Tag: sxswi

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • TED and then some

    The makers of the ‘Livestrong Austin Marathon and Half-Marathon’ App. Photo by Jay Janner, Austin American-Statesman

    This post is about a week overdue, but that’s probably a good thing because there’s a lot more to add. Last week, a “There’s a Creator for That” feature ran in the Statesman about the Livestrong Austin Marathon and Half-Marathon app (the marathon itself happened yesterday; I’m running a bit late).

    I also had two more pieces in the paper that day, one about Google’s campaign to make its Places and Hotpot services take off in Austin for Tech Monday and the other a reverse-publish of a blog post I wrote about digitizing our old VHS tapes.

    Last week, I hosted a live chat with organizers of South by Southwest Interactive and then wrote about Saturday’s TEDxAustin conference. I didn’t go last year, but this year we made the effort to attend and the Statesman was able to pay for my ticket. We did a pretty extensive preview of the event and today I posted a very lengthy wrap-up. Tried to explain not just TEDxAustin, but the whole TED phenomenon and why it’s taken off so quickly.

    We weren’t allowed to bring laptops, digital cameras, video cameras or anything larger than a cell phone and even texting and Tweeting were discouraged during the speaking portions of the day. That made for an interesting reporting challenge since I’m so used to covering conferences live, but it also freed me up to really pay attention, take careful longhand notes and really think about what I thought of the event before I posted something two days later.

    Right now things are in a weird balance between me being very much a homebody — I’m loving being here with the girls, taking them to the park, going to the local Children’s Museum, catching up on TV with my wife when they go to bed and playing video games or watching my own shows after everyone else is in bed.

    But for TEDx, I had to spend an entire Saturday away from home; it was also the day after we went to Austin for a concert. As I left Saturday morning, Lilly followed me to the door and told me not to go. Carolina is old enough now to recognize when I’m here or when I’m gone and she’s been especially affectionate lately. The older they get the more I miss them when I’m not here and more valuable the time seems when I’m not off working. It’s made it a lot easier to turn down extraneous projects, unpaid speaking gigs and anything else that takes me out of the house when I’m needed.

    But then tonight, I attended a Town Hall for SXSW Interactive and got home late. Carolina was asleep and Lilly was already curled in bed, waiting for me.

    In just a few weeks I’m going to be gone 24/7 for practically an entire week. I wish I could say I’m completely pleased that the fest is growing and drawing more and more attention every year. It’s my home turf and I get very competitive covering the fest; I love that I’m usually in the top tier of reporters covering the event and rarely get scooped in mid-March. But I’m also a little resentful that Interactive is expanding in both directions, with pre- and post events that are stretching it from 5 days to at least 7 and as many as 11 depending on how we choose to cover it all. Four nights away from home are hard. Six I’ve never even tried before. I’m a little worried.

    I’ll take time off after the fest and probably a day or two beforehand to make up for the long hours, but as my wife is fond of saying, I’m not 25 anymore.

    I can’t deny, though, that at events like TEDx and SXSW, I love being around people. I love seeing friends who are in from out of town and people I only ever see online through Twitter or Facebook. I love staying out late and seeing people speak and having a few drinks and getting to process it all and put it back out there in writing.

    Maybe it’s good that I have a job where I can compress nearly a year of that fun into about a week. It’s exhausting, but it’s also a lot of fun and maybe necessary given what the rest of the year is like.