Tag: SXSW

  • SXSW Survivor

    A Tweet of mine that got posted on a sign during the SXSW Interactive craziness. Photo by Rob Quigley

    I’ve been approaching this blog post with a weird trepidation that’s gotten worse the longer I’ve put it off. Typically when I have a column run in the paper or something significant I had published to share, I post it here right away. But for what feels like two months straight, almost everything I wrote about was related to South by Southwest Interactive and it got to be so exhausting posting and posting and posting about that elsewhere that I just had no gas left to come over here and repeat myself. So a month and a half of columns, two big pieces I wrote for CNN, literally dozens of SXSW-related blog posts, a major profile I did for the Statesman and more has just fallen through the WordPress cracks of non-updates around here.

    How badly have I been procrastinating on this? I DID A MANUAL UPDATE TO WORDPRESS that had been nagging me for months just so I’d have an excuse to do something else before starting this post. I FTP’d my ass off just to delay the inevitable. “I can’t write the SXSW post,” I thought to myself, “not with an old version of WordPress! That would be disgusting!”

    Don’t get into a procrastination contest with me. You will lose. Eventually. Years from now.

    So in order to make this as painless as possible, I’ll just run through all the content. Please bear with me. I don’t expect anyone to go through and click and read through all of this material. It’s a giant mountain of writing and some of it is by now out of date and of no real use to anyone but me for the purposes of having it all in one place.

    But despite all my grumbling about how much work it was and how exhausting I feel after it’s over, SXSW Interactive really was pretty great and magical and worthy of note, or we would never put the kind of effort we do into covering it the way we do. I have to keep reminding myself of that and remembering that I actually thought we did a better job this year and I had more fun and less frustration than in 2011 covering the event.

    So here we go. Strap in!

    Columns

    On March 3rd, I profiled the opening keynote speaker of the festival, Baratunde Thurston, who recently published a very funny book called How To Be Black.  He was a great phone interview and I got to see his keynote and a much smaller party event where he was just as charming, super-smart and insightful.  So glad I got to meet him this year.

    I wrote a column for CNN that got a lot of attention at the fest called “The Changing Culture of SXSW.”  I wrote a similar piece for the Statesman last year, but I got the feeling that a lot of newcomers to the fest (and perhaps CNN readers) weren’t as familiar with the fest’s origins and how it’s evolving.

    I also got to write a lighter piece specifically for newcomers at CNN with tips for first-timers to the fest.  Coolest part of that one was that the story made it to the top-of-the-page center spot on cnn.com for a little while. (Screen shot above).

    On March 11th, we did an interview with Jennifer Pahlka that ran as a Digital Savant column.  She founded Code for America, a group that’s doing some amazing stuff nationwide with city data and an army (or brigade) of volunteers and fellows. She also delivered a keynote at SXSW Interactive.

    I didn’t have a column in the paper on March 19th due to SXSW Music coverage, but the day before, I had a pretty large wrap-up of the festival in the Sunday paper detailing some changes this year and some of the hype and money pouring into the fest.

    That set the stage for the next week’s column, in which I more overtly ask the question, “Are we in a social media and apps bubble that’s about to burst?”  I get to use the column as an outlet for my anxiety sometimes.

    And this week’s column was about a big trend we saw at the fest, a bunch of financial services and mobile payment add-ons that count point to where we’re going as far as paying for stuff with our phones instead of with traditional cash or credit.

    News and other articles

    SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest. Photo by Julia Robinson, for the American-Statesman

    Had a bit of an early scoop when I found out from Apple that they weren’t planning to do another pop-up store at this year’s SXSW.

    My favorite thing I wrote leading up to the fest was a profile of SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest that ran on the Saturday of the fest.  It was a story I was surprised we’d never written before in all our years of covering the fest.

    A few days into the fest, the story broke about “Homeless Hotspots.”  We ended up running a piece in the next day’s paper about the topic, which ended up being one of the most talked-about things at Interactive (especially by people who weren’t at the fest).

    We ran daily stories in the metro section wrapping up what was going on, like this one.

    In the weird lead-up to the fest, Apple announced the new iPad and I ended up being mentioned in a CNN story about it because of a Tweet I wrote while it was being announced.

    I did a preview of this year’s Screenburn Arcade event for the Austin360 print section, which had a very cool cover on it (you can see it below: from Street Fighter x Tekken.)

    Austin360 cover by Adrian Zamarron.

    And then there were perhaps 100 or so blog entries that our staff wrote.  It was a great team this year and I was thrilled to have a great mix of staffers, freelancers and editors working with us and contributing so much writing, photos, videos and more to the Digital Savant blog.

    I don’t even know where to begin as far as the daily stuff goes because it’s all just a blur, but I interviewed Segway inventor Dean Kamen, got a nice swag bag, took some pics at ScreenBurn, caught an important mom blogging panel, met Tobey Maguire and saw Leonardo DiCaprio at a party (weird story), watched Kevin Smith go way over his allotted time, got terrified by Ray Kurzweil, saw Al Gore interview Sean Parker, caught Jay-Z, Sleigh Bells and Major Lazer all on the same night (crazy!), and got the scoop on this year’s 27 percent jump in attendance before anybody else.

    I also received one of the weirdest voicemails of my life right after the fest ended.

    That’s far from all that I wrote and just a fraction of what the whole staff produced in the five days of Interactive.  Looking back on it nearly a month later, I’m kind of amazed.

    Photo by Vivien Killilea, via Getty Images Entertainment, provided by Mobli.

    Personally

    I only told a few people this last year and one of them, eventually, was my editor, but I think a week or two after 2011’s festival I swore to myself that this was the last year I was going to put myself through this, that somehow I was going to get out of covering the festival in 2012, no matter what.

    As with having a second kid when you start to forget what having the first one entailed, I stopped thinking like that by the time March 2012 arrived and I’m glad.  This year’s fest was busier, larger and crazier than the year before, but I think I did a much better job balancing work and fun. In 2011, the ratio was completely out of whack and I went home feeling like I’d burned myself out and missed it all with my head stuck in a laptop.  This year, I made sure to devote lots of evening time to friends I never get to see, to be more open to ditching things on my schedule that weren’t absolutely necessary and, as always, resisted trying to set too many appointments and driving myself crazy trying to get from place to place.

    On the Sunday of the festival, I forced myself to miss a panel and instead go see a band I’d been wanting to check out live, Wild Child, at a tiny, practically empty live show.  That turned out to be one of the biggest highlights of the entire fest and it was a completely private moment away from from the throngs.

    One of the nights of the fest I got to see Eugene Mirman, Kristen Schaal and other comedians do stand-up for a Bob’s Burgers event.

    I took my bike to the fest this year.  First of all, I forgot I had a bike.  I had to pump the tires and wipe off the dust and ride it to make sure the damn thing still worked.  Work it did.  I even bought a fancy bike lock, transported the bike to Austin and rode it around.  The first two days of the fest, it rained, so that was useless, but the rest of the festival it got me where I needed to go much faster, and was a nice way to end each night, crossing the Lady Bird Lake bridge to the newspaper parking lot when I’d usually be trudging back on foot.

    I took care of myself more.  On two nights of the fest, I stayed at my brother’s new apartment in Austin instead of commuting back to New Braunfels.  I made a point of finding decent food to eat and drinking tons of water instead of just skipping meals like I usually did.

    And I brought more phone chargers and gear (like a simple plastic bag to put in my bike seat when it rained) that saved me lots of headaches.

    Mostly, though, my editor and I just planned the crap out of the festival.  We went through 1,000+ panels multiple times, had scads of Google Docs we shared and just really got our heads in the game a lot earlier than we usually do (and our planning usually begins in January).  We were just better prepared this year and that preparation paid off, especially when we were thrown curveballs. (In case you haven’t figured it out by now my editor Sarah is really organized and great at planning.)

    Good experience, pretty amazing festival, and I don’t even feel exhausted or burned out talking about it.

    But talk about it I will stop because it’s practically all that’s come out of my mouth for months and that needs to end.  Until, you know… January of 2013.

    A few more pics:

  • I got to bag it up

    Where to begin? Crazy season in my life starts around mid-February and doesn’t let up until mid-March. For about a month, my life revolves around South by Southwest Interactive and somewhere in there I’m also celebrating my brother and mom’s birthdays and trying to enjoy the suddenly awesome spring weather that only lasts a few weeks before the crushing summer heat returns.

    I start thinking about how I’ll handle my DVR duties (MUST. WATCH!) when I’ll be gone for five or six days, how we’ll juggle the kids’ daycare and my middle-of-the-night commuting and even what I’ll be packing in my work bag, which became the subject of last week’s Digital Savant column.

    (No column this week due to the Oscars).

    I haven’t followed my own advice and purchased a little power strip yet, but I plan to do that tonight. The other thing I plan to do differently this year is to take my bike. The one I never ride that’s been sitting in the garage forever. I bought a fancy bike lock and checked to make sure the tires aren’t flat. I plan to dust it off, lube it up and ride (we’re still talking about the bike here). So if you see someone in downtown Austin in two weeks swinging wildly on a bike with a heavy work bag causing imbalance, that’s probably me. Say hi.

    I had two other pieces run in the paper last week, reverse-publishes of a post I did about Code for Austin’s Saturday Hackathon and a guide to finding (and RSVP’ing to) parties at SXSW Interactive.

    Also, I’m writing about the official app, the guy from Stratfor who’s speaking at the fest and the co-founder of Pinterest. (Oh, I’m on Pinterest, by the way. Come watch me pin things.)

    Have a lot more pieces about the fest in the works including some stuff for CNN.com.

    I’m trying to spend as much time as possible at home with the kids because I know I won’t be seeing them a lot in mid-March. When I wasn’t looking, Carolina went from the pre-verbal baby to a kid who can repeat pretty much any word and who’s talking nonstop and grabbing EVERYTHING. Grab grab grab, baby STOP! OK, not a baby, but STILL. Toddler, QUIT!

    Here she is. We dig her crazy style.

    Happy theater goer.

    Hangers-on

    And one of Lilly for good measure:

    Getting whooped at princess checkers.

  • The columnist

    This is what I look like in the 'Star Wars' universe. Hey, shut up, Bantha are DELICIOUS!

    Back in August, we started running Digital Savant in the paper once a week (a lot of it generated by the long-running blog that I write) as a column. Work-wise, it’s not a whole lot different, perhaps just a little more structured than writing the same kinds of topics on the blog and with a firmer weekly deadline. Sometimes I’m so caught up in updating the blog and working on other stories that I forget that the column runs in the paper on Mondays and that once a week newspaper readers are subjected to my grinning face, often way too early in the morning.

    But it’s been nice to have that routine. I was initially dreading it and, in truth, there are some weeks when my Wednesday deadline looms and I think, “This is going to be embarrassing for all involved,” but it usually turns out OK, and sometimes better than OK. Sometimes I’m really pleased at how the columns turn out and that they definitely have a voice and a point of view that isn’t otherwise represented in the paper. (That point of view I’ll call “Extreme goof dad nerd” until I come up with a better description.)

    I haven’t posted about the last two columns because I took a trip to Atlanta or a social media panel that I was moderating (I found out a week before that they wanted me physically present; I thought I was going to be beamed in somehow via Internets and telephonies and magicks). Someone emailed me, “How are your travel arrangements coming” and I stared stupidly at my screening, thinking, “My what?”

    Going to Atlanta was lots of fun since I never get to travel, but I’m still catching up with everything that this brief 36-hour trip pushed aside.

    So here’s the two columns that ran recently.

    The first one is a sort-of review/set of impressions about the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I’ve been playing pretty regularly since the holidays. In the column I make clear how much of an MMO newbie I still am. I found a way to embarrass myself even in an online game where I don’t know anyone.

    It’s very tough to review an MMO, impossible, really. It would take months, if not years. The best you can do is relate some of your own experience and compare it to other gaming experiences you’ve had.

    The other column ran this Monday and it’s a list of conversation-starters for South by Southwest Interactive, which is less than a month away. I also posted a blog version that’s full of links to all the panels I talk about in the piece.

    On Saturday, I attended TEDxAustin and followed it up with a big, detailed blog post rundown of it. It really was an inspiring day, full of great ideas and speakers who are out there kicking ass and (presumably) creating big-data ways to take names and do something with said ass-kicking/name-taking database. I’m still processing what I can take away from the experience personally, but one thing I hope to do is just get out of my own head a little bit and get out there in the community more. I feel like I’ve been living the last two or three years in a hidey hole, trying to hold down the parenting fort and the work fort and several other forts that perhaps are not build up to code and Tweeting or writing from behind a protective screen. It needed to be that way, but perhaps that isolation is going away a little.

  • All Hallow’s Vacation

    Illustration by Don Tate II / Austin American-Statesman

    Today, I’m at home on the first day of a week-long vacation. It starts with Halloween and ends with the first day of Wurstfest, which seems to me to be some kind of divine calendarification, evidence that sausage and ghosts and perhaps God are all working together in some way. Maybe two out of three of those, at least.

    The work trip I wrote about last time went fine. The kids were well-behaved and went to bed on time and there was even sleep to be had. That ended a week later when the weather changed, some allergens blew in and Carolina developed a bad, phlegmy cough (which sometimes leads to middle-of-the-night vomiting) that we’re still dealing with. Still, she just gets up and starts bouncing around when she wakes up, as if the psychic and also goopy wreckage of the night before never happened. She’s going to be one of those annoying people who never gets a hangover, I can feel it.

    The vacation was… very necessary. We got more bad news at work last week. This was news that was scheduled. There was a meeting and a date and time for that meeting set and months of anticipation as to the things that would be announced at that meeting. All that was left were the details.

    And yet, we’re all still devastated. We’re hurt and frustrated and knowing it was coming doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. This was the day before my last day at the office (which I ended up spending working from home). The last few weeks in general were really tough at work and I just bore down and tried to knock every single thing off my to-do list so that I wouldn’t have any loose ends or things to worry about when I was gone.

    So here I am, first day of vacation, writing about work.

    I wrote so much the last two weeks, a lot of it stories and blog posts scheduled to run later, that it’s going to look like I’m not even gone.

    Last week, I did a Tech Monday column about Siri in which I asked her a bunch of questions about Texas and the lady of the iPhone 4S proved pretty convincingly that she’s no Texas belle.

    This week’s Digital Savant column was a bigger piece, a lead story in Life & Arts in which I ask whether we might not all have a little bit of the online troll/griefer within us. This was part of the online identity series and as of right now, it’s the last officially scheduled piece of that series, but I’m sure we’re continue returning to the topic because there’s so many ideas that my editor and I have that deal with those ideas. I love the illustration that ran with it (it’s at the top of this blog entry) and the story, which I guess is half-essay, half-reported tech trend article, seemed to have worked out pretty well.

    Also in today’s paper was a short story about SXSW Interactive’s ScreenBurn and I have a few more things in the pipeline for the rest of this week and next. The blog’s been busy with lots of tech reviews that’ll run as an upcoming roundup column and lots of stuff about Apple’s iOS 5.

    We’re taking the kids trick-or-treating tonight. My wife and I went to our first Halloween party in probably about six or seven years and we even worse costumes. Mine was not so well-received and I blame it on the party being in San Antonio where, apparently, “Breaking Bad” is not a thing people watch at all. I went as Walter White, meth cook extraordinaire:

    Halloween costume #breakingbad

    We haven’t taken any photos of the kids in their costumes, but Lilly did get in some carving time yesterday:

    4-year-old: carving pumpkin's sworn enemy:

    Also on tap this week: new Trailers Without Pity season starts with The Muppets! That should be up in the next day or two.

    Busy vacation! Hoping to do lots of writing, TV watching, de-cluttering, gym-going and Halloween candy eating.

  • E-books, panel picking and a 4-year-old

    Nook Color, one of the e-readers we mention in the guide
    I have a big story due at work on Monday, so my last week has been a crunch to try to make sure all the pieces are aligned for that (and that pieces I might have had missing could be rounded up through some reporting I did last week and over the weekend).

    Not that the Digital Savant print column is a month into its life, it’s starting to feel more routine and I’m figuring out how to balance other larger-sized stories along with that deadline and the daily blog posts and other stuff that comes along from day to day.

    On Sunday, I had a big back-to-school tech gift guide in the paper, this year focused on e-book readers and tablets for college students.

    On Monday, the Digital Savant column is about the South by Southwest Interactive PanelPicker, which allows the public to vote on panels for the fest. As far as I’ve been able to tell, it’s the largest tech conference to do anything like that except for maybe BarCamp-style events where the programming is organized after the event starts.

    The story I have due tomorrow should run next Sunday. I’ll write about it when it’s published, but it’s another part of the online identity series I’ve been working on.

    Lilly is 4

    Lilly turned four years old this weekend. It was not entirely unexpected. I mean, we had about four years to prepare for it (and some months more than that, even). Three-to-four is a bigger transition than two-to-three was; at least it feels that way in my life. She’s no longer a toddler and next year she’ll be in kindergarten. She left being a baby long behind her, I just hadn’t quite accepted it. Having an almost-two-year-old in the house does make it seem a little less like the end of an era, at least.

    We had a pizza party for Lilly. She remembered last year’s and raved about it long enough that we figured we should do it again. She can sometimes be cranky and she’s very demanding, as I imagine most 3-4-year-olds are, but this weekend she really turned on the charm and was on her best behavior for almost the whole weekend.

    She asked for specific things this year without prompting, based on trips she’s made to the store recently and, more disturbingly, things she’s started to notice her friends have at her school. That’s how she ended up with a purple unicorn Pillow Pet that, I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty jealous about.

    I didn’t have any real work or writing projects or plans and we were able to spend more time than usual just hanging out with the kids all weekend. It was wonderful and brief, but it’s nice that we get to do it all over again next weekend and the weekend after that.

  • Summer days unpacked

    Every year, it’s begun to feel like since I moved to New Braunfels in 2004, I complain around August or September that I felt like I missed the whole summer, but that’s probably because I haven’t thought to quit my job and be a river bum all summer, tubing all day and sleeping outside staring at the stars all night.

    Come to think of it, that sounds kind of crappy, at least the sleeping outside part. Where would I plug in the HEPA filter?

    Instead of working on my (not really in need of help) tan, I’ve been mostly indoors, working, and this last week there was so much output I began to feel like I should just stop talking for a little while. The week began with a new CNN.com tech column that I pitched when the summer started and I saw that my DVR was about to make for a steep climb for the next few months. It’s about how much old crap we have hanging out in our digital video recorder and the stuff you notice when you’re digging back through months or years of old programming.

    My Digital Savant column is rolling along. My second weekly print column was a list of intermediate/advanced tips for Twitter now that it’s matured quite a bit since the last time we did a primer on it, back in 2008. Really good reaction on this one and it got passed around quite a bit on the social media sites, especially on Twitter itself.

    The third column, which runs in tomorrow’s paper, is about the Livescribe smart pen, which I’ve been using for the last few months. It’s replaced my old digital audio recorder and notepads for taking interview notes and I’m surprised more reporters aren’t using something like it. (Or, really just it. I’m not aware of any product that does exactly what it does.)

    I also had a story run in the paper last week about Spotify, the online music service that recently arrived in the U.S. I’m still using it, but still not sure what I’ll do once the Premium trial runs out this month. I’m not sure how much I’d like it if I couldn’t use the mobile app and I’m not sure I can justify $10 a month on music given that I already pay for Sirius XM and carry my entire music collection with me on my phone every day. I ran a long blog post with all the comments that readers and social media friends shared about their thoughts on Spotify.

    I also had two pieces in the paper about South by Southwest Interactive raising its rates for the 2012 fest.

    Despite all the output, it’s been feeling a little lazy here, at least at home. We’ve got a break from videos for a few months, a writing project I’m working on with a friend hasn’t really gotten off the ground yet and apart from working on some jokes for a friend who’s hosting an event and very short iPad reviews for Kirkus, I’ve mostly been spending my nights catching up on Breaking Bad (only about 7 episodes left and I’ll be up to date!), reading some books including the first three volumes of The Walking Dead, finishing off the last book of Y: The Last Man and savoring Spoiled, a really well-written and hilarious young adult novel by The Fug Girls.

    As much as I’d like to be outside enjoying the summer, it’s been so hot this year for so long that we can’t even take the girls outside in the evenings anymore unless they’re going to be submerged in cool water or we’re taking them directly to another place that’s indoors. It sucks not to be able to take your kids to the park, even, when it’s still 105 degrees as the sun’s going down.

    So we’re going to Schlitterbahn when we can, going to indoor places like the New Braunfels Children’s Museum or just shopping. Maybe we’ll make it down to the beach before summer’s over.

    But not to complain. I’m actually enjoying the rest and kind of digging how busy work has been and how busy home has not.