Category Archives: Work

The business of business cards

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A week ago, I ordered business cards yet again–my sixth such transaction, adding up to 900 cards procured since I embarked on this adventure two years ago.

Business-card iterationThat purchase also represented the third version of my card’s design since my initial market research: sifting through the stack of cards on my desk and determining that those made of unusual materials (not to name-drop, but Steve Wozniak’s card is photochemically etched steel) and those in unusual sizes stuck out.

A different size of paper being a lot cheaper than metal or plastic, I opted for miniature cards–which brought the added benefit of doubling my wallet’s capacity.

The basic design has stayed the same since (for those curious, the image on the back is the photo of the Blue Ridge I picked for my Twitter background years ago, the close-up of a manual typewriter’s @ symbol on the front comes from the too-many shots I took for this blog’s header image, and the text is in Franklin Gothic and Hoefler Text). But I’ve increased the font size on the front after people said that copy was too hard to read; on the back, it’s gotten smaller to leave more room to jot down notes.

I’m sure that I’m overthinking this. But I also like graphic design, and this exercise yields nearly instant, mostly positive feedback from people who see a card that doesn’t look like most.

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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.

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SXSW 2013 by the numbers

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Modern science provides an extraordinary number of ways to quantify one’s participation in the South By Southwest Interactive festival that wrapped up Tuesday (its sleep debt is still with me, to judge from the hour-long nap I just woke up from). Here are a few:

  • SXSW 2013 badgeSteps taken, as recorded by a Jawbone Up: 98,610 steps, adding up to 51.64 miles. This includes mileage at home Friday morning but leaves out my walk to the bus that took me to the airport Wednesday morning.
  • Tweets sent while in Austin: 178, excluding retweets of other people’s thoughts but including tweets about non-SXSW news.
  • Data usage on my phone from March 8 through March 13: 739 MB, 192 MB of which came from tethering my laptop to my phone.
  • Food truck check-ins on Foursquare: seven
  • Bar check-ins on Foursquare: 14. (Some of those stops were mainly for food. Don’t judge me!)
  • SXSW sessions attended, or in one case watched from an overflow room: 11. Sadly enough, this is considered a pretty good showing in some circles. There at least as many that I seriously regret missing.
  • Business cards collected: 33. Yup, still waiting to see some app make this printed product obsolete.
  • Business cards handed out: not enough to exhaust my supply, fortunately.

After the jump, a Flickr slideshow from the festivities…

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My MWC mileage, as quantified by a Jawbone Up

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For years, I’ve wondered how many miles I walk through convention-center halls when I’m attending one conference or another. Now I have a much more accurate sense of that, courtesy of the Jawbone Up wristband that I took to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress trade show after reviewing it for Discovery News.

Jawbone Up MWC dataMy feet got their most intense workout on Monday the 25th, when the sensor-laden wristband recorded me taking 20,475 steps–10.63 miles, in its estimation. As you can see in the screengrab, the Up app’s interface doesn’t scale for those kind of figures; should I file a bug report, or would that be an obnoxious form of bragging?

(Timestamps to the contrary, I was not stumbling around in the pre-dawn hours. I just forgot to switch the Up to Central European Time, six hours ahead of Eastern.)

On Tuesday, the Up indicates I took 17,882 steps and traveled 9.25 miles. I eased up a bit on Wednesday by clocking 14,694 steps and 7.61 miles–most likely because I blew off MWC for a couple of hours to visit Antoni Gaudí’s dreamlike Casa Milà apartments. Like you wouldn’t do the same thing!

I apparently slept poorly on the nights I remembered to switch the Up to sleep mode: three hours and 48 minutes on Monday, 5:09 on Wednesday.

Sadly, even with all that exercise I came home a few pounds heavier. Large quantities of free food provided on an unpredictable schedule lead one to treat each press-room snack, hospitality spread and reception as if it will be your last for the next eight hours.

After the jump: my Flickr set from the show and the trip.

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News flash: There are a lot of white guys in tech

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There’s been a contentious and useful conversation this week over the demographic balance of the tech economy, sparked by Jamelle Bouie posting the piece he’d written earlier on that topic for Marco Arment’s subscription-required iPad publication The Magazine. The first two sentences of his story:

Click through to the “about” page of any technology magazine, website, or blog, and you often find individual or group pictures of the staff and regular contributors. What’s noticeable is so in its absence: You find precious few brown people.

Bouie pinned much of the blame for that on tech journalists sticking with their default recruitment settings–as he quoted Anil Dash, “they’ve tended to hire from their familiar circle of connections.”

TC Disrupt crowds

Not all of the tech community appreciated the critique. After some back-and-forth on Twitter, veteran startup founder Jason Calacanis posted an essay defending his ecosystem’s meritocracy and suggesting that ambitious writers of any color follow his example of “hustling in my spare time”:

To fall back to race as the reason why people don’t break out in our wonderful oasis of openness is to do a massive injustice to what we’ve fought so hard to create.

It was interesting to digest that a day or so after reading testimonials by two female tech types, Sarah Parmenter and Leslie Jensen-Inman, about the grotesque sexism they’d encountered while speaking at conferences. Perhaps the tech ecosystem is not a wonderful oasis of openness for everyone?

I know it’s not.

I’ve been to more than enough tech events that didn’t exactly look like America, but I also have my own experience distributing work to journalists. From 1997 to 2005, my job titles at the Washington Post ended in “editor,” and a key part of those jobs was assigning a page or so of reviews each week.

I did okay at finding women writers, but I was not effective at signing up non-white ones. It was not (I think) an error of commission, but one of distraction: I had more than one person’s job on my plate, I was stressed enough figuring out my own–and once I’d located enough freelancers who could file on time, I didn’t look beyond the people I knew and the people they knew.

This is one white guy’s story, and it may not apply to any other editor who looks somewhat like me.

But I do know this much: As the sample size grows, a continued mismatch between your community’s demographics and those of the larger society increasingly suggests an inefficiency in the allocation of talent. You might want to look into why that happens.

My Sulia experiment, three weeks in

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If you follow me on Twitter or you’ve liked my Facebook page, you may have spent the last three weeks wondering “What is this Sulia site and what is Rob doing there?”

Sulia logo

Fair enough. Sulia bills itself as a “subject-based social network” that “connects you to the top social sources on subjects you care about,” both by curating links to postings elsewhere and inviting contributors to post their own short updates.

The New York firm also provides curated feeds to news organizations; I first encountered it as a source for the “Live Topics” section in the Washington Post’s iPad app. It’s gotten some coverage from places like AllThingsD and Mashable but otherwise hasn’t risen to an “oh, that” level of recognition.

Anyway, back in August I got a pitch from Sulia inviting me to become a technology contributor. Its mention of compensation intrigued me, but then I spent most of the next month and a half traveling and I forgot about it until Sulia showed up in this blog’s stats in December. I inquired further; after some negotiation and the realization that I might need an extra outlet for my CES coverage, I signed on for a one-month trial.

Sulia posts should fill a gap between tweets and blog posts: you can’t write anything longer than 2,500 characters, headline included, and you can’t format it beyond adding an  image or a YouTube embed.  The headline and a link to the rest of each update then go out automatically on my Twitter and public Facebook feeds. It’s not Twitter’s microblogging but more along the lines of Tumblr-style mini-blogging–except that unlike those sites, Sulia pays contributors.

It’s not a huge sum. As a per-word rate, this stipend represents the second-worst I’ve accepted after my paltry WordAds income here. (Another Sulia contributor described it as “a bit of extra bourbon money”; I’m doing a little better than that each week, unless we’re talking seriously high-end hooch.) But it’s also infinitely more than the $0.00/word Twitter pays me, and I don’t have to bother with invoicing either. Hence my motivation to post a thought on Sulia that might otherwise require serializing over three or four tweets.

For example, I have used Sulia posts to:

Few of those items would have merited a story of their own for my clients at the time. Some could have surfaced here, but that would have involved more work–I can’t resist the urge to tinker with prose and its presentation using the tools available here–and even less income.

So in that sense, it’s worked well and slotted neatly into my workflow.

I’ve been less happy to see glitches deprive some updates of images I’d uploaded (it seems I found a Safari compatibility issue) and, less often, strip out line breaks or even some of my words. With no editing after posting, my only recourse is to delete an update and rewrite it.

I also need to work on my own approach: I’ve often found myself fiddling over Sulia updates as if they were mini-articles instead of really long tweets, and that same inability to focus has also led me to miss chances to jump on breaking news.

Three weeks in, I can certainly attest that I’m still figuring this out.

What about you? Do you find this exercise in compressed prose worth a click over from Twitter or Facebook?

Post-CES travel-tech recap, 2013 edition

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Last week was a little busy. I flew to Las Vegas to cover CES, walked several miles each day trying to stay on top of show events, wrote and spoke at length about it, ran into Vint Cerf (who, no kidding, asked for help getting on the Internet) and met Bryce Harper (I told him thanks and good luck). And I subjected various hardware and software to the cruel and unusual punishment of five days at the electronics show.

CES 2013 travel techHere’s how technology worked out compared to last year–and 2010, 2009 and 2008.

This time, I left my 2011-vintage ThinkPad at home in favor of the lighter, faster MacBook Air I bought last summer. The battery life and backlit keyboard were great; I was not so fond of having to break out an Ethernet adapter (not Apple’s, but a $10 Monoprice model that worked just as well once I went to the trouble of installing drivers for it) when I didn’t want to take my chances with WiFi.

But–this is going to sound crazy–the WiFi actually worked at lot more often at CES this year. Even in the past-fire-code-packed Samsung press conference, where the Mandalay Bay convention center’s wireless somehow never dropped. I would love to think that we’re learning a few things about scaling this technology.

I did my standup computing on two loaner smartphones I’d packed, an unlocked Galaxy Nexus on a prepaid T-Mobile SIM and an HTC 8X Windows Phone unit on Verizon. Both were a lot better than the smartphones I took last year–even though one of them was a Verizon LTE Galaxy Nexus. (Yes, the VzW Nexus was that bad.)

I employed the HTC phone and its faster, more reliable LTE connection for a fair amount of tethered access. That worked fine in my hotel room but was almost unbearably unreliable in crowded settings like Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs’ bizarre keynote. As in, the one where Jacobs kept going on about how awesome our wireless future was going to be.

I took more photos with the 8X than with the Nexus, but I still spent more time on the Android phone. I blame Twitter–specifically, its buggy, clumsy excuse for a Windows Phone client. The Nexus also had slightly better battery life, but I was pleasantly surprised to see I didn’t have to recharge both phones by lunch every day.

The one application I used most often was Evernote. Once again, it was terrific to be able to start a note on one device, then seamlessly pick it up on another. And once again, I could not get through the week without a synchronization hiccup resulting in conflicting modifications that I had to reconcile by going over two copies of the same note to see which one was newer.

For photo editing, I used mostly iPhoto, with OS X’s Preview handling some basic cropping. My word processor? Don’t laugh: OS X’s TextEdit, combined with the free WordService plug-in, sufficed to generate copy to paste into an e-mail or a blog post.

I brought an old Canon point-and-shoot camera (some of its work is on display in the Flickr set shown after the jump). It was fine in most cases, but there’s no way I’d take that to another CES. Modern cameras have better resolution, low-light performance and telephoto reach, and now camera vendors also seem to have agreed that they all should support automatic picture transfers to cameras for on-the-go sharing.

The photo above shows the two other major pieces of technology I brought: the Belkin travel surge protector that avoided “who gets the last outlet?” awkwardness in various press rooms, and the nerdy Airbeltbag messenger bag that distributed the weight of my gadgets sufficiently well to keep my shoulder from feeling completely destroyed. Continue reading →

Packing and planning for CES

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Here we go again: Tomorrow morning, I’m going to board a plane and fly to Las Vegas for my 16th consecutive year of covering CES.

CES 2012 South HallI should have the packing routine down by now–if you’re going to the show and haven’t read the cheat sheet I wrote in late 2011, it’s not too late to check it out–but I’m still not sure that I do. This year’s gear doesn’t stray too much from last year’s:

  • 13-inch MacBook Air
  • Ethernet adapter to make up for the Air’s lack of wired networking (has nobody at Apple ever tried to use the WiFi at most tech events?)
  • unlocked loaner Galaxy Nexus phone overdue to return to Google; in the meantime, I’ve got a prepaid T-Mobile account on it
  • Verizon-loaned HTC 8X, since I haven’t given Windows Phone 8 a real torture test yet
  • My own pathetically obsolete phone
  • aging Canon point-and-shoot camera (I need to upgrade and hope I’ll get a sense of what I should buy at CES)
  • charger and spare AA batteries for the camera
  • Belkin travel power strip
  • compact USB hub, in case the two USB ports on the power strip aren’t enough to power nearby devices

I’ll be in Vegas through Friday morning, meaning I have all of Monday to hop between press conferences, followed by three days on and around the show floor. Beyond incessantly tweeting out whatever I see, I’ll be writing a CES recap for Discovery, a couple of posts for the Disruptive Competition Project, and some sort of contribution to the PBS NewsHour’s site.

I’ve got a couple of video interviews on tap as well–the Motley Fool wants to get my thoughts on the show, and I’m supposed to chat with tech journalists Cali Lewis and Jordan Burchette on Panasonic’s Live@CES video stream Tuesday at 3:30 Pacific. And I’m going to try an additional experiment: posting too-long-for-tweets updates at Sulia, a “subject-based social network” that aims to provide more depth and context than Twitter.

I will not be at all surprised if this to-do list expands over the next few days.

If there’s anything in particular that you’d like me to look for or check out while I’m at CES, now would be an excellent time to leave a comment.

2012 in review: business and baby development

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This year hasn’t been nearly as dramatic as last, and I think I’m okay with that (aside from not going to any rocket launches).

2012 calendarI started this year with three regular clients constituting almost all of my income and have spent a lot of my time since showing up at other places. I’ve had the pleasure of writing at some of my favorite sites and of getting reacquainted with long-form journalism in print and online.

That experimentation was the right idea, since I stopped blogging for CEA in September (not that I’d mind doing the occasional guest post there) and will be writing less for Discovery next year.

I have other income coming along; in particular, I’m enjoying opining about tech-policy matters at the Computer & Communications Industry Association’s Disruptive Competition Project. But these shifts have been a useful reminder of how as a freelancer, you can’t get too fixated on any current client–a principle that I may have let fade in my mind during those 17 years at the Post.

I’ve also traveled a hell of a lot this year. Conferences, trade shows and speaking invitations took me to Austin, Boston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Napa, San Francisco (four times!) and Santa Clara–plus a transatlantic jaunt to Berlin.

I’ve enjoyed coming home to my family every single time. The miniature human being who had started calling me “Dada” by this time last year now seems to learn a word a week and has developed distinct interests–including, to my delight, trains, airplanes and spaceships. She has gone from toddling around the house to fearlessly exploring playgrounds on both coasts. What will our daughter think of next? I look forward to finding out over next year.