edited quickly by Emma Janzen. You can find that below.

     

     

    Other highlights from Vegas: playing blackjack with friends one night drinking endless Manhattans (my new favorite get-drunk-quick drink!) and woke up to the worst hangover I’ve had since my 20s and maybe ever. I literally could not look at a computer screen for several hours.

    And then I thought about how that might look on Twitter.

    I went to Ellis Island for karaoke and had the time of my life. Vegas is the perfect karaoke city.

    I finally got my ass to the pinball museum, which was pretty great but won’t replace the soft spot in my heart I have quickly developed for Austin’s Pinballz.

    I had my doubts about The Cosmopolitan because the first impression it gives is pretty douchey, but my goodness the rooms are enormous and the dealers are super friendly and the restaurants there are incredible. Highly recommended, just don’t let the freaky lobby freak you out like it did me:

    I put a whole mess of Vegas photos on Flickr. You can view the whole album here. I put a few of them below as well.

    Inaugural #SXSWV2V sushi and fried chicken and Google Glass meetup!

     

    Chris, Claire, Sweet John and Me.

     

    My power

    Steve Case keynote @ SXSW V2V

    Previously

    I mentioned the launch of Previously.tv a while back, a site created by the founders of Mighty Big TV / Television Without Pity and featuring lots of alumni as contributors.

    It’s a wonderful thing to be able to write for people you love and respect and enjoy working with, but even after the launch, I hadn’t approached them about contributing to the site because I was trying to force myself to stop freelancing and to finish the novel I started before the start of the year. With that finally done in late June and me pretty far into the second draft/editing of it (about 210 of 360 or so pages), I finally sent a query and was thrilled to be welcomed aboard.

    My first piece for Previously ran last week and was an “I Am Not a Crackpot!” suggesting that the part of Marc Maron in the TV show Maron should be recast.

    This week, I wrote a story about The Walking Dead’s lead character Rick Grimes for the site’s Career Week and I’ve got another piece in the pipeline.

    It feels wonderful to be a part of that team and if you’re not already checking out that site and making it part of your daily reading, you’re missing some really fun, creative TV writing. I mean, this Tales of the Gold Monkey post alone… my God. Consider it indispensable for the coming fall TV season.

    Those space monkeys

    Screen Shot 2013-08-31 at 12.35.04 AMWe’re still updating the space-faring adventures of Bobbo, Meany and the crew in weekly fashion and their Twitter account has been pretty active of late.

    Also, we’re about to hit 300 “Likes” on Facebook. More of those are always good, hint hint.

    It’s been so long since I’ve updated this blog (mostly lethargy, but also I didn’t feel like I had much to say till now) that if you haven’t kept up, you’ve missed five whole new comics!

    They are:

    We’ve been nothing if not extremely topical.

     

  • The All-updates update

    A sea turtle

    This is what is happening, in bite-sized updates:

    That whole selling our Austin rental house thing

    Sold! We got three offers the first day and one the second day and then no more offers. We were told by our fantastic realtor that this is common in this market and the good news was that two of the first three offers were serious and we got into a little bidding war situation. We came out about 5 percent above asking price and we closed on Friday, so a combination of a scorching hot Austin seller’s market and good timing means we came out pretty well ahead.

    That wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t put a big, scary amount of money into fixing the house up for sale, but the investment and the worry paid off.

    Now I need some margaritas to celebrate.

    Travel!

    Because of kids, we rarely go anywhere, but this year has suddenly been full of travel. We did Disney World and shortly after that, I went to my 20-year reunion in Oklahoma. We ended up going on a shorter second vacation two weeks ago to sunny S. Padre Island which the girls enjoyed almost as much as Disney.

    On that trip, I got to really relax and enjoy myself, eat a lot of seafood and see some rescued sea turtles (above), which I immediately chose as my new spirit animals. As opposed to a cranky crab, which I can be when I’m not at the beach (below).

    Crab, man

    My wife took a just-concluded work trip, so I’ve been juggling taking care of the kids with work, which has left me exhausted. But the kids behaved, which they always seem to do when one of us is away (do they think they’re in trouble or something?), so it went well. My wife will be taking her turn going solo when I go cover SXSW V2V next month in Las Vegas. I like Vegas, but it’s a work trip and it’s no fun going there alone. Hope the conference is exciting and has good energy.

    Novel

    I feel weird saying much about this because like all superstitious writers, I fear the jinx, but the quick status update is that I took a few days away from the material and have since spent the last week and a half just reading back through it without trying to edit as I go. I was expecting to be horrified and to want to rewrite huge swaths, but instead I’ve been surprised by stuff I don’t even remember writing and pleased with a lot of it. Next step will be to give it a hard 2nd-draft edit/revision and to get some feedback from a very tiny group of people I asked to read the first draft. Not sure what’ll happen after that, to be perfectly honest but I’m definitely not going to just put it away. This year for me has been primarily about this project and very little else.

    Things that have brought me joy lately

    This video (which I was very late to seeing), this song, this blog post, this Tumblr, this T-shirt, the photo below.

    Don’t worry, we were able to reclaim her arm from the seaweed virus before she ate Megatokyo.

    Stuff I wrote

    My Digital Savant column last week was a roundup of reviews: the video games The Last of Us (depressing!) and Gunpoint (clever and funny!), as well as the Nikon D5200 SLR camera.

    This week’s column was about the nonprofit Austin Free-Net, which has been around since 1995 and has been doing great work in the Austin community to bring Internet access and computer services to those who wouldn’t otherwise get it.

    I also did some Digital Savant Micro stories about clickjacking and about Google’s just-announced Chromecast dongle.

    One new thing at work is that it looks like I’ll be doing more video stuff soon. More on that as it happens.

    Pacific-Specific

    Monkeys who hump and more

    The Space Monkeys! really liked the movie Pacific Rim(which I still need to see) and this week did a whole lot of sexing in honor of “Hump Day.”

    Give them a Facebook Like, won’t you?

    I made some tacos and they ended up in a book

    Through one of those random Austin things that happens from time to time, a friend of mine found himself working on a book about breakfast tacos and he asked if I’d like to be included. This involved me making some tacos and taking them to a photo shoot and writing up a little bit about my love for and history with the humble breakfast taco.

    The book turned out beautifully and a launch party for it drew a huge crowd.

    Buy a copy. I promise it’s worth your money and time.

    In the taco book

    On Twitter

    Two out-of-the ordinary things that happened on Twitter recently.

    The night of the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman verdict, I tweeted something I thought was very vague and of course that’s the thing that people latch on to retweet hundreds of times.

    You can’t really see the responses or how some people reposted it anymore, but what was interested was the responses said way more about the person than the original Tweet did about me, I think.  It was a very weird, bad week on multiple fronts and in some ways it just summed up the bummer that was in the air that night.

    The other Tweet was much more recent and came from my daughter. I think it may have had something to do with a dinosaur exhibit she just saw, which must mean she thinks her father is about to become extinct:

    I wish I’d had a good response to that other than, “Damn. You got me. Well done.”

  • Doing the Disney

    We bought hats and the girls made faces. Yup, those are my kids, all right.
    We bought hats and the girls made faces. Yup, those are my kids, all right. (All photos in this post by me, my wife or Disney PhotoPass.)

     

    [dropcap]I[/dropcap] loved Disney World. It would be easy to complain about individual parts of the experience. I’d never been before, not even as a child, and I could have chosen to be disappointed that because we were toting two kids and fulfilling their dreams (a common parenting thing), my wife and I didn’t really get to go on any boss grownup rides.

    I could complain about the heat which, when it wasn’t raining, was a stifling, exhausting omnipresence. I could complain that it was so corporate in that sneaky ingratiating way that makes you forget that you are basically going broke trying to have a good time and I could complain that traveling on a plane with a 3-year-old who decides to completely lose her shit was in my top 10 horrible nightmares list and that this item on the list came absolutely true and was just as horrific as I’d dared to bad-dream.

    But fuck all that. I loved the experience. I loved the traveling and I loved the resort where we stayed and I loved the damn refillable plastic cups they gave us that we filled with water or fruit punch or sweet tea. I loved the pool, I loved the boats, even the ones that took forever to arrive to take us two minutes away across the water. I loved all four parks, even poor, divisive Animal Kingdom and Epcot, which could be a complete drag if you’re in the wrong frame of mind for them. Come to think of it, that could all of Disney World. All of Florida, in fact.

    Just one example of the insanely awesome overkill of a Disney resort hotel.
    Just one example of the insanely awesome overkill of a Disney resort hotel.

     

    But perhaps it was that it had been so long since I’d taken a proper no-work vacation (about two years, honestly) and that our kids had wanted this for so long and that my parents came along, too, and offered some much-needed help. But I had a great, no-lie awesome time. Instead of getting more worn out as the vacation went on and wishing we were home, we settled into a groove where we got used to our surroundings, figured out the best ways to navigate and got into the perfect cocoon of comfort and relaxation.

    Of course, if you are a parent, you know that I’m talking about a cocoon where kids still lose their shit fighting over a seat at the dinner table and where you have to have lights out in the hotel room by 9 p.m. even though you want to stay up and drink or watch TV until 2 a.m. But within those boundaries, I found so much to love about the parks and Florida’s general weirdness and the uninterrupted time we got to spend with the kids.

    It was expensive. It was a lot of work to keep the kids entertained and fed and content for a full six nights + travel days. But we’re still, nearly three weeks later, talking about things that happened on the trip, looking at the photos we have and talking about it to anyone who’ll listen.

    Disney has got this stuff down. They know what they’re doing and even when things don’t work like they’re supposed to (the transportation breaks down or the heat is unbearable amid way too many people), Disney finds a way to distract you. Too hot? Here’s a parade for you right down the damn street! Monorail broken? Here, take a free boat or a bus. Don’t like the food at this restaurant? There are 15 other restaurants in your vicinity and they all serve stuff your kids will actually eat.

    An editor friend of mine told me that at Disney World they really take care of you and it was reassuring to be at a place where everyone, from the workers to other parents, understood how kids can be in unfamiliar surrounding and all the little things it takes to put them, and you, at ease.

    We could see the monorail from our room.
    We could see the monorail from our room.

     

    So here are the things I loved and the things I did not love about Disney World. I imagine we’ll go back in a few years when the kids are older, especially since Carolina at 3 seemed about a year or two too young to really experience it (and who knows how much she’ll remember).

    Loved it:

    • Pretty much all the Pixar-themed rides and shows. The 40-minute Finding Nemo stage musical was fantastic, the Buzz Lightyear shooting ride was fun for every single person in our party (ages 3 to my parents) and the Monsters Inc. stand-up comedy show was surprisingly hilarious and not cheesy like I was expecting. It was actually more enjoyable for me than Monsters University.  If you find yourself at Disney World and don’t know what to do, hit the Pixar stuff first.
    • The food was something we were expecting to struggle with. We were on a meal plan and based on the description, we thought the “Quick service” restaurants were going to be a bunch of small snacks or junk food. Turns out they serve quite good food and, most importantly, stuff the kids enjoyed. And there are tons of them, so after you feel like you’re eating the same stuff for two or three days, you can switch it up and try other places at the parks. We fell in love with the quick-service place at our resort.
    • Our resort was amazing. Gorgeous buildings, great service, super entertaining lobby with live music every night, shops, good restaurants and beautiful pools. We would stay there again for sure.
    • I don’t get to travel much anymore, so going country-by-country at Epcot was probably way more fun for me than for the kids. We completely fell in love with the giant Japan store and the Germany stuff took me back to my days living overseas. Mexico completely sucked for me, but probably only because all the stuff you could buy in that area was stuff you can get much cheaper in San Antonio.
    • I haven’t been to Florida much and I guess I was expecting it to be a lot more urban and paved, but there is so much empty land and swamp and water that it really feels like you’re cut off from all the sprawl of a state like Texas. That’s a weird thing to enjoy on vacation, but I liked in some ways the feeling of being a little bit isolated from the rest of the country geographically.

    Hated it:

    • That cuts both ways, actually. I felt isolated in a nice way for a vacation, but also in a way that made me twitchy as someone who likes to keep up with the news and know what’s going on. More on that below where I talk about what happened when I got back home.
    • It takes chutzpah for someone from Texas to complain about Florida heat, but seriously, in a park with so many people and without much shade, Magic Kingdom just felt like an oven both days we went. Other parks with more shade and less people like Animal Kingdom and Epcot were much better. The unpredictable weather goes without saying.
    • Transportation was a problem a few times for us with much-delayed boat rides or a monorail that wasn’t working. The buses for the parks not near our hotel were fine, but the stroller we rented was huge and had to be broken down for the bus, which was always stressful for me, the one who had to deal with stroller wrangling.
    • It was great that there was Wi-Fi everywhere, from the resorts to all the parks, but man was the Wi-Fi spotty at the hotel, especially late at night when I was trying to get some writing and news-surfing done in the lobby of our building. Is that when everybody’s in their room jamming up the network downloading porn after their kids go to bed? I imagine so.
    • That’s pretty much it, which should tell you how much we liked the trip. All the hotel and park people we dealt with were super-curteous. As parents, we never felt like we were getting stares or being shamed when our kids occasionally acted up (OK, on the plane ride that happened, but we deserved it). Other parents seemed to take it in stride and staff at the hotel and parks made it a priority to make our kids feel special and welcomed. So, I guess that’s not a “hate” item… I hate that I don’t have more to complain about!
    Rebecca insisted that getting a monogrammed hat at Disney is a tradition. So I did. "Where's yours?" I asked. She said, "I already have one at home."
    Rebecca insisted that getting a monogrammed hat at Disney is a tradition. So I did. “Where’s yours?” I asked. She said, “I already have one at home.”

     

    Here are a few more photos:

     

    They loved the airport.
    They loved the airport.
    This image ran in the paper with my column because we couldn't find an image where my wife and I didn't look all sweaty and/or bloated from Disney meals.
    This image ran in the paper with my column because we couldn’t find an image where my wife and I didn’t look all sweaty and/or bloated from Disney meals.
    Ariel was all by herself in the grotto for hours at a time, which is not at all creepy.
    Ariel was all by herself in the grotto for hours at a time, which is not at all creepy.
    The first part of a crazy Princess lunch as the Cinderella castle.
    The first part of a crazy Princess lunch as the Cinderella castle.
    My daughters couldn't understand why Pocahontas and Governor Ratcliffe are just hanging out like it's no big deal.
    My daughters couldn’t understand why Pocahontas and Governor Ratcliffe are just hanging out like it’s no big deal.
    At a character breakfast in our hotel.
    At a character breakfast in our hotel.
    Father's Day landed on the day of our trip after we left, so we had to gather for that way later. This was my message to my dad on that Sunday.
    Father’s Day landed on the day of our trip after we left, so we had to gather for that way later. This was my message to my dad on that Sunday.

    At the Hollywood park

    So, here’s what happened when I got back.  I was still Tweeting and commenting on stuff like the Apple product announcement while on my trip (there are some long lines at Disney and I had my phone).  My co-worker Addie Broyles, who writes about food for the Statesman, emailed me suggested we do something together about whether it’s a good idea to unplug from technology on vacation.

    She was going to be taking a trip to Florida with her son and was planning to disconnect herself from social media, unlike my Instagramming ass.

    It turned out to be a great idea. We wrote dual columns for Digital Savant that ran this past week. Mine was about staying plugged in on vacation and hers was about her experience doing the opposite. (MyStatesman subscription required for those two columns.)

    They ran in print with this great Don Tate illustration:

     

    By Don Tate / American-Statesman
    By Don Tate / American-Statesman

     

    We also did a public Google Hangout you can watch below talking about the topic in more detail with special guest(s).

     

    [hr]

     

     Work, monkeys and more

    The Friend ZoneA new Digital Savant Micro ran in print and online explaining “Virtual machines.”

    I also got to attend the first day of the huge RTX 2013 (Rooster Teeth Expo) and posted a short blog and some photos I shot at the event. I met some really great people and had a fun time.

    I keep forgetting to post this here, but I was on NPR’s “Marketplace” for about five seconds talking about Rolodexes. A Don Draper reference was employed.

    In the world of our monkey friends from space, their recent adventures include a forced visit to The Friend Zone and an unintentional drug brownie trip.

    We took a much shorter family vacation to the beach this last weekend and because my vacations still involve staying up late and working, I was able to finish something I’ve been working on since around December.

    I Tweeted this from the hotel lobby of the Hilton Garden Inn at South Padre Island around 1:30 a.m.:

    I hope to have a lot more to share about that soon but the first big step, just finishing the thing, is done and now I’m starting on editing and next-drafting and moving it forward.

  • The House for Strangers

    [dropcap]I[/dropcap]n 2001, I bought a house. It was a crazy time. 9/11 had just happened and we were all exposed tooth nerves walking around trying to Make Sense of It All with no idea of what the future might be. We did strange things.

    I was only 26. I had a very great editor who told me, “The interest rates are insane. It’s never going to be like this again. You need to buy a house.”

    A very tiny picture taken a very long time ago.
    A very tiny picture taken a very long time ago.

    So I did. I’m really impressionable that way.

    The house was not very large and it was not very new, but I didn’t know that then, I just knew that this incredible home with a gigantic backyard perfect for parties was suddenly mine and all I had to do was not go totally broke paying to move in. After that, things would be fine. And then they were.

    I didn’t stay long in that house. Just a few years later, I got married and we moved further south and we kept the house as a rental property, managed by a company that made sure all we had to do was stay paid up. It got stressful when we’d lose tenants, but things always worked out and I always maintained that all the expenses helped us on our income taxes. (We found out later that it really didn’t, but it was nice to have that illusion for so long as we were losing money.)

    We thought about selling the house. Many, many times. There were times when we were paying double mortgage and had fetuses growing in bellies (OK, just the one belly) and my wife was all, “WHY DO WE STILL HAVE THIS MONEY PIT!?” and I would remind her that the actual movie The Money Pit had a happy ending and she wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the night.

    Good times.

    Then the housing crash hit. I don’t know if you heard about it. Fucking dire wolves attacked the housing market and chewed it up, ruining it for everyone! Yes, they were supposed to be extinct. That’s why everyone was so surprised. Well, except for economists who predicted the housing collapse in books like, The Fucking Dire Wolves Are Coming! and Paradise Lost: The Housing Market is About to Be Chewed Up BY FUCKING DIRE WOLVES, WHY WON’T YOU LISTEN?!

    Every time the subject of selling the house came up, I would raise my hands diagonally at about a 45-degree angle and say, “The housing market. What are you gonna do? It’s a terrible time to sell. Dire wolves.”

    [quote float=”right”]Dire wolves![/quote]Then the housing market got good. Then it got really, really good. Then we decided to sell the house.

    Part of my reluctance to sell it was that I had always fantasized about moving back to Austin and maybe expanding the house. The yard is so enormous that wouldn’t be impossible. But the neighborhood we lived in never really got into renovation and expansion projects and at some point in our stay in New Braunfels, my wife decided we should die here.

    Usually when your wife tells you you’re going to die somewhere, it’s pretty ominous and you should probably not be anywhere near that spot from then on. But the conversation was actually quite pleasant. It went like so:

    Rebecca: After this, we should build one more house in New Braunfels and then that’s it.

    Omar: What do you mean “That’s it?”

    Rebecca: That would be our last house. That’s where we’d retire.

    Omar: You mean that’s where we’ll die?

    Rebecca: You first.

    The thing is, I actually found all that comforting. We have a plan. That’s a little story I trot out whenever someone asks me why I’m not trying to get a job in New York or D.C.. I tell them it’s because I already know where I’m growing old and they back away slowly and then go subtweet about it.

    Did I mention we are selling a house?

    I took you on that detour to get you to here, where I am in the middle of trying to fix up a house to sell right before we take a big family trip, which is like trying to ride a roller coaster while painting a house, which incidentally is something that costs close to $3,000, I just learned.

    I was never a big DIYer when I lived in that house. I’m still not. I barely have time to write my own blog posts. So it was with dismay that we saw how dated the fixtures and ceiling fans look and other bits of wear and tear that accumulated in the time since I lived there.

    The yard is still spectacular. The back patio, with its Saltillo tile and tin roof, is still wonderful and I miss it a lot. The backyard has so many trees and so much shade that it was always 10 to 20 degrees cooler than everywhere else in the summer. We visited the house recently in the middle of a rainstorm and I imagined myself sitting there with my cup of coffee in the morning using my laptop back when Wi-Fi was a new and wondrous thing of no wires.

    I am buying ceiling fans at Lowe’s and talking about paint swatches and remodeling bathrooms (by proxy; we have people) and fixing fences and yards. We’re making a house beautiful for people we don’t know yet, picking out items for a place we’ll never live, trying to make it nice but not so nice that it’ll impose our style on someone who might find it crappy. It’s a weird, tricky balance, trying to spend enough to make the house desirable but not spending so much that we defeat the purpose of selling.

    So that’s what’s been on my mind. I miss the house but I’m also eager to be rid of it. In the years since we moved out, we’ve replaced a roof and a furnace, put in new carpet, made endless small plumbing repairs and gotten stressed about house issues for a place we don’t even live. We don’t need it anymore and we haven’t needed it for a while. But letting go of something you love that you think you could love again is never easy. Now I just hope someone loves it just as much as I once did.

    [hr]

    Other new things happening

    I have a new editor at work, which is exciting and fun.

    I mentioned a family vacation. I’ll have a lot more to say about that soon. It involves a whole world of Disney stuff. You can probably guess.

    I’m still painting miniatures, this time a set for my brother while I await my Zombicide stuff to arrive in the fall.

    I am so cool.
    I am so cool.

     

    Also, I am now buying comic books on eBay, so instead of having a midlife crisis where I buy sports cars and unsuccessfully solicit blowjobs from waitresses, I seem to be going the other way, continuing to do things I stopped doing as a teenager before there was such a bay as eBay.

    And lastly, my older daughter finished kindergarten, which seems unreal and far too soon, but then again, she’s worked really hard this year and come a long way and is thrilled to be going to first grade. She did great.

    [hr]

    Work stuff and monkeys

    Of course, I have articles to share.

    Meany at the discoI wrote a meditative column about whether our use of technology is making us speak less. I’m not sure there’s a definitive conclusion there, but certainly the ways we use our voices is changing, at least.

    And this week’s column was about our changing TV viewing habits, a column prompted by the debut of Arrested Development’s fourth season on Netflix. I also did a bonus blog with a few more thoughts on the subject.

    There were also new Digital Savant Micro features on the Xbox One and on Gmail’s new tab-focused design changes.

    A note on some of those MyStatesman.com stories. Our paywall goes up soon for reals as our free preview ends. That means links I post here to articles will often require a subscription to read. Blog posts won’t be affected, but most of my weekly stuff that runs in the newspaper will.

    Separately on the blog, I wrote about a cool civic tech expo, a plastic surgeon live Tweeting a procedure, and an Austin-made app for the website A Beautiful Mess.

    Our favorite monkeys in space were mystified by “Shelfies,” panicking at the disco, and engaged in a discussion about TV binge-viewing.

    Give our monkeys a Facebook like or a Twitter follow, would you?

    And that’s it! Please hope for me that the house sells so I can stop buying hardware and embarrassing myself.

  • Calamity

    Not my actual back, but this is my blog and I can pretend.
    Not my actual back, but this is my blog and I can pretend.

     

    Nothing major happened the last two weeks since I wrote that monster blog entry and promised myself that I would write much shorter entries more often.

    A few personal heroes died: Roger Ebert and Jonathan Winters. At home, lots of little horrible things happened that kind of destabilized things around here.

    The most significant was something I mentioned last time; our girls got a stomach bug. What I didn’t know at the time was that it would take a few days longer for them to fully recover and that the whole week after Easter was going to be a lot of changing work shifts and hoping that neither kid threw up at school and got send home. (That happened twice.) Luckily, my wife and I both fought off whatever the bug was, although we each had a dicey day where we thought we were getting it.

    Then my mother got it, much worse than the kids. Then my father in law got it. Then other members of the family reported other ailments. And this is right after I’d just been knocked on my ass for a full day with horrible allergies.

    Things were starting to go back to normal as the kids got over their bi-directional expulsion of bodily fluids and then suddenly I started getting a weird pain in my back.

    It wasn’t suddenly in one way: I began to feel some back issues right after South by Southwest and I thought a massage I got soon after had fixed most of it. But this one specific spot on my back kept getting worse and worse until finally it got to where I couldn’t stand for too long without a sharp pain mid-back, just to the right of my spine. It hurt to sit, it hurt to stand, it hurt even to lie down sometimes.

    Maybe it was from lugging a heavy laptop bag around during the festival or maybe I just pulled something at the gym. I had no idea what was up and it kept getting worse. So I saw a doctor.

    I don’t have a primary down here in New Braunfels, so I went through my insurance and just picked one at random. It turned out to be in a really nice house-like building that specialized in back pain, allergies and, I guess massage therapy.

    I won’t bore you with all the details, but the conclusion was this: they thought it was a muscle spasm and they injected a needle full of saline right the fuck in the muscle that was giving me problems. They warned me it would hurt and boy were they not lying. I stifled a scream as I stood there with a needle in me and my muscle spasming worse than ever.

    It started to feel better immediately and they prescribed me some anti-inflammatory meds and some serious muscle relaxer medicine that I can only take at night before I go to bed. That stuff knocked me out two days in a row and is not to be trifled with.

    The back feels a lot better but that spot of pain still comes and goes a little. I really don’t know how people who live with chronic pain do it. It’s at the point where all I want is to feel normal again and not have to worry about a physical problem getting worse and taking me out of commission. It seems like small potatoes given the health issues others have to deal with, but all this has been happening right around my 38th birthday and I am very aware that I’m at the stage where shit’s going to start breaking down, some of it irrevocably, and I should stop expecting my body to just stay the way it is forever without problems. There’s certainly more to come.

     

     

    As sometimes happens with this blog, I wrote the above and left it unpublished, planning to go back in the next day and add images and links to flesh it out.

    That was Sunday night. On Monday, Boston was bombed.

    I didn’t feel at all like going in and looking over what I wrote about back pain and a stomach bug and publishing it that night.

    Apart from something so significant making all of our problems look so much smaller, it just felt all too familiar to me and the gut-punch to the stomach never really goes away. Not after they figure out what happened, not after they find the person or people who did it, not after the punishment is dealt.

     

    Some new writing stuff: last week, my Digital Savant column was a sampling of reader emails about a column I did on technology gripes. The reader responses were so good, I rolled them together into a piece and gave my own feedback to their problems.

    Clay Shortall shows off some of the 3-D printing tools of his trade. Photo by Christina Burke, Austin American-Statesman
    Clay Shortall shows off some of the 3-D printing tools of his trade. Photo by Christina Burke, Austin American-Statesman

     

    This week’s column is about the future of 3-D printing and how quickly we may see it go mainstream. I think this is something that’s going to evolve really quickly and get into our homes a lot sooner than you might expect. Not everyone will need one that soon and it’s going to take a much easier learning curve, but I think it won’t be long before some version of 3-D printing becomes very, very popular and widespread.

    The last two Micro features were about Wi-Fi calling and Bitcoins.

    I had a few other things to say about Bitcoin on Twitter.

    I also had my first front-page story in a while, a Q&A on Google Fiber coming to Austin. (It was paired with the main Statesman news story, which you can find here.) There were rumors about it starting the Friday before the announcement and it snowballed into a pretty sizable national story by the time the official announcement happened. I was there and it felt a lot like a pep rally only instead of your football coach and principal, it was the mayor, the governor and a bunch of Google people telling us how lucky Austin is to be getting such a cool thing. We shall see how long it takes; if there’s one thing Austinites like to do is complain about things that don’t meet their expectations.

    And one other story I did was about Austin’s Rooster Teeth, who are going independent and closing in on 2 billion (yes BILLION) views on YouTube. There’s also a separate blog post with some more background info on their 10th anniversary.

     

     

    Our Space Monkeys addressed the situation in North Korea and dealt with breakfast cereal mascots.

    For my 38th(!) birthday, we kept it pretty low-key. We went to San Antonio for lunch, I saw a movie (The Evil Dead; it was fine, not great) with my brother and played “Zombicide” that night, which was lots of fun.

    Took the girls to the Children’s Museum this last weekend and they painted these for you:

  • Post-fest

    Honestly the best thing I saw at SXSW, maybe?

     

    The hardest blog posts to write, I’ve found, are the ones you don’t want to write but feel you have to write.

    Someone else has already wordplayed a term, “Oblogatory,” out of this, right? I’m afraid to Google it and fall down a rabbit hole.

    In fact this whole blog entry should have been called “Rabbit holes” because for the last few weeks, I’ve been allowing myself to slip down into them in order to not talk about South by Southwest Interactive.

    You guys, you have no idea how much I don’t want to talk about SXSW anymore. Last week, at a meeting with one of my editors, I fretted that I honestly have no idea whether I should keep mining the festival for stories and trends or move on in case readers are just completely sick of SXSW.

    And that’s the weird part. I’m not really sick of it. I had a pretty great time at the festival and I’m not one of those people who gets online and bitches every year about how it’s not the same as it used to be or that last year’s was so much better or whatever. Every year is different, even if some things stay the same on the reporting/working side of things and I found lots to be excited about and keep me busy.

    But it was the busy that really killed me this year. Some years, I have so much fun and so many cool things happen that they far outweigh the sense of work and I end up feeling euphoric about the experience. This year, as seems to happen on odd-numbered years, I came out more exhausted than exhilarated, my body a wreck from carrying a heavy laptop, walking and biking in rain, and just keeping incredibly long hours with not enough sleep.

    This was a problem even after the festival. The way it usually works is that I spend weeks gearing up, work the five days (Friday-Tuesday) straight through, come in to work Wednesday to write a wrap up and then take a few days off to rest and recuperate.

    Things went fine until I went in to work that Wednesday when the fest ended and was completely paralyzed, buried under a mountain of blog posts, essays and emails about the fest that I felt I had to get through before I could properly articulate what it all meant.

    Distractions kept coming up and by midday I wasn’t even close to getting through that stack. And then the day ended, my deadline passed, and still I had the barest flicker of an idea of what I had seen that could tie it all together. My brain was shutting down, having been scheduled to detach from the festival by day’s end. It ran away without me.

    I spent that night at home barreling through and writing anyway, trying to make something cohesive out of an experience that has gotten bigger than my ability to write authoritatively about it, at least in that moment.

    The column, much longer than budgeted, was turned in and pushed through the system to be published the following Monday.

    That Thursday night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept waking up, remembering things that should have been in that column, threads I should have followed and memorable bits I forgot to include. Then I would remind myself, half-awake, that the column was already too long and nothing more would fit. But my brain wouldn’t stop working. It just whirred and whirred.

    And that really scared me.

    It’s why instead of writing a bunch of follow-up articles and blog posts related to the fest, I’ve tried to move on, mostly unsuccessfully. Two months+ of obsessing about one thing and trying to outpace everyone else in somehow mastering it as a subject hollowed me out this year. It’s taken a while to not feel antsy even thinking about it, honestly.

    So enough about that. I’ll link later on in this post to most of the stuff I wrote/was a part of during the festival, but honestly, I can already use another break from talking about SXSW.

     

    Things that are not SXSW:


    Video games

    Post-fest meant I had some free time to do things like vacuum the filthy floor, which accumulates child-crumbs on the daily, and to finally play some video games for the first time in months.

    I finally got my hands on a Nintendo Wii U which is great in some ways (some of the games are OK, I love the overall design) and terrible in others (sloooooow menus, very limited GamePad connectivity range) and really cumbersome update/install processes that seem to come up with every single new game you insert or buy online.

    I also played a bit of Tomb Raider (much better than I was expecting), a great downloadable game called Bit.Trip Runner 2, Lego City Undercover and most of all BioShock Infinite, which is taking up most of my gaming time right now. BioShock was my favorite game of 2007, though to be fair, Team Fortress 2 came out that year and I’ve spent many more hours on that. But that’s only to say I’ve been waiting a long time for a proper follow-up after I was let down by BioShock 2, which I didn’t bother finishing.

    Infinite is gorgeous and brave in a way that so many games aren’t and I’m enjoying just falling into that world and taking my time with it.

    Kickstarter and tabletop gaming

    e552933abbf07c4ced415b7f0f4721bc_large

    Speaking of games, I seem to have developed a quick-spreading intense addiction to both Kickstarter and to tabletop/board games all of a sudden, mostly due to one great game called “Zombicide.”

    My brother owns it and was part of the original Kickstarter last year.  We’ve played the game a few times and I really have grown to love it. It’s complex and takes forever to play, but it’s just really well-designed, has gorgeous miniatures and just really puts you in the mindset of trying to survive a zombie apocalypse; it’s basically a high-end Walking Dead board game.

    This year, they rolled out a much more ambitious Kickstarter campaign for a Season Two game and an expansion.  At first, I was just going to let it go by because my brother was planning to get it anyway and he’s the only person I play with. But he said, “What if I move someday?” and that got me thinking I should get my own copy and then I decided I should just get all three and then the stretch goal items hooked me in even more and before I knew it I had pledged a couple of hundred dollars to a game I’m not even sure I have room in the house to store.

    You guys, the Kickstarter was so exciting. I downloaded the Kickstarter app and started checking it every day for updates and new stretch goal items and it was just such a sorely-needed rabbit hole for me to fall into at the time. The campaign finally ended on (Easter!) Sunday at more than $2.5 million, making it break the record for a Kickstarter board game project. Last I checked there were over 30,000 comments from geeks completely obsessing over every detail of the game, its components and its (incredibly generous) stretch goal prizes.

    I won’t get the games until September, but I’ve also fallen into a sub-rabbit hole of looking into how I’ll paint the figurines. Suddenly I’m researching acrylics and brushes and X-Acto knives and watching paint tutorial videos.  I’ve also been playing the “Penny Arcade” card game and I gave my brother a copy of “Cards Against Humanity” for his birthday.

    I’ve unwisely mentioned this ugly new hobby to a few people (which I haven’t even started; I’m in pre-hobby mode). A co-worker astutely noted that this was also a hobby of the 40-Year-Old Virgin. Other friends expressed sorrow and chagrin at the way I’ve managed to find a new geek low on the eve of my 38th birthday. Hey, better late the never! Now go away. I’m gonna be painting some zombies. I may dip them in Army Painter dark shader.

    Disney World

    Here we go...

    We booked a trip for June to Disney World. I’ll have a lot more to say about this soon, I’m sure, but we waited until the girls were both potty trained and until they were old enough to appreciate the trip.  It’s crazy expensive, but we’ve been planning to do this pretty much since Lilly was born so we’re just going to hand over the wallet and enjoy it.

    Easter: a stomach bug intrudes

    Easter weekend was great except for the part where Carolina threw up four times in one day. She rallied enough to enjoy the first of two big Easter egg hunts and you wouldn’t have known she was sick (except for the puking), but by the next day, she was tired and much worse for wear, having gotten gunshy about eating anything.

    She seemed to be getting better but then Lilly threw up and suddenly we had two sick kids in the house and the terror of worrying that we’d get it too.

    So far, so good on that front. The girls are recovering, we haven’t gotten sick ourselves (yet! hope not!) and after juggling our work schedules around and waiting through a day when no more puking happened, they should be back at school soon.

    Like I said, it didn’t seem to slow them down during Easter:

    Cascarones '13

     

    Lilly makin' faces

     

    Carolina gets aggressive

     

     Writing stuff

    It sure doesn’t look like it around here, but I’ve actually been writing every night, even when I’ve been feeling sick from brutal allergy attacks. The only time I didn’t write was during SXSW and that was, of course, lots of work writing.

    I hit a writing milestone this week, the halfway mark on something I’ve been working on since December, and that filled me with hope. It’s probably the most sustained amount of time I’ve spent on one writing thing in a really long while and I just keep thinking, “If I can just keep writing three pages a day, it will get done. Just three more pages. Three more pages.” I tell myself that every night, even when I’m nearly falling asleep at the keyboard.

    Screen Shot 2013-04-02 at 11.10.56 PM

    The comic plugs along, proudly posting every single Wednesday even during crazy festivals that may draw my and Pablo’s time and attention away.

    Since last we spoke, Meany has tried some terrible stand-up comedy, our Kickstarter addiction was turned into a comic and we addressed the cute sloth from the movie The Croods.

    The sketch show/play I helped write, Pulga Nation, that I mentioned last time went really well. I didn’t think I’d get to see it, but it turned out the Friday night of SXSW Interactive allowed me enough time to slip away and catch 20 minutes of the early show and the entirety of the late-night show. I was thrilled to see it and so tickled to hear two audiences laugh at these jokes we wrote. There was a talk-back after the first show in which a person asked me why we killed off an elderly character so soon in the show. The same person told me afterward that the same sketch I wrote did not need a blowjob joke. “But that was the best part!” I said brightly. The man was not amused and shot back, “No, no it wasn’t.”

    Blowjob joke notwithstanding, the production did very well and we’re already meeting to talk about what’s next. I don’t know if the show will be re-mounted, toured or what, but it sounds like everyone involved wants to keep working together and that there’ll be more Mexcentrics in the future. So that’s really good news.

    Really, I’ve been good except for the parts where I was so sick I had to stay in bed for most of a Saturday because of allergies or the part where my daughters have been vomiting as if for comedic effect. Spring came early and it’s filled me with hope and purpose in some ways and frustration and impatience with the parts of my life that don’t feel like they’re keeping up.

    Anyway, here’s the SXSW coverage and other Statesman stuff I was busy writing since the last update. It’s a long list. Strap in!

    Some Vines I shot at the fest (Mashable listed me in ones to follow during SXSW):

    And a few more photos, ending with my encounter with Grumpy Cat.

    LEGO Man

     

    My beautiful work lawn

    Daniel Tiger + Curious George

    Peter Sagal, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer

    Guitar Shawn is guitaring, probably named Shawn

    Tina, Me, Emma and Grumpy

    Damn, girl, you’re telling me.