Are my eyes really blue?

There are things I wanted, especially on the gadget front, that I still kind of want after all this time. The PowerBook 1400. The SonyEricsson K700i (or K790, or T650). The original New Beetle turbo diesel. The Motorola Skytel satellite pager watch. They were perfect enough in their conception and execution that they still have a hold on my imagination.

Unfortunately, I think the iPhone SE may have fallen into that space.

Two weeks on, using it as my daily driver, there are a couple of problems that didn’t use to be problems in the era before iOS 13. The first one, obviously, is the screen – while the device itself is still a perfect size, the display is not. A modern SE would probably have a 5” AMOLED screen in approximately the same real estate, but the 4” LCD is cramped at best running an OS version designed for phones that are all around 6” on the screen. The keyboard is fiddly at best, some text actually requires me to lift my glasses and squint, and the display brightness just isn’t where it needs to be. And that’s setting aside the extent to which I have become accustomed to reading RSS feeds, website articles and even Kindle books on a larger display.

The other is battery. And this is kind of upsetting, because when I first got the SE, it had the power-sipping iPhone 6s processor with a display 30% smaller, and I could get through an entire day in low-power mode and come home with 50% of the battery left. Now, even with corded headphones instead of Bluetooth, an hour of normal use from my front door to my desk takes me down to 80%. And I had come to take for granted just how easy having a wireless charger made things (even if constant wireless top-up might have caused some of the battery issues on the X). 

I still love the SE. But I’m not sure it’s really an everyday phone. Travel phone, shutdown phone, sure, absolutely. But as a daily driver, it may finally be reaching the end of the road. A faster processor and larger screen (even if it’s too much larger than I strictly require) are too important to pass up, especially with domestic travel coming that will require the best available camera. So next week, I’ll probably be getting the X back from my co-worker, migrating everything back to it, and then leaving the SE without a number or a SIM card – possibly not even registered and configured. A true emergency backup, forcing me to live with one phone and one number like most people do. And they do all right.

Sometimes you just have to move on. A lesson I could have stood to learn a lot earlier in life.

I honestly don’t know how a government that insists on maintaining an embargo against a mostly harmless speck of an island off Florida can reconcile that with the fact of massive trade – indeed, massive economic indenturement, to be blunt – to the hugest Communist dictatorship in the world. Yes, Communist. Yes, dictatorship. Just because everydamnthing in this country is made in China, because businesses get moist in their special places at the thought of 1.2 billion future customers, we’re willing to overlook the fact that IT’S A GODDAMNED TOTALITARIAN STATE.

–March 22, 2008

 

Speaking even more of phones, looking at Apple’s situation, it’s hard to argue that they – and the West generally – got played for suckers these last twenty years. The promise of a billion new customers was too good to pass up, so the West signed China onto the WTO with assurances that business would lead to liberalization and that everyone would just go along with this. And then, after we spent two decades thinking this would all work out in the end, these companies find themselves tied in legal knots, aiding and abetting a totalitarian regime and their intellectual property being ripped off wholesale for profit. All so Silly Con Valley could have their widgets assembled for ten cents on the dollar. And now there’s not really a cost-effective alternative solution any longer, so we’re stuck until someone else can spin up modern manufacturing at scale in a different place – assuming, of course, that you have a physical product to sell. If not, you just have to wait and watch as Tencent and Alibaba do the same thing you can’t for those billion customers you assumed would be yours.

–January 4, 2019

 

It’s time for Tim Cook to start putting some of those massive cash reserves toward figuring out where Apple’s going to move its manufacturing. As the only major tech company in America still dependent on hardware, they’re highly exposed by having the Chinese government having their manufacturing in a professional threat sandwich. Not to mention the fact that the Chinese government is completely unchanged from the era in which they gunned down their own citizens by the thousands.

We tried. It was a useful experiment. We have the results. It’s time to stop handing the family jewels over to butchers. Let them try to invent their own things without using Cupertino for R&D.

Get out, Tim. Start now.

This is starting to shape up as I look at the present state of my phones, numbers and usage. I’ve shed two entire phone numbers since the first of the year, much to my wife’s relief, and I’m down to the streamlined presence I’d hoped for with two and a half months to spare on my 2019 resolutions. So without further nattering, let’s get on with it.

This iPhone SE came out as a 4-inch phone a year and a half after Apple stopped producing a current 4” phone. It had a current chipset and current camera in an older body with an older front camera, older version of TouchID, less bright screen. Basically a hodgepodge of parts from the 6S and the 5S, in the body of the latter. It seems like the SE2, so-called, will be more of the same on that front. Eighteen months after Apple makes the smallest phone in the current lineup a 5.8” full screen monster, they take the smaller size and put the newer chipset in it. From the sound of things, it sounds like the A13 and accompanying RAM in the remains of an iPhone 8, so the only feature gains you might get are some computational effects and improved performance. It doesn’t sound like the newer camera is coming at all, unless it’s the XR’s single camera, and we may not even see the 3DTouch stuff removed (which would suck out loud, as that represented at least another 100mAh of available battery space in the 6-to-6S move).

Now, for me to go from the SE to the notional 2020 5.4” iPhone Pro would be an enormous leap. Same size device as the 8, which is what I care about, but definitely more battery than 3DTouch would allow. Waterproof, haptic touch, all the amazing new A14 processor whizbang, maybe even 5G support – and dual-SIM capable. Which is potentially HUGE. If I could have the work number on the built-in e-SIM (which AT&T ought to be able to manage), I could pop my own VZW-backed USMobile SIM in the slot and have a nice little failover for places where one network fails but the other is fine, not to mention insurance against walking out the door at work. And you just take out the VZW SIM and you’re ready to go abroad without a hitch. 

Basically, the die is cast. I’ll wait a year. If the 5.4” Pro doesn’t materialize, I’ll get the SE2 in September, unless the benefits of the 5.8” 2020 phone are just too good to pass up. If the SE2 doesn’t materialize in Q1 as promised, I’ll wait until September. And come September, it’ll probably be time to hand in both the SE and the iPad Mini 2, which already didn’t get iOS 13 and has the most fleeting battery life as is. A single 5.4” phone the size of the iPhone 8 with all the bells and whistles would suit me down to the ground, especially personally owned with a built-in escape hatch.

And I’m reconciling myself to the the larger size. The Moto X was dead solid perfect and the 6  just a hair too big, but the SE actually feels a hair too small at this point – mostly for reading and keyboarding. Which I do a lot more than I thought. I might not be happy with the SE if I didn’t have the actual Kindle to work with. But the prospect of what will in essence be the lost iPhone 9, in 128 GB size for $500 or less, is definitely a plausible path of last resort going forward, four years after first taking the SE plunge.

It’s a good plan. I like it. I approve. Onward and upward, and enjoy the return of the pocket rocket in the meantime.

Two years ago, I got the iPhone X from work almost as a goof, with the notion that if I didn’t get it, I would just keep using my iPhone SE for the foreseeable future. But I did get it, and the SE became the escape phone, the phone for going abroad or just getting away from the world. And other than having to replace it after crunching it in the seat of a 787 over Chile, it worked out pretty well.

But after a couple of years, it rapidly became apparent that carrying two phones was never going to be a working proposition, and the nature of modern computing with two factor authentication and everything else meant that you were expected to have one phone and one number. And so the iPhone X reluctantly became my daily driver. And then, work became something else, and I decided I’d rather have my own device even if I have their service, and my work partner damaged his iPhone X beyond repair, and and and…

So here I am, having migrated everything to the SE. A phone with a four year old chip set in a six year old body, with a 4 inch screen running an OS where around six is the norm. A phone from the other side of the 3DTouch fiasco. And fortunately, this physical sample is less than a year old with a fresh battery, so this is about as good as can be expected to test with. It took most of an evening to get all the 2FA repaired and the music downloaded, but by morning, it was time to get started.

So what are we looking at?

For starters, the camera is definitely a step back, two generations behind the X, and you’re giving away FaceID and Animoji. But MeMoji still work, and TouchID is still a superior solution for me for actual usability. Given that I don’t think we have a lot of travel on the horizon – and certainly none abroad – the camera is good enough for Insta.

Text entry is going to be a challenge, although the smaller keyboard is offset not only by years of improvement in speech recognition but with the addition of the swipe function in iOS 13. It’s less of a pain to do this post than I had anticipated, but I wouldn’t want to bang out any significant posts on a regular basis. The screen size is fine for most things. although the 4″ isn’t a Kindle substitute by any stretch and it might not be the best for movies (which I’ve never watched on the phone to any meaningful extent).

There are other things. There’s no AMOLED, which might not be as much of a power saver anyway in the grand scheme of things. There’s no NFC reader capacity, which means using the Yubikey for 2FA is off the board for now. There’s no water resistance rating, which means no trips to Drown Town for this one. And I don’t think it can take advantage of the whole 18W fast charging.

But it’s one-handed. And it’s comfortable snapping a picture hanging off the cable car. And it fits a shirt pocket nicely. And so far the performance has been entirely acceptable. So we’ll see how it holds up during the work day. If I leave in low power mode at 100% and get home at the end of the day at 25% or better without plugging in, it’ll be as capable as the X. The question is whether a smaller battery only driving a 4″ LCD can last as long as a 5.8″ AMOLED pulling on the larger one.

But for the first time in I don’t know when (probably since the coming of the Moto X), I have one phone with one number. If nothing else, my lovely bride will be over the moon.

Fifteen years ago yesterday, we were going to have an easy sort of day. We left our warehouse and drove to Apple main campus for breakfast and to see some people, with the thought that we’d have a light day. And then, the power went out in Cupertino. It ended with handwritten airbills, multiple FedEx runs, an attempt to get them to hold the plane, and me sitting on the curb next to the other contractor having a smoke and wondering if our badges would work in the morning.

It was the beginning of Black October. More management turnover, more chaos, a bunch of guys in a foxhole trying to hammer out a process and a plan and a methodology while the plane was plummeting to the earth. Me, dragging pallets of shipping containers to build a wall to escape behind while I started just cooking laptops, making myself the laptop specialist (where I would be for almost a year and a half and the backup for it thereafter). Just go down the list every day: here are the prioritized orders, get as far as you can. Lather, rinse, repeat until Thanksgiving.

Those guys are scattered to the winds now. The two I was closest to moved away from NorCal altogether before long, and I haven’t seen either of them in a good five years or more. Apple itself seems like something that happened in a dream, and to be honest, the most vividly remembered part of it is the first part, the contractor phase that ended in a public house with all the guys clapping me on the back as my boss and director handed me a white folder clearly labeled “THE OFFER”.

That’s the only full time job I’ve ever had that didn’t involve some kind of shady hookup or someone interceding on my behalf. I came to California with nothing but a resume and hope, put my name online in a couple of places, and got a call from a recruiter who didn’t know me from Adam and delivered me to Infinite Loop scarce days before I would have started on a contract all the way in South San Francisco. As a result, I can say I’ve never had a commute in the Valley longer than ten miles.

It was an extremely liminal moment. New job, new town, new state, new apartment, wedding coming in April, plus the chaos of an election season and the unreality of the Boston Red Sox on the path to the most amazing comeback since Our Lord rolled away the stone on the third day. The new car plan was on hold. I was still paying for XM radio and not really playing as much KFOG as I’d anticipated. Steel-toed boots and cargo shorts were work wear well into November. And Cal football was the most important sport in the house and it wasn’t even remotely close.

I know I point back to life in DC a lot, but that first couple years in California, before the dull moment and then the depression, are a sort of touchstone as well. They represent the one time that I took the reins of a fresh start and succeeded in a new workplace on my own without having to have someone hold the door for me. I was able to get in, prove myself, and achieve and accomplish something that came with rewards and got better as time went on.

Wouldn’t that be something.

I have written before about the mall. For the last few years, though, I haven’t really availed myself. Every mall around here has either closed its doors for good or else been transformed into some sort of open-air high-end lifestyle center catering to tech wealth and Chinese tourism. Hell, most of them – Mayfield, the Old Mill, Sunnyvale Town Center – bit the dust well before my time, and only Vallco survived for years as a ghost of itself. Valley Fair has gone way upscale chasing the business of Santana Row or Stanford Shopping Center, and even Hillsdale has started to posh it up a little.

So you can imagine my bemusement when I was alerted to a new musical genre called “mallwave”. Itself a subset of a niche genre called “vaporwave,” which is built around taking late-80s/early-90s-style ambient music and applying all manner of VCR distortion and Windows 95 sound processing, mallwave actively adds the visual aesthetic of…well, just search YouTube for “Neon Palm Mall” and you’ll get the general drift. 

It’s weird, extremely weird, to see your past getting chopped and screwed and recontextualized as some sort of nostalgia trip. (Not really surprising, though: the high-waisted jeans, puka-shell necklace, scrunchie and enviro-conscience of the “VSCO girl” is pretty much a direct lift from 1990, just like the Neo-hippie aesthetic of my late high school era was itself twenty years old.) But in a way, I think it makes sense that mallwave landed when it did and where it did. Generation Z is the first generation to grow up entirely on the other side of the nodal point. After 1994, our present model of politics plus civilian access to the Internet plus the advent of affordable mobile phone service meant that life in the United States was drastically and permanently transformed.

And that transformation wasn’t always for the good. It’s possible the kids are nostalgic for the world they see in Friends (still wildly and inexplicably the most popular thing on Netflix) – a world without iPhones, a world unmediated by Snapchat and TikTok, a simpler and saner world where your meet your friends in person at the food court and shop for clothing in an array of stores instead of through Instagram ads, when a wayward remark (or even just existing) wasn’t enough to bring a thousand assholes into your conversation out of nowhere. It seems like a simpler time, a time when a lot of things weren’t better than now but when shame was still enough of a thing to make people try to hide their bigotry or at least not present it as a virtue.

No mall (around here, anyway) has a tobacconist or a music store anymore, and if they have a bookstore it’s likely to be some Amazon pop-up thing. The last piece of clothing I bought at a traditional mall for myself was probably a random button-up shirt six years ago. Socks, T-shirts, work shirts, jeans, flannel, plastic sandals – all online. Every song, album or movie I’ve purchased in the last decade or more: online. Every gadget imaginable: online. It’s been that way forever, but as the Amazon bomb completes its destruction of malls and starts leveling big-box stores (there is no longer a Sears or a K-Mart in the entire state of Alabama), it’s worth contemplating what life used to be like and if we didn’t lose something in the transition.

Well, here we go. At long last, the House has launched an impeachment inquiry. Details to follow.

Many people were bagging on Nancy Pelosi for months for not launching an impeachment inquiry, and hopefully those people appreciate how foolish they look now. Maybe something could have been done off the back of the Mueller inquiry, but after Barr soft-pedaled the results and Mueller insisted on staying above the fray to a fault, there wasn’t enough there to get public traction. And since impeachment is a political process, public traction is the necessary ingredient if this is to go anywhere.

I trust Nancy. Implicitly. The streets of Washington are filled with ghosts of the careers of people who underestimated Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi. She was never going to shove her chips into the middle until she had a winning hand, because she knew damn well that you only get one shot at this kind of thing. The Senate was never going to turn over before the election, and there would never be 67 votes for conviction in this Senate, but at this point you don’t need 67 votes. You just need 51, enough to get a majority of the Senate to say that yes, the orange decompensator at 1600 Penn is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, and let the ballot box handle the rest, both in the White House and in the Senate.

This is a bet – and basically she’s betting the country – that it’s enough to follow the forms and processes that have been laid down for years and decades and that the system can be made to work. Haltingtly, uneasily, never fast enough or fair enough, but made to work. It’s a direct challenge to the McConnell Republican ethos, that everything and anything goes and there is no law but victory. If she wins, maybe she’s right. If she loses, well, at that point we’ve lost anyway. Again, the point is not to impeach and convict, it’s to grease the skids for removal in November 2020 at the ballot box.

Part of the risk in all this, of course, is rule of law. Which only works, in the end, because of guns. You can blather on all you like about our Constitutional system and the norms and practices of democracy, but in the end, the decisions of Congress can be ignored (as this Administration has done with everything, whether subpoena or black-letter law or traditional conduct). And then you have to appeal to the courts, which may or may not rule on a nonpartisan basis (cf. Bush v Gore, 2000). And then when the courts decide and it’s gone all the way to the top…who was it that said “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it”? And how do you enforce it? You have to send around Feds, who have warrants. Which can be, again, ignored. Did you ever see a piece of paper stop someone who didn’t want to be stopped? Remember how Earl walked right through that restraining order? At some point, all law boils down to the squeeze of a trigger.

Which, frankly, is what a lot of them want. The GOP spent years in nutpicking and painting the most extreme leftists they could find as the mainstream of the Democrats. The rank and file of the Republican Party pointed at some random Berkeley city councilman crowing for a war crimes trial for Bush while lining up behind the idea that businesses should be allowed to refuse birth control as part of employees’ insurance, and a supine press in thrall to the Golden Mean fallacy more or less let them. Trying to facilitate increased access to private health insurance – lining the pockets of the private health system because public insurance was beyond the pale – was tantamount to some sort of Muslim socialist invasion, while literally shoving asylum seekers into camps and taking their children was “so what”.

We have one party that has reduced its practitioners to zombies. Reason is out the window. Logic is ignored. Facts are malleable. Truth is opinion. At the end of the day, if a zombie is really a zombie, your choice is to either run, get your brain eaten, or take its head off. Nancy’s going to sharpen the machete. It’s up to us to swing it. We have less than fourteen months and only one chance to get it right.

I need some distraction from the troubles in my life at the moment, so I’m going to complain about where I live. Not just Northern California, which is a magical place, not just Silly Con Valley, which is not, but the specific belt of 101 between CA-84 and CA-85, which seems to be the particular Hellmouth from which all our troubles come.

At one end there’s Facebook. At the other end there’s Google. In between there’s Stanford. And clustering around the far side of Moffett Field, there’s Google AND Facebook AND Amazon. And every square inch in between is getting filled with Teslas, artisan bakeries, and apartment buildings that are turfing people out so they can try to sublet a 3BR for $10,000 a month on AirBnB. All in a nine mile stretch with an ostensible population of maybe 200,000.

See, that’s the problem. The finance industry was always a magnet for horrible assholes, certainly, but they were being pulled into New York City – a place with a huge population at high density and with the infrastructure and transit to support it. You drop ten thousand big swinging dicks into the isle of Manhattan, nobody will notice, because they’ll be overwhelmed by everybody else. Drop ten thousand big swinging dicks into Mountain View and you’ve grown the population by almost 15% in a place with no subways, no apartment buildings over 4 stories tall and an existing population that wasn’t prepared for housing costs to double inside of a decade when wage growth has been stagnant all century.

Because the idea that nerds would somehow make tech a better place than other industries was always aspirational rather than descriptive. The tech sector was created by human beings, and human beings are assholes. Anyone who could see the Apple vs Commodore flame wars on a BBS in Birmingham in 1986 could have told you that there is no particular moral virtue in being a nerd, and fifteen years in Santa Clara County has proven me correct in this assessment. All the people who thought Alex P Keaton was awesome and ran off to Wharton in 1986 had kids who all ran off to Stanford so they could drop out after a year and get on the VC sugar tit so they could be like Uber or Snapchat or WeWork or (fill in current trendy “unicorn” that bleeds money like a gutshot pig here).

And it’s making things worse. There are towns all along the Peninsula that will be screwed if the Big One hits us during other than business hours Monday through Friday, because most of their first responders live two counties away since a cop or a firefighter can’t afford to live in Los Altos or Cupertino. The people who make a city possible – the cashiers, the janitors, the taqueria operators and pharmacy technicians and bus drivers and bank tellers, you know, all the jobs that existed when we were in kindergarten – can’t afford to live in the city any more, and are progressively being othered out of the world of Silly Con Valley now that you can be anonymously serviced by Uber and Doordash and the likes of the gig economy. And people didn’t care as long as it was “unskilled labor,” but they also underestimate how many of them are nothing but bit-janitors in the end. The point being not that they deserve better, but that the janitors deserve better.

The good news is that with things like AB5, the state of California is punching back for the people against the nerds and the algorithms. The bad news is that it may already be too late for this place to be dragged out of the Hellmouth. Silly Con Valley is where your future comes from, and you may not be glad it does.

Well, you can’t buy last year’s high end phones anymore. That’s the quiet news out of Apple Park, as the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max (sounds like a gas station male enhancement supplement) will be joined on the shelf by only the XR and the 8 going forward. This suggests to me…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

WHAT THE FALL APPLE EVENT MEANS TO ME, by Stagger Lee:

1) Apple Watch: always-on display but still has “all day 18 hour battery life.” That reminds me, I haven’t charged my Fitbit Charge 3 in a week, need to top it up. Not a word about sleep tracking either. Pass. I still think the Apple Watch with LTE could be a very interesting device – especially paired with the AirPods and able to be the shutdown-night phone – but I don’t need two things to charge every night. The always-on display is reminiscent of how Jony Ive always used advances in processing power and size to make the phone thinner instead of longer-lived. Of which more momentarily.

2) New cheap iPad, 10.2” for $329. Interesting. This is clearly the entry-level bulk-order hand-them-out-to-the-class device, but even so…when have you ever been able to buy an Apple laptop for $329? iPad OS and Swift mean you’re getting close to the last piece of the Dynabook puzzle, in which you don’t have a computer until you can program that computer and write software FOR the computer ON the computer. If I had to get serious about Swift in a big way, $329 wouldn’t be the worst entry-level option. And it’s always nice to see Joz again.

3) Apple Arcade: $5 a month is probably right for this kind of thing but I’d have to see the game options first. I have come to realize that after a childhood spent pumping tokens into every machine at Big Al’s or Silver Star, and a college life spent pumping quarters into Cyberball or 1st and 10 or NBA Jam, I am simply not a gamer (bar the likes of Kentucky Route Zero). Even casual gaming is not my thing; my idea of a time-filler is hitting refresh on Slack and Twitter, God help me. Pass.

4) Apple TV+: this is basically the equivalent of launching Netflix or HBO GO with only the prestige series, with no long-tail backlog of hundreds of older movies and shows. I don’t think they could have brought this in for more than $5 and had the kind of uptake they want, but a year free with every new Apple screen you buy may help hook people. I don’t know…maybe? The only show that looks compelling is For All Mankind, but if they want to take me up on my pitch for a Mad Men-style look at the dawn of Silicon Valley called “Wagon Wheel” after the legendary watering hole in Mountain View near Fairchild…

5) iPhone 11: This is plainly the new default iPhone, as was the XR before it. They are really trying to position it as such, too. There is a clear line of demarcation between the “everybody” phone (8, XR, 11) and the “special” phones (X, XS and now Pro). And the highest-end phones now only last a year. The X, XS and XS Max all got turfed out after twelve months, and you can’t buy the Plus sizes any longer (although 6.1” without a bezel seems to split the difference in most cases). Still too big for me. Pass.

6) iPhone 11 Pro: Hold. Up. The big news here is not three cameras, or the full plunge into computation photography to catch up with Google (and arguably surpass them if this is all done on the phone without needing cloud processing), or the increased focus on dropability – the battery life is four hours longer than the XS. It’s been a while since Apple gave out absolute battery times and not relative to older models, so I’m gonna need to algebra this up, but four hours made me sit bolt upright on the sofa. That’s not nothing. Especially if you’re not gaming or taking a ton of pictures, but just doing the kind of text downloading that takes best advantage of the throttled processing. I guess this is why they think the always-on watch is doable now: they’ve perfected a processor that has running-away-from-the-cops speed but, like Milton Berle, can also pull out just enough to win. 

Pass, for now, but it puts me in mind of two things: the notional 5.4” iPhone 12 Pro, so-called, would not have an appreciably shorter (and possibly longer) battery life compared to the iPhone X work has saddled me with. Indeed, the A13’s battery-sipping ways might make it possible to make a smaller device with a smaller battery without compromising mean time between charges. And that in turn makes me think of the “new SE”, so-called, which would have that A13 in the body of an iPhone 8 (with, presumably, no superannuated 3DTouch taking up thickness where a battery could fit). That device, with its 4.7″LCD display taking less power than a 6.1” Liquid Retina LCD or a big AMOLED and a bigger battery than the iPhone 8 being gently consumed by the A13, might just be my next phone, especially with TouchID instead of FaceID. I don’t need Animoji that badly, and lest we forget, the 8 had all the chipset features of the X including NFC reader mode, waterproofing, the better front camera…the New-SE could very well be my next phone.

Circumstances brought my wardrobe to my attention this week – a little bit of social media and enough overcast in the morning to make the flannel shirt viable – and I began thinking about the semiotics of my wardrobe over the last decade or so. I had a pretty distinct look in DC by the end of my time there: black shirt, black shirt, Hawaiian shirt, black Hawaiian shirt. Khakis in hot weather, jeans in cold, Docs all the time and the leather jacket from September to March inclusive. In California, I was dressed for dock-walloping at Apple half the time (even if I did try to look a little nicer on keynote and beer bash days) and once I landed where I am now, there really wasn’t anything distinctive – it was the same wardrobe as grad school, albeit with adult shoes instead of the Nikes.

It started to change as I hit 40. I could sense it changing for sure, but where things really took a turn was when I went to Uniqlo in NYC (at a time when there were only three Uniqlo stores in the United States) and left with a couple of $30 cotton blazers, one off-white and one darkish-blue. They were transformative. I realized that the mere act of putting on the sport coat made me feel different, made me act different. The same holds up with the seersucker blazers (yes plural), or the new linen one I picked up this summer, or the Harris Tweed: as soon as it slides on I feel differently about myself and I project differently. I can’t explain exactly how or why, but I can be slouched in a black T-shirt and jeans and as soon as I put that linen blazer over it I’m ready for the first-class lounge at Heathrow.

Which I don’t name-check accidentally. I’ve never worn my Alden boots out of the country, but my wife’s dead-perfect birthday gift from over five years ago is the sort of thing that suggests things to me – that these same boots would be as well perched on a rock in the Scottish Highlands as on the rail of the bar in a pub in Galway or on the cobblestone streets of the West End theater district in London. These boots make me think I should be wearing them abroad, down European back alleys and alongside Japanese canals and propped on the footrest in international business class on a Dreamliner.

In the various notebooks (virtual and physical alike) I kept lists of things that were visions, inspirations, mood boards if you will, and looking back through them one of the common threads is wardrobe: most looking for workwear, things made in America, things of the sort I could wear and use for decades if I wanted to. In the last seven years, I’ve mostly accumulated them. Shirts from American Giant, especially the work shirt that I’ll wear every day from November to March if allowed. Jeans by LC King. The Filson x Levi’s trucker jacket, which I desperately need to re-wax. The peacoat. The Aldens. My Vanderbilt hat from Ebbets Field Flannels and the Kangol my dad used to wear. When I talk about having hit the finish line on stuff, I think that’s a huge part of it. I have the tools to be dressed the way I want to dress, and achieve the mood and feeling that comes from that. I can’t explain how different I feel in that work shirt (or now the flannel) – it just feels right.

The problem is, I rarely have more than four months to wear the things that just feel right. Even the summer blazers are a big ask when commuting in an area that gets hotter than it ever used to, more frequently and for longer. It’s entirely possible that the last piece of the puzzle is to lace up the boots and head for someplace gray, urban and below 60 degrees. Which is the trick. I can watch minor league baseball, I can watch MLS and the Premier League, I can drink 3.5% ABV pub bitter, I can walk through the Sunset and ride down the PCH at dusk, and I can do all of this in my most comfortable wardrobe – but it’s not going to be a substitute for Galway, or York, or Bath, or London. Not yet anyway.

Might be time to do something about that.