On Monday, I had a story run in the American-Statesman about getting good tech support/customer service, which is an issue that seems to hit critical mass a day or two after Christmas after the dust and eggnog have settled. There’s some good resources in the piece and, knock on wood, I haven’t had to use any of them yet this year. Enjoy!
I’m on vacation right now and trying to do as little as possible that doesn’t involve pajamas, television or ice cream. So far, I’ve been wildly successful.
It’s Thanksgiving in two days and, like I said last time, things seem to be accelerating grimly, spinning outward as if by centrifuge, instead of settling into tedium and sugarness, like my famous (OK, Luby’s famous) sweet potato casserole.
I spent the end of last week finishing up what I thought would be a front-page story (in the end: not so much) about a University of Texas study about how students and recent grads are using Facebook. S. Craig Watkins, who led the study, is one of the smartest, most interesting people I get to interview regularly and it’s always fun to catch up on what his thoughts are on the state of social media and tech.
For several weeks before that, I’d been working on a holiday tech gift guide for the Statesman, an annual tradition that always ends up being more work than I remember from the year before. We focused on Internet-video-on-your-TV products like Apple TV, Roku and the Logitech Revue with Google TV. I’ve tried two of those three products and am curious about the third (Apple TV), especially since iPads and iPhones can now do a neat trick with it.
There’s also a helicopter that flies around and shoots video. You’re welcome!
Another annual tradition is a similar gift guide I do for Television Without Pity. It’s more a photo gallery than a story, much shorter and with some different items. If you like things like Karaoke Revolution Glee, you may like this guide.
This week, I’ve been finishing up a profile of game designer Warren Spector, who is releasing Disney Epic Mickey next week. The reporting for that story has been pretty epic itself; I’ll tell you more about it after the story runs on Sunday.
What was I talking about again? Oh, right! Sweet potato casserole! I gotta get on that for Thursday.
Where things have been busier than usual is at work where I’ve had three pretty large-scale, reporting-intensive stories in a row to work on in the summer. I don’t know what your office is like, but in the summer, our office changes quite a bit. There’s lots of people going on vacations, an influx of interns and a flood of summer movies, summer concerts, video games and, for me, lots of smart phones hitting the market.
Feels like I’ve been working harder this summer than usual and there’ve been more opportunities to get on the front page or do big packages for the chunky Sunday paper. In today’s paper, I did a story about e-textbooks, which was an attempt to answer a simple question: “Where are we with electronic textbooks in Texas?” The answer was fairly complicated even though everyone I talked to on the subject for interviews was speaking along the same lines. There’s great potential, but we’re at the very start of what’s going to be a significant change in the way kids learn and interact with materials in the classroom. Obvious, yes, but the law changes in Texas are pretty major and will probably affect the way other states do things as well.
Last week, I had a story appear in the paper about a local Pokémon champ. It was from a blog post on Digital Savant, where I’ve been doing tons of blogging lately.
I mentioned earlier that I’m getting to spend more time with the kids. Lilly turned 3 a week and a half ago and we’re still trying to wrap our brains around having a 3-year-old in the house. She’s getting to be fun and funny and full of questions (some brilliant, others ones we wish she’d ask less frequently). We had a small pizza party for her birthday and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so excited. Today, we took her for an all-day trip to Schlitterbahn and she went on a tube ride that was much scarier than we were expecting. She was terrified the whole way and at one point got separated from me on a tall slide where you have to go one-by-one. My heart was breaking as she got caught up there, without me, starting to cry, but when she came down, after the splashing, she smiled hugely and said, “I did it!” She was so proud that she went down that huge incline alone.
It’s been like that a lot lately. I just watch her grow and conquer and everything feels like it’ll burst inside. It’s been a good summer.
Last week, I asked my folks at NPR if I could do a blog post about how methods of holding your new iPhone 4 might sound really dirty. They asked, “How dirty?” It was a fair point. My list included things like, “FaceTime Fingering.”
Glark helped brainstorm some ideas with me and by the time we were done, the piece shifted into a photo gallery with photos by Glark and text by me. I think the result, “12 New Ways To Hold Your iPhone 4” turned out pretty great. It’s far less dirty than what I originally imagined, but given that this story was mostly told in photos, that’s probably a good thing.
Even more fun is imagining Glark in his home studio setting up lights and gathering props to do these. Or imagining his face, with an iPhone in his mouth, on the front page of NPR.org. He’s got full-sized images on his site. Wow! Check them all out.
That’s never possible, but this one, from my point of view, comes close. All the graphic and photo elements came together, almost all the pieces made it onto the online version and there were no last-minute crazy changes that needed to be made. It was as smooth an experience as I’ve ever had with a story like this. I’m pretty thrilled to have it finished.
I wrote a blog entry setting up the story and another one with lots of background and notes I couldn’t fit in the actual story (“deleted scenes”) if it’s a subject that interests you. I had no idea I was so passionate on the subject until I was pretty much done writing it all.
Bonus: the comments on the story are actually unintentionally hilarious, or racialtastic. Here’s one:
Yeah but you know how the economically disadvantaged, among other “classes” score on the TAKS. Maybe homie just don’t got the brain power to see that $70 for access for the whole family is cheaper than a net-capable phone in every hand. Plus I got idea that texting my posse is quite a bit more important than looking up some BS about getting a job or school. That’s uncool. The men in pookie’s gang just wouldn’t approve of it. Here the bottom line isn’t necessarily the bottom line.
Dude. Classic! The same guy made a “pork-n-beans” reference in another post. To be honest, I was expecting far, far worse in terms of comments.
A few months ago, I got an e-mail asking if I’d like to write some tech columns for CNN.com. After making sure it was cool with my employers, I wrote two, the first of which appeared on CNN’s Web site yesterday. It’s about my belief (which I still believe despite a bunch of nay-saying comments) that smart phones and other touch-screen Internet devices will eventually replace our remote controls.
(I wish I’d taken a screen grab of CNN’s front page yesterday; it was featured there with a little image and headline near news of the oil spill and the NBA Finals.)
So, apparently, CNN is making a big push into online tech coverage. They have a very active tech blog and are publishing a large number of freelance pieces, guest columns and other pieces on their redesigned tech section.
They did ask me for a mug shot, but I had no idea it would run so large up at the top of the story. I mean, it’s cool and all, having my gigantic face up on the Web where America can easily access it and mock, but very few dudes in the tech world can pull that off with anything approaching aplomb.
OK, only one guy can pull it off. He’s Pete Cashmore and we all have a crush on him.
Look at this guy:
Are you kidding me?
Even the background is beautiful and hip and cool! No fair.
Anyway, my second column should appear next week, I think. They haven’t asked me to write anything beyond that, so we’ll see what happens.