A writer's world

And now it's (almost) time, to say good-bye

2009-02-28T15:11:00.000-08:00

So those of you in Lubbock have heard by now that we are on the job market and interviewing at several schools in coming weeks.

We had a really wonderful opportunity at Tennessee State, and I could have pursued some music publishing in Nashville, but it was not a fit for my son, who is starting college full-time this fall after taking a class here and there.

I never thought I would get misty thinking about leaving Lubbock, but it is starting to set in that our time in the South Plains is coming to an end.

I came here after an 8-month stay in Laramie at the University of Wyoming, where I did the coursework for my master's in two semesters and then moved to Lubbock when Texas Tech accepted me into its doctoral program in the College of Mass Communication. That summer I took nine hours at TTU, taught a news writing lab, and wrote and defended my thesis, with the defense coming via conference call from the basement conference room near my office in the "grad-school projects." That was a hard summer -- I also wrote "The Complete Idiots Guide to Running Injury-Free" for Penguin's Alpha imprint.

After summer school, though I still taught two news writing labs in Fall 2007 (and loved my students), I focused on my cognate, doing 12 hours in Tech Comm-Rhetoric, which really sharpened my writing and gave me a foundation in rhetoric that I am using in part for my dissertation -- and wrote two more books.

I did another full load of TCR classes in the spring (and we ate like kings and queens each news writing lab I taught), wrote another book, and became close professionally with Dr. Craig Baehr, who is serving on my dissertation committee as the outside reader. He is also working with me on my first academic book, "Writing Online," out early next spring.

Last summer, I took three Educational Psychology classes in research methods and statistics, including an SPSS class -- and wrote The Everything Kids Basketball book for Adams Media, a bio book on Kanye West for Greenwood, and a Michael Phelps book in August ("Michael Phelps: The Untold Story of Champion," from St. Martin's Press, which documents how just months after getting busted for drinking and driving, Michael moved to Michigan, got drunk, and broke his hand punching a porch pillar).

Last fall, I took the final requirements for Mass Comm, a 12-hour semester with classes in theory, integrated campaigns, and the twin buzz saws of research methods and data analysis. Methods was with Dr. Sam Bradley, probably my closest friend in Lubbock -- he is close friends with about 250 people here, that's how likeable and caring he is -- who told me I needed to finish the Ph.D. Everyone wants Dr. Bradley for chair. Fortunately, I had experienced a great integrated campaigns class with Dr. Shannon Bichard, who explained branding to me in a way that resonated with what I have been doing professionally, and intersected with the rhetoric scholarship I had completed in Tech Comm. Dr. Bichard became my dissertation chair, and has been very tenacious in keeping me focused and having me rewrite the proposal to meet her specifications. I am sure Dr. Bradley and I will write a half-dozen books or so in the coming years. In 2008 my books were reviewed by more than 50 publications, including Newsday and the Los Angeles Times twice each, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, the Indianapolis Star-News, the Arizona Republic, Yahoo News, the Baltimore Sun, ESPN.com, the Miami Herald, the Oklahoma City Oklahoman, the Houston Chronicle, and TIME magazine online (all are linked to at www.BobSchaller.com).

I have just one required class this spring, and when I am not running data or SPSS or research, I am usually in my office helping students get internships (I've now helped 74 at Wyoming and here successfully get internships, including students here going to ESPN, CMT-Nashville, and the San Antonio Express-News), and graduate school applications for TTU, Loyola Business School (Chicago), and nearly a dozen other universities. I think the students are wonderful; we get back what we give. If we treat them all like liars and thieves, that is what we will get. These are young people with remarkable minds and spirits, and I like them for their fabulous truths and wild lies, because I was in the latter group as a student two decades ago, so it is a karmic justice that I would occasionally look to the chair across my desk and see a younger version of myself staring me down. They just inspire and motivate me to be better, smarter and more caring.

I am still writing books (three out last year, three this year, three more next year) and filing two pieces per week for http://www.swimnetwork.com/, including today's piece on the internal conflict Christine Marshall, a 2008 Olympian, is trying to resolve. I also file five pieces per issue for Splash magazine, as I have every issue since February 1999.

As this time at TTU winds down, I feel like I have spent three years opening my mind, getting intellectual traction in academia, and meeting some really neat people, including Dr. Coy Callison, who helped me narrow the job search last week and focus in on two jobs that make the most sense. Dr. Glenn Cummins, who is also on my dissertation committee, provided a lot of good direction, too -- he's very reflective and calm, which balances me (and some of my other advisers) out in a nice way.

We live directly across the street from campus, in the palatial Centre at Overton Park, where downstairs we have a gym, pool, lounge and office for use 24-hours a day, and a four-story parking garage. I walk to school each day I go in, never driving. No need, just a five-minute walk and crossing just one street. In the parking lot of our building on one side is Chili's, and the other a Starbucks. We filled our main car with gas ONCE last year, in June (it had an eighth of a tank left in January when I caved and filled it again). I do have a couple of nicer cars I store locally (they don't belong in a parking garage, though we love having that in our building) -- and the indoor access is wonderful and hotel-like, especially on the few cold (or even really hot) days.

Those I don't like here I can honestly count on one hand -- most left our department or left TTU all together, funny how that seemed to happen in one fell swoop last year; I have made more friends in Lubbock than I ever imagined. Really good friends. The kind you keep even when life's fork in the road takes you one way, and them another.

So it is a time of mixed feelings, of an anticipated jubiliation, and turning the page into a new chapter as the second half of my life starts with a new career, my third -- a career in journalism that lasted a decade, a decade writing books and freelancing for magazines, and now getting ready to teach college fulltime, though I'll still write books and freelance.

I am inspired by the college atmosphere. The resources are amazing. The people, especially the students, give me hope. The lifestyle is something I enjoy. And I will always be learning -- often the most from those I am teaching.

The new President

2009-01-28T08:55:00.000-08:00

I like the idea of reaching out to the rest of the world and mended some fences, while even building some new ones.
I didn't vote for this man, but I will support him as he sets out to promote peace and prosperity. The last eight years of bad financial and political decisions are going to take a lot of years from which to recover. The world is not a safer place, no matter who claims it is. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I see great value in reaching out and rebuilding the American brand as a world leader and promoter of synergy, not dictating and picking fights -- "You are with us or against us" and "Freedom Fries" remain the two great regrets of my life, that I didn't speak up at the time and say something while we all hummed Toby Keith songs. My Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, was buried in the Shroud of Turin, not the American Flag. And while Old Glory gives me chills and I sing loudly and proudly with my hand over my heart, I worry that my kids and someday grandkids will still be reeling from the mess 2000-2008 left us in.

Tech update: Huge difference, and demand, for Revolution versus Evolution

2008-12-28T08:38:00.001-08:00

Technology is poised for a new surge forward.

All the indicators are there -- an economy that at some point will rebound, and with the housing market so grossly overvalued for so long, capital will go into tech stocks before it will ever see real estate as a lock, stock and barrell investment again. Trust of Wall Street -- the Bush welfare plan for it, and its non-forward thinking Big 3 automakers (seriously, throw billions at an unprofitable and flawed business model? What happens next quarter when that money's gone, another bailout?) -- is at an all-time low. People will invest on their own. It's a dream come true for the tech industry. I am not a corporate analyst. All of my stock knowledge is gleaned from reading news Web sites (and not just American newspapers, if you take nothing else from this today, look at the BBC and around the world for some additional facts so you can come to some meaningful truths) and following the market on my own.

If you see BP and Exxon approved to go into Iraq to "help manage" oil, buy Haliburton. If you see a U.S. brand like Citi headed down and know the government will bail it out, buy the stock when it drops below $3. These are easy, but money-making, common-sense approaches that the individual investor will have to be aware of. And an educated investor, or citizen for that matter, is a good thing for moving this country forward.

Which brings us to what are and have been the best brands in the world, Google and Microsoft. Microsoft and Google, two of the companies that revolutioned the tech world -- and the actual world itself, not to mention cultures -- are once again poised for a battle royale at some point relatively soon.

A couple of very significant differences are apparent between Google and Microsoft.

First things first: Microsoft did a great job leading the software charge. It had the right idea, and enlisted (most of) the right people from the start. There is great value in that sort of thinking, although a lot of Microsoft's better products were ideas hatched at other companies and then (legally, contractually) co-opted by Microsoft through working agreements that, without fail, worked to Microsoft's advantage. Hey, that's business. Not good for the little dog, but if the little dog crawls in bed with the big dog, one is going to hog the sheets, and the other left out in the cold. And we know which one is which.

But revolution and evolution are two completely different battles requiring different mindsets, planning and even corporate cultures.

Revolution demands the proverbial all-nighter approach, that faster is always better in battle-- that's where the "element of surprise" comes from. Even a flawed first-strike strategy is countered by being the attacker, not the attackee. "Start me up," indeed. From there, where?

Evolution is different. Keeping the pedal to the metal at that point is no longer as important as keeping the car on the road, and on the right roads. The map has to be clear, the thinking concise and forward. The Microsoft legends of sleeping in the office and writing unfathomable amounts of code per quarter take a backseat to proper planning and painstakingly organizational and managerial demands that Microsoft, post-Windows revolution, just wasn't set up for. Google, quite improbably, entered the market with graduate students leading the charge, yet had a structure in place that allowed it to evolve as the dust had yet to settle from the revolution itself.

So for better or worse, revolution is followed ineveitably by evolution. Products become more sleek, more functional, go in more well-thought out directions. Alliances are built. Reaction, built in by the intellectual process itself, becomes reflection. The corporate mauling is set aside and a lot of counterpunching goes on.

Google, which led its own revolution with search engines, became so much more than that, and branched out nearly perfectly. The branches of the Google tree grew firm and long. Advertising buds turned into crisp economic leaves that yielded sustenance and provided energy for growth. Just imagine for a second what kind of shape newspapers would be in now if they had, as an industry, embraced the Googles and Yahoos of the world, which would have made perfect sense (and cents) since newspapers are, by definition, disseminators of information.

Anyway, as Microsoft has turned corner after corner looking for the next big thing, Google has orchestrated a series of wise, sometimes shrewed, sometimes spectacular moves.

While Microsoft was closing a deal for seemingly ahead of its time WebTV (which so far has actually been behind the times because it jumped the technological curve -- news flash, people might never embrace watching feature-length movies or TV shows on phone screens), Google was paying what seemed like an inordinately high price for YouTube, yet that has proven to be the kind of cutting-edge investment to propel the company forward.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has made an unsuccessful bid for the second-place car in the search engine race, Yahoo, offering what appears to be far more than market value for it -- but what's the point? Is it going to refurbish or rebuild the engine, so to speak, to catch and pass Google?

Not likely.

Google has added such features as maps -- maps! -- to keep its own stock and star-status rising. Microsoft gave us a recycled Word program and tried to reintroduce Seinfeld to reinvent itself and Chairman Bill (who remains, regardless, one of the great visionaries in the history of the world). I never thought I would feel sorry for Gates, who is, despite the media portrayals to the contrary, a charming and engaging and -- the commericals notwithstanding -- fun guy, but those commercials with Jerry were...kind of about nothing.

Perhaps another indicator of Google's look-ahead approach is its corporate makeup: Its leaders are the kind of melting pot that made America what it is for more than two centuries. Microsoft, fairly or not, is seen as being as white as WonderBread, and that wonder has worn off, leaving it stale at a time when the industry is moving not so much straight ahead like a bullet (when Microsoft was steering the tech train) but in several other directions. Google has shown it is equipped to navigate these trails, cutting a swath when the territory is uncharted. Playing catch-up is not what Microsoft was designed to do.

There must be acknowledgement at this point of Apple.

Apple has become a player again because of its reinvention of the Mac, and its revolutionary work in mobile technologies, specifically the iPod and iPhone. Google has explored those waters, but has yet to make a splash. For now that's for the better, because coming out with an inferior product just for the sake of getting in the game is embarrassing: Running a race just to be in the field is admirable, but when the leaders are running laps around you, it's neither effective for branding-building nor for investor confidence, as Microsoft has learned.

The curve for mobile technology is starting to flatten out. Kudos to Apple for planting a flag among the telecom giants, and making Blackberry, AT&T, Sprint/Nextel (though Sprint's name on NASCAR's premier series provides such little value since there is a "Sprint" division of racing at a lower level), Verizon and the others raise their games.

And there's certainly room for Apple to create a big three -- Google, Microsoft, and Apple -- though it would be risky at best for Apple to take its focus away from hardware and mobile technology to compete in other areas now.

What's the sure pick? Nothing's ever sure. But as I sat down weeks ago to start researching this, I wanted more information on Microsoft's corporate history and culture. And how did I find it? Of course, I went to Google.

Opening lines

2008-12-23T09:09:00.000-08:00

So I am a blogger now -- again.
I'm author/writer Bob Schaller, and I am finishing my doctorate in Mass Communications at Texas Tech University.
My blog will be about life as a working writer the past 10 years, much of it in New Media. I write daily for www.SwimNetwork.com and have earned my living writing for magazines and websites in the Olympic family of National Governing Boards, including USA Swimming, U.S. Figure Skating, and USA Hockey.
I also blog about "The Hills" on MTV, and other Pop Culture trends and matters intellectual.
Get to know me better at www.BobSchaller.com.