Author: Stagger Lee

The launch of Google’s Chromebook Pixel has been the butt of endless derision around the blogosphere, and rightly so – the point of Chrome OS was to provide a cheap and cheerful alternative to the netbook, back when the netbook was a thing. The Pixel is basically a Chromebook with a MacBook Air case and a touch retina display…and a price tag of $1300, or $1500 with LTE. And the Google VP talks about how nobody has brought touch and high definition to web browsing until now.

Um…except for the iPad on which I am typing this, which is a year old and has the same 32 GB of storage and LTE as the high-end Pixel, for literally half the price. If you think you can sell a browser with a keyboard strapped to it for $1300, then God bless you, but you’re going to lose your shirt. The whole point of the Chromebook was to be cheap and accessible, and once it costs more than an arguably far superior ultrabook that can run, you know, software, where’s the unique selling point?

More interesting is the re-hype of Google Glass, the presently-$1500 connected eyewear device. The best way to think about this is as if it were the 21st century Bluetooth headset – it’s meant to pair with a phone for its pervasive data connection. But it has its own camera for quick photo and video work, and responds to voice command and to a touch-sensitive strip on one side. It also has its own GPS, which becomes interesting when you factor in something like Google Now – if it’s location-aware and can provide relevant data contextually, that becomes far more interesting.

Lets face it, what I want out of something like Google Glass is JARVIS. I want the heads-up display with time and temperature and instant Wikipedia on whatever I stare at, plus response to voice commands and inquiries. Between Siri and Google Now, we’re actually getting close to viable voice-directed computing, and with Glass – deftly machined into a tasteful pair of Warby Parker frames – you have the potential to do everything you’d want to do on the fly without taking the phone out of your pocket.

It’s the same deal as the Pebble watch, which intrigues me, or the notional iWatch – what’s the use case? The use case is an extension of the phone: location-aware time and temp and weather alerts, incoming texts and notifications and caller ID, remote control of the music with the ability to flip through playlists in a way the headphone remote can’t and Siri frequently won’t. And with the Pebble, it’s waterproof enough for the shower, so you can literally get your text messages anywhere now…

Seven years ago, the state of the art in cell phones was a Sony Ericsson candy bar phone with 3G, a simple proxy browser and rudimentary video calling. Today, the median bar to meet is a touchscreen phone with LTE networking, Wi-Fi, 8 megapixel camera with 1080p video capture, a full HTML5 web browser and natural-language voice control. In another seven years, the likes of Pebble and Glass will probably be a natural and accepted part of mainstream mobility computing. And Apple and Google are already ahead of the game in a way no other tech companies have proven able to match…yet.

NB: According to my index, there’s supposed to be a flashback post from about 3 years ago that deals with January 2007.  And yet, I don’t see it when flipping through the archives, and I suspect it may have been a casualty of moving from MT to WP, or from ecto to MarsEdit, or who knows what.  But since that era has crossed my mind again lately, I’ll just write a new one. – The Mgmt

NB: Oh, and it’ll sit in the drafts folder for a couple of weeks while my life goes on super donkey tilt and I’ll find it and clean it up and post it now instead. -The Mgmt

 

A few nights ago, I was wandering around the neighborhood.  It was clear, and it was freezing cold, and I realized it’s been a while since I did it. We walk – and sometimes run – around the neighborhood regularly enough, but we have an established route that serves us as the regular track.  But back when I started wandering around the neighborhood a few years ago, it was in between areas, down alleys, along fences and rail tracks and back passages by swimming pools and clubhouses.  Basically just a good way to get lost.

Six years ago, I was coming off one of the better years of my life.  A little travel for family, an office move at work, a new roommate, but by and large it was the long-awaited dull moment for the first time in almost a decade. In a lot of ways it seems like my life never stopped moving from the moment I came flying out of Vanderbilt against my will until I settled in at Christmas of 2005 with a new wife and a new house and started going through the detritus of twenty years stuffed in the old footlocker at home.  It left me in something of a fugue state, where it was abundantly clear I wasn’t the kid I had been decades earlier.  January of 2007 was when I first started wondering “well then what am I now?”

One of the first things that tripped it was hearing some Irish music that immediately sent me on the search for the 4Ps pub experience again, which was a fool’s errand – back in greater DC you can’t throw up without hitting an Irish bar of some sort, but the sons of the Auld Sod are thin on the ground here in Silly Con Valley.  Indeed, I’ve only ever found two in the entire South Bay and none on the Peninsula that even offer live music, and it’s of the seisiun pickup variety, which isn’t exactly the McTeggarts kicking off the third set with “On The One Road” at 11 PM.

The pub quest led to the third-space quest in general, which took me to Trials in San Jose – a bar near the light rail, with no televisions at all and lots of soccer and 2-Tone artifacts on the walls.  And so I boomed “This Are Two Tone” through the iPod, because I was hearing a lot of that on Virgin Party Classics with Suggs every Friday morning at work, where I was enjoying an actual desk job with an actual desk in an actual office with an actual door.

And I did a lot of walking around the neighborhood at night, thinking about who I was and what my life was going to be like now.  Something was missing, and I couldn’t put a finger on what I’d lost. It sort of felt like I missed my gang, missed my crew, missed going out and solving problems – after all, that cushy desk job could probably have been done by a well-written shell script if there’d been a competent developer around to bang one out.  It felt like one of those liminal moments – like December 1984 or September 1997 or January 2000 – where in retrospect I was in transition without realizing it.  I just did a very poor job directing the transition in 2007, but that story’s been told before.

Still, the urge to sit quietly in a dark public house on a Sunday night in January with the music in the background comes around with every new year, even if it never seems to last past March Madness.  Maybe this year, with no rooting interest to disrupt, I’ll make it out a little more regularly.  Then again, it wouldn’t do to leave the pub after a couple of hours and find it still light…

January and February 2000 were when we discovered the Irish.

It all started when we went for after-work drinks with some of our Y2K contractors, one of whom was off the boat from Kildare and who recommended a place in Cleveland Park.  It was, of course, Ireland’s Four Provinces, and after-work drinks turned into closing the place at 2 AM…and coming back the next night at 6 and staying until 2 again.

In between, on that Saturday morning, I remember driving to Tyson’s for a new pair of Docs, my second. These were proper brown 1460 8-eyelets, the sort I’d probably never have now because they’re not black or red or cap-toed or whatever, but at the time, they were appropriate to post-blizzard DC.  The roads were clear but the white stuff was still a foot deep in all directions, and there were two-foot walls of ice down the sidewalks with cuts to dodge in and out.

I didn’t have the cigar shop at this point.  I mean, I’m sure I’d been by at least once, but for the most part, skulking around for something to smoke generally meant either Georgetown Tobacco in Tyson’s or a place whose name I can’t remember over in McLean – one that stands out in my mind because they had unfinished pipes.  No varnish, no paint, no nothing – just raw wood that had been carved and sanded (mostly) and which you had to stain yourself through use and handling (and in my case, as often as not, filling with Maker’s Mark and allowing to sit overnight before first smoking).  I guess that’s the point in my life by which I had genuinely become A Smoker, albeit a pipe smoker – which meant carrying a pipe, a lighter, a pouch of tobacco, something to scrape the pipe out with and as often as not a couple or three pipe cleaners.  (A lot, when you don’t have a bag or a jacket, and I was grateful when Dockers produced their pants with the concealed zip pockets on the side.)

And on the drive to make my tobacco run, I was playing the tape – because of course we bought the McTeggarts’ cassettes the first night. All three. To this day, there’s one chord of their “Whiskey in the Jar” that puts me right back there, surrounded by the snow.  There would be other music, of course – we’d see Ronan Kavanaugh and buy both his albums, buy every Fenians disc imaginable, and that co-worker loaned a tape of old rebel songs that we damn near wore out until we knew all the words to (some version of) “The Man From Mullingar” and “The Men Behind The Wire”…and, of course, the sad tale of Roddy McCorley cited earlier.

That, I think, is when things really clicked.  We’d been the EUS for a long time before that – through the first great shedding of contractors, the 9-day backlog of support tickets, the crash project to replace Token Ring with Ethernet, and of course the massive Y2K cleanup – and we already had some small rituals in our past, like the Thursday prime rib at Sign of the Whale or the fledgeling softball team playing out on the Mall.  But it was when we got the 4Ps, when we started singing along, when we got that third space outside work to just have fun together – that’s what stands out in memory.  That’s the thing I wish we could go back for – and when I did go back in 2010 and 2012, it wasn’t to run tickets, it was to belt out the old songs and stagger out at closing time.

Even if it’s non-smoking now.

O see the fleet-foot host of men, who march with faces drawn

From farmstead and from fishers’ cot, along the banks of Ban

They come with vengeance in their eyes – Too late! Too late are they

For young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today

The important thing about this tale isn’t that they were too late. The important thing is – they were coming.

There is ex-NGS. There is no ex-EUS.

Ten years ago last week, Colin Powell stood up before the United Nations and fed his reputation, his credibility and his honor into a chipper-shredder. The good soldier to the last, he took the flimsy tissue of the Bush case for war with Iraq to sell to a dubious world – and an utterly credulous American media.

People forget. The Dixie Chicks were damn near crucified for telling a foreign audience they were embarrassed that the President was from Texas – again, the cult of Texas supremacy even in its most liberal adherents, what are the fucking odds – while “eventheliberal” MSNBC cancelled its highest rated program and fired its host, because Phil Donohue had expressed ambivalence about the case for war. People who had the slightest doubt about the parade of security theater in this country were shouted down as insufficiently serious about the threat of Terror – and didn’t die of irony overdose. And then, with malice aforethought and a complete lack of reason and logic, we went forth into Iraq and shat the bed.

Thousands of Americans dead. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. A client state established for Iran. Osama bin Laden left alive another eight years. Afghanistan neglected to fester into violence.

No accounting. No accountability. The GOP had its ass royally handed to it in three of the five subsequent national elections, with Bush’s 2004 election drowned by both of Obama’s wins, but the GOP never changed course, never expressed regret or remorse or doubt, and indeed, has since made a virtual rerun against Iran the necessary touchstone of its foreign policy (that is, the foreign policy that hasn’t already been outsourced to apartheid-minded Likudniks in Jerusalem).

Being part of Conservative, Inc means never having to say you’re sorry. Or worse yet, that you were wrong.

This comes to mind because of another situation. One that has left me exhausted and physically depleted in a way I can’t remember work doing for a long time. One that has evoked frustrations and exasperations and rage that sent me out the door at previous employers. A situation brought about by a similar lack of understanding basic facts, failure to prepare, failure to plan, and an insistence on rushing in on a wave of panic with eyes tight shut. And once again, there’s going to be a price to pay and it will be paid over a very long time frame. It’s fried me and it’s frazzled me in ways I’m not particularly proud of, and it’s leached into my life outside work, which is a huge huge no-no these last five or six years.

I’m not particularly interested in wrecking myself for other people’s fuck-ups at this point in my life. And I am absolutely not willing to do so in a customer-facing position. And let’s be honest, given the current state of technology, mine is a job with maybe ten years of life in it. Unless you know of corporate IT positions in the field of “smartphone and web browser support.”

The world has moved on and it’s time I started thinking hard about what that means for me. Of which, catchphrase, more later.

“You ain’t got no problem Jules. I’m on the motherfucker.  Go back in there, cool them n****z out and wait for the Wolf, which is coming directly.”

 

“The world is coming apart at the seams.” “Well then, thank God you sent for me.”

 

“I. Am. Bulletproof.  Next time, you best bring kryptonite.”

A 50-year-old design, the Levi’s trucker jacket – an American classic, an essential component of the Canadian tuxedo, a critical part of the wardrobe of any 80s cute girl, a symbol sufficiently semiotically fraught that one became an important MacGuffin in William Gibson’s Zero History.  And as of December 25, damn near the only piece of outerwear in circulation for my wardrobe.

Start with the jacket itself: the same basic style for decades, but this one is made from Filson’s 12-oz Tin Cloth: heavy waxed cotton rather than denim, black oilcloth that eats light with a sheen that suggests leather from a distance. On a man of a certain age and race, of similar build, the look might suggest the Black Panther Party. As it is, on a pale Appalachian, the fashion statement is more like “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” 

From a fashion standpoint, the critical thing is the color. Because it’s not blue denim, it can be worn with jeans, which means it can basically go with any casual clothing I have. But because it’s oilcloth, the breathability isn’t so great, which is the tradeoff for the water-resistance and that little bit of extra warmth. Spill a whole glass of Dr Pepper on it and it’ll wipe clean – well, clean-ish, but with a jacket like this that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?

Because that’s the whole point of this: timeless, classic American workwear. Simple and timeless, and utterly flexible in its look – put the blue mirror-shades on and it’s cyberpunk, put the Wayfarers on and it’s rockabilly, slap a woolen stoker’s cap up top and it gives the feel of an old gaffer leaned into the bar of some working-man’s club in Newcastle or York or Kildare.  It can be all you – whatever you happen to be at the time.

Right now, though, it’s dead solid perfect for what I need.  In temps that go from mid-40s to mid-50s, possibly showers, at a time when I legitimately need the memento mori of the best techs that ever walked the earth so I can ride on their memory and propel myself through the daily shit-hurricane that echoes the struggles of ten years ago…  I may not be wearing the exact clothing of 2003 – or 1998 – but I’m definitely wearing the same armor.

Responsible gun owners, this is why you are losing the public.

The guy had a note in his pocket expressing his intent to exercise his rights.  Why a note in his pocket?  Why would you bother with a note when you could just say something?  Because he expected to get shot.

There is no reason any law-abiding person needs an assault rifle in the grocery store. None. Maybe in Switzerland, where guys are popping by for milk as they walk home from militia assembly, but I rather doubt that the kind of person with an assault rifle is taking public transit to Kroger.  So why isn’t the rifle locked up in (one presumes) the pickup truck?  I grew up in Ala-fucking-bama, my family drove around with guns all the time, and not once, not on one single solitary occasion in the first twenty-five years of my live, did we ever find it necessary to go strapped into the goddamned Piggly Wiggly.  Al-Qaeda is not lurking in the produce cooler, and the odds are effectively 100% that a firefight is not breaking out in the frozen foods.

Take it, Susan Faludi. From Wikipedia’s entry re: her 1999 book “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man”:

 “The common theme that runs through the book is that men have attempted to live up to the expectations of masculinity established in post-World War II America, only to find society not living up to its end of the bargain as globalization, downsizing and other economic pressures have made it difficult for men to live up to their expected roles as providers. At the same time she applies a feminist critique to these expectations, while noting that the feminist critique of the rise of an ornamental culture applies to men as much as women: As the culture has shifted toward an ornamental one in which awards, popular culture symbols of ideal masculinity, and economic bottom lines have become the societal norms of success, ordinary men are losing self-esteem and a sense of purpose. In particular she links the problems of many men today with abusive or absent fathers when growing up, and is critical of the rise of a corporate “organization man” culture in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to absent fathers failing to provide a positive, nurturing environment to their children, and then to failed expectations as companies laid off longtime loyal employees during the 1980s and 1990s.”

There’s a very legitimate case that the modern world is at odds with our traditional ideas of what manhood means.  We are no longer a rural pioneer society, where one has to go hunt for dinner and protect the family home against predatory beasts or marauding humans.  We no longer have the postwar social contract, where you can graduate high school and get on with an employer that will pay you a living wage that can support your wife the homemaker and your children plus offer a sufficient pension in retirement.  Never mind college; I know plenty of law school graduates who are looking for work in other fields so they can find a job, any job.  Somebody in an exurban service economy, somebody whose job can be sent off to China or India, somebody whose job can be done off the books for single digits an hour by a desperate undocumented migrant worker? Those poor bastards are living on the edge of a knife, and it stands to reason that Ed Earl Brown feels powerless to control his own destiny more often than not.

But.

In the immortal words of Chris Rock: “if you got a gun, you don’t need to work out.”  I can strap on my M4gery and swagger through the cereal aisle and everybody will cower before my might, because there’s no law that says I can’t do it so NYAH NYAH LOOK AT ME I’M NOT TOUCHING YOU.  And looking at the demographic patterns of gun ownership – as more and more firearms accumulate with the same people, who as a cohort are ever older and white-male-er – it’s hard not to see a fundamental connection.  Not to put too fine a point on it – the problems of guns, and the people who want to need the guns, can in large part be reduced to the question “How shall we then man up?”

In so many ways, it goes back to W.J. Cash, as it always does, and his characterization of the essential Southern quality: “that no man living could cross him and get away with it.”  I don’t have to go along to get along. I don’t have to listen to some pointy-headed bureaucrat. I don’t have to stand behind the yellow line. I’ll just roll through that stop sign. I’ll put my cigarette out when I feel like it.

It’s not just Southern anymore. It’s not even just gun-suckers anymore.  Call it fascism, call it socialism, call it political correctness, or just call it fucking manners if you like.  But until our concept of citizenship in a polite society rises above the level of a sugar-shocked 8 year old in the back seat on a road trip, don’t expect a lot of progress on things like assholes meandering their guns through the grocery.

So let’s say that I was dropped into 2013 bare-assed, sent forward in time from 1993 to start my life anew.  Never owned a computer, a cell phone, so much as a pager – my personal technology consists of a boom box and a Walkman, plus a handheld tape recorder bought in a Twin Peaks frenzy and untouched for a couple of years.  How then shall we set up this prior regeneration with the necessities of life?

This thought experiment began when we were staying at a friend’s place in San Francisco – we clocked the better part of a couple of weeks in there over the last few months, and began thinking about whether we could live there.  It’s a one bedroom condo in a high-rise with a breathtaking view of downtown, perfectly located for transit access, just a dream of a pied a terre…so could we make it work?  And the first casualty was bookcases, because we have half a dozen sagging under the weight of thirty years’ worth of books…and my first thought was Kindle.

So that’s the beginning: the books have to be digital.  Which in turn means all the media needs to be digital.  The obvious solution at this point is the one I have: Kindle for books and Apple for music and video, both conveyed via AppleTV to the big screen.  The only thing is, this sort of ties you into Amazon and Apple’s respective ecosystems.  It’s less a problem for music as most of the Apple stuff is .m4a now and you can still acquire and use other unlocked media forms (.mp3) with iDevices (and even have them synced with iTunes Match), and it’s less a problem for books as the Kindle format has apps for every major platform in addition to its own devices.

But streaming is an issue.  I can’t have my media reliant on streaming – Spotify or Pandora, for instance, are right out – because mobile data is expensive and streaming will kill battery life.  And as far as I can tell, for movies, anything I want to buy and keep locally is going to mean Apple, unless I want to piece together some combination of Amazon Instant Video and Netflix.  Which I can probably sort out…eventually.  But if I want that copy of Avengers, it looks like the simplest route is still iTunes.  So yeah, ultimately, that’s the choice: all in on the Apple system.

Now, what to do for actual devices?  The first question for me is: laptop vs desktop?  If you assume the Mac mini will be connected to the TV for the few times it will be used, it’s no contest – the tricked-out high-speed Mac mini with 8 GB of RAM and a 1 TB internal drive is $900, whereas the higher-end 11″ MacBook Air bumped up to 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB drive is $1500. Bad arithmetic, when the Mac is meant to serve as the central media repository as much as an actual working computer.  That $600 difference will let you buy a 16 GB retina-display iPad with LTE built in…and just enough left over for a low-end Kindle, suitable for carrying and reading.

Because in the end, there’s no getting around an iPhone. In 2013, the one thing I can’t work around is portable audio – not just music but podcasts.  Getting podcasts on the run rules out the iPod, and portable audio rules out even the smallest iPad.  The iPhone has to be there to split the difference and serve as the all-everything portable device, with the Kindle in reserve for ease of reading (and as the focus of magazine subscriptions).  And once you have the iPhone, it doesn’t make as much sense to buy an iPad mini as the sole portable device, not yet anyway: the screen’s not retina yet, and the input isn’t substantially better than a phone.  If you’re actually typing on glass, you need the full-sized iPad.

So there it is: iPhone, Kindle, full-size iPad with LTE, and a Mac mini at home to drive it all.  Amazingly, this is exactly what I have and use right now…well, and the work laptop.  Technically if you want to take everything of work’s away, my loadout is the Mac mini, the iPad, the Kindle, and the MOTOFONE F3.  Which begs the question of whether you could get by if you could somehow get a phone that only functioned to make calls and serve LTE wirelessly to your tablet…but that’s another story.

So the Library of Congress has apparently decided there’s enough cellphone competition, and therefore unlocking your phone yourself is now going to be against the law again.  This is possible because of some insane DMCA interpretation that happens every three years, and allowed for olly-olly-oxen-free unlocking before because locking was held to create a sort of competitive imbalance.

Which it still does.  If I have a brand-new unlocked iPhone, I can take it to AT&T or T-Mobile.  If I have an AT&T or Verizon (or maybe Sprint) iPhone and I unlock it, I can take it to…AT&T or T-Mobile.  You can’t move a phone between Sprint and Verizon without the carrier’s participation; it’s not as simple as buy-a-SIM-and-pop-it-in.

The principle of the thing is, of course, outrageous – if you’re under contract with a subsidized phone, that’s one thing, but there is absolutely no justification for preventing the unlocking of any phone once the user is out of contract.  Then again, of the carriers that you can freely move between, only T-Mobile appears willing to charge you less for bringing an unsubsidized phone of your own.  And T-Mobile’s network has of late been suspect, not least because they insisted on pitching HSPA+ as “4G”.  Now, they may have LTE rolling out and they may not, but by and large…

You know, it’s hardly worth ranting about at this point.  We have settled into the every-two-years model with carriers and phones, and the FCC and FTC have essentially given the AT&T-Verizon duopoly the whip hand.  And that’s just how it’s going to be, absent a major uprising.

My solution was to give up my personal phone and let work pick up the tab for the Verizon iPhone 5. (And not a minute too soon, as my cellular data usage has basically trebled in the three months since I took possession.)  Once I need a new phone on my own…well, we can burn that bridge when we get to it.