Author: Stagger Lee

Of the teams in the Final Four, 3 of them are among THE flagship programs of college basketball. Any list of the greatest programs has to include UCLA, North Carolina and Kansas. (I would also throw Kentucky, Duke, and Indiana in there – I think that’s your top 6 hands-down.) I find it singular that every one of them but Indiana has blue as their primary color.

And all four of the teams this time are blue-based. Hm.

I’m pulling for Memphis, as they are the closest thing to an underdog here. They were everyone’s pick for the 1-seed that wouldn’t make it, and instead they have caught fire in a big way. The Conference USA and state of TN connections also help – love for ConfUSA going back to its roots as the Great Midwest and UAB’s last turn as a big-time program. In fact, a Memphis-Kansas final would suit me right down to the ground.

Yeah, this is a strong Final Four. I just wish they would catapult Nantz and Packer into a swamp and give us Gus Johnson on play-by-play. Seriously, he’s this generation’s Dick Vitale – just electrifying without having become self-parody yet.

There will be more about blue later.

If you’ve never actually read the test of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, knock off for about 20 minutes and click the link. It seems like all we get 45 years on are sound bites and quick clips – you need to read the full text to realize that this wasn’t just some random “black leader,” this was somebody with three degrees and an unimpeachable background in sociology, theology, and Western philosophy, whose argument knit together everything from the Fiery Furnace to the uprising in Hungary and who quoted everybody from Reinhold Niebuhr to T.S. Eliot.

This guy was good.

More later, on why 40 years isn’t as long as it feels like.

…let this be true about Apple and Wal-Mart.

Lately it seems like I’m gauging Apple’s success not by how good the product it, not by any imagined edge in “elegance”, not by the impressive resistance to malware, but solely on market share and stock value. Does that make me some kind of raging narcocapitalist?

EDIT: YEAH, SON. Take that you Arkie swine!!!!

1) Anybody using WordPress and hosting it yourself, rather than using wordpress.com?

2) How difficult is it to install the WP infrastructure on a system that’s already rigged for Movable Type 3? Can you use the existing install of MySQL or is there more stuff to set up on the server?

I do not have the chops to redesign this thing myself, and the stuff I can get to with StyleCatcher resolutely fails to blow my skirt up. However, I have not found anything in iWeb or Sandbox to be suitable for blogging, and it really seems that everyone who’s anyone is using WordPress. But if it’s not going to be simple and instantly rewarding, I don’t want to put my brother-in-law through the whole reconfiguration and install process.

So…y’all holler ;]

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Grey’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

They need to teach you this on Day One in tech support class.

EDIT: And now, the epitome of Gen-X Zen:

“If Ponch and Jon had to arrest Bo and Luke, who would win?”

Plugging away at home and at work. I seem to be on a productive streak lately in both cases – not only am I churning through a lot of paperwork at the office (which deadline is approaching like a freight train) but I have also scheduled an eye exam, a CSDC appointment, come up with an anniversary plan (of sorts), replaced the filter in the icemaker and finally ploughed through the enormous backlog of dirty laundry and dirtier dishes.

Coming up on the to-do list: schedule my first 10.5 certification test, see about changing to a credit card with a lot of travel benefits, switch all my automatic monthly payments over to said card, and finally, dig through my wardrobe and see what I really need to start looking like a respectable human being on a regular basis. See, my last job entailed a good bit of manual labor, and by “a good bit” I mean “I had my knee scoped and am still going to the chiropractor regularly.” As a consequence, my normal apparel ran to increasingly-roughed-up jeans, an endless stream of company T-shirts, and of course nice stylish black steel toed boots that would make me look like Frankenstein even if I hadn’t got size 13 feet.

Now, I know what system administrators are expected to look like. However, I like to think that I and my crew are a cut above the typical knuckle-dragging troglodytes that normally reside in the basement tending the machines. Hell, we once turned out in suits for happy hour to try to impress a pack of girls in the next department over. Much good it did us, but still, we cleaned up real good, and the PC hardware guys went to great lengths to look sharp on a regular basis (much to our frequent chagrin). Anybody who saw the spectacle of Del Boca Vista Social Club should know that we rolled in style.

So I want to look a little nicer than the typical Sleestak you see in the server room. Problem is, a lot of my wardrobe is black. And fading from overuse. A string of coincidences meant that I went out for a walk last night in head-to-toe black – jacket, sweater, jeans, boots – and every piece was a different shade of black. Not too money!

Oddly enough, I found myself mixing a lot of brown and gray in the last year or two. I thought maybe I was really botching it. However, on Timbuk2’s website, pretty much every new bag for 2008 is in some combination of brown and gray, so who knows, maybe I’m ahead of things. I still walk around wondering whether I’m on safe ground with a black jacket and brown shoes, or vice versa, but I made sure to buy a reversible belt so I’m covered there.

Maybe I should stop with all the black, but look here, my main influences were St. Johnny Cash, St. Roy Orbison, and Darth Vader, so what do you want from me?

First time ever…four #1 seeds in the Final Four.

Shame about Davidson. Stephen Curry has got to be the MVP of this tournament.

If CBS had any sense, they would put Billy Packer in a home, sentence Nantz to pitiful voiceovers of that overrated debacle in Augusta, and make Gus Johnson the play-by-play man for every major game, because he is THE most electrifying man in basketball-entertainment.

Somebody want to come drink the rest of this case of Newcastle? I can only handle so much Brown Drank before I have to revert to Guinness.

I am eating Guinness ice cream, washing it down with Guinness beer, watching tournament basketball out of one eye and Mary-Lynn’s Friday night collection of college-era hip hop You Tube videos out of the other. Let me tell you, Young MC had this whole relationship thing sorted DECADES ago. Also, I still enjoy everything Digital Underground ever did.

One of these days, when my mother and my *peh* stepfather visit and leave town, I am going to have a massive blowout bash at my house as if they were leaving for the weekend, and we can all get sloppy drunk on bad combinations (vodka and Coke, anyone?) and play all this stuff way too loud. I think we could get eighty people in this house, no sweat.

Davidson College. The Wildcats just knocked off Wisconsin in the Sweet 16. They are now one win away from the Final Four.

Davisdon is a liberal arts college outside Charlotte, North Carolina. Enrollment: 1700. Endowment: a shade under $500M. Rated as one of the “New Ivies” by Newsweek. Ranked top 20 in four different categories by the Princeton Review. Has a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. And oh look, there they are in the Big Dance. Sunday night, they will be playing in front of a national television audience all by themselves for a shot at the third weekend of the tournament.

It doesn’t look like academic success has imperiled their athletics. And it sure doesn’t look like their athletics (10 trips to the tournament since 1966, including the last three seasons in a row) have done any harm to their academics. And now, they have the kind of publicity money can’t buy as everyone in the country with a bracket asks “Who the hell is Davidson!?”

You can do both. No matter how small, no matter how selective, there is no reason you can’t compete at the highest levels both academically and athletically. A lot of schools could, but they won’t. Some just don’t care enough about sports. Some just don’t care enough about academics. Some just don’t have the will to make an effort. And some of them, like a flea-speck garbage heap in the west end of Birmingham, Alabama, would rather try to persuade you that taking a great big shit on their athletes will make them a superior academic institution.

You say you haven’t heard of Birmingham-Southern College? How would you have heard of them? WHY would you have heard of them? WHY SHOULD you hear of them?

No reason. Plain and simple. There is no reason to hear of them. Because they’d rather be safe and happy in their own little bubble, slapping each other on the back and telling themselves how great they are. And if you’re willing to spend the rest of your life in their bubble, you might even come to believe they’re right.

Motorola is splitting in two, shedding the largely unprofitable mobile phone division.

Think about this.

In the spring of 2005, the RAZR cost $599 with a contract. Think about this. When the iPhone dropped, it played music, movies, YouTube clips, synced with your computer, it did email and surfed the web, it had an amazing touch-screen interface and 8 GB of storage – and people ranted about how bloody expensive it was. The RAZR did…F-all. It had speakerphone, a color screen, Bluetooth, a trifling VGA camera, and people could NOT get enough of it. On the floor at PRINT ’05 in Chicago five months on, every single sales meatball was yakking away into a RAZR.

So how could Motorola botch this? Well, for one thing, they learned the wrong lesson from Apple. Pretty sells. This is a true fact. Three years later, I still occasionally find myself coveting the RAZR solely for the form factor, which is perfect for sticking in your back pocket before going out for the evening. However, the actual innards of the RAZR – its feature set, its interface, its underlying operating system – was basically the same “Triplets” set that first shipped on the T720…two years earlier. In fact, at the same time that Cingular was offering exclusive sales of the RAZR, you could buy a Moto V635 from abroad with the exact same features PLUS a megapixel camera, a memory card slot, EDGE higher-speed data, video capture, changeable metal covers AND completely unlocked and unbranded…for half the money.

The RAZR was sold on pure fashion. It eventually got the EDGE, the better camera, the video capture, it even added iTunes playback for a while. But for the most part, the biggest changes in the RAZR were…new colors. Black, red, three shades of pink, gold, purple, on and on and on.

All you really need to know, though, is this. Motorola phones based on Triplets use the volume buttons on the side to change the ringtone settings when the flip is shut. Press the volume either way and it goes into ring profile mode. Press the other side button and it steps through the various profiles: Silent, Loud, Vibe and Ring, etc etc. The only problem is that these buttons are raised for ease of use…which means if there’s anything else in your pocket, your backpack, your purse, whatever – if it bumps the left side of your phone, your ringer can get changed. Which means your phone might sit on silent for hours or days while you miss calls because it never rings or vibrates. Or it rings – loudly – right in the middle of the movie. Or the Bris. You really don’t want to startle the mohel when he’s got a sharp object down there.

And from the T720 release in 2002, it took FOUR YEARS for Motorola to ship a phone that let you lock out those buttons from accidental presses.

Some of the newer Moto phones – the W510 for instance – have recessed buttons that don’t bump as badly. Others have a software lockout (the 3G version of the RAZR does this). But it should never have taken four years for something so simple.

And that, boys and girls, is why Motorola is spinning off their most highly-visible division.