Bloggystyle

Shortweek

2009-07-02T12:56:00.001-05:00

Shortweek

We all have Friday off at work (as does my wife), so it's definitely a strange, compressed week with lots to do and a much shorter amount of time to do it.

Oddly, though it's been a bit of a slow time for me. I have one big story due soon, but all the reporting is done and for once I feel like I have a really good handle on a major project. It's a nice, relaxed feeling.

I did get caught up in lots of small things, though, and completely forgot to post this week's NPR segment, which was about the future of screens and displays. One reason I may have forgotten about it is because I feel like I've blogged on the subject to death since I attended a conference in San Antonio last month, but it was definitely new to the airwaves and it was nice to be able to share that information with All Things Considered. I am a master recycler.

I also had a story in the paper about green remodeling, a Masters of their Domains feature on a Web site called My Green Casa.

Oh man, I am writing a lot about recycling! And I've been catching up on episodes of The Goode Family (which, after some initial resistance, I kind of like).

Oh no! I'm turning one of those Austin greenies! Nooooo!

Teardowns: gadgets and celebrity news

2009-06-28T23:41:00.003-05:00

Teardowns: gadgets and celebrity news

Another busy week, with unexpected twists and turns (some of which you've heard about, I'm sure).

On Saturday, I had a Life & Arts lead in the paper about a company called Portelligent that does teardowns of gadgets like the iPhone 3G S. They take the thing apart, document every single little minute detail, and provide that information to clients. It's an amazing little business and I had a lot of fun visiting them and doing a quick-turnaround (a teardown of sorts) the next day. They were really great to work with.

The big surprise of the week was, of course, Michael Jackson. I spent a big chunk of Thursday following the news, like everyone else, and my grouchy posts on Twitter about how people weren't willing to accept that what TMZ.com was reporting was almost certainly true let to a blog entry that led to an A1 story (which ran the same day as the teardowns piece).

The story, strangely, didn't end up back online, but the original Digital Savant blog post (which is almost word-for-word what ended up in the paper, but a little longer) is still available for reading. It's called, "The day online news took over."

I'll be on NPR for the "All Tech Considered" segment tomorrow and will tell you all about that in the afternoon.

It's so hot in Texas right now (many consecutive days of 100+ degree heat) that it's hard to get motivated about anything right now that involves leaving the air conditioning. We can't even take Lilly swimming because it's so hot, which is a complete bummer.

We're trying to stay cool and wish for rain. In the meantime, we're watching The Wire: Season Two, doing lots of cooking and gearing up for the rest of the summer.

Trailers Without Pity: I Love You, Beth Cooper

2009-06-23T23:03:00.002-05:00

Trailers Without Pity: I Love You, Beth Cooper

I don't think we've ever done a teen comedy that seems to be riding the hormone train (it departs about 35 times an hour) before and it was a lot of fun. I think horror movies and teen comedies were pretty much all I watched until I discovered David Lynch (boy did that guy screw me up) and it was nice to reminisce about the days of John Hughes and Molly Ringwald as we did a Trailers Without Pity episode for the upcoming I Love You, Beth Cooper.

Hope you enjoy!

It's hot at the zoo (plus some other stuff)

2009-06-16T14:32:00.008-05:00

It's hot at the zoo (plus some other stuff)

We took Lilly to the zoo on Saturday and I was again impressed by how my parents managed to get me out of the house to do stuff when, for me, it feels like one giant nightmare to go anywhere outside of half a mile where a child is involved.

In this case, we were driving all the way to San Antonio (about 45 minutes).

Actually, Lilly is not badly behaved, but damn, she's almost two. I'm sure I was a pain in the ass in a car seat when you tried to take me anywhere for distances more than 30 miles. Did they even have car seats back in 1977? Maybe I just thrashed around in the back seat, loosely strapped into a seat belt and the concussions were what kept me quiet.

The trip wasn't so bad, actually, but when we got to the zoo, it was so damn hot, people. I'm from Texas. I've lived here most of my life. I know hot. I don't usually complain. But the combination of the heat, the stench of flamingo doo-doo and other exotic waste products, plus dealing with a rambunctious toddler who under no circumstances listened to anything we said made it like Hell, but without the entertaining nudity and hot pokers.

This is what I sounded like for most of the day: "Lilly. No. Lilly. Come here. HERE. Give me your hand. No. Your HAND. HAND. Manita. Give me your hand. Come back! Wait. Over here. HAND! No, don't throw that water bottle at the ducks. Stop! Want me to carry you? OK, well, stop running, NO! HAND! LILLY!"

She wanted to run all over the place by herself and didn't even seem to mind that it was 100 degrees and the world was melting around her.

The zoo itself was pretty cool, but we lasted less than two hours before we were nervous, exhausted parental wrecks. Seriously, Mom and Dad, I don't know how you did it. I feel like I owe you some money or something.

We shot a little video at the zoo (I've been testing out a Verizon MiFi device for work and was seeing how well it played with iPhone video streaming). It's an incredibly boring video unless you are her parents, but it was a live broadcast, so we had no control over how interesting she'd be at that moment. There's a picture below, too.

The other stuff: this week's NPR segment was about keeping kids safe online. Online, yes! That's easy. Try keeping them safe when it's 100 degrees and there's freakin' monkeys nearby!

Also a blog post that went with that segment where we offer many more Web sites and tips.

I wrote a story that ran in Saturday's paper about the digital TV transition and how it went in Austin.

And I got mentioned in the most recent Austin Chronicle. It was weird because it was another in Kevin Brass' seemingly neverending series of hit pieces about the paper where I work, yet I got complimented in the article in a backhanded way. Despite having written some not-nice things about me in the past, Brass seems to think there should be more columns by me in the paper more times a week (even though I'm not a columnist) and that the paper is ignoring me by not allowing me this opportunity.

I immediately told one of my editors, "But I don't WANT to write multiple columns a week!" Our publisher, who follows me on Twitter, saw a comment I made about it where I said I asked if this was what it feels like to experience an unwelcome crush and wrote me a very nice e-mail asking if I was feeling neglected.

Hell no. In fact, every day, I feel like I'm racing myself to catch up with all the things I want to say and write and do. I haven't yet had the experience of working on things I care about that the paper doesn't want to run (whether it's online or in print).

But thanks, I think. Maybe I just don't know how to accept compliments from people who constantly belittle my friends and co-workers.

If that's weird, then I guess it's my bad.

One more thing: although we're off to a slower start than we anticipated, our comic Space Monkeys! is still in motion. We had a comic that went up late last week that I neglected to mention. I still love those monkeys.

Trailers Without Pity: Br�no

2009-06-10T10:41:00.005-05:00

Trailers Without Pity: Brüno

This week, we gave our take on Sacha Baron Cohen's upcoming Brüno, which, hilariously, was featured prominently in ads during the NBA Finals this week. No matter how much you try to sell it as a sequel to Borat, there are still some key differences that make the marketing for this one especially subversive.

In any case, here's the video. I kinda like that wig on me.

The toddler phone, a building's history and very geeky tech stuff

2009-06-09T13:22:00.004-05:00

The toddler phone, a building's history and very geeky tech stuff

Another busy week. I found myself so exhausted by the weekend that I couldn't even imagine what it would have been like to have a recap due. As it is, work, NPR and the videos my brother and I are doing for TWOP are keeping me pretty busy. I've been trying to find my usual summer groove to do some reading, play some video games, catch up on TV and DVDs and, hey, maybe even go outside once in a while.

It's much more challenging as Lilly gets older because when she's awake she demands pretty constant attention now. And damned if she doesn't have her dad's crazy all-day/all-night energy levels. I don't my wife's ever going to forgive me for that.

Anyway, it's a happy busy and I'm still working to try to clear extraneous things from my life that no longer need my attention or work. So far, so good.

Here's what's been going on lately:

Over the weekend, I had two stories on the Life & Arts front. The first was a pretty sizable story about an Austin man who found out, completely by coincidence, that he's working in the same building where his great grandfather ran a grocery about 111 years ago.

It was a little tiny story that turned into a much bigger one; I found myself at the Austin History Center researching everything I could find about that building. I also shot a short video to go with the story:

That same day, a print version of this blog post I wrote on the very cool Society for Information Display conference I went to last week in San Antonio ran. It was much better than I expected and I felt like I got a brief glimpse into the future of TVs, e-books and other displays. Here's another video:

For yesterday's NPR All Tech Considered segment, we talked about kids and cell phones. As expected, I got a few comments calling me (or others like me) a lazy parent for daring to let my kid play with my iPhone. What the fuck ever, dudes. You can come entertain my kid with some Lincoln Logs at 3 a.m. if you like, you ass. My lazy ass will be sleeping.

There were several blog entries related to the story both before and after. Lilly's photo from about a year ago is on there, chewing on my phone. I didn't mind putting it up because she really doesn't look like that anymore. For one thing, her hair's getting really long.

Last thing: spent practically my whole day yesterday writing about the new iPhone and pricing ambiguity for existing AT&T customers. Now I'm gonna go nap.

What vehicles in New Braunfels are saying

2009-06-05T12:42:00.003-05:00

What vehicles in New Braunfels are saying

We went to see Drag Me To Hell last weekend (Up was sold out, but I'm not complaining; Drag me To Hell was DRAG ME TO AWESOME!), and as we were walking to the theater entrance, I saw four different vehicles, all sporting different messages in the same aisle.

So I took some pictures. Larger sizes are over on Flickr if you click on the images:

As you can imagine, I have absolutely no conclusions about the town I live in that I can draw from these.

Web video on the TV, 'Punch-Out!!' and Windows 7

2009-06-02T13:17:00.002-05:00

Web video on the TV, 'Punch-Out!!' and Windows 7

Time to get geeky.

Now that recapping season is over (forever!), I've been able to immerse back into stuff like reading actual books printed on real paper, playing video games, watching movies and playing with tech items that have been waiting for my attention.

I'm still doing the NPR gig, which takes up a little piece of my weekend, but it's typically stuff I'm very interested in, like this week's All Tech Considered segment on the challenges of watching movies from the Web on your TV. ("Challenges" being a relative term. Some people seem to be doing it just fine.)

This is one of those segments where the script we went in with was probably twice as long as what we actually got on the air, so there's lot of info missing, like about Apple TV and on the challenges of having different boxes in different rooms (something we're constantly dealing with; we can watch Blu-rays in the living room only and Vudu movies in the bedroom unless we want to move hardware around).

There was also a blog entry with lots more links and research than we were able to fit into the audio segment. We'll probably return to the topic again at some point.

For work, I had a review of "Punch-Out!!" (yes, with two exclamation points) for the Nintendo Wii. That ran Monday along with a Tech Monday column I wrote about how, to my surprise, I really like Windows 7.

Other recent things happening that have nothing to do with tech: Lilly is addicted to The Little Mermaid on DVD. She says, "Mermaid! Mermaid! Li'l Mermaid!" and that's what we're watching. Again.

Yesterday was a very interesting day. I went to a board game Tweetup and played an excellent game called "Pandemic." I went to an end-of-legislative-session party at the Dallas Morning News bureau near the capitol and felt very out-of-place at first until Texas Governor Rick Perry made eye contact with me and gave me a little hair wave/salute that made me feel better. We're buds now, I guess!

And before all that, I went to Waterloo Records to see one of my favorite bands, San Antonio's Girl in a Coma, do an in-store performance. The women in the band are incredibly sweet and humble and deserve stardom. Looks like they might be on their way.

Their new album Trio B.C. is out today and what I've heard so far is fantastic. I also shot a video. The first half is sideways (I'm SORRY! I was holding the phone wrong!), but it rights itself at about the midway point. Hope you enjoy!

Trailers Without Pity: Inglourious Basterds

2009-05-27T12:21:00.002-05:00

Trailers Without Pity: Inglourious Basterds

This week, we looked at Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which seemed to get some mixed reactions at Cannes. I know that I resisted doing this one for TWOP because I just really didn't like the trailer much when I saw it, but then I guess that's sort of the point of our show. If the video below isn't embedded, you can get to it here.

So, here 'tis:

I also wrote a story that ran in Monday's paper, a Masters of Their Domains feature, about Malathy Jey, a woman who started a Web site for Indian women called Indusladies.com. You can find that story here.

Goodbye Smallville

2009-05-20T17:28:00.006-05:00

Goodbye Smallville

Yesterday, my last recap of Smallville for Television Without Pity was posted. I decided to stop recapping the show around mid-season when it was announced that the show was coming back for a ninth season in the fall. When faced with the thought of writing 7,000-8,000 words each for a batch of 22 more episodes, it became simply too much to bear.

There was a lot more to it than that, of course. With all the other freelance stuff I'm doing, it was becoming harder and harder to find weekend time to write the recaps and give them a decent edit before sending them in. I have a few big projects coming up later this year that would have made it nearly impossible to keep on recapping consistently. This year, I asked for a substitute for the first time during the South by Southwest Interactive festival. It was the only time anyone else had written a Smallville recap for the site except for the two weeks off I took in 2004 for my honeymoon.

At that time, someone e-mailed me asking if I was going to go back and recap those two episodes I missed, for the sake of completism. I wrote back saying no and thought it was a silly idea, but privately I saw their point. There's something to be said about committing to something for that long and seeing it through to the end. For a long time, I wanted to do that.

But I fell into the trap of doing this before -- thinking Season Seven was the last season and feeling sucker-punched when the show went on longer. I could see myself hanging on for two or three more seasons, hoping things would end and being crushed to find out they wouldn't.

It also made a certain kind of sense to me to quit now: I outlasted Lex Luthor, Lana Lang and the show's original executive producers, Al Gough and Miles Millar. If they all left, I thought, why the fuck was I sticking around?

In truth, part of it was that ever since NBC/Bravo/Universal bought the site, the raises recappers got made it financially palatable to keep on chugging. It was good money and even though recapping is long, exhausting work, it's also very fun. For me, it was always stream-of-conscious and I was able to let loose whatever was on my mind at any given moment and get paid for it. Very few writers are ever afforded that luxury, and I convinced myself for years not to take that for granted.

Having a daughter made the decision a lot easier. I found myself in front of the TV trying to make sense of Clark Kent's dumb pseudo-pacifism instead of taking my kid to the park or teaching her the alphabet.

I'm still going to be doing the Trailers Without Pity videos for the site with my brother, and I've let them know I'm open to future assignments (though probably not full recaps), so it's not like I burned the building and the bridge leading to it, I hope.

As for the recap itself, I tried to bring back some things I've enjoyed writing like "Bamboo Heather" (which is probably more of an inside joke at this point; it happened almost 10 years ago when I recapped City of Angels. Remember that show? You shouldn't.), the extremely dirty Al and Miles, and Roger the Rottweiler, who appeared in the recap of "Beast" as a sort of prequel to this final recap. That's what made me emotional last week: Roger's metaphoric death (oh shit, spoiler!) was me preparing to say goodbye to the really great, really supportive people who've been reading the recaps for eight long years. Not to oversell it too much, but there is also a bit in the recap where two grown men take a crap on my laptop. For real.

It was nice to make the decision before the season ended. It gave me time to think about what I wanted to say and to plan it out a little bit. I feel I did what I set out to do and, as I said on Twitter, it marked the completion of the longest writing assignment (both in word count and in time) of my entire life.

So, goodbye, inconsistent, surprisingly violent and formerly very gay show. In a weird way, I'll miss nitpicking you for money.

So Long, and Thanks for All the FAIL! -- Smallville's worst season finale manages to offend all factions of fans alike. A major character dies (and turns out not to be who we thought anyway); Clark is betrayed by his superjerk friends, but trusts them anyway; and the epic battle between Clark and Doomsday ends up shorter and less satisfying than a commercial break. You guys should have packed it in with Season Eight while you had the chance. Just sayin'.

Oh yeah -- this was a sign I was given at a Smallville gathering in Boston I was invited to years ago. I'll treasure it always:

p@s5w0Rd$!

2009-05-19T14:53:00.003-05:00

p@s5w0Rd$!

This was one of the more fun All Tech Considered segments I've done, probably because it was very straightfoward and because I had time to do some interviews and lots of research before opening my mouth.

It's about passwords: how we choose them, how we remember them and ways to make that easier. I like that it's such a universal topic.

Anyway, I was able to follow up with a blog entry with additional info and so far both the segment page and the blog entry have gotten lots of feedback. Very cool. It feels like the All Tech Considered blog is building some momentum.

Roger the Rottweiler breaks my heart

2009-05-13T16:32:00.002-05:00

Roger the Rottweiler breaks my heart

My second-to-last Smallville recap before summer vacation is posted. It's a little longer than usual because I brought back a character I created a really long time ago. I'm doing a little bit of that with the season finale recap next week, too, in which there'll be some special surprise guests for people who've been reading the recaps for a long time. I had a little time over the last few weeks to give it some thought in advance, which is not something I usually get to do with recaps.

Anyway, here's the one for "Injustice." I don't write a lot of fiction these days, but I guess you could call the Roger the Rottweiler thing a kind of fictional creation. It got me a little emotional, in any case.

Itty Bitty Pity Committee -- Tess's band of teen heroes, including Punky Bruiser, is a lot less impressive in action than in theory. While hunting Doomsday, they fail miserably, but not before whining about their hard-knock lives before they worked for Tess. Clark and Oliver, meanwhile, continue to tussle over the morality of killing Davis. And Roger the Rottweiler stops in for a visit.

Trailers Without Pity: The Boat That Rocked

2009-05-12T11:45:00.002-05:00

Trailers Without Pity: The Boat That Rocked

This week, we're taking a look at the upcoming Richard Curtis movie The Boat That Rocked. I will see it, no doubt. I am a complete sucker for these kinds of movies, even if this one looks particularly twee and feel-good manipulative.

Not sure what movie we're doing next, but there's a Quentin Tarantino Nazi-hunt movie on the horizon that looks interesting.

Death

2009-05-12T11:19:00.002-05:00

Death

This week's segment for All Tech Considered was about what happens to your e-mail, digital files and social networking accounts when you die. It's a great topic, one that was addressed at a Core Conversation at South by Southwest Interactive this year.

So far, the piece has drawn some really good comments from listeners, as has the blog entry I wrote on the (redesigned) All Tech Considered blog.

In print, even now

2009-05-10T23:14:00.002-05:00

In print, even now

One of the weirdest things about my job is that I work for a newspaper and yet writing for the publication that rolls off presses and ends up in people's slightly ink-stained hands (sorry for that) is becoming less and less a part of that job.

When I'm working, I try to blog every single day on Digital Savant and Twittering is now a small, but important, part of my day-to-day. I'm also doing video stuff and occasional live chats with experts on the blog. Some of the stuff we're doing does feel like, "Let's throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks," but other things, like the use of social media and video, feel like they're going to continue to be major parts of how we cover news for the foreseeable future.

I know that my attitude toward print has changed a little. There are things I work very hard on and that I think are of very high quality that never end up in the paper. By the same token, the stuff I work on for the paper doesn't always seem to have the same impact online, where you can't see the excellent job our designers do to package the news in attractive, visually stimulating ways.

That's probably more than you needed to hear as an introduction to two stories I wrote that appeared Friday and Saturday in the Statesman. I'm on vacation (it started Friday and continues through this coming week) and am getting a little bit introspective about work and my various other projects.

I just gave up a major freelance project (I can't talk about it yet, but I will write about it in full after my vacation, promise) and have been reevaluating all the other things I'm working on right now. My brother and I just relaunched our comic strip again and I had an idea for a very fun thing I want to work on with an old friend and it might take up a large chunk of my summer.

I'm very loyal to my workplaces, so it's very hard for me to give up any kind of work, but this is definitely a year of getting my priorities straight and beginning to work toward creative goals, not just let things float toward me and grasp at them when they're close enough to seem real.

So, the stories! The first one is a story about Internet star (and very genuinely sweet person if my SXSW interview was any indication) Felicia Day. We'd been planning to write about her since the festival, but had a hard time attaching it to what we call a "time peg," an event or release date that would justify running the story at a specific time. We ended up running it the day of the Dollhouse finale despite Felicia Day not appearing in it (explained in the story). She's one of those people who is as nice as you'd imagine from everything you read about her. It was cool to find out she's been this smart and talented for a very long time.

The second story is about how-to Web sites like eHow and Howcast. There's a pretty large concentration of how-to talent in Austin and a lot of the videos you might see online might have originated from here. This was a very tough story to finish on deadline for various reasons, but I'm glad it came together.

For my vacation, I'm lucky enough to have friends in from out of town and have gone to the gym enough lately that I don't feel too terrible eating everything in sight for a few days. Yay, Eat Through Austin tour!

Return of some monkeys

2009-05-07T12:27:00.004-05:00

Return of some monkeys

It's not a secret that I really love working with my brother on projects and it was making us very sad that because of the work we were doing on "Trailers Without Pity" last year, mostly just getting it off the ground, we had to give up doing our comic Space Monkeys!.

By January, we were getting a lot more comfortable with our video schedule, so we started talking about bringing Bobbo, Meany and the rest of the crew back.

This week, we've posted our first new comic in eight months. New strips will be regularly appearing on the comic site. We've got some other new ideas related to the comic we plan to roll out this summer, but first on the agenda is just getting back into the swing of producing two comics a week, at least.

We've very pleased to be reunited with our monkey crew. We really missed them.

And speaking of relaunches, Glark has brought back the best T-shirt storefront in the world, Glarkware. I think about half the T-shirts I wear these days come from Glarkware. And you know how sexy that makes me.

Beastly

2009-05-05T22:26:00.003-05:00

Beastly

The third-to-last Smallville episode, "Beast," is about Doomsday and Chloe and, to a lesser degree, Oliver being a douchebag to everybody. Here's the TWOP recap:

Chloe's Choice -- Davis gets worse as he tries to control his Doomsday impulses, so Chloe does what any hero's sidekick would do: she agrees to run away with the bad guy even as Clark begs her not to. Meanwhile, Jimmy begs for "car" money and Oliver lectures everyone about their morals.

Swine flu, job Web sites and travel tech

2009-05-05T14:51:00.002-05:00

Swine flu, job Web sites and travel tech

The last two weeks have been a blur of project after project and I've finally gotten to the point where I'm about to shut down. The summer begins for me as soon as Smallville ends and there are only two more recaps left to do. I'm also taking some vacation time next week. Even so, there are freelance things that keep popping up and I'm trying really hard not to let them intrude on my time off, but that's going to be almost impossible.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to only have my day job to worry about. I don't really remember a time in the dozen years I've been here that that's happened. I've always had the comedy troupe or recaps or some other kind of extracurricular work to fill out my schedule.

But having a kid and wanting to have some measure of free time in my life has made it a lot harder. Summer's usually my catch-up time, but I have a feeling that I'm going to have to make some big changes in the fall to avoid getting this burned out again.

Anyway, here's what's new.

Last week, it really, honestly seemed like we were all going to die of swine flu for a minute there. My personal panic started when the school district in New Braunfels decided to shut down until May 11 (our daycare followed suit). That's when it really began to feel serious.

I drove to work that day and saw a parade of police cards followed by a huge military vehicle. It was probably unrelated to the flu, but still freaked me out a little.

On Twitter that day (this was last Wednesday), people were just starting to freak out. It was a weird, weird day. I ended up writing a story for the Statesman about the online reaction to the swine flu crisis and the media backlash. I can't tell you how many messages I read that day comparing swine flu to the number of deaths per year that "regular flu" claims. Not the point, people.

Our kid's daycare is still closed and even though all the hysteria has died down, it certainly doesn't seem like it's over yet. People in Texas are still a little freaked out, or at least they were last week.

The other story I had in the paper this week was a column for Tech Monday about several new job sites that have launched in Austin over the last few months.

And lastly, yesterday's All Things Considered segment was about travel technology. There was so much information we were only able to fit a small portion of it into the on-air segment, but I added more links to things we found on the newly designed, relaunched All Tech Considered blog.

That's it for now. More stuff to come very soon.

Maybe We Could Call Her 'The Tit'

2009-04-29T00:00:00.002-05:00

Maybe We Could Call Her 'The Tit'

I've been recapping Smallville for eight seasons and toward the end, I tend to get a little giddy and enjoy it more because I can see the light at the end of the cold, dark tunnel.

There's four recaps left including the one I just finished and then it's summer vacation for me. Anyway, here's the one for this week. I'm pretty pleased the headline I wrote made it to the TWOP home page. Pretty awesome.

Maybe We Could Call Her 'The Tit' -- Lois decides to cure her journalistic rut not by rutting this time but by making up a pleather-clad superhero named Stiletto and then going out and being that pseudo-hero. Against all odds, the effort fails.

Finances on NPR and secret agent guinea pigs

2009-04-28T11:45:00.003-05:00

Finances on NPR and secret agent guinea pigs

It's been a busy week. Things are back on track with "All Tech Considered" after I was off last week. This week's segment was about financial Web sites like Mint and Rudder. I did a whole lot of research over the weekend since I'd never used them before and I think the segment came out more relaxed and flowed better than usual. The more prepared I am, the better it turns out, it seems. Who knew?

And I was not lying: I still use "Microsoft Money 2002."

The other big thing is our new episode of Trailers Without Pity, about Disney's G-Force. We'd gotten into a rut of reviewing trailers that actually looked really good. This was the time to go in the opposite direction. Making jokes about a movie that features jive-talking, gyrating, government-employed guinea pigs was much easier than breaking down a Michael Mann or Spike Jonze movie, I can assure you.

Enjoy!

Twitter trauma

2009-04-26T23:54:00.005-05:00

Twitter trauma

I can't tell you how many times and for how long I've cried about Maddie since it happened, but I can tell you it's been a lot.

Like a lot of parents, like a lot of bloggers, like a lot of people who didn't know the story and suddenly got up to speed, I was hit hard by the story of the Spohr family, who lost a daughter earlier this month.

I first heard about it from a co-worker who was home sick. He messaged me about it and I misunderstood what he was telling me, but he told me he was a complete wreck about what had happened the night before.

It wasn't until late that night, right before bed, that I followed the breadcrumb trail back from Twitter to the blog and realized what happened. I cried for the first, but not the last time and was puffy-eyed and congested when I went to bed.

What happened formed the basis for a story that ran in the Sunday paper about how Twitter is becoming not only a medium for trivial stuff and for fast-breaking news, but also for genuine real-time emotion and the expression of tragedy, the kind that isn't filtered through the time and effort it takes to post a blog entry. (Remember when blogs were thought to be quick, mindless posts compared to the literary value of an online journal? How times have changed.)

We were calling the story "Twitter Trauma" for a while, but I think it expanded a bit from the original idea which was to be a very short essay. I had time to do a little more reporting and the focus of the piece changed a bit.

There are a lot of parents in my newsroom with kids around the same age, from a little over a year old to just past two. We've all been thinking about Maddie these last weeks and watching our own children with a little more fear and a lot more love. It hurts, and I hope that our concern and our love for this little girl we've never met translates into something useful. That's all I can really hope for right now.

I write about a lot of goofy shit sometimes, but this was a story I wanted to tell right and I worked very hard to try not to make a single mistake, in content or in tone.

Before the article appeared in the paper, I let Heather Spohr know, via Twitter, it would be published. I didn't want her to be surprised or blindsided by it should someone send her the link to the online version. It turns out she had already read it and liked it. Turns out she's a long-time, old-school Television Without Pity reader. It was great to make that contact and it put my mind at ease that I didn't put something out into the universe that might hurt the family I was being most careful not to injure with the article.

Beyond writing about something like this and letting people know that these things are happening, there's always a sense that there's not much else I can do when it comes time to put an article like this behind me.

In this case, there's a little more that can be done. The March of Dimes/March for Maddie has raised quite a bit of money already, but there's much more we can do. We can remember Maddie, keep Heather and Mike and the rest of their family in our hearts, and be a community that helps its own.

Edited to add: Rob says it beautifully for all the dads out there.

Fore!

2009-04-22T17:44:00.003-05:00

Fore!

Golf is something I know absolutely nothing about, like the Heimlich Maneuver or feeding a baby food that doesn't come out of a potato chip bag.

Nevertheless, I bluffed my way into getting a story published in the newspaper, by writing about a golf Web site. That is the distinction: if it's about golf, I'm an idiot. If it's about a WEB SITE to do with golf, I have GOT IT COVERED.

You can read the story here. It's about Tencups.com, which is a very amusing site, even for a golf idjut like myself.

There was also a video. That is also in this post just after these words:

Trailers Without Pity: Where the Wild Things Are

2009-04-14T11:41:00.003-05:00

Trailers Without Pity: Where the Wild Things Are

I think my brother might have been surprised to learn, when we were planning this video, that I'd never actually read Where the Wild Things Are. I thought it was a book, like Where the Red Fern Grows, but it turns out it's a very short children's book, the kind I read to Lilly before she goes to bed now.

He gave me a copy for my birthday recently (the timing worked out nicely that way) and I was sad to realize that reading a book like that for the first time when you're 34 isn't the same as reading it when you're 8 or 9. I was like, "What is UP with this kid? His poor parents!"

That informed some of the Trailers Without Pity video this time out for Where the Wild Things Are, although I'd be lying if I said I can't wait to see what Spike Jonze does with it. I hope it works.

And that's two episodes in a row where we've tackled movie trailers that actually look good. They're very hard to write. The next one is going to be for a movie that looks like garbage, I promise.

Time Warner Cable craziness

2009-04-14T11:21:00.003-05:00

Time Warner Cable craziness

After last week, I thought I was done covering the Time Warner Cable bandwidth story for a while. Their change to "consumption-based billing" won't start in Austin until October and that's a long time -- a lot could happen between now and then.

But then I found this online yesterday, which kicked up some controversy again and then I did a segment about it for NPR's All Tech Considered, where the online comments have been interesting and unexpected, to say the least.

Trying to let it roll off my back, but given the energy I've put into making people aware of what Time Warner is doing and how it will affect customers (I am one of them), it's bizarre to hear that I'm somehow defending them or justifying tiered Internet pricing. I should probably leave those comments alone, but in recent months I find I'm not able to and would rather risk pissing people off than letting them think they're right. Journalistic brio or character flaw? You decide.

Do you have spams?

2009-04-07T14:59:00.003-05:00

Do you have spams?

The "All Tech Considered" segment on NPR this week was about spam. I've been finding lately that rather than doing research on my own on a particular topic, it helps to draw on some local expertise. In this case, I picked the brain of Joshua Baer of Otherinbox, a guy who has been dealing with the world of spam for years and gave me some great background info. Given that his company works in that area (and, even moreso, in the world of more tasty "Bacn") he seemed like a good source.

You can find the segment here. I think it went well and was more relaxed than some of the other ones have been.

I was also quoted in two different articles. One was a story about e-r�sum�s, and the other was a piece about how newspapers can use tech to avoid total meltdown (at least my part of the article was about that). Man, I sure do talk a lot.

The other major thing that's been happening lately is that Time Warner Cable announced it's rolling out tiered pricing in Austin, San Antonio and a few other cities this summer. That means if you go over a certain amount of downloading, they start charging you $1 per gigabyte.

Obviously, this hasn't gone over well in Austin and a blog post I wrote about it last week had nearly 200 comments from (mostly irate) people. You can follow the whole saga on Digital Savant. It's not over yet.