Category Archives: Occupational hazards

Respect the vacation

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I did something a little crazy two Tuesdays ago, which was board a plane without a laptop. That strange behavior–the last time it had happened might have been Christmas of 2010–was the result of something almost as out of character, my taking a vacation.

iPad not at work

If you define that term as meaning a trip out of town that runs at least a week, which does not involve more than a tiny fraction of your usual workload and which is not listed on your taxes as a business expense, our last one had been a pre-parenthood jaunt in Montana in 2009.

The next summer saw entire weeks of time off, courtesy of our daughter’s birth–but that period  lacked the essential vacation ingredient of sleeping in. In 2011 and 2012, we had some great long weekends, but nothing matching the traditional definition.

(Some of my work trips have had vacation-like qualities–SXSW absolutely comes to mind–but if you’re on e-mail and Twitter all the time, your laptop is in use every day and all of the expenses will wind up on your Schedule C, the obnoxious term “workcation” is unavoidable.)

This year, however, things finally lined up. Our tenth wedding anniversary was approaching; we could leave our kid with her parents then; we both had enough time freed up in our respective work schedules. I even committed to avoid booking any business meetings in the tech-friendly cities we visited–that’s Portland in the above shot–even though that could have easily converted my airfare into a Sched C line item and allowed me to sell a story or two from the road. But I still had to force myself to unplug from my usual online outlets.

I used to be a hard-liner about not checking any work-related communication on vacation. That got harder to do as the pace of tech journalism accelerated, but many of our vacation destinations still enforced some disconnection. (Have you ever tried checking your e-mail in the middle of Glacier National Park? Would you be excited about doing that from the shared computer in the lobby of a hotel in China?)

This time, however, I figured I couldn’t skip telling people about just-published posts I’d written in advance (the last ones filed at around 3 a.m. the morning of our flight out of D.C.) or answering tweets mentioning me. And not checking my work e-mail at all also seemed like a freelance foul. It didn’t help that major tech-news events happened while I was out: Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference and the revelation of massive phone and online surveillance by the National Security Agency. But even so, I found myself checking Twitter less and less after the first few days, to the point that I spent at least 48 hours without tweeting anything, and I felt zero guilt about letting unread e-mails and RSS items pile up.

There’s probably something to be learned from that experience. And yet: Here I am typing this on a Saturday evening.

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Trade shows may have ruined Las Vegas for me

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LAS VEGAS–I’m writing this from a hotel room a little before 7 a.m., and I did not just get back from the casino floor. Instead, I got back after a couple of receptions for the CTIA 2013 wireless-industry show, thought I’d lie down for a bit and then slept for six hours.

The Strip at nightI could head downstairs now for a little gambling–but, honestly, I have some e-mails to attend to after this post, and then I want to get to McCarran to try to get on an earlier flight home. Maybe I’ll have time to hit the breakfast buffet first?

This is what traveling to Vegas for business has done to me. I have now made my way to this city 18 times. Sixteen of those (!) were for CES, there’s this trip for CTIA, and I went to Vegas once for a friend’s bachelor party. The one time I couldn’t get my expenses reimbursed or put them on a Schedule C, I had to stop myself from asking for a receipt everywhere.

I can’t tell you what any of the fancy shows at the Strip hotels are like, but I have memorized the fastest walking route through the Venetian’s floor to the Sands exhibit space. I’ve eaten in some of the better restaurants in town, but I have no idea what they charge. I should find better uses for my brain then caching the locations of bathrooms in the convention center.

Before the invention of blogging and Twitter, I had a little free time in my Vegas schedule. One year, I blew off a keynote to check out the Star Trek Experience; another, I detoured to the Gun Store and discovered how quickly an M-16 can empty a clip. But from 2007 or so on, my only time to experience Vegas as a civilian has been the last night in town–except when I’m too tired and conk out first.

A neater yard and an emptier screen: How spring kills my productivity

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I’ve written before that I’m a writer with a gardening problem, but my condition is never more obvious than this time of year.

lawn pornBetween late March and mid-May, three things come together for D.C.-area people who don’t mind dirt under their fingernails: many of the plants you want return to life, most of the plants you don’t want run rampant, and the mosquitoes remain offstage.

Since I work from home, I only need to look up from my desk to see the state of my yard. There, I have problems that I can attack without waiting for a reply from a source, the end of a tedious battery-life test, or a go-ahead from an editor: weeds to yank out, seeds to sow, flowers and shrubs to move around, borders between the lawn and the landscaped areas to tidy up.

Some of this work is hot and exhausting–I must have transplanted around 100 pounds’ worth of plants this spring–but much of it can be done in short stretches before I shower or right after some other chore that takes me outside, like getting the mail or taking in the trash and recycling. Plus, with many of the fast-spreading weeds that infest my yard every spring–I must have yanked out 15 pounds of chickweed and deadnettles so far–there’s the seductive promise that with a twist of a weeding fork in the right spot, I can painlessly dislodge a massive clot of uninvited foliage.

And as a 10-minute break stretches into an hour and I realize that my hands have gotten too dirty for me to want to check my phone, upstairs I have a half-written e-mail, a document that stops with my byline and a blog post that only consists of a handful of links. But when I do return to those things, the view outside will please me so much more.

A bout of broken links at CEA’s blog

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The Consumer Electronics Association recently moved its Digital Dialogue blog over to a new content management system. That wouldn’t be a news item to me, except that when CEA switched its blog to the same CMS that runs the rest of the site, they elected not to bring over entries older than November.

CEA Digital Dialogue logoThat means that along with CEA posts going back to the blog’s debut in March 2008, all of my own work there has gone down the bit bucket. (That’s not the first time this kind of link rot has happened; when Discovery News changed CMSes and redid its design in January, my car2go review somehow vanished; they were able to repost it, but not at the same address.) That’s not what I would have done; it’s also not my server.

You can still find most of my CEA contributions through the Internet Archive, but only if you know the original address of each. So I asked the folks at CEA if they’d mind me reposting some of that stuff here–I had to ask because my contract, like too many freelance arrangements, had a “work for hire” clause assigning copyright to them–and they said that would be fine as long as I noted where and when the work first appeared.

I said “some” and not all because I don’t have the time or motivation to rescue 50-plus contributions, not all of that material retains its relevance, and some of it is, you know, not that good. Four I have in mind: a December 2011 post unpacking the odd ritual of granting exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention clause, an April 2012 rant about how “digital rights management” restrictions in e-books preserve Amazon’s dominance, a June 2012 confession of how I overestimated the appeal of the DVD recorder, and a July 2012 protest against sacrificing compatibility or connectivity to make phones and laptops fractionally smaller or thinner.

But if there are others you’d like to see restored here, please let me know. To help with that, I’ve gathered a more-or-less complete list after the jump of the posts, podcasts and chats I did for CEA, with Internet Archive links when available.

Continue reading →

The campaign-distraction factor

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We have only 17 days until Election Day, which is good. I don’t think I can stand any more of this.

Compared to earlier presidential campaign seasons, I held off the obsessive news-gathering stage for a long time this year. But the combination of the advancing calendar and shifting, contrary poll results has finally pulled me in; there’s no way I won’t be less productive through November 6. Possibly the 7th, depending on how long election night runs before somebody calls a winner.

This isn’t the first presidential campaign that I could follow to an unhelpful degree: 2000, 2004 and 2008 took large bites out of my schedule. (There were probably intense discussions on Usenet about Dole and Clinton in ’96 that have since escaped my memory.) But in each of those years, I spent most of my workdays in an office, while mobile Web access ranged from nonexistent to underdeveloped.

Now, however, there’s nobody sitting next to my desk to ask why I’m checking Talking Points Memo or FiveThirtyEight for the fifth or eighth time in the workday. And stepping out to run an errand doesn’t mean I can’t get that fix of political updates–even if they amount to little more than noise.

The other difference this time is that, unbound by delusional social-media guidelines, I don’t have to pretend that I have no interest in the outcome. So I’m a little more open about what I think on Twitter. And on Friday, I went to President Obama’s rally at George Mason University (photo above), which allowed me to hear “Romnesia” make its debut in this year’s headlines. Fact: campaign rallies can be fun if you support the person running. I didn’t know that before, having never gone to one until Friday.

(That support doesn’t extend to donating money or my labor. Working on behalf of a candidate goes way beyond making a little noise in the stands.)

The wait on election night to see if things go my way may not be so much fun. I like the president’s odds–but as a Nats fan, I know how the score can change unexpectedly and unpleasantly if your team loses focus. Seventeen more days.

Redefining “busy”

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It took me a few days to finish reading an article about how we’re all letting ourselves feel too damn busy. I should have seen that one coming.

The piece in question was a New York Times post last Saturday called “The ‘Busy’ Trap.” In it, writer and cartoonist Tim Kreider condemned a cult of self-induced over-scheduling–not among “people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs,” but those who had a choice:

It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

I have no doubt that such people exist, especially in the Washington area. But then Kreider went on to brag a little about how he had escaped that trap:

I also feel that four or five hours [of writing a day] is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie.

Another, much busier, cartoonist, Matt Bors, read that and was not amused by the smug entitlement he saw there:

What Kreider glosses over is how it is he able to maintain a living in New York City while working a maximum of 20 hours a week devoted to freelance writing. He alludes to a retreat in the essay, from which he writes, a home in Chesapeake Bay where he spends some of his time. Kreider is either extremely well-compensated for his time or he has another source of income, a privilege he doesn’t acknowledge in the article, that allows for his leisurely lifestyle.

I don’t feel as overworked as Bors describes himself to be, but I sure don’t have time for multiple afternoons off, much less ditching work to “drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long,” as Kreider memorably put it. And yet when I look at how my output has dropped compared to my Post workload–well, should I?

Last week, for example, I wrote about 2,600 words for my various clients, plus maybe 650 words here. In about the same seven-day period two years ago, I pounded out–yikes–about 4,900 words’ worth of blog posts, plus another 1,100 words of print columns. (The likes of Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias probably write still more on any given week, but I have no idea how they do it.) My increased verbosity on Twitter made up for some of that, but still… by those numbers, you’d think I’m now leading a Kreider-esque life of ease.

I assure you, I am not. I may take the occasional nap after lunch (a meal I almost never eat at my desk anymore), but I still struggle to get everything on the to-do list done by Friday evening. And if I take two hours off in the afternoon to run some errands–often the most efficient way to get chores done–I have to make that up after dinner or over the weekend.

I would like to think that the work has expanded to fill the time in the healthiest way possible–I’m taking more time to research, write and rewrite each story, then join the conversation with readers on social media and in comments threads. But it could be that I’ve just gotten less efficient and, worse, am losing my deadline-writing habits.

(This post, for example, should have been done an hour ago. Why haven’t I clicked “Publish” already?)

The risk of inefficiency is that it can box you into the artificial busyness Kreider decried. And that, in turn, carries long-term risks, as he noted in that post’s least resentment-inducing paragraph:

The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

So if anybody asks, that’s why I’ll be at the Nationals game tomorrow.

Relationship status with Apple PR: It’s complicated

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SAN FRANCISCO–I’d planned to spend this morning covering the keynote opening Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference here. But after getting some optimistic replies from Apple PR over the last two weeks, I was told last Wednesday that they were out of room.

Apple Sept. 2010 press pass

My press pass at Apple’s Sept. 2010 event to introduce the redesigned Apple TV

An e-mail reiterating my interest (in addition to Discovery News, I had a tentative assignment from a larger regional newspaper to write up the keynote) and asking if Apple had concerns with my coverage or the scope of my potential audience yielded the same answer: sorry, nothing personal, we’re out of space.

This was not a total surprise. With Apple, working for a big-name media property does not guarantee access–while I was at the Post, smaller news organizations and even some individual bloggers got review hardware days before I ever could. But it’s also possible for a site to get an advance look at one year’s highly-anticipated Apple gadget and then get left out the next year.

I have written some uncomplimentary things about Apple–this rant about App Store rules comes to mind–and, as a Mac user, gripe about OS X issues often enough on Twitter. But  while I haven’t gotten any review hardware or media-event invitations from Apple since leaving the Post (when I reviewed the new iPad, I elected not to deal with Apple PR and worked out an alternate loan arrangement), its reps still return my e-mails and phone calls reasonably quickly, especially in recent months.

Since those steps don’t involve allocating scarce review hardware or seats in exhibit spaces, there’s always the ego-deflating possibility that my current outlets don’t promise enough exposure in Apple’s estimation. Or maybe it’s something else. With a company as set on keeping its own secrets as Apple, you never know.

At the same time, on a personal level the Apple publicists I’ve talked to have been among the nicer people I’ve met in my work. After I announced my exit from the Post, two of the first “good luck” e-mails I received came from people there. One wrote that he hoped our conversation at the iPad 2 introduction wouldn’t be the last time we met; I hope so too, but our next chat may take a while longer.

I’m not writing this to beg for sympathy or brag about my fierce journalistic independence. Apple has its job to do and I have mine, and most of that doesn’t require liveblogging product-launch events. Worst case, the money saved on three annual roundtrips to the Bay Area (for new-iPad, WWDC, and new-iPhone events) would more than cover buying all the Apple hardware or software I’d review in any year, even if I have to do the karma-denting move of returning a review iPhone to a carrier within two weeks to avoid getting stuck with a contract.

I am, however, writing this to document that covering this company involves a certain low-level angst I don’t get when dealing with some of its competitors. That imbalance amounts to another influence I need to factor out of my evaluations–customers don’t deal with Apple PR or anybody else’s. And now that I’ve talked about this issue instead of pretending it doesn’t exist, you’ll know to call me on it if you see it skewing my judgment.

The agony of absent-minded accounting

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I am in the midst of an annual reminder of my inadequacy at financial record-keeping: tax time.

Once again, I found myself staring at a stack of receipts that weren’t even in chronological order and which needed to be matched up with incompletely-tagged records on Intuit’s Mint.com. With that done (I think), there’s a largely-vacant business-mileage spreadsheet to fill out by cross-referencing my calendar with Google Maps driving-distance estimates.

I assure you that I don’t operate at a Gene Weingarten level of financial absent-mindedness. I pay my bills (though it helps to set up some for automatic payments) and I have a pretty good idea of my bank account balance on a given week. It’s just that I have a habit of letting other financial chores slide until a deadline compels my attention.

Now is one of those times.

And this year, it’s a lot more important that I not neglect any legitimate business expenses, lest I make a overly generous contribution to the Treasury Department. (I’ll leave the subject of how the tax code is stacked against the self-employed for another post.) So even though I’m officially giving up on preparing my own taxes, I still have to line up this data in formation so my preparer can plug it into the appropriate forms.

(In contrast, there’s a pleasant simplicity to my county’s business-license tax: Take your business’s gross income; multiply it by this percentage; pay. I’ll leave a discussion of how the federal tax code has become so nauseatingly complicated for another post.)

I’ll get it done. But I seriously don’t need to repeat this experience next year. Is there an app or Web service I should have been using all along? What works for you? Or should I just add these record-keeping chores to my productive procrastination workflow of things to do–like, say, writing posts on a personal blog–when I’m avoiding work?

Bye, out: More Posties to leave

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Sometime later this year, my old shop will have another series of farewell cakings: The Washington Post plans to trim its newsroom staff through its latest buyout program.

This will be the fifth round of buyouts at the paper over the last decade, courtesy of a still-overfunded pension program. (The Post Guild would add an unofficial round last fall in which about a dozen staffers were at least strongly encouraged to leave.)

I didn’t enjoy learning about this Wednesday, because I remember how much fun the previous episodes were. First you see the announcement, then people speculate about who will be eligible, then you count who took a buyout offer and who declined that exit–and finally, as the newsroom goodbyes wrap up, you realize how much experience and talent is walking out to the sidewalks of 15th and L Streets NW.

It’s not good to watch this happen in a place where people traditionally stick around–the Post has no formal recognition of tenure until you clock 20 years, at which point you get a pin. It’s worse when this keeps happening.

This year’s program aims to whittle away 33 positions out of about 600 in the newsroom–down from roughly 1,100 at its peak, then 850 in 2009. About 200 people could be eligible, but the specified reductions would hurt some sections worse than others: The tiny Investigative section is set to lose three people while Metro would drop nine and Sports only two. Some parts of the newsroom are exempt: anybody hired from 2010 on, foreign correspondents, national politics and government reporters, most columnists and all of Outlook and Weekend, among others.

The reaction from friends inside the newsroom doesn’t seem too positive. Outside it, there’s American Journalism Review editor Rem Rieder’s pithy dismissal of the do-more-with-less messaging: “So cut if you must. But spare us the bogus happy talk.”

I hope the paper I still read and subscribe to keeps doing its job. As for my old colleagues who discover they need to find a new one, there’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot lately: It gets better.

Correction: Apple TV-show rentals not an inevitable success

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You may not see the following correction in the Washington Post, so I am posting it here:

A Sept. 2, 2010 Style story about the release of ABC and Fox TV episodes for rent at 99 cents each on Apple’s revised Apple TV incorrectly assumed the success of the Cupertino, Calif., firm’s new video offering. Last week, Apple quietly removed that rental option from Apple TV and its iTunes Store.

Yes, I feel a little used after hyping that service in my story. But I wasn’t alone–analyst Michael Gartenberg, sitting next to me in the auditorium at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, told me that he thought all the other networks would sign up for Apple’s rentals by the holidays. And things could have been worse: That story was briefly a candidate for the front page before a space crunch in Financial resulting in it moving to Style.

Apple’s reversal–along with two other notable retreats last week, Facebook’s elimination of the Places mobile check-in feature that was supposed to kill Foursquare and the Deals Groupon clone that might have done the same to other daily-deal services–constitutes a useful reminder of the virtues of small-c conservatism in tech reporting. Not every new product or service will upend the world, no matter how incredible it looks in the demo or how big the company behind it; many of them will leave no trace beyond a Wikipedia entry.