Tag Archives: holidays

For tech journalists, this may not be the most wonderful time of the year

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It’s almost the middle of December, which means I’m once again in the weeds with my CES planning, in the weeds with Christmas shopping, and in the weeds with writing stories in advance so I can maybe spend some of the holidays moderately unplugged.

All of these things have been part of my Decembers for 20 years (although working on a blog schedule has only been part of the deal for the last decade). I should have been able to get better at this, especially since I succumbed to leaning on the crutch of free Amazon Prime two-day shipping and let my wife handle the cards I’d otherwise not send out until early January. Nope!

CES, meanwhile, has kept growing in size–from 117,704 attendees in 2003 to 184,279 this January–and generally making a mockery of predictions that big tech shows no longer matter.

And because it’s 2017, there’s now the added hilarity of the Trump news cycle. Today, it’s given us the complete repeal of 2015’s net-neutrality rules. That’s been readership gold–2,678 comments on my Yahoo Finance post and counting–but it’s not exactly helping me ease into the holidays.

At least it’s not just me. Every CES-bound tech journalist has to be feeling the same crunch, and many of them have to post much more often. And as much as I hate CES PR pitches, I’m sure many of their senders tried to remind their clients that the space-time continuum still governs CES and that expecting reporters to attend an off-Strip event the first day of the show is wildly optimistic–and then the clients ignored their advice.

I do, however, have one thing extra going for me: CES doesn’t start until the second weekend of January, so I have an entire five blessed days between New Year’s Day and my getting on a plane. I plan on sleeping for as much of that time as possible.

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Technology hasn’t upped my gift-giving game much

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Between the advent of cloud-synchronized note-taking apps and the everyday logistics miracles performed by online retailers, remembering good ideas for Christmas presents and turning those thoughts into wrapped packages placed under the right tree in plenty of time should have stopped being a problem years ago.

2015 wrapping paperAnd yet my last holiday delivery arrived in the late afternoon of Dec. 24–and I made my last two gift purchases, one digital and one analog, at about the same time.

I can’t blame that on a lack of tools. I’ve had a frequently-updated “Gift ideas” note in Evernote since March of 2010–and I had a similar note in the memo-pad apps on various Palm phones and handheld organizers for most of the decade before. I’ve been able to lean on the time-condensing crutch of Amazon Prime since 2011, but by then I’d long since acquired a sense of logistical entitlement from the two-day shipping of such Web-retail pioneers as Cyberian Outpost.

But instead of letting me compile a thoughtful shopping list of gifts and fulfill that comfortably ahead of time, technology has only enabled and optimized my procrastination instincts.

It doesn’t help to have CES planning devour a large chunk of my mental processor cycles every December. But who am I kidding? If I didn’t have the annual gadget pilgrimage to eat my brain, I’m sure I’d find some other reason to leave present procurement until the last few days.

Did I do the whole vacation thing right?

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I was on vacation from last Tuesday morning to Wednesday night. Could you tell?

Maybe not. Beyond my output at Yahoo Tech (two posts written in advance, one I did Monday), at USA Today (filed the night before we left). and here (neither of those two posts were done ahead of time), I hardly disappeared from social media. I tweeted 33 times, not counting verbatim retweets, and posted three things on my Facebook page, not counting WordPress.com’s automatic sharing.

Golden Gate and hillsAnd I skimmed through my RSS feed each day and read my work e-mail more or less as it came in, even if I didn’t answer as much as usual. Over those seven days, I sent 33 messages from that account. In the three days since, I’ve sent 32. But wait–I composed 10 or so of those on the plane home but left them in my outbox until Thursday morning. No, I did not even think of setting a witty out-of-office message. Who would believe it?

Finally, the destination of this trip–Sonoma County–meant we arrived at SFO late Tuesday morning. And when I’d be in San Francisco at lunch, how could I not meet my Yahoo editor for lunch? (I let Dan pick up the check.) I couldn’t entirely escape work in the North Bay either. After my wife and I met a friend for lunch in Petaluma, he suggested we walk around the corner to stop by the This Week in Tech studio.

I had my reasons for all of that work-like activity: I had to finish a couple of projects, I didn’t write the Yahoo column before the trip as I’d hoped, I didn’t want to miss an e-mail with a writing or speaking opportunity and actually did get one such invitation, the laptop was on the kitchen table, the phone was right in my pocket, blah blah blah. (My most successful act of unplugging was an overnight trip to Vegas for a friend’s wedding, when I liberated myself by taking only my phone.) But it all falls short of how much I was able to let work go two years ago.

And it’s nowhere near how my friend Alex Howard didn’t check his work e-mail for an entire six days of a vacation. Or how my wife could ignore hers for our entire trip. The key difference: Both of them have full-time jobs. Imagine that–somebody pays them not to work!

I don’t quite have that luxury unless I sell enough stories first. But the flip side of full-time freelancing is that without a boss looking out at my desk, I can take time during the day to do other, offline things–gardening, laundry, baking bread, maybe even bottling a batch of homebrew–instead of trying to look productive in front of a screen.

It’s not a bad trade-off.  But I really should check my work e-mail less often the next time I’m on vacation.

The holiday season, as seen by a tech journalist

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To those of you with normal jobs, this time of year means things like eating and spending too much, long travel to see far-flung relatives, having to remember where you stashed the ornaments, and wrestling with wrapping paper.

WreathIn my line of work, however, the holiday season includes all of those things and then a few extras:

  • Gift guidance: We’re expected to reel off lists of what computers, phones, tablets, other gadgets and games to buy, even if knowing that CES will offer us a peek at the next year’s crop of consumer electronics discourages gadget purchases at this time of the year. (I have escaped that particular obligation so far this year, but my Yahoo Tech colleagues have been busy offering tech-procurement advice; won’t you please check it out?)
  • Watching people make purchases they’ll regret: You will inevitably see somebody you care for buy the wrong device or app–perhaps because they read somebody else’s misinformed gadget-gift guide–and you can’t get too bent out of shape over that.
  • Holiday tech support: Taking a look at issues on the computers, phones, tablets and other gadgets of the people we see over the holidays is part of the deal. I can’t say I mind, since I can count on getting at least a couple of ideas for my USA Today Q&A column every holiday season.
  • A break from business travel: December is second only to August for its paucity of tech events likely to land on my travel schedule. I’m okay with that!
  • CES is coming: My enjoyment of quality time with friends and family always gets eaten away by the realization that only a few days after New Year’s, I’ll have to leave all that behind and spend five or so hours in a pressurized metal tube on my way to Vegas for this annual gadget gathering. CES is a good and useful event, but I sure would like to see it happen later in January.

Wintry mix: a Christmas playlist with a little indie-D.C. cred

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By now, your brain is probably crammed full with the holiday songs you’ve heard since you were five–and they’re all stuck on repeat, right?

Playing the traditional earworm cleanser, AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” wouldn’t be seasonally appropriate on this day. But maybe the following playlist will help: songs by artists based around D.C., or who at least got their start there, that either speak to the holiday or to the time of year.

 

Merry Christmas!

(Links are to Amazon’s MP3 store or if unavailable there, to iTunes; if unavailable there as well–yes, that remains possible–I pointed to Amazon CD listings. You can also hear most of these on a Spotify playlist.)

Christmas calendar compression

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I can now click a button on a Web page and have almost any product delivered to almost anywhere in the United States within two days at no additional cost. That’s a respectable alternative to Star Trek’s transporter, but it has somehow not freed me from hitting this point in December with this much Christmas shopping undone.

Christmas wrapping

Arguably, the existence of Amazon Prime (like every other new parents, we signed up for the retailer’s free “Amazon Mom” option and then couldn’t wean ourselves of the convenience of prepaid two-day shipping) has only enabled my holiday procrastination. As in, right now, I’m comforting myself by thinking about how many more days I have to wait to place orders for family members and have them still arrive before they depart to their respective Christmas destinations.

Meanwhile, I’m also still figuring out my CES schedule–if I haven’t replied to your PR pitch about meeting at the show, just assume you’ll see me at your booth eventually, or at least don’t call to bug me about it–and lining up some other early-2014 events.

At least my wife takes care of the Christmas cards these days (otherwise, they’d be New Year’s cards). And I’m not on the hook to write any enormous gift-guide packages.

The good news is, in a few weeks both the holidays and CES will be behind me, and I’ll have a good 10 months to decompress and forget most of the lessons I’ve learned about why I should try to knock out more of these holiday chores before Thanksgiving.

Side effect of reviewing gadgets: a largely gadget-free Christmas

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Since I see so much gadget coverage timed for the holiday season–and have contributed a fair amount of it in the past–I have to assume that normal people give and get gadgets around the holidays.

Present ornament

But I am not normal! I understand why I rarely get the output of the electronics industry as a present; if a friend worked as a chef, I’d feel intimidated trying to buy kitchen gadgets or cookbooks. And as a freelancer, anything that I could use on the job should come out of my budget so it can land as an expense on my Schedule C at tax time.

But I also rarely buy myself gadgets as presents, even when there’d be no reasonable work connection. For that I blame the advent of CES: Knowing that I’m going to get a peek at the next six months to a year of the electronic industry’s handiwork two weeks after Christmas makes me leery of any non-trivial gadget purchases in the month before.

So what do you get for friends or family in the same disreputable profession that still acknowledges their professional interest? Cheap and non-obvious accessories can work. One of the better gadget-related gifts I ever got was a tiny, silicone smartphone stand that attaches to the phone’s back with a suction cup. It’s helped me stage more than a few phone pictures–and as a bonus, our toddler enjoys sticking it on my forehead.

Of you can try to make your gadget-reviewing pal’s business travel a little more pleasant: Figure out what airline he or she flies most often and buy a day pass to its lounges.

Edited 12/14/2013 to remove a stray sentence fragment.