Tag: statesman

  • I Disappear

    I’m about to disappear into the hidey hole of South by Southwest Interactive, tomorrow in fact, which is not new. It’s become so routine, in fact, year after year that at my house we don’t even panic and scramble over it, we just know that those five days, Daddy is gone and we need a little extra help and planning.

    But there’s some weirdness that this is the most public I’ll be all year, out from around 10 a.m. till probably 1 or 2 a.m. every night, meeting new people and seeing old friends. But at home, I’m just gone and disappeared. It’s like SXSW Interactive, for one week of the year, is a second family and I’m all Charles Kuralt up in there.

    And then I’ll be so exhausted when it’s over I’ll stay home and miss all the Music fest stuff as I hibernate. My kids already think I’m some kind of bear, so perhaps this will comfort them.

    ANYHOO!

    Here’s all the stuff I’ve been working on the last few weeks. I’ve been writing and typing so much for so long lately that I truly feel my fingers might fall off and it was all I could do to round this up, but I know that if I don’t do it now, on the eve, it will have to wait till after the festival and the hole will be much, much deeper.

    Here’s the roundup and thank you for your patience. I’d like to write more essays here but the truth is that I feel like I’m spending lots and lots of time writing either for work or for the other projects I’ve mentioned that there’s barely anything left but fumes by the time I’m done. I’m hoping things will settle down in a few months because some of these things are winding down or eventually they’ll be completed.

     

    Work stuff

    I hadn’t written anything for CNN in a long while for lack of me pitching them any ideas, but they were kind enough to let me write about SXSW Interactive as I was already gathering intel for the Statesman and doing lots of interviews.

    CNN-SXSW 2013

    My article, which was actually written almost a week ago, was about whether the hype at SXSW Interactive is dying down and if the festival has peaked (and whether that’s a good thing.) Since the article was sent in, my email inbox has a’sploded and now, I fear, the hype is even bigger/worse than last year. Somehow I had forgotten that people like to knock on our door at the very last minute with news and information and that this always makes life harder for everybody. But I think there’s still some good insights about the fest from the people I interviewed.

    For the Statesman, of course, things have been hugely busy leading up to the fest.

    This Thursday, I did a big Life & Arts story on free official events at Interactive.

    Tardar Sauce (aka Grumpy Cat) Photo by me

    In a very strange series of events, I met Grumpy Cat, the Internet meme sensation and even took a photo and shot a Vine video (below).

    Emma Janzen and Tina Phan on our staff did a great video and I make a short appearance getting all cat-love on poor Grumpy Cat.

    Further back, I did a Digital Savant column rounding up reviews of an Acer W700 Windows 8 tablet and the great Studio Ghibli-animated game Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. This week’s column was also about SXSW Interactive, a preview of the first two keynotes from adventurous entrepreneur Elon Musk and design guru Tina Roth Eisenberg.

    The recent Micro features were “What is jailbreaking?” and “What is Google Glass?”

    Speaking of Google Glass, I was on NPR’s On Point With Tom Ashbrook recently talking with Amber Case and Ben Chigier about wearable computers and user interfaces. It’s a full hour, but there was lots of great discussion and questions from readers. (An emailer told me I talk too fast and that they could not listen to me.

    And from the random files, I interviewed LeVar Burton about a Holodeck project AMD is working on as well as Demand Media CTO Byron Reese about his upcoming SXSW presentation.

    I also drew a very ugly picture of what the PlayStation 4 might look like.

     

    Non-work stuff

    The new sketch show that I helped write, Pulga Nation featuring the Mexcentrics, opened tonight.

    It’s weird not being there for the opening and with the festival starting, not even being 100 percent sure I’ll be able to see the show. I caught a rehearsal the other night and all the nights spent in theaters rehearsing during the 10 years of Latino Comedy Project came flooding back and I remembered how much I missed it.

    It’s a mix of people I’ve worked with for many, many years and new people. It’s exciting and fun and seeing words that I wrote up on a stage again, especially when the words are coming out of the mouth of my friend Patti, who makes me laugh always, has been a thrill. The show runs through Saturday. If you’re in Austin, please try to catch it.

    Grumpy MeanyOur Space Monkeys continue to thrive. Their Twitter account is starting to take off and the new comics, I think, have been really good. And we’ve been consistent, posting every week, no exceptions.

    New comics include one about the horrible game Aliens: Colonial Marines, a strip about an evil Higgs boson particle and this week’s comic about Grumpy Cat (kind of a coincidence, that). I also did a surprise birthday ¡Pescados del Mar! comic for my brother, drawn in my own horrible scrawl.

    And because I hate to leave the girls out, here’s a Vine I posted of them playing at a gymnastics center for the first time. Those children lost their damn mind having so much fun.

    I’ll be back after SXSW, post-hibernation.

  • Real life

    Cloudy

     

    For the last couple of years, I’ve been nose-to-the-grindstone writing stuff for work and for freelance that was almost exclusively tech-related. Even the fun, goofy stuff I wrote for CNN last year was all based in the real world, all of it structured as commentary or essay even if it wasn’t completely meant to be taken as super-serious.

    Even when I was recapping TV and doing the movie trailer videos, those were grounded in the reality of what I was writing about. These weren’t universes I created, I was talking about them more like a reporter, telling you what they were about from an outsider’s perspective.

    mexcentricsNow, outside of work, the bulk of my writing for the last few months has been fiction. I’m working on two things that I’m alternating between apart from writing comics about monkeys in space and just finished revisions on a sketch comedy show going up in March that I was able to work on with some close friends. Then there’s another thing that may or may not happen in the audio world, but fingers crossed because it would be a lot of fun, I think. If I’m not posting here (he said, looking at the date of the last entry), it’s because I’m doing those things most every night.

    It’s really different writing the fiction things. Fun and freeing and putting me in a mindset that I’d neglected for a long while. It’s fun to float between worlds like this and, being that I never got into drugs or heavy drinking, the only way I really know how to do it.

    Real real life has been kind of sweet lately. The kids have gone from pitiless marauders of the fall to more manageable sweethearts of the spring. We booked a big family trip for later this year. I’ve gotten to see and catch up with more friends in the last month and a half than the previous six months combined, which was one of my big New Year’s not-so-much-a-resolution-but-just-something-I-want-to-do things. But, like you, I deal with toxic people sometimes or walk away in a stupor due to layers of bureaucracy or hear about something on Twitter that is so dumb, so asinine that I can’t help but talk about it like everyone else.

    Real life is beautiful and magic, but it’s also random and mundane, sometimes at the same time and finding beauty and magic in all that is the challenge. (And, really, why we write.)

    I wouldn’t call it an escape hatch, exactly, but more like a really diverting puzzle that you’re continually trying to solve. When pieces lock together, it’s so satisfying that it makes all the other stuff so much easier to deal with.

     

    Work stuff

    Busy couple of weeks leading into some insanely busy of weeks coming in March for South by Southwest Interactive.

    Two pieces I wrote after the whole Total Frat Move thing got a really nice response.

    First, I was lucky enough to catch a Tweet in passing last month from a woman named Vicki Flaugher, who was getting ready to shut down her account and give up social media. It was completely by chance that I was about to write a column on that very idea and when I asked if she’d chat with me, she was open and honest about why she needs to take a break from Twitter, Facebook and everything else.

    The column got a good response from other people who feel overwhelmed by their daily online rituals. Vicki ended up writing a follow-up piece for Bulldog Reporter where she said some very kind words.

    The girls outside

    Another column that got some positive response (and one negative Letter to the Editor) was one I wrote about the challenges of raising girls in a tech-heavy house when sometimes I just want them to go play outside or put down the iPad. My wife, who usually reads or sees most photos or text I’m going to put online about our family in advance, didn’t get a chance to read this one before it got published and I was scared to death that she was going to tell me she didn’t agree with my point of view or that she thought I was overestimating the amount of thought we’ve given it. It turns out, to my relief, that she liked the story and so did other folks in our family who were thrilled to see a photo of Lilly and Carolina in the paper. (I cropped it so you can barely tell, but Carolina on the left there is lifting her shirt and sticking out her belly in an obvious homage to Tracy Morgan.)

    Photo by Ricardo B. Brazziell / American-Statesman
    Photo by Ricardo B. Brazziell / American-Statesman

    I did a roundup of places to play video games and tabletop games in Austin. It was a lot of work putting it together, but as part of my research, I got to spend an afternoon playing video games at Pinballz and that was an incredible amount of fun.

    Last week, the column was a roundup of South by Southwest Interactive 2013 stuff we know so far. In about three weeks, the fest returns and I’m going to be covering it again. I’m trying to stay positive and not get too overwhelmed, but it’s pretty much taking over everything right now and I’m riding that wave.

    Photo by me for the American-Statesman

    And the new column that just went up is about the ongoing influence of SimCity, which will have a new version out next month. I spoke to some Austin students who used SimCity 4 Deluxe to build a city 150 years in the future. Then they built a physical model of that city and are taking it to Washington D.C. to compete in a Future City competition.


    Digital Savant Micros have been published on the topics of “What is Facebook’s Social Graph?” “What is Vine?”, “Who has the best wireless service in Austin?” and “What is a sound bar?”


    I had a humorous Twitter spat with Verizon about unused data and I covered TEDxAustin 2013, which once again was worth spending a Saturday listening to people inspire you and get you to think about big ideas. The post I wrote is so comprehensive it took me two days to write, which perhaps is overkill, but recapping for so long at TWOP blessed and cursed me with endurance and a need to finish what I started.

    Wow, seeing that list all put together just made me really, really exhausted. Excuse me while I go take a small nap before SXSW Interactive starts.

     

    Other stuff

    Meany and the zombiesI mentioned last time that the monkeys from space that we do comics about started a Twitter account.

    The comic is chugging along. We did one about zombies and another about that cute little Iranian monkey that was blasted the fuck into space against his will. And we did one about poop, which with us is kind of a given.

    This weekend, my wife went on a business-related trip (the business in this case is Zumba, but that’s a story for another blog entry, maybe, perhaps) so I watched the girls on my own, which was terrifying at first and then pretty OK in the end. We theorized on the phone about whether the girls behave better when one of us isn’t around because they’re not competing for the attention of two parents at the same time or if maybe having one parent out of town freaked them out just enough to be obedient. Whatever happened, this weekend was not the crazy, Mr. Mom comedy of hijinks I thought it would be. In fact, it was kind of wonderful.

    The big mistake I made was watching Eraserhead for the first time on Hulu, which put a bunch of Criterion Collection movies out for free (free if you don’t mind annoying, tone-shattering commercials every 10 minutes). I’m a huge David Lynch fan and this was the only movie of his that I hadn’t watched all the way through.

    Well, that was a big mistake. Not because the movie is bad (it’s brilliant) and not because I didn’t like it (I found it incredibly disturbing yet weirdly relatable), but… well… mewling tiny worm baby and terrified father. It did not exactly set the best tone for me for the weekend.

    But then we went to the bounce castle warehouse and the kids ran around for three hours while I sat and read and all was well.

  • Total Work Moves

    When your job involves a lot of constant deadlines, you have a lot of, “If I can just get through this week…” moments. Sometimes it’s a whole month and last year it actually got to the, “If I can just get to mid-December…” point.

    Last week, I knew that I had a very large story due for the Sunday paper and that as soon as that was done I was going to have to turn around and produce my weekly column, too. I spent about a week trying to knock out smaller assignments and to get everything else out of the way so that freight train could pass without any interruptions.

    Things worked out fine, like they always do. I knew this, inside, that things would work themselves out one way or another.

    But there’s always that scary moment when you wonder if you really have any idea what you’re going to write and if it’s going to come out in what my mom sometimes calls a chorro (a flood or torrent in Spanish, or if you’re being gross, a diarrhea) or if you’re just going to sit there and wait and nothing magical happens.

    Luckily, as happens most of the time when I’m under pressure, it was the chorro.

    pnWTB

    This is a weird story, so bear with me. One of the articles I wrote last week ran in Sunday’s paper. It’s about a very popular website called Total Frat Move. That website, which is based in Austin, has turned into a very successful web empire which spawned a book that is already a New York Times bestseller and will likely become a movie.

    I met with the guys who run the site a few weeks ago thinking it would be no more than a short blog post or book write-up. An editor instead suggested I do it as a Sunday lead story. Then the pressure started and I tried to figure out a way to say something more than “Here’s a website, here’s a book.” I transcribed my interview notes and did a lot of online reading. I read the book itself, which was kind of a disturbing and problematic read for me being that I have two daughters I hope will go to college one day. There’s a lot of ugly humor on the site and in the book, stuff that even in the guise of being a joke or satire is still really rough to read for even a jaded-ass, South Park-watching vulgarian such as myself.

    I tried to convey that in the story, a story that ended up being much longer than I anticipated and written in a tone that tries to be neutral in the face of material that we would normally not highlight and put in front of our readers.

    Clearly, it wasn’t what the subjects of the story expected:

    https://twitter.com/WRBolen/status/295745186548568064

    But I’m kind of proud of this weird, long story I wrote. I don’t know that anyone else would have written it the way I did and sometimes that’s a pretty significant kind of victory when you stick words next to each other for a living.

    The other piece I wrote last week was a Monday column about taking a break from or giving up social media completely as Vicki Flaugher is doing.

    Like anyone who’s been using social media for more than a few years, I’ve fantasized about massively pruning the number of people I connect to, taking a long break or just walking away. The work I do doesn’t really allow for not using social media and most of the time (OK, half of the time), I really do enjoy and get a lot out of these online connections. But it can be tiring, stressful and time-wasting.

    elWnQ_immzfGcL_8J7wUngpCxj4wa3lz3aZyVvRHxFI

    Speaking of exhaustion, last week, I wrote a column about transmedia storytelling, specifically authors who are mixing book writing with online game worlds, interactive games, real-world events and other new media. This is not new, of course. Authors have experimented with this kind of stuff even through the early days of computers and CD-ROMs and all through the Internet era. But the sheer ambitious some of these authors are showing in carrying out their vision is inspiring and a little intimidating.

    I say this as someone who’s spent the last couple of years trying to write a Goddamn Book™. The idea that instead of working on one book or two, you just up and say, “How about 7 or 10 plus an MMO?” makes me want to go down a gigantic popcorn bowl of amphetamines. (No, not really, it actually makes me want to nap.)

    Photo by me! Austin billboard

    Other bits: I wrote about a woman who won a billboard from Ben & Jerry’s for an Instagram photo she shot. In the Digital Savant Micro feature, I defined “Gorilla Glass” and explained Facebook’s Social Graph.

    Bobbo and Meany

    We’re still diligently working to revitalize our “Space Monkeys!” franchise after that very long absence.

    Comics come out every Wednesday, like these two recent ones.

    In addition to the Facebook page I’ve mentioned, they now have a Twitter account, too, where Bobbo and Meany talk about ship and space stuff. Give ‘er a follow, why not?

    Other random things that happened recently:

    I bought a swing set for the girls. That’s an adventure I’ll probably write about in full after it’s set up.

    We went to the circus! It sounded like it might be terrible but instead it was the opposite of terrible, which is CIRCUS AWESOME! Seriously had a great time and these daughters of mine loved it.

    I wrote 50+ pages of something in less than a month which must mean I’m pretty excited about it. If it keeps on at that pace, I hope to have some news of it to share by summer.

    Started playing around with Vine and made this video:

    Took this picture of the girls on a beautiful walk around the neighborhood:

    January walk

    So it’s been a good January. A good year so far.

  • Deep into ’13

    My name all fancy

    Hello!

    The last time we talked, we had just announced the re-launch of “Space Monkeys!” and I was about to go back to work after a lengthy vacation that was both stupid-lazy and incredibly productive. Those were good times.

    Things settled back into the work groove where a lot of things are up in the air as more changes (these are positive ones, I think) come our way. Our newsroom is getting remodeled, so there is exciting new carpet to look forward to and I’m almost caught up after being really far behind on emails and column ideas after I was away.

    At home, I’ve tried really hard to keep up the momentum that started at the end of 2012 to move forward into this year a bit spring-loaded. I feel like I stumbled creatively in 2012, especially the latter half of the year, and since November, I’ve really been pushing to get back on track.

    That’s been going well. The comic re-launching has given me something recurring to focus on and the two other things I’m working on (three if you count a March sketch comedy show I’m helping write for Teatro Vivo) have kept me writing every night instead of crashing out, watching TV or wasting time playing iPhone games.

    Usually when I’m working full time, I have to be mindful to save energy to do the things I want to do on my own. Lately, it’s been the opposite. I’m trying to maintain my energy and focus at work to match the things I’m suddenly really excited about on the writing-for-me side.

    Just producing pages every night makes me feel like things are happening and getting done, even if they’re pages that only one or two other people get to see right now. That’s OK. I feel like I’m building a little bit at a time and I can see the structure of what’s being made. That helps immeasurably to keep me going.

    Photo by Julie Jacobson / Associated Press
    Photo by Julie Jacobson / Associated Press

    At work, I’ve had two columns run since I got back. Last week’s was a how-to on getting rid of duplicate files (songs, documents, photos) you probably don’t need to save space and keep organized. Tomorrow’s column is a sum-up of the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (which I did not attend because except for SXSW Interactive, I don’t do those gigantic press release-driven expos anymore), giving percentage odds on whether a lot of the technology will really matter in our lives this year. I’m proud of that one because I was able to get like three poop jokes into one paragraph, which I’ve never been able to do in 16 years at the paper. Times are changing, I think!

    Photo courtesy of Microsoft Games
    Photo courtesy of Microsoft Games

    The Digital Savant Micro features recently were a piece defining the game “Minecraft,” which apparently every pre-teen is mandated to be playing right now, and one running tomorrow offering advice on how to clear off and donate an old PC

    I also had a few updates about SXSW Interactive (Aisha Tyler is coming!) on the work blog.

    And I spoke at a country club to a women’s group about technology which was, no joke, perhaps the highlight of my week. (Photo at the top of this blog entry.) It is very nice to be treated like a visiting dignitary by ladies who lunch and the food they serve at these things is no joke. It was nice to make those connections and they told me if I ever have a project or book or something to promote, to please come back and share it with them. “How do you feel,” I asked, “about comics detailing the comings and goings of homicidal monkeys from space?”

    I’m pretty sure they love me.

  • All of the lights

    This year, for some reason, I got really into our Christmas lights.

    We had bins in the attic of lights including some we bought last year in the post-Christmas sales, but except for the ones we put on the tree or around the house, I never messed with trying to set up lights outside.

    It always seemed like too much of a hassle and I never had enough time as Christmas chugged, Polar Express-style, toward us at high speeds. (See also: why we haven’t sent out a family Christmas card in a few years.) It seemed exhausting and a little dangerous (what happens when it rains? Does your house just explode in a shower of sparks?) and I just had no solution.

    But maybe it was a sudden burst of energy I was having at the end of the year, or a restlessness of not doing enough stuff outside with my hands that got me going, but I made the decision to put up lights. Or lay them on the ground. Or something. There were going to be lights, dammit!

    So I started setting up the lights. In my mind, we had all the stuff necessary to do this stashed away, including extension cords, electrical posts, plenty of lights that all matched and (imaginary) items that would hold everything in place perfectly. It was all in the bin just waiting for me to set things up.

    In reality, it was a mismatched heap of tangled indoor lights, one shady-looking green electrical post that looked like it might shock me if I looked in its direction and maybe one set of six 3M sticky tabs that probably wouldn’t work with our stucco and stone outdoors.

    So I bought lights. And then I bought more lights. And then I bought some extension cords. Then I bought a bunch of hooks and adhesives and a holiday staple gun that shoots staples as well as plastic staple protectors, as if the stapler were afraid of getting a loathsome disease and is blowing through dozens of tiny little condoms.

    They also keep you from stapling through the electrical cord and killing yourself, I think, so sure, why not. Staple condoms.

    I set up a line of big bulb lights (not LED, it turns out, but the old school ones that burn you if you try to touch) along the yard. I didn’t have stakes or clips or anything to hold them down. In fact, three different gigantic stores told me they had sold out of crates and crates of these. So, I tried to make some makeshift stakes by tying the lights to some skewers and you can image how shitty and lame and ineffective that turned out. So the lights were basically just lying on the ground in a loose row, ready to be tripped on or blown away by a strong wind. Success!

    I had better luck with a set of tiny globe LED lights that I stapled up around the garage. Near the stucco is a spongy border and that turned out to be perfect for the staples. I set everything up, brought my wife and the kids out to see the glory of my gorgeous lights.

    Half of the set that I had just put up didn’t come on. I had forgotten to check before I put them up.

    Another trip to the store. More lights, Lots of cursing.

    I finally found some stakes at the grocery store and I was able to lock down the lights around the sidewalk, or at least keep them from wandering off.

    When it was all finished and I taped up the ends with Duct Tape to keep water out, it all looked really nice even if it was a pretty simple setup with nothing for the bushes or in our yard. We have the lights down the sidewalk, some lights around our garage, some lights going around the side of the house, a little LED tree and bear in the doorway and that’s about it. Next year, maybe we’ll add some stuff to the yard, but I felt pretty manly-man enough with just this first effort.

    I couldn’t tell you why I needed to to this this year. I think it’s that the kids (now 3 and 5) like it and the things I used to really not care about seem to matter a little more when there are kids involved.

    All this happened before recent events in the news made that even more clear to me. It’s so easy to just let the holidays fly by and to try to get through it and look forward to days off and a new year. But this year, I’m trying to enjoy it moment-by-moment and not let is rush past too quickly before I’ve gotten to really let the glow of the lights illuminate the darkness a little.

    Lights 2

    Recent writing stuff:

    I’m finally on vacation through January, but here’s what’s run recently (and one thing that’s running tomorrow that’s pretty significant).

    In the Digital Savant column, I did a piece going over my 2012 tech predictions from last year and then looked ahead and made more predictions for 2013. Will those pan out? Wait a year and find out! One neat thing was getting to see the word “Omarstradamus” in display headline type in the paper.

    The column for Monday, Christmas Eve, is a roundup of all the apps you should download if you happen to get a new smart phone or tablet. It’s impossible to list anything even close to comprehensive, especially if you’re trying to include more than just iOS and Android, but I tried to focus on stuff people who are new to these kinds of devices might need. Even trying to narrow it down, it was a pretty impossible task to cover all bases, but I think the list is a good start for most people.

    Fairway Solitaire: current addiction

    I included Fairway Solitaire, the mobile game I’m currently addicted to. Please don’t download it. It will eat your life.

    The Walking Dead: my video game of the year

    Other stories I wrote since the last blog entry: a piece about the Statesman’s new digital offerings, a story about top Austin searches on Google for 2012, a review of the full first season of the brilliant “Walking Dead” video game and a write-up of two Austin-made games, God of Blades and Arcane Legends, that are worth a look on iOS.

    For Digital Savant Micro, I wrote about why you might need a dual-band router, what the Hell Snapchat is and what a “Chromebook” laptop is all about.

    I was also on the radio last week, talking about holiday tech gifts (it’s a bit late for that, I know, but maybe you’ll get some ideas for post-Christmas gift exchanges) with The Daily Circuit on Minnesota Public Radio. You can hear the full audio by following the link. The other guest was Dana Wollman from Engadget.

    The last thing is that Carolina turned 3 on Friday. As much as Lilly keeps us on our toes constantly, it’s Carolina who makes us laugh, who always does or says something completely unexpected, and who seems to always have mischief and smiles in her eye for everyone she meets.

    I’m not sure if it’s a phase or if it’s just part of her personality that she constantly tells us she loves us. I hope it lasts a good long while.

    Carolina at 3

    IMG_1971

  • This is better than rejuvenation!

    Things improved dramatically, almost all at once, to the point where I wondered if it was all a coincidence or if it was a chain reaction, a one-thing-leads-to-another fixx, if you will, where the outlook becomes brighter on everything because of self-fulfilling optimistic action.

    Maybe it was all coincidence.

    I’m not going to complain or question. I just know that things that felt stuck just over a week ago seem to have greased their way past the logjam. Not only am I working on one of the things I thought was hopelessly stalled, but I have a totally new thing that popped into my head that I can’t wait to work on as well, something that sounds so fun that it’s all I can do to stop myself from putting everything (including my day job, eating and sleeping — I mean my day job AND ALSO eating and sleeping, not my day job, which involves eating and sleeping for money, though holy shit, wouldn’t that be awesome?) aside to start working on it immediately.

    Our girls have been behaving better lately and getting more sleep, which seems like some kind of pre-Christmas miracle because it means that I, too, get more sleep and am less cranky.

    And on top of all that, work has been pretty good lately, I have vacation coming up and a friend of mine invited me to come help pitch a completely and totally separate thing that could turn into something that might be a cool thing that I would like to do and share with you should it become an actual thing!

    Things! They are happening.

    Also, and perhaps because of the flow of good things lately, I came out of my upside down turtle shell a bit and invited a few close friends out for lunch, a sign that I really don’t want to be at home all time bitterly wondering why I’m at home all the time. And I’m having fun writing again. That sounds like a given, but I’ve had real dread and anxiety about writing this year that simply wasn’t there before. Being able to look forward to writing instead of dreading it is kind of a radical thing for me right now. It has me bouncing off the walls with new energy, feeling renewed.

    There’s renewal and newness in the air all around.

    One friend of mine just had a baby, another friend is about to have one and a third friend has a slightly older, but pretty recently newborn baby. Babies are coming out, people are getting engaged, other people are breaking up or moving away or moving back to Austin or selling things or making things and for the first time in a while, I feel like I’m part of the community of things happening and people doing. It’s a good feeling, one I really missed.

    Here’s some of what I’ve been writing lately at work.

    Photo by Jay Janner / Austin American-Statesman

    I did a column about the usability testing as it’s taught at the University of Texas School of Information. I got to meet a really great professor and some scary-smart students who are trying to make the future of product design a little brighter and smarter.

    Image courtesy Acura

    Last week’s Digital Savant column was about the increasing amount of technology in our cars. Since I’m not into cars and don’t know much about them, it was a bit of a shock for me to realize that this is stuff I should be paying a lot more attention to as a tech writer. A woman wrote me a terse email a few days after the column asking, basically, “What happens if you’re on the highway and you’re about to hit a semi in a collision and all this technology fails?” I responded, “You crash?” I mean, honestly, I’m not sure what else could happen.

    And the column that runs on Monday (but appears early online in the blog) is about how we deal with grieving online, particularly on social networks. Every year is suck-filled with death, of course, but this year it hit me personally a few times and many people I care a lot about and I’ve been paying a little more attention to it than in the past. In the column, I reference my grandmother’s death, which I wrote about earlier this year on this blog.

    Other new stuff: a Micro about making digital photo albums and a Micro offering advice on Xbox games for 6-year-olds.

    I was also on the radio, speaking on the “At Issue with Ben Merens” show about holiday tech gifts. You can listen to it on this page or download the audio directly.

    What else… we bought a fridge! I kinda got the bug seeing all the huge price cuts during Black Friday time and it reminded me how much I hated our fridge, which was so small and cramped and always made me curse when I’d load it up with groceries. It was so cramped I would not buy things because I knew what a pain in the ass it would be to try to cram them into the freezer or find space in the fridge. So we’d run out of stuff really fast, creating a cycle of fridgefrustration (or fridgestration for short).

    The new fridge is not even as big as they come. We have a narrow space to fit one in, so a full-sized 30-square-foot one would be banging on the sides whenever the doors opened. We ended up with something smaller/narrower, but still gigantic and spacious and luxurious compared to our old one. It has French doors, but they’re not that snooty, and two drawers the kids can easily pull on to get their own damn yogurt and frozen waffles for once.

    They moved our old fridge, which had not budged an inch in about eight years, and there was a Leviathan dust monster back there I had to defeat in just moments before they wheeled in the new one. Rugs were moved, doors were attached to metal frames and a burly man taught me how to push a button to magically generate water. “But don’t drink it,” he warned, like a grizzled shaman, “it’s full of charcoal.” It turns out that is temporary, you just have to drink two gallons of water before the water gets good. Mmmm charcoal. I just realized he said DON’T drink it. I was distracted by the stainless steel.

    It doesn’t have a TV or Internet, but the new fridge keeps stuff cold and spits out ice and doesn’t make me not be able to buy more than one damn frozen pizza at a time, so I think it goes solidly in the win column.


    Talk to ya soon. I’ll keep updating every week or two, but I’m really hoping to have some actual news/announcements to share with you before the end of the year about some old friends who will soon be returning. December is getting really exciting all of a sudden.