Tag: tech

  • At the word jam

    True story: I wrote an article, the column that has my face on it and runs in the paper on Mondays, that was part two of an occasional series we’ll do defining tech terms that are either confusing or that aren’t easily explained in the barrage of tech-related marketing that’s thrown at us every day.

    This second Digital Savant glossary includes words like “Airprint” and “animated GIF,” things that are common parlance to geeks and Internet bottom-dwellers like us, but that I get asked about by readers in emails and blog comments all the time. (I had to go and research, “3-D printer” to make sure I knew exactly what those are and, holy mac-n-cheese, that’s amazing! And a future source of legal problems, surely.)

    Soon after the column ran, someone who reads my stuff regularly told me, “I read your piece. Didn’t understand a word of it.”

    I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or what, but before I had time to let out, “But… that was… kind of… the point… of…” the moment had passed and I was left to go deflate.

    It was one of those, “Now why am I doing this again?” moments, which I’ve seemed to have a lot of lately. Weird bursts of deflated, defeated lack of purpose and paralysis mixed with (often Twitter-driven) bouts of self-congratulatory confidence and frenzied catch-up activity. Is this what it’s like to start going bi-polar? Is there a take-home urine test for that or something? A Facebook quiz?

    Anyhoo! The other thing I wrote this week that was in the paper was a preview of the new season of Red vs. Blue, which afforded me the opportunity to virtually chat with the folks over at Rooster Teeth, who are inspiring like a lot of people in Austin who just keep putting out high levels of creative stuff over a very long period of time until the Internet has no choice but to notice and to follow raptly. Anyone who has a modicum of interest in the Austin film scene or Internet video in general should be standing on their chairs and applauding that crew for what they’ve done.

    Interrupted…

    Everything up to this point I wrote last night. And in the middle of writing and previewing the post, the site went down. The entire host of the site went down. I waited a few minutes and the site, WordPress, everything… still down.  The editing page was still in the browser, so I copy/pasted the text into Google Docs and went to bed.

    Which led me to… maybe I wasn’t supposed to write this?  Or I needed to take another look? Or I just need a new webhost?

    Or perhaps just some perspective.  This has been a spectacularly up and down week.  My wife and I had a great three-day weekend that included a pool party, lots of eating out, lots of time having fun with the kids and then, boom, a weird stomach ailment that felled us both right as Memorial Day was ending.

    At the AT&T Spursachampionatorium

    Then I recovered enough to go to an NBA game in San Antonio and that was a blast even as I was struggling to climb up stairs to our seats and trying hard not to bring back on the headache that had been plaguing me all day.  The game and its screaming, dancing, San Antonio-puro-pienche-people crowd was, weirdly, restorative.  Even as I tried not to move too much, I was totally digging the scene and the great game and feeling very much at home.  It was wonderful.

    A friend mentioned a piece that ran on this site a while back in an article she wrote for Bitch Magazine about people asking you to do work for free.

    And then, today, I did a Skype session with some students visiting my alma mater in Oklahoma, journalists from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. It was very similar to a session I did last year for the same event and just like last time, they asked incredibly insightful questions about everything from blogging to curating content to the future of social media to how to handle news in a country where broadband Internet just isn’t spreading to people fast enough.  I actually had answers and insight and stories and even a few funny bits of experience to share.  The comments they posted immediately after the session to Facebook, the friend requests I got and the personal thanks some of them sent (again, immediately after; they’re young and super-quick) made me feel like I’d actually helped them figure some things out.

    Weird, wonderful week.

    And then I just got interrupted again. Diaper failure causes 2-year-old’s crib to be soaked in urine, requires immediate sheet and clothing changes. She was a trouper, smiling the whole time and cheering me on as I lifted up her crib mattress and “Daddy fix it.”

    The thing that’s hovering over what’s been a fitful couple of weeks is that a friend and I finally figured out what we need to be doing with a writing thing we’ve been working on for a long while and now we’re at the actual doing point and it’s scaring me.  There’s so much information we’ve collected and conversations we’ve had and things that we want to say and my brain can’t seem to hold and process and filter-distill and dispense it to my satisfaction. And that’s freaking me out. It’s making me think I need to print out pages and put things in an accordion folder and search-cloud-tag-up material and put stickers on papers and that I’m going to sit right back down with everything organized and still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.

    So that’s what’s really troubling me. Because, except for stomach bugs that come and go, most everything else has been pretty awesome lately.

  • The Social

    Facebook went public last week. You might have heard about it. They sold some stock or something.

    In the big lead-up to the big let-down, I wrote a piece for CNN.com about why I’m staying on Facebook and why people should just accept that the kingdom of Zuckerberg is just a fact of life and that people should just get used to it.

    Of course, every time Facebook has shown vulnerability or made a bad decision in the past, they’ve found a way to sidestep criticism and come roaring back. This stock market thing shows a much deeper, perhaps more fundamental weakness in the company that we really haven’t seen before.

    And since was a column that was meant to be a little contrarian in the first place, I find myself wondering if it’s going to be a piece of writing that I’ll come to regret in a few short years. We’ll see, won’t we? I certainly was anticipating the flurry of negative comments this time around and was able to enjoy them from backstage, twirling my mustache and saying to myself, “Job well done, villain.”

    What I wasn’t expecting was for CNN to slap it on the front page center with my name out there for the world to see. That was pretty amazing-cool, but also terrifying at the same time. I felt like I’d been called out by my own words, made to stand before a crowd and justify my opinion. Lucky for me, I have a lot of opinions about Facebook, even if they’re not even always consistent or right.

    Dustin Maxey (right) and his friend Larin Frederick, talk about “GroupWink,” a group dating app Maxey is planning to launch this summer. Photo by Julia Robinson for the Austin American-Statesman

    Another big piece I wrote that ran this week was in the Statesman and it was about ambient/serendipity apps like “Highlight” that pair you up with people nearby, social network-like, even when you’re not actively using them. The piece evolved into an article about the line between convenient and creepy and how future apps are going to have to overcome that label.

    I had some great conversations in the interviews I did for the article and as usual it was just a lot of material that needed to be condensed into one good-sized story. I hope it didn’t lose too much in that process and that it made enough sense to people who don’t follow this kind of tech.

    I’ve had a weird thing lately, just the last few days, where I’m getting a little tired and bored with the whole social media thing. It’s not that I’m not posting; I still do that. But I’ve also found myself not posting a lot when in the past I would have responded to something or had a thought I wanted to share. Some of it may be that I’ve been writing so much about social media lately that I’m a little burned out on thinking about it, but some of it is also that I know that if I respond to certain posts that I’m going to get into a whole conversation with someone and of late, I’ve been so pressed for time that I’d rather just not even get into it, you know?

    A guy I know, Loren Feldman, is working on a documentary about social media and I’m dying to see how it turns out because he and I have a very similar view on a lot of what’s going on, only he’s able to say a lot of the things I can’t in ways that I don’t. We both feel the bubble is close to bursting and that in a few short years, people will have moved on to something else, even if it’s just faster/more efficient ways of doing what we’re doing now.

    Or it could just be that I get bored of hearing my own voice (typed, rather, and online) and that I get the sense a lot of other people are chirping along with very little to say, too, at times. It gets boring sometimes, doesn’t it? That can’t just be me that feels it, right?

    Another theory: summer is here (we get it early in New Braunfels) and I’d rather just be outside, swimming or tubing. That’s probably it, honestly.

    Schlitterbahn is pretty empty today. More water for us!

  • Listening

    This has been a strange and terrible week, but then on the other hand I spent a lot of time with family and we took our first road trip with the kids (it was torture going one way, not so bad coming back).

    Being out of the mix in the middle of the week — and not during a holiday — was weird and made me feel dislocated. It was the week of the Consumer Electronics Show and I found myself completely out of that news bubble for a few days and then struggling to catch up days later.

    On Monday, I had a column published which was basically a review of Ultimate Ears custom earbuds. I spent a few weeks thinking about it (the fitting I describe in the column happened, I believe, back in November) and was really happy with the way the piece turned out right after I wrote it. Then a few days later, it was completely forgotten as I had other things to deal with and I barely noticed when it ran in the paper. (I got a few really nice emails about it, but nothing like the reaction we got with the Dyson vacuum piece.)

    As it happened, the Klipsch earbuds I describe in the article broke right as I was wrapping the column up and sending it to my editor. They were still under warranty so the company sent me a brand new pair,after I called tech support, then emailed them a copy of the gift receipt and described what went wrong. The package arrived today — brand new earbuds, new packaging, everything. I was super impressed; it’s a two year warranty and I’m still only six months into owning them. I didn’t even have to send in the broken pair of buds.

    The other thing that ran in the paper this week of mine was a reverse-publish of the blog post I previously mentioned, my tech resolutions for 2012.

    I haven’t really written anything yet about my grandmother, but I’ve been thinking about her a lot and trying to wrap my memories together somehow into some thoughts that make sense. But it’s hard; I don’t really know where to begin.

  • Gifts!

    Every year around this time I usually put together a holiday tech gift guide for the Statesman and a separate one for Television Without Pity, working off a big master list and then deciding which items should go where (with a little bit of overlap).

    This year the gift guides diverged a little more than usual because we decided to make the Statesman one more locally focused with products produced by Austin companies or powered by Austin technology (or, in a few cases, just stuff that would appeal to Central Texans). So the TWOP gift guide ends up being a lot more general and TV-focused while the Statesman one has a more local feel.

    This is probably way more information than you care to have.

    Which is all to say that while these packages often look really easy: just a bunch of product images with really short descriptions, they’re a huge challenge to put together. I save email pitches all year in a folder called “Gift Guide Tech” and I literally go through those emails one by one when it’s time to put these stories together. This year there were about 170+ emails and more kept coming in as I was working on it. Some of those emails included information for 10 to 20 products each. I used to put all my picks in one big Excel spreadsheet and work from that, but this year I ditched the spreadsheet and just made a simple list and that saved me a little bit of time.

    I’ve been trying in general to save time on the things I do and not waste it, especially at work where it feels like deadlines are closing in and the year is already drawing to a close.

    Like most of you, I’m just hanging on for Turkey Day, looking forward to just relaxing for a day or two and not thinking too hard about what’s left to do in 2011, which has proven to be a challenging, very weird year for me that I’m still trying to figure out.

  • Section fronting

    "Sweet" John Muehlbauer, from my tablets story. Photo by me.

    I feel a bit like I lost my Eye of the Tiger (I blame the stupid, eyeless tiger) for a while after South by Southwest Interactive, as I wrote before, but things seem to finally be ramping up again. After months of feeling too tired and overwhelmed to pitch outside of work, I’ve had a few things start to materialize (more on that later) and at work, I’ve had two section-front stories appear this week that I think turned out really well.

    The first is a story is an advice/how-to piece on transitioning to a tablet like the iPad 2 from a laptop or desktop computer. This is probably not a full-blown trend yet, but I’m starting to hear of people ditching their heavy laptop on business trips in favor of a tablet or just finding they have less use for a full-blown computer the majority of the time. We were hoping we were a little ahead of the curve on this. I think by the holidays, we’ll see a lot more of this going on as that market grows. This piece ran in Sunday’s Life & Arts section.

    Austin writer Gabrielle Faust. Photo by Zach Ornitz, Austin American-Statesman

    On Tuesday, another piece I wrote about how Austin celebrities like horror writer Gabrielle Faust, HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff and Jojo Garza of the music group Los Lonely Boys manage their connections and correspondence with fans online appeared in the paper.

    The common thread I heard in my interviews was that it scales up really fast and becomes unmanageable in a short amount of time unless a famous person devotes staff or a significant amount of time to it. (Even then, it can get beyond their control.) Something to think about for those who are gaining popularity online with their art or business.

  • So reviewed

    I hate rushing reviews for tech stuff.

    This is a bit antithetical to what the industry is like now. Everybody wants their hands on a gadget first and to put out the earliest review (usually right when an embargo lifts) and rack up those page views from curious Googling readers.

    But given the kinds of stuff we’re talking about — tablet PCs, smart phones, stuff that you really have to live with a while to get your head around and really sort usefulness from novelty, I just don’t think you can review something like an iPad or a radically new kind of phone in a few hours or even a day or two. So I tend to play with stuff over time and then realize that a month has gone by and I still haven’t written anything about (insert name of gadget). Right around the time the PR people start e-mailing me, asking, “So, uh… are you ever gonna review this thing and mail the product back?” is when my crack timing, motivation and work ethic kick in and I write the damn thing. Sometimes I write two in the same article just to clear the decks.

    So, here’s some recent stuff that ran in the paper. I did a review that appeared as a Sunday secondary taking a look at the Motorola Xoom tablet and the T-Mobile G-Slate. I liked them both for different reasons, but not as much as the iPad, which should be no surprise to anyone who’s spent some serious time with an iPad or iPad 2. The article in the paper was reverse-published from a Digital Savant blog entry from a little while ago.

    A bit of a companion to that is a first-impressions I did of the BlackBerry PlayBook this week.

    I’ve got a more detailed story about migrating to a tablet running June 11 that’ll offer tips, app ideas and more to those thinking about moving away from a laptop or desktop to something a little more portable.

    Also had a review of the new Mortal Kombat game, which I quite liked. Spent a lot of nights trudging through that story mode (which was ridiculously awful/awesome) and getting back my moves from all those years of Kombo muscle memory.

    And on Saturday, I wrote a lengthy “Raising Austin” column about kids, security and Facebook. I got to talk a little about a trip I took to Dallas last year to speak at a panel for Jewish Family Services on the topic and to tie it in with some recent news. Sometimes I do speaking stuff or freelance and worry that it won’t be useful for anything but making a little money, but other times it pays off in other ways and helps me a lot at my day job.

    That’s about it for now. Summer has kicked off her in New Braunfels and we went to Schlitterbahn three times in one weekend. That is how the Gallagas roll when it is hot outside and we have season passes.