Tag: statesman

  • Breaking news


    There was a little bit of worry that the euphoria bump from some recent trips might go quickly away, that things would settle back into the pre-trip rut before too long, but that’s not what happened.

    Instead, in a really nice way, that renewal held and, just as shit has a way of snowballing downhill, so do good things move the opposite way if you’re willing to get behind the boulder and push a little.

    For me, pushing has meant going from, “I just don’t want to write anymore” to writing a lot and not feeling so drained by everything. I pitched an article idea to CNN for the first time in ages (more on that in a minute), started feeling more energized about Ye Olde Work Blog and had an annual evaluation with my editor that left me feeling really supported and appreciated through some tough work times.

    All those good things led to other good things and suddenly, things feel normalized. Or stabilized. Something “lized,” for sure.

    It’s hard enough to clear your head enough to let your mind wander around an idea for a while and to generate something, and nearly impossible when you feel low on energy and your head is buzzing with a bunch of other stuff. But the recent clarity (and some fortunate early holiday deadlines) allowed me to spend some real time working on this Digital Savant column about the echo-chamber effect of social media.

    My editor and I had been talking a while about how we might approach a story about the 2012 election cycle without repeating the obvious stories about the campaigns using social media and What That All Means. So instead, over several weeks, we chatted about it in our meetings, brainstorming out loud about our social media habits and what we were/weren’t seeing and the column is a direct result of those conversations.

    One post-note: the day after I wrote that column, but the day before I put it online, my Twitter stream suddenly was flooded with Tweets about the Republican National Convention, including posts from one person who I had to unfollowed when he (of course it was a he) dropped the C-word in reference to a female politician on TV. So, perhaps I wrote the column a tiny bit too soon, but I think what it has to say about how we silo ourselves within our social networks applies to a lot more than politics.


    Paired with that column, which runs in print on Monday, is a Digital Savant Micro about the humble USB Flash Drive, which also goes by other names. There was also a video game review I did of “10000000,” an iPad game that I was completely hooked on while on the trip to NYC. Sorry to pass along this crippling addiction if you choose to download the the game.

    Now, about that CNN story. Like a lot of people, I’m obsessed with Breaking Bad and at some point in mulling over a recent episode, I had the idea that Walter White’s empire building reminded me a lot of Apple and that his rise to the top was only going to make things more dangerous for him and his family.

    I wrote up a few paragraphs of notes and pitched it in an email to my CNN editor, fully expecting that this was going to be too zany an idea and that I might need to consider pitching it elsewhere or publish it on my own here. Despite my editor not being a Breaking Bad fan, he greenlit the column and it ran on Friday after a few days where I nervously wondered if the piece would get sidelined before the half-season finale.

    The comments were exactly what I expected this time: a few notes of support and many more decrying the ridiculousness of the piece and CNN’s silliness in running it. To one commenter, who said it was just more flotsam on an Internet full of junk, I ended up replying, “I stand by my flotsam.”

    The thing is, I know the article is a stretch. I’m comparing the world’s most successful company to a homicidal meth kingpin. But that doesn’t mean the TV show doesn’t have some things to teach us about greed, about karma, about how bad decisions can doom even the best of intentions. Once I pitched the column and got to writing, I was terrified that I wouldn’t have enough material to pull it together. Instead I wrote about 300 words past my word count and had to stop myself from including more threads of comparison.


    Right before I started writing this post, the piece was posted on the front page of Slashdot. It’s been fun watching the reaction from some of the smartest people on the Internet (it was also on some of the Apple news sites and on Hacker News), even the ones who think I’m an idiot for writing the column. Call me an idiot, call me wrong, call the entire premise absurd, just read it and talk about it and I’ll be over the moon for days.

    Another reason I had a little thundercloud trailing overhead all summer was because I dreaded, absolutely dreaded, the idea that starting in August, I was going to have to get my ass up super early, which I may have mentioned last time.

    Is has not been so bad! I mean, it’s not great, but my kids have been handling it well and on the nights I’ve been able to get to bed, it’s been pretty OK. 6:30 a.m. is still much lamer and darker than 8:30 a.m., but the advantage of dropping my kids off so early is that I get to go back home and either nap for an hour or hang around and make some eggs or check email and get a jump on work or do pretty much whatever I want until traffic dies down and I head to Austin.

    I’m in a lot less of a rush and the day feels longer. So, perhaps the early risers kind of have a point. It’s not like it’s up for debate. This is the new reality for a very long time and in just a few days, my kids were already fully adjusted to the new rise time. I’m still not quite there, but it’s not the disaster I thought it might be. The kids are too tired at that hour to put up a fight about their clothes or breakfast preferences and Lilly has been enjoying kindergarten too much to make her dad miserable in the morning.

    In fact, the only tears came on the first day of school. Not from her. She was beaming. Her dad, though, may have gotten misty over how grown-up a 5-year-old can already seem.

  • Beachy

    We went to the beach and even though I didn’t do a lot of swimming, I could still feel the salt and the cool gulf water cleanse away a lot of the residue that this year has left on me.

    Not that I was in a bad way or needing saving or anything like that, but this has felt like like a very rough 2012 for a lot of people I know and although my year started badly and a few curveballs have been thrown my way, I feel very lucky overall.

    But the trip to New York City and now a trip we just took to south Texas for a wedding and a beach trip to South Padre Island both cleared my head to the point that I could see how foggy things have been in there for months. We hadn’t traveled in a very long while and I hadn’t taken a proper vacation in so long that I was just in a really bad way creatively and feeling completely uninspired in a lot of ways. I didn’t even want to write anymore for a short time; that’s how bad it got.

    But the break from the routine and have a change of scenery both with the girls (beach fun!) and without them (NYC!) really helped. I’m just in a better mood, and a little more inspired and my energy to create stuff, which felt completely sapped for most of the summer, has returned.

    In the week since we got back from South Padre, I wrote 10 new pages of the “Project,” successfully pitched a column idea to CNN (which I’m both nervous and excited to write this week) and got back in the routine of saving time for myself to jot stuff down and have real time to write instead of wasting my night in front of the TV or skimming Twitter and starting up way too late at night to get any real stuff done.

    The beach itself was a very short time — we were only at South Padre Island for a day, but it was the first time Carolina had ever been to the beach and only the third time Lilly had seen it. They loved it, just as we expected. It’s deep in their genes to love that place. My wife and I both grew up near there and spent big chunks of our childhood on that sand, playing in those waves. It was very important for me that the kids gets to visit it this summer, no matter what hassles might be involved in a road trip with two kids who are not the most patient travelers.

    We ate lots of seafood, let the kids run back and forth to the surf until the sun was setting and wished we could stay three or four more days. We’ll be back, I know.

    Even though I was on vacation for a few days the Digital Savant column continued like a mechanism with a ticking clockface. Last week’s column was a back to school tech gift guide where I tried to steer away from the more obvious laptop and tablet choices toward accessories and other must-haves.

    The Digital Savant Micro that week was a definition of “domain names”: what they are and (to some degree) how they work.

    The next column, which runs in the paper on Monday, is an explainer about the South by Southwest Panel Picker. Every year there are lots of misconceptions of how it works (and discussion about if it works), so this was an attempt to demystify it a little and explain why it’s next to impossible to go through all the proposals. (I usually just wait until the actual, finalized programming is announced since I don’t allow myself to vote for or against panels anyway in my role as someone who covers the fest as a journalist.)

    This week’s Micro is a definition of the term “YOLO” as it appears online.

    The CNN column I mentioned, if all goes well, should run at the end of this week. It’s tech-related, but it’s timed to next Sunday’s finale of Breaking Bad. Trust me, if I’m able to make this piece work, it’ll all make sense soon.

    The other big thing happening this week is that Lilly starts kindergarten in the morning. That means I have to go to bed, like, 10 minutes ago. I have to get her to school every day by 7:45 (or earlier), which given my morning crankiness seems like a superhuman feat. Her daycare was much more lax about such things and the girls were only required to arrive anytime before 9:30 a.m.

    7:45 a.m., it sounds like, is much earlier. I don’t really know because I have very little experience with 7:45. It sounds awful, frankly. I don’t know why people put up with such a horrible-sounding time of day. Are there better donuts at that hour? Public nudity? Something I’m not aware of that makes consciousness at that hour more rewarding than an 8:30 wake-up?

    I think I only have to keep doing this, the getting up far earlier than I would like, for something like 10 more years, so… we’ll see how that goes.

  • Kids and cars

    Sophia Rayne Cavaliero. Photo provided by Cavaliero family.
    This was a story that turned out to be a much easier to write than it was to research and report. It’s Monday’s Digital Savant column, which runs a bit longer and bigger than usual as a lead Life & Arts story.

    It’s about the horrible phenomenon of children left in cars who die of heat stroke. It happens 33 times per year nationwide on average and shows no sign of abating despite calls for more awareness and efforts to incorporate technology into vehicles that could prevent these cases from happening. In 2010, the number peaked at 49 and as of this writing, 15 such deaths have already been reported for 2012.

    My goal was not to write any kind of definite article about this because that has already been written. The heartbreaking, rigorously reported, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 Washington Post story, “Fatal Distraction” by Gene Weingarten is the starting point for any discussion on what happens. (And if you are one of those people who believes as a parent that it could never happen to you and that parents who lose a child this way accidentally should be prosecuted as criminals, please read the Weingarten article before commenting.)

    I also found the transcript of a live chat that Weingarten held after the story was published to be incredibly helpful. And by helpful, I mean that my wife came upstairs asking if I was OK when she heard me upstairs in the office gasping and crying halfway through the original article. It’s a tough read, but also a must-read.

    Instead of rehashing that excellent piece, my article was meant to look at the tech aspect of this — why there hasn’t been technology built into vehicles yet to prevent such accidents and if such technology does exist, why it’s not selling like gangbusters to parents who otherwise buy every safety apparatus out there. The whole article idea started when I was emailed by a local inventor hoping to sell just such a technology and that led to the other sources in the story.

    As I say in the article, I’m haunted by the idea that something like this could have happened to me in the hazy, forgetful, incredibly stressful first year of parenting (and even after that) and I think writing this story helped me deal with that fear to some degree. (You can also read the Statesman.com version of the article here.)

    I’m on vacation right now.

    It’s the first official vacation on the books I’ve taken all year and by around June I was getting really, really antsy about needing a break. I was also sweating quite a bit, but I bet that had more to do with the start of summer than stress.

    Later this week, I’m attending BlogHer to do some writing research, but also hoping to have some great food and enjoy New York. My wife and a good friend of ours are going and we’ve already got tickets to The Book of Mormon and plans to eat bagels until we can’t walk.

    I worry that we’re trying to cram too much into a trip where I’m already booked up for two solid days at the conference, but I don’t care. I miss traveling so much that I’ll take it.

    I have a bunch of stuff I wrote in advance running in the paper over the next week, but I’ll wait till I’m back in town to go over all that. For now: NYC! Excitement!

  • Big photo help (mostly for myself)

    The last two Digital Savant columns that ran in the paper have been how-to columns where I’ve been trying to help myself as much as I’m trying to guide readers.

    Over the last couple of years, I’ve managed to get a few of my little organizational projects off the grounds. I scanned in every business card I ever got and turned those into digital address book contacts. I started (and am still working on) digitizing some stray VHS tapes that have stuff on them I’d actually want to keep.

    But with photos, I’m still a bit a of a mess. I back up everything to a very reliable Drobo drive enclosure (it holds multiple hard drives and if one dies, which has never happened, you can just swap the bad one out and your data’s still safe). I’ve put the most important photos of ours online in a few strategic places. But I still haven’t done a full backup to somewhere off-site or online of the photos, videos and documents we can’t afford to lose. And we still have photos scattered across two computers, two phones, optical discs and other places. So it’s a work in progress.

    That doesn’t mean I can’t advise others to do better! In part one of the how-to, we talk about how to sort and organize photos and, with the help of a professional archivist, we talk in part two about ways to store and protect your photos and videos so they stand the test of time.

    Would I pass that test? Not yet, but I’m working on it!

    The other new Digital Savant things of note are Micro features defining what’s an SSD (“Hey, what’s SSD with YOU?”) and the definition of “IRL,” a good suggestion from my co-worker Addie Broyles.

    The SSD in particular has been on my mind because I’ve been thinking about upgrading my laptop with one of those for the BLAZING SPEEDS. But they’re pricey. I almost pulled the trigger in a 480 GB drive for $360 (which sounds expensive until you see what these things normally cost at that size), but hesitated too long and lost the deal. Plus, I was thinking that I didn’t really feel like opening up my computer and fiddlin’ around with that right now, although truth be told, I want desperately to be upgrading. I recently bought a Neat scanner (which arrived DOA and is being replaced), upgraded our home router on a whim and am in general doing little upgrades here and there, perhaps as much out of restlessness than out of a genuine need to incrementally improve our little home office.

    Summer is flying by, but this year I’m weirdly OK with it. No, I haven’t gone toobin’ yet and I’ve only been to Schlitterbahn a few times, but I’ve spent a lot more time with the girls recently than I had earlier in the year and we’ve gotten to see more movies and done more relaxing stuff than our schedule usually allows, so it’s all cool in my book.

    We’re taking a trip to New York soon and then another trip to the beach, so I feel like there’s plenty to look forward to even if it’s not involving getting soaked here in town.

    Oh, and Carolina ate a lot of sushi the other day and that made me really happy. My 2-year-old is the opposite of a picky eater. She’s absolutely indiscriminate about what she eats, something I hope lasts for at least another year or two. At this point, if she orders lobster off the menu with a side of caviar, I’m inclined to just give it to her and grin.

  • FOMO, protect yo and mellow

    And the medal for beating three deadlines does NOT go to you. Suck it up.

    You know what this blog post won’t have in it? Dead cats. You’re welcome.

    So, how are you? I am good. I am fine. Things are finegood.

    It’s been raining this week in our part of the world, breaking up what is usually an unbearable, dry, stultifying, soul-reapening summer season into something pretty manageable. The (relatively) cooler weather and season slowdown of life in general has made for a really mellow week.

    But work does not stop, of course. It only seems a little slower for me right now because I’m caught up on most stuff, trying to work ahead when I can. I beat a set of three small freelance deadlines by several days, which never happens. I looked around my home office expecting to be presented with a polished medal or a crown of flowers of some sort, but none of that materialized. When I looked around the room, it was still empty, the deadline beaten its own virtuous reward.

    What a fucking shitty reward.

    Anyhoo! Time to catch up on the stuff I’ve been writing the last two weeks. The two big ones, the Digital Savant columns where thusly:

    • I wrote about “FOMO” or “Fear Of Missing Out,” an Internet-borne affliction I suffered (I’m proud to say mostly in silence until now) when Radiohead played two shows in Austin, including a long-awaited Austin City Limits taping that I had to missed on account of I wasn’t invited. Yes, it still stings.
    • This week’s column was about protecting your digital gadgets (phones, e-readers, tablets and the like) from the scorching sun, the gritty sand and the remarkably wet water.

    We also introduced a new weekly feature in the paper that I neglected to mention before called Digital Savant Micro. It’s a bite (or “byte!” Ha! Sorry!)-sized little article where we define one term, answer a question from a reader or offer a quick tip or event information on the front of the Life & Arts section. The ones that have run so far include the definition of “Retina Display,” an alert about the SXSW Interactive Panel Picker, a definition for “bandwidth throttling,” and tips on what to do with a failing laptop battery.

    Seperately, I reviewed Apple’s new Retina Display MacBook Pro. Do I recommend everyone go out and buy one right now? The answer… may surprise you. (It’s “No.”)

    I have some pieces coming up about organizing and storing your digital photos, and something else that’s much darker and harder to discuss that I’ll hold off on sharing until a little later.

    Let’s see, what else is going on… I finished Messy, which I really enjoyed; am currently reading Suffering Succotash, which is making me laugh and learn a lot.

    Been watching, in no particular order, America’s Got Talent, The Eric Andre Show, Metapocalypse, Bunheads, Louie, among others, and gearing up for Breaking Bad, which is my favorite show currently on TV.

    We caught up on some movies, including Brave (really, really good), Horrible Bosses (funnier than I was expecting), X-Men: First Class (great for an hour and then baffling and shitty toward the end).

    See? Mellow. Spending lots of time with the girls, lining up all my writing stuff for the fall, trying to keep up with work until I go on vacation in August.

    It’s a good summer so far. Face-melting heat index so far surprisingly low.

  • The online writing presentation

    [slideshare id=13460422&doc=onameetingnew-120626121756-phpapp01]

    Monday night, I spoke at an Online News Association meetup with Tolly Moseley about secrets of online writing. The above Slideshare presentation amounts to the slides that we emailed back and forth until we were satisfied we had enough visual ammunition in case words should somehow stop falling out of our mouths (it turns out this will never be a danger).

    The session was good. It was a large crowd, it was downstairs from my work desk which made getting there supremely easy for me, and I brought two big bags of cheap candy (for eating) and a box of Kleenex (in case anyone should get emotionally overcome by our tall tales from the wilds of writing careers).

    Great questions were asked, an abundance of visual Powers were Pointed at and at the hour and a half mark, we had to stop when we could have easily gone on another few hours. As we were packing up, Tolly mentioned that she was going to put up a blog entry on Wednesday summing up the panel. She confirmed this later over email, remarking that the Twitter response was great; some of those attending had taken great online notes, posting tidbits that I didn’t even remember us talking about just seconds after it was over.

    What I expected would be a few short clips of warmed-over reminiscence was instead synthesized, powerfully, into a perfectly delicious 7-course goddamn feast (I’m not even counting the appetizer or dessert) baked with care by Tolly. Let me tell you something about Tolly: she does not say she’s going to do something and then not do it. Rather, she tells you she’s going to do something, to which you may reply, “Oh, that’s nice,” and then she doesn’t just do this something, she freakin’ WHALLOPS IT WITH A SHOVEL UNTIL THE THING IS DONE TO THE GREAT BEYOND WITH A QUICKNESS.

    I had never worked with Tolly before on anything more than social chit-chat, but it turns out that when you work with Tolly, you’d best come correct, because if you come incorrectly, shirking as one does when there’s no money or long-term business commitment involved, you will be shown How It Is Done. It’s a good lesson to learn.