Tag: work

  • Goodbye, Statesman

     

    A bunch of many years ago, I got an internship at the Austin newspaper. That internship turned into a job and then the job into a career and I find myself 21 years later looking at the exit sign and beginning a long, long set of goodbyes.

    I’m accepting a buyout offer from the Austin American-Statesman and GateHouse Media that concludes almost half of my life working as a reporter, editor, podcaster, video shooter, social-media troll wrangler and co-creator of ahora si, the long-defunct Technopolis tech section, the I Love You So Much: The Austin360 Podcast and “Statesman Shots,” and 512tech.com from the Austin American-Statesman for the Statesman and Austin360.

    My last day is Sept. 7. I’m still not 100% sure what my involvement is going forward, but I’m hoping to still contribute to the podcast and the paper. And I’m going to be super pissed if the wonderful staffers I work with don’t stay in touch. Not getting to see them is the biggest bummer, the part I’m least looking forward to in this move. (And insurance! Anybody know where I can get some decent freelancer insurance? I like my teeth!)

    I have so many memories of this place and so many thanks to give. Editors including Kathy Warbelow and Sarah Lindner Beckham and Sharon Chapman and Barry Harrell and Becky Bisbee and Debbie Hiott and Kristin Finan and Emily Quigley and Kathy Blackwell and Richard A. Oppel and Fred Zipp, staffers and creative partners from Andy Alford to Tolly Moseley to Addie Broyles and Alyssa Vidales and Gregory Kallenberg and Gretchen Heber and Melissa Segrest and Angela Shah and Josefina Casati and Gissela SantaCruz and Sharon Roberts and Rob Quigley and Joe Gross and literally hundreds of other names. Thank you to every reader, even the ones who just wanted me to come fix their broken printer or the ones who thought I was part of a vast left-wing conspiracy bent on turning Austin into a condo-spewing Mecca for tech dudes. (We did it, guys!)

    People talk about not getting too wrapped up in a job, about not feeling like you should owe them anything but what you do for the paycheck. But this is a place that has kept me and my family fed and happy for so long, that put my damn face up on a billboard by the highway for the whole city to see, that let me take ridiculous flights of fancy with articles I never thought would actually get printed because they were so dumb, that let me jump from job to job and keep doing outside projects all the while, that allowed me to CREATE NEW THINGS that didn’t exist before. That’s where I got the most joy here, making new things and launching them with a team of passionate coworkers and seeing if they could thrive. I hope to be doing a lot more than that in this new life I’m starting.

    I have loved my Statesman family and I’m going to miss it so much. But in the end, it just felt like, for me, it’s time to go. I will keep reading and watching. I’ll keep championing the great work that is done here.

  • Conquering fears

    There’s a lot to talk about so let me get the housekeeping out of the way first. The video above is part of a story that’s running in Saturday’s newspaper, part of the ongoing online identity series.

    I shot and edited the video and I think it’s the best video I’ve done, content-wise. It says exactly what I wanted to get across and is very close to what the story says. I dread editing video and it always feels like I’m having to learn how to do it all over again, but I feel like the time I put into this one was worth it.

    Going back a week, I did a story in advance of the big Austin City Limits Festival about some of the technology from AMD, Dell and others behind the scenes and how they were planning to live-stream big chunks of the fest. There was also a video I shot for that you can find below.

    On the day of the Emmy Awards, I had a piece run in which I tried to make the case that Friday Night Lights should win the Best Drama Emmy. Of course, it didn’t, but I was still thrilled that the show won a writing award and that Kyle Chandler walked away with an Emmy for acting. I’d call it even.

    And in Friday’s paper, I wrote about a large grant awarded to the University of Texas Advanced Computing Center to build a giant, devastating supercomputer called “Stampede” that will one day rule us all (benevolently, I hope).

    I recorded and posted a new Digital Savant podcast, the first one in about two months, with Michelle Greer, who is leaving the Austin tech community, a loss for all of us in the area.

    And lastly, this week’s Digital Savant column was about Fantastic Arcade.

    That’s a lot of stuff, right? Allow me to explain.

    The week before Labor Day, right before I went on vacation, our editor abruptly resigned. I tried really hard not to think about it and to dwell on that during my time off, but when I came back to the office, the mood around the office had changed and ever since I’ve been feeling the void.

    Fred is someone that I had always tried really hard to impress in all my time working on his staff. In that way, he was very much like a parental figure for me. He’s not an easy person to blow away and when I knew I’d done good work that earned praise from him, it always meant a lot to me. He’s also a very funny person (in a bone-dry Texas summer kind of way) and I respected his opinion and his hard-assedness about things even when I didn’t agree with him.

    The one time I ever cried in frustration about something work-related, it was in his office. He kindly, quietly, passed me a box of Kleenex.

    His leaving has left me feeling a bit adrift, as have other changes as the paper. I’m not job hunting or worried for my livelihood or anything, it’s just big changes in a short amount of time. We’re all adjusting, some staffers more than others. For me, I think I’ve been working harder, trying to take on more things, unwilling to allow myself to pace myself like I should. I’m panicking, maybe, and probably unnecessarily.

    So I’m trying to be better about that. I do miss Fred, though. He was a looming authority figure in my life — in the best possible way.

    Outside of work, I’m working on a few writing projects and the summer laziness has given way to trying to remember what it’s like to be busy again and be juggling a bunch of things.

    The big writing project I’m working on with my friend Tracy is actually making some progress and it’s scaring me a little. I write a lot, all the time. but I’ve never actually written a single volume of anything longer than about 100 or 200 pages (and that was unfinished). You could add up all the recaps I did for Smallville and it would be a few thousand pages, probably, but it’s not the same as trying to build something cohesive and I’m trying really hard not to scare and intimidate myself into being paralyzed into not doing it. Apart from Tracy being one of the friends I’ve kept the longest and being a funny and knowledgeable writer, I think I want to write with her because I’m been fearful of doing it completely alone.

    That’s one reason I’ve never written a book. I’ve been too afraid of failing at it or doing it and realizing it’s not good enough to get published.

    Lilly is getting old enough that she’s aware of the concepts of tomorrow and of wishes and, strangely, unicorns, which she wants to see at a county fair we’re going to this weekend.

    She’s reached the age where she can see what tomorrow might be like and hope for things to be there. She’s not afraid of that future; she wants it to get here as soon as possible.

    I’m trying to shed some fear, too, and to build a life where my kids embrace possibilities and don’t shut down their own abilities before they even have a chance to get used.

    I’m going to try to lead by example.

    I need to write. Because, clearly, I can’t draw.

  • Parking and Plus’ing

    'Parking in Motion' app screengrab
    Just a short note about two stories of mine that ran over the weekend.

    The first was a sort-of review/riff on an app called “Parking in Motion.” Parking in downtown Austin keeps getting worse and worse and I think most people in town who have to go there are looking for some sort of silver bullet to avoid $10/per parking lots. The app, it turns out, doesn’t really solve that many problems, but it sure does look nice and may lead the way to something even better.

    Of course, the name of the app implies that you might use it while… you know… you’re in motion? I guess? That’s probably not such a hot idea.

    The other story that ran in the paper was a reverse-publish of a blog post I did on Google Plus, but with some updated information and a few opinions from commenters to the blog.

    Work has been a little weird and a lot of interesting lately. My beat isn’t changing, but some of my day-to-day duties might in terms of what I’m working on for the paper and what we prioritize. I’ll be writing certain kinds of features more regularly, so that’s good since sometimes covering personal tech is a pretty large beast to try to get your arms around all the way.

    I’m still trying to get a separate, more personal writing project off the ground and we’re about to finish another season of Trailers Without Pity. Summer, of course, is moving far too quickly for me to keep up and soon it’ll be too late to go toobin’ or to use that Schlitterbahn season pass. So, despite all the stuff I want to write, I’m trying hard not to spend these next few months stuck inside, away from the sun.

  • Busy in tech

    iphone 4
    iPhone 4, ruiner of current iPhone you own

    Even though I haven’t done NPR segments in a couple of weeks (I should be back on next Monday, but I never know from week to week exactly what’s happening), things have been super-busy at work with so much tech news, mostly in the area of new phones and wireless announcements.

    Last week I did a story about a partnership my newspaper has started with local social media/location company Gowalla.  Stories where you’re writing about your own company are always tricky to navigate and this one was no exception.  As that was going on, I was testing out the new Sprint EVO 4G phone that hit stores on Friday.

    I wrote a review for this week’s Tech Monday, but we ran it early on my Digital Savant blog Friday and the response from fans of the Android OS was… spirited. Make no mistake, iPhone vs. Everybody Else is the new Macs vs. PCs. People are getting really passionate and territorial about their smart phones.

    I called it “Impressions” instead of a review because I don’t think you can really hit all the details with just a week or two of time with a phone with so many features and apps, but I did my best to give it a fair shake.  As I was working on that, news broke that AT&T is changing its wireless pricing for smart phones and that created a big flap on the blog, too. ( got an NPR blog entry out of that, too.

    That rolled right into my write-up and live chat on the new iPhone 4 Monday, which turned out to be an exhausting time. I love this stuff and I enjoy writing about it, but after a while my brain just gets tired of all the details and just wants to shut down. (Which it did. Last night.)

    So that’s been my last week. Lots of writing, lots of trying to keep up with tech announcements.  When I’m not working, I’m trying to take it as easy as possible. We got season passes for our local water park Schlitterbahn (“Shitter Bomb,” Glark calls it) and have been taking Lilly. It’s great, relaxing fun and except for when I take my phone in the water to snap photos or video of Lilly on a tube, I’m trying not to be so inundated with tech in my off time. It’s hard, but I’m trying.

    Toobin' Lilly

    The only other major thing of note that I haven’t mentioned anywhere else yet (not even on Twitter) because I didn’t want to jinx it: my first tech column for CNN.com should be up on their site tomorrow. I’ll post it here as soon as it’s available.