Over a long weekend in September 2007, and right before I sent an overly earnest pitch letter to the editors at Lifehacker, I created this web site so that I might appear impressive, experienced, and engaged in the wider world of tech.

Once I’d made the jump to being actually engaged as a full-time, at-home, independent editor and freelancer, I made updates to the site so as to appear busy and important. Once I was busy, and at least self-important, I wanted to appear responsive, involved, and all kinds of quirky.

These days, I have no time to appear anything at all. Or appear most anywhere, unless it’s tangentially work-related or deductible from taxes. Free food, sure, but otherwise, no dice.

This is, as The Wire‘s Marlo Stanfield put it, “One of those good problems.” Still, I occasionally get time to look back over my shoulder and notice how much space I’ve put between myself and this site, and its original aims at being about me, my interests, the people who share my interests and earn my respect, and the place where I live.

Oh, well. This update mostly keeps the pace down that same, singular street, but let’s hope it’s the last block before I turn the corner again. Having pounded that extended metaphor into the pavement (meta!), let’s get to the new stuff about me, me, me:

Writing a book: The Complete Guide to Android. There is nothing to show at this point, and nothing’s ever certain. But I’m sure trying to get something done, in the vein of Gina Trapani’s Complete Guide to Google Wave, with the topic being the rising Android smartphone OS from Google.

This Week in Google: We all listen when Gina suggests something, and she was kind enough to suggest to the host of This Week in Google that I appear to talk about a Top 10 Android Apps post, and other topics related to Android. So I plugged in my webcam, sat my headset on my ears, and had more fun than I’ve ever had with a camera on me.

You can grab audio and (soon) video from that episode, “Perky Jerky,” at the site. If you dug the topics and talk, subscribe to This Week in Google from iTunes, or head to the show site for other feed options. I get through it every week, often while cooking or watching dishes. It’s like having some really nerdy, wonderful friends let you join them at their tech table.

Nickel City Chef:

As you might imagine, it’s a Buffalo-focused take on the Iron Chef (America) phenomenon, with two chefs–one a “Nickel City Chef” from Buffalo, the other a challenger–competing, on deadline, to imaginatively incorporate a secret ingredient into several dishes.

I was asked to represent Buffalo Spree magazine as a judge at the first regular season throw-down, and I gladly accepted, since tickets last year sold out before I could think twice about it. Adam Goetz from SAMPLE took on challenger Ross Warhol, executive chef at the Chautauqua Institution’s Athenaeum Hotel, with the secret ingredient being whole milk ricotta cheese from Sorrento, itself headquartered in Buffalo.

Via Nickel City Chef [Facebook].

The highlights:

• Learning that local NPR morning host Bert Gambini doesn’t look anything like he sounds. I’ve had similar “radio voice/image dissonance” revelations about folks like Brian Ibbott, but, seriously–Bert Gambini sounds like your toy-train-collecting uncle after enunciation lessons, but looks like he could lift your car if you dropped your wallet under it.
• Eating ricotta as a powder steeped in Earl Grey. Probably won’t ever get to do it again.
• Learning how to think fast, faster, fastest about what I’m eating, as the microphone lands in my face. Mention was made of “a chocolate bar left just a minute too long in the back of a station wagon,” though.
• Eating all that food, meeting the chefs, chatting with friends after, learning how hard it is to talk about food.

Artvoice’s 5 Questions With … Were asked of me. My dad later informed me that the “little brown device” he carried around was actually a signal emitter that let him use his own long distance service over AT&T lines. Which is kind of neat, to learn your dad dabbled in phone phreaking while you were wolfing down Honey Nut Cheerios.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Interviewed me for a feature, “‘Life hack’ aims to boost productivity in workplace.” Steve Twedt was great to talk to, and genuinely interested in learning about the roots, range, and regular uses of all kinds of things Lifehacker-ish.

CBS3 Philadelphia: Did a video Skype interview for a feature on resolution-keeping apps.

Yeesh. I feel like I’m about to drown in the internet equivalent of a very still pond. With all that What I’ve Been Up To out of the way, though, I aim to write something else next time. Something with cheese, perhaps.

Personal blogging is hard when you’re updating another blog at least five times per day, and often more. As I put it to my editor recently, it feels like my Who Cares Filter is completely closed up by the time I find myself with time to write in this space. I don’t have to write about software, productivity, gadgets, or time management here, of course; it’s just a vague feeling that I’ve linked and updated everything I need to on the net each day.

But! Now it’s way too early on a Sunday, and I’ve got a few things that need sharin’.

• The headline: Yep. Less than six months after moving to Rochester, the wife and I are moving back to our home of more nine years. I defer my feelings on this to an upcoming Roc/Buff open comparison chart I’ll be posting (seriously) later this month.
• Food Week at Lifehacker: That was seriously fun. I earned some experience doing solo video shoots, interviewing Art Rogers of Lento restaurant about slicing and dicing onions and fileting a fish.
  
  What did I learn? Per @jordanconway, I might find a bolt that fits in the tripod mount of my Zi6 and attach it to a lanyard for steadier shots. When shots go wrong (“Macro Mode” my butt), I’ll politely ask my subject to back up and re-explain, and I’ll keep the camera on the subject (food!) more often.
• Rockin’ the G1: Finally joined the realm of folks who can complain about two different kinds of cellular reception. I dig the open nature, the browser is pretty snappy when the bandwidth’s there, and certain apps are total killers (Locale, for one). Many reviewers and iPhone purists have knocked on the hardware, but I see a clear trade-off for the “bulk” and “design choices.” Namely, having 3.2 megapixels in your pocket at all times, to shoot ridiculously clear photos and video:
  
  
• Firefox add-ons for journalists: Titled Journalist Picks for now, and it’s a work in progress. Got an extension that would help with research, note-taking, or tracking beat subjects online? Drop them in the comments or hit me up on email.

Thanks to Kevin Lim for shooting and posting, and to BarCamp Buffalo for letting me try out an alpha-level presentation on the late-night crowd.

I’d intended to run through three areas early-morning bloggers can use to sprint through material and write faster, but ended up focusing on one app I could easily keep in the 10-minute time frame. Intrigued? Check out the full list of tools and tricks referenced at the end of the vid.

Iron & Wine is one of the very few music acts the wife and I have Absolute Agreement on, so we snapped up tickets to their Nov. 12 gig at Ani DiFranco’s Babeville, a.k.a. Asbury Hall, as soon as we knew about the gig.

Samuel Beam walked onto the stage of the renovated church hall, looked out from heavy eyes and said, “Wow. I didn’t know there were this many people in Buffalo.” At that moment, it seemed a bit like … everything anyone’s ever said about Buffalo after spending some real time here (or so I tell myself). Listening to it now, though, it seems more in line with his general shyness and modesty, to see that many people lining the halls of the arching space.

I teased PlayedLastNight.com a bit about the literalness of their releases, but, one week later, you can preview, buy and download the whole 18-song, 1-hour-35-minute Iron & Wine set from that show. The basic $9.95 package gets you MP3 files with a 160 kb/s bitrate–decent enough for headphones and non-audiophile enjoyment. $3 more gets you (via email, two days later) FLAC files that haven’t lost any audio quality in compression.

Quick tip on the sly: One YouTube user has posted three full song videos from the Asbury Hall gig. Consumer-cam quality, but pretty neat angle.

The tagline of The Soup, possibly the only show on the E! cable network that won’t ruin your day, is that they watch it all so you don’t have to. In these times, that is no small service.

I watch this show every week, without fail. If I’m away, I set my DVR to record it Saturday and Sunday, as a fail-safe, because for all the easy targets–the Kardashian/Lohan/Abdul bloc, the reality non-shows, Cee Dub’s Dutch Oven Cooking–those brave scanners of cable culture ofen find something truly amazing. If Dadaist morning shows don’t do it for you, try Willard Scott’s Today-Show-sponsored madness.

It’s one of those wonderful accidents of television, like Space Ghost Coast to Coast in its prime, when nobody at the network has yet noticed how weirdly brilliant their tiny little show has become.

Our local ABC affiliate WKBW, suffering for years under serious cutbacks, accidentally turned the studio microphones on during the big finale of this year’s Oscars (post-spoiler: “No Country for Old Men” won). Rather than embarass their last-in-the-market station, however, the staff provide some astute inadvertent commentary. I question whether an apology was truly necessary.

My favorite line (in response to co-anchor Joanna Pasceri asking “What’s it about?”) is from Keith Radford: “Guy with no expression, keeps blowing up everything?”

I agree with New York Magazine on this one: Give this guy his own live-blog during next year’s telecast. (via Buffalo Pundit, though his link is to the non-embeddable version with better sound).

If you’ve spoken to me recently, or if you’re one of about six people I forced to read my last post on my defunct first blog attempt, you know that Sunday night was a pretty frickin’ huge event for me.

The last season of the best television project I’ve ever seen, The Wire, started its run, leaving me both fulfilled and really, actually nervous about how the last chapter will play out, how it will integrate a topic—journalism and its discontents—near and dear to my heart, and how it will affect the show’s legacy.

I say write “chapter” intentionally, because, as umpteen pundits have pointed out, the show is more “televised novel” than “Dramatic Series” (or whatever category the Emmys have UTTERLY SNUBBED it in). I write “legacy” intentionally because I’m all too aware that the show pulls fewer viewers right now than even a modest hit like “Big Love,” so its best chance of actual impact lies in that new kind of never-ending memorial service known as a DVD boxed set.

But blah blah “What the show means” and yada yada “Where is this season headed?” (for that kind of thing—but good—bookmark Slate’s TV Club for this season). Here’s just a few take-aways, good and bad.

The Good

• Bunk—The first shot of the first scene of the first episode is a long, multi-line mind-f#$% by homicide Detective William “Bunk” Moreland on a gullible murder suspect, and it’s a great “welcome back” for long-time fans. The man just carries any scene he’s in, bringing menace, mirth and wisdom to moments like this.
• Bubbs—Nobody can envy Andre Royo’s lot in this season, as he takes Bubbles/”Bubbs” down the well-worn “recovering addict” path. This being The Wire though, you know he’s going on his own, with no system to catch and comfort him, and that even if he keeps clean, there might not be a great life waiting for him—kinda realistic, you’d have to imagine.
• The Humor—I’d never watched “The Wire” with more than one person until last night, when I hosted a low-key “Season Five Party” at my place for two other couples. Yes, we are all white and middle-class, and yes, I scolded myself many times for throwing a “party” for a show depicting the utter abandonment of the predominantly black, overwhelmingly poor American City. Yet watching the show in a group made me realize how skillfully little moments of humor are woven into what would otherwise seem like a daramtized Howard Zinn tale, with swearing. The opening scene drew five laughs, some in disbelief. A later scene, when a politician sees their face under a gotcha headline and mouths her discontent, brought the whole room up in “Ohhhh!”s. And the little moments of gritty truth the show is sprinkled are way more fun to smirk and nose-breathe at with a crowd.
• The One True Newspaper Moment—Critics seem to be lining up evenly on both sides of how realistic or human the characters in this season’s pseudo-Baltimore Sun are. The language and overall tone, however, seem right on. I’ve only had a bit more than five years’ experience in the newspaper trade, but there’s one moment involving an executive editor back-handedly spiking a story—using a sentence that starts off with, “I was talking with [name] at [institution] the other day, and …” that rings all too true, from my own recollections and coffee break tales I’ve heard.

The Bad

• Those Other Newspaper Moments—At this early point in the season, I’m a bit wary of how rootsy and truth-seeking they’ve made the obvious hero, City Editor Augustus “Gus” Haynes, and how blatantly clueless his higher-ups come across. And if you know anything about David Simon’s decades-spanning beef with his former editors at the Baltimore Sun, you know that well goes much, much deeper—maybe a whole season’s worth. Then again, I might be a bit too familiar with it to really see it, and I suppose Burrell and Rawls likewise came across as Skeletor and Megatron, at first.
• The Electric Piano Borrowed from “Law & Order” in the New Theme—See clip above. I love Steve Earle, but the new opening credits track makes me think someone’s always going to get done right before the commercials at 32 minutes.
• No Omar—I used to fall in with the crowd who thought Omar should have been dead about 20 episodes ago. After the wait between season four and five, however, I just want the duster-wearing, shotgun-toting, Deus-Ex-Machina-serving man back in the game

I’m going to try this again after next week’s episode, hopefully in a more timely fashion (thanks, On Demand!).