Author: Stagger Lee

Hail hail hail, after the long misery of almost THREE WHOLE MONTHS there is finally a native app for Google Maps available for iOS.  No longer the misery of Apple Maps!  No longer the sluggish indignity of the web-based Google Maps!  No more stooging around with Nokia’s half-assed Here or dallying with MapQuest as if it were 2003 again!

Get a grip.

First, yes, the iOS native Google Maps app is amazing.  It is, hands down, the best mapping solution ever for iOS, and by some reckonings the best smartphone mapping solution ever on any platform. Google has played entirely within the rules for third-party developers and still come up with something that quite frankly kicks the shit out of everything that came before.

But this app also demonstrates why Apple and Google had beef. The standalone app has everything that Google was pouring into the Android version of Maps: vector-based graphics, so faster and lighter on your data service. Turn-by-turn directions, further killing the standalone GPS as a viable product. Full integration with Zagat reviews.  All the stuff that wasn’t getting put into the native iOS Maps app for the last couple or three years, so Apple chose to do the whole thing itself and paid for it.

Thing is, the number-one advantage Google Maps has is the fact that Google Maps has been a thing for the better part of a decade.  Apple began its mapping effort seven years behind in terms of real-world data in the field, and suffered for it – and also got pilloried for the flaws in trying to combine 3D and satellite imagery. (Try the 3D flyover function in Google Earth for a sample of how Google’s solution to pasting 2D pictures over 3D models works. SPOILER ALERT: not impressive.)  As has been mentioned in this space before, Apple chose to take the hit and hope for the best, and ended up sacking some pretty high-level people as a result.

I suspect that within a couple of years, Apple Maps will be a fully viable solution (although I wish they’d acquire a couple of these transit apps and get that integrated with a quickness).  Until then, though, Google Maps gets pride of place on the first screen…at least until they start throwing ads in there.

Of which…you know.

So it sounds like the Catholic private schools which were at the core of the Big East from the beginning – Georgetown, Providence, St John’s, Villanova, Seton Hall and the like – have finally decided enough is enough.  After the bloodbath of conference realignment, they seem to be on the verge of withdrawing from the Big East and taking an automatic bid with them, with an eye toward setting up shop as a mostly Northern, mostly urban group of basketball-first athletic programs.  You know…like the Big East.

The Big East was a name-brand to reckon with.  Within a few years of its founding, the conference placed three teams in the 1985 Final Four.  But at some point, the league decided it needed a football presence, and tried to claim instant credibility by adding Miami – a year or so too late. Indeed, the Miami team that was ignominiously pantsed by Alabama in the Sugar Bowl was technically the Big East champion.  And from there, the Big East executed a bit of a shuffle with the Atlantic 10 and the dissolving Metro conference, trying to piece together enough teams to form a viable football league.  Sometimes they actually added schools that gave credibility to the core basketball mission – lumping in Louisville did them no harm at all – and they still managed to get good basketball expansion with the likes of Marquette and DePaul. Plus Notre Dame, for non-football only, proved a coup just as Mike Brey and his shmedium turtleneck were making the Irish a power again.

But.

For every Louisville, there was a South Florida.  Then the defections started, with Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College fleeing to the ACC.  Then Syracuse and Pittsburgh jumped ship, and all of a sudden, the BIg East was flinging itself at the likes of Boise State and San Diego State and trying to beg back Temple and giving long looks at East Carolina, all in a desperate attempt to keep the football numbers at a point where they could exist as a football league – let alone piece together 12 for a possible title game.  But even at its best, the Big East was barely a BCS-caliber conference, and spent most of its years taking a slot from more deserving teams.  At this stage, it is beyond risible to try to sell the 2014 Big East as any sort of major conference.

And now, the Catholic schools have said enough.  Or are about to, apparently.  Enough of trying to add teams in the Pacific time zone for the sake of football.  Enough of yanking around the membership for the sake of football.  Enough of realigning and diluting the original mission and chasing the almighty BCS dollar for the sake of football.  The Catholic schools want to go back to what they originally joined the Big East for: a solid basketball league with lots of academic respectability, without the sordid distractions caused by the pursuit of big-time college football.

At long last, somebody has said enough is enough.  Bless you boys.

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)


So I’m sitting on the worst conference call of all time, bored to tears (NO YOU DO NOT NEED TO MAKE SURE EUDORA WILL WORK IT IS ALMOST 2013) and I decided to start totaling up the bowls and teams.

The following 15 teams with only 7 wins are in bowls:

Nevada
Arizona
BYU
Washington
W. Kentucky
Baylor
Texas Tech
W Virginia
Syracuse
Navy
Arizona State
TCU
NC State
USC
Oklahoma State

 

The following 13 teams with only 6 wins are in bowls:

SMU
Central Michigan
Duke
Virginia Tech
Minnesota
Rice
Air Force
Michigan State
Georgia Tech
Iowa State
Purdue
Pitt
Ole Miss

 

The following 10 bowls are matchups of teams with a combined 14 wins or fewer:

New Mexico Bowl
Little Caesars Bowl
Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas
Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl
New Era Pinstripe Bowl
Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl
Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl
Hyundai Sun Bowl
Heart of Dallas Bowl (ON JANUARY 1!!!)
BBVA Compass Bowl

 

The following four bowls feature a matchup of teams with only 15 combined wins:

Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl 
Hawaii Bowl
Belk Bowl
Russell Athletic Bowl

Amazingly, the math works out perfectly: if you make the minimum standard 8 wins, and only retain bowls that currently offer a combined-16-wins-or-better matchup, there are precisely and exactly enough bowls to go around.  And face it: how many of the 14-or-less bowls would you miss?  Hell, how many of those bowls did you know existed?

If you set the minimum standard at 7 wins (and that’s where it ought to be in a world of 12-game regular seasons; if nothing else it would end the necessity of waivers to allow 6-7 teams that lost a conference title game to go to a bowl), you end up lopping off 6 or 7 bowls (assuming that some 7-win team goes begging a la Vandy in 1975).  To keep the ESPNU announcers happy, we could allow the 6-win team with the highest APR to get in and keep the numbers straight.  But seriously, you can’t find 7 bowls on that list to kill?  And that list still leave intact the matchups of high-win mid-major teams in the Idaho Famous Potatoes Bowl or the GoDaddy.com Bowl or the Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl (how’s this for a start: any bowl named for nothing BUT a corporate sponsor gets whacked first).

To be clear, I’m going to want all the football I can get my hands on now – with the regular season over, there isn’t much left and we should cherish every opportunity to watch.  But this is a modest proposal toward restoring some of the old-time magic to the bowl system – coupled with the end of automatic bowl bids down the line below the conference champion, this could and should get us some shiny matchups to carry us through the week between Christmas and New Years, not to mention the classic moveable feast of 14 hours of killer games all January 1 while we nurse our hangovers and swear we really will go to the gym this year…

I don’t know how long ago it began, but I’ve always had the instinct to hide out in times of stress. It might be hereditary – as a child, there was a storage room off the garage where my dad had his leatherwork tools and his fly-tying apparatus (complete with a little hot plate to melt lead over hooks) and shelves of all kinds of odds and ends. Very little has moved in that room since 1998, and it still smells of old leather and gun oil and stacks of old Field and Stream magazines.

I remember being a kid in day care and finding a spot under the bleachers to hide, or high up to one side of the stage in junior high, or in a back corner of the almost-totally-unused library in high school. In college, it seemed like half my time was spent finding some place not to be found – a forgotten third level storage alcove in the old gym, a corner of the old ruined boiler building, a practice room in the music building around a warren of corners.

And then there was the shower. My dorm in my sophomore year was the oldest standing, dating to about 1940, and it had shower stalls with foot-thick walls floor to ceiling and a spray that was less like hot water and more like a radiator breach. It was possible to pin the curtain in place with the various bottles from your little crate of shampoo and soaps and whatnot, upend the crate, fold a couple of washcloths on top, and just sit in the steam for a half hour or more. And as long as it wasn’t in the morning, there was almost never anyone around. I fell asleep sat there more than once.

I’m sure it must have happened at Vanderbilt, but I don’t remember exactly where the spots were, if any. I was more likely to be in the corner of the deck at SATCO or in a random library carrel or up in the Overcup Oak nursing a triple-espresso milkshake with the grounds in it. And the there was DC, and I didn’t have much time or opportunity to hide out at work other than the cigar shop or the remote deck where I would smoke and do remote control help tickets.

And then, in the heart of at first chaotic and trying autumn at my first California job, it started again. The warehouse was so crowded and cluttered that I could easily drag a pallet of shrink wrapped Power Mac G5s here, another pallet of Pelican cases there, pull a third in behind me to block the path, and just like that I had a six foot wall around my workbench in all directions. Nothing but the tinny sounds of a stream from Virgin Radio UK, and the solitude to work without distractions.

That’s part of the whole drive for 5-space. I think about throwing a dark towel over the shower door to soak up some of the morning light through the window and make the space feel cozier. I think about holing up in the garage to watch the laundry machines work and read quietly. I curl under the covers and wish we were in a sleeping bag in a pup tent in some distant part of the woods miles from anywhere or anyone. And I think that’s why I like the fog, like the overcast, even like the light blowing rain and low cloud we had earlier this week. Just give me a peacoat to armor myself, and I’ll be happy to disappear for a while. Sometimes, you’re just better off without too much light.

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

Bowls are funny things. In 2010, a record of 8-4 was enough to get Connecticut the Big East championship and a berth in a BCS bowl. In 2012, a record of 8-4 is good enough to get Vanderbilt into the SEC’s seventh tie-in bowl, what with 6 SEC teams having 10 wins and the Gator Bowl unwilling to risk a Vandy-Northwestern rematch on New Years Day. But this isn’t about bitching at the indignity and inconvenience of facing the rest of the SEC, this is about the bowl process itself, and how the last 25 years have more or less ruined it. 

Conference title games are a BIG part of that, of course. It did nobody any favors that the Big Ten’s probation and suspensions left a 7-5 Wisconsin team in a position to take a Rose Bowl berth with one neutral-site win, but it happened. It hardly seems fair that a Georgia team that beat Florida head-to-head would be passed over to put that same Florida team in the Sugar Bowl and send Georgia to the Citrus, but there you have it.  The combination of the BCS (and its annual automatic bids afforded to unranked conference champs) with the proliferation of automatic bowl tie-ins (with the resulting lack of matchup flexibility) has combined to routinely shaft deserving teams and deprive the college football world of exciting matchups. 

How different would things be in Bowl World if we were still playing by 1990 rules?  Let’s have a look:

ROSE BOWL: Stanford vs. either Nebraska or Wisconsin depending on whether the B1G has a conference title game or not. Either way, not a game with national title implications, but a more attractive matchup if it uses the Huskers, and a prima facie demonstration of how the conference title game can bite your best team in the ass.

SUGAR BOWL: Alabama vs Notre Dame. We’ve seen this before, in 1973, but the old ways are sometimes the best. Still the 1 vs 2 matchup we would have wanted all along and in the most fun bowl town of all.

ORANGE BOWL: Florida vs Kansas State. The Big 12 inherits the old Big 8 auto-bid, and the “best available Florida team” that sometimes seemed to be a rule actually yields one hell of a fun matchup.

FIESTA BOWL: Georgia vs Oregon. The most arriviste of BCS bowls gets the runners-up from arguably the two top conferences in America, and gives us the SEC-Pac12 pairing that has only happened once in a bowl in the BCS era. And depending on what happens in New Orleans, a team who wins this matchup decisively might have a case for the national title if the Tide and Irish are lackadaisical and low-scoring.

COTTON BOWL: Oklahoma vs LSU. Couple of leftovers, but preserves some of the spirit of the old Southwest Conference.  I would have said Texas A&M vs LSU, but thanks for nothing, SEC expansion.

There you have it – mostly top-10 matchups, except for the Rose Bowl and its insistence on locking in a champion from a conference whose best team is on probation instead of playing for a title. (Said champion now apparently being out of a coach.)  Trickling down from there, you still have a chance to see choice games like South Carolina vs Florida State in the Citrus (you think Steve Spurrier isn’t fired up for that?) maybe Texas A&M vs Clemson in the Holiday Bowl (if you think this is burdensome, you’ve obviously never been to San Diego).  Point is, there’s no reason the top six or seven bowls shouldn’t be chockablock with top-10 matchups

If it weren’t for the upcoming playoff, there would be no need to do anything but go back to the way things used to be.  The system of conferences locking in berths all the way down (the SEC has lock-ins for potentially ELEVEN TEAMS if two go to the BCS, which they nearly always do) has done more than anything to stick us with unwatchable games. In fact, guess what?  We HAVE a playoff, and have had since 1992, when the SEC brought in a conference championship game. If not for a clutch pick by Antonio Langham, the undefeated Tide of Gene Stallings would have given up their Sugar Bowl bid to 3-loss Florida and would probably have had to go to the Cotton Bowl to play Texas A&M for the winner to grasp at a title if Florida could knock off Miami.

Point being, as long as you force a one-off game at the end of the season, you create a point at which a top team could have a bad day and crap the bed and throw things into chaos (looking at you, K-State 1998 and Chokelahoma 2003 and in fact quite a few Big 12 title games). The minute you expand a playoff past 4 teams, you increase the odds that somebody slips in at 8 who may or may not deserve to be there – especially if you put a restriction on participants or insist on giving a bid to every BCS conference champ.  Who deserves a bite at the title more: Georgia, Florida, or Louisville?

So in the Brave New World Of Bowls, here’s how I would roll if made God-Emperor-BAWSE-in-Charge:

1) Auto-bids to bowls are for conference champions only, and are VOIDED if the conference champ is not ranked in the top 10 (so long, B1G – enjoy your Gators, Stanford!).  No bowl shall be automatically saddled with a dud.

2) Minimum standard for bowl participation is now 7 wins. No more fretting over 6-6 or 6-7 or (as ESPNU couldn’t shut up about at Wake) 5-7 teams. The 6-win baseline was from the age of 11-game seasons and no conference title games; in 2012, you ought to need 7 wins to rate any postseason play.

3) We inaugurate a 4-team playoff to start next year, and ONLY 4, with no automatic bids for anyone.  Winning your conference title is no guarantee of anything, because you might win your way in without even being a top-25 team.  Why should Wisconsin somehow get a seat on the starship because they luck-boxed their way into one win on the right day? If the goal is to get the true national champion, there’s no room for feel-good spots.  Let the committee pick or just use the top 4 of the BCS formula (and re-engineer the hell out of it to get the coaches poll far far away) – but in any event, it’s crucial to privilege strength-of-schedule and discourage the practice of never playing more than one major-conference OOC game or never playing a non-rival OOC game on the road.

4) At some point down the road, there’s going to be a reckoning that results in massive conference realignment with a hard cap of 10 members and mandatory round-robin scheduling. Once a team is the champion of the entire conference and everyone has played everyone else, we can go back to allowing automatic bids into a notional playoff for conference champs (and ONLY conference champs, this time) – 12 conferences, 4 byes, bibbity bobbity boo. We always used to get by just fine with 10 teams per league from 1966 to 1991…

I think this would be fair and fun.  Otherwise, I think the way things used to be was better than the dog’s breakfast we have now, which is just as arbitrary and crooked as anything else but adds a veneer of alleged respectability.

How ’bout it?

Just because: the very first public performance of “Man In Black,” 1971, after a visit to Vanderbilt University.

 

The final insult. As Jeff Tedford slinks out of town with a 3-9 record and the worst graduation rate in the league, Stanford – six years removed from 1-11 – is going to the fucking Rose Bowl, their third straight BCS bowl. Which they got to by winning the PAC-12 title game at home in front of a crowd of just under 32,000. Which means TWENTY THREE THOUSAND EMPTY SEATS.

I don’t know how Old Blues can stand it. Cal maxed out in 2004-06, but lost the PAC-10 title both times to a USC team that later got absolutely nuked by the NCAA for their gross malfeasance, and missed out on a second-chance berth in the Rose Bowl after Mack Brown begged Texas a handful of poll votes to put the Horns just enough ahead to snap up a guaranteed BCS berth. The brightest era in memory for Cal, and a hollow “co-championship” in 2006 is all there is, plus 1-1 in the Holiday Bowl because Tedford couldn’t figure out how to use JJ Arrington and Marshawn Lynch to run clock and pound the ball on the ground.

In retrospect, I’m glad I came to it by marriage. If this were my own alma mater, and God took that kind of shit on us, I’d be done with football forever. As it is, I can’t see us paying for tickets next year, not until there’s some sign that our support and emotional investment isn’t going to be pissed down a rathole.

Meanwhile, three-quarters of the student body on the Farm thinks a BCS bowl is there every year, without the hassle and inconvenience of showing up to games. Amazing what you can get with a $10 million check every year. I can promise you this, though: if Vanderbilt gets this lucky, you won’t see us taking it for granted. Ever.

I can’t explain it, but I’m going to try to: the iPhone 5, on Verizon, is like rediscovering the iPhone all over again. The size doesn’t seem that big relative to the 4 line, but it feels cramped to go back. And the thinness and weight make it feel tangibly different to hold and use. Even with the current snap case, it’s got the hand-feel of the 4 with no case.

And let’s not mince words: if you’re serious about LTE, the only provider in the world right now that has you covered is Verizon, for better or worse. The network is pervasive enough here that I don’t generally have to worry about falling back on only the old CDMA crap-ass data protocols, and the combination of LTE with an A6 processor and extra RAM makes this the fastest iPhone ever. It’s hardly worth getting on Wi-Fi out and about: so much easier to just turn off and race. Give Big Red this: they went all-in on the new standard, and as a result the iPhone 5 is a rocket. Because let’s face it, actual phone calls are a tertiary priority at best.

I love it. It was the right move. And amazingly, it’s made carrying the iPad less of a priority, saving a pound and a half in my backpack daily. Say what you like, but Apple gets it, and they just keep grinding down the field relentlessly.

Five years ago, our Thanksgiving dinner was high tea at the National Gallery, on Trafalgar Square in London. Singularly ironic, I thought, that we would commemorate my wife’s forbears loading up the Mayflower and fleeing England by spending the holiday in the Big Smoke, but there you have it.  We’re complicated folks. The trip was one we’d been tossing around for a while, but was triggered by two things: one, the notion that if we didn’t have kids yet, we should be doing the sorts of things that having no kids allowed us to do, and two, I saw Ratatouille that summer and decided I wanted to see Paris.  Which was an easy lift, as far as convincing the wife goes.

As it turned out, the trip also fell into the first ninety days at my new government subcontract job, when I couldn’t take any vacation.  The unpaid aspect of it was partly alleviated by the payout of the unused vacation from Cupertino Hexachrome Fruit that would have been spent on the trip, although that was at a time when Himself had a tendency to declare the whole of Thanksgiving week as unscheduled paid vacation, so who knows.  The timing was deliberate, though – our hope was that since England doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, they might already be in full holiday roar, and we might get our London Christmas experience.  Easy peasy.

2007 wasn’t the best year. In fact, it was kind of the worst. No bereavement to blame like ’98, or adolescent whatever-it-was in ’86 – just twelve months of suck.  Family illness (it seemed like everyone got some kind of cancer that year), my own knee surgery, the decision to change jobs and the almost immediate realization of what a huge mistake I’d made, and the slow evaporation of my past behind me. I mean, I didn’t even have Danny (my old Saturn) anymore, which was as complete a sign as any that my past was falling into a black hole and I wasn’t doing enough to build a present under myself.  And all that baggage went abroad with me, just in time to meet that peculiar depression that goes along with being in a new place for the first time and not knowing the language, let alone the way around.

Ironically, not knowing the language was the least of my worries, because Paris was the best part of the trip. Possibly because it was also the longest – we stayed at least three nights that I can remember.  In England, it seemed like we were somewhere else every night, passing through London three times in two different hotels when we weren’t on a day trip to Oxford or hurrying up to York.  And I hadn’t realized that late November meant sunset in York at around 3:45 PM, so early night in a strange town.  Ultimately, it felt like I was forcing the issue a lot of the time, instead of having the experience that was around me.

It’s not like it was a disaster, not at all.  I saw some things I was glad I’d seen, we had some fun – I’m sure I was an utter pill to be with, in retrospect, proving once again the surpassing patience of my wife – but I think I might have been putting way too many hopes on that trip, expecting it would be the same sort of more-fun-every-day that the honeymoon had been a couple years before.  And then it was over – I woke up one morning in London, got on a plane, got home that night at 8 PM, and woke up the next morning at 5 AM to go straight back to work.  And that was where the despair really hit like a load of bricks: holiday blues, the dread of going back to see my relations in the old country, and walking out in the dark every day at 5 PM and staring across the bay at the flicker of lights in the distance, wondering both where I’d gone wrong and how I was ever going to get right again.

Five years on, I’m thankful that I swallowed my pride and chose to swallow the meds. I’m thankful that I was sufficiently diligent to find another job, and not to pull the trigger on the wrong job (which would have paid me what I make now – except the company has gone under). I’m thankful that I learned some lessons from the trip and started making an effort to find the things here that reflect what I enjoyed abroad.  But more than most, I’m thankful that I broke off the pattern of holiday travel and will be here for the whole season for the third straight year.

Go home for the holidays? Fuck that noise.  I am home.

 

 

I think it’s traditional for me to punch one of these out on the device in question, so here it is. I’m very very impressed with Verizon’s LTE. I routinely get anywhere from 18 to 24 Mbps in normal use, which is damn near enough not to make Wi-Fi worth it except at the office. I’m less impressed with the lower ranks of data service – EV-DO is showing its age and 1xRTT is fucking primitive – but the LTE is sufficiently pervasive that it hasn’t been that big a deal. I don’t hit a dead spot on the train anymore, and today was the first day simultaneous voice and data became a problem (and only because I was stuck on the train for almost an hour. Caltrain kills more people than LAPD.)

It’s sexy, this. I almost feel like I have to up my wardrobe game ever so slightly – better jeans, better jacket, something appropriate from which to pull the phone. The screen is definitely larger but not obviously so; it doesn’t feel like I’m wrangling with a larger device like one of those Samsung slabs. The screen looks bright and clear even at half illumination, and battery has been largely well-behaved. I’m also again experimenting with Apple’s own Podcast app and this may be the time it takes. And the device is thin and light enough that putting it in a case (cheap one-piece Incase snap-in) doesn’t add any appreciable weight, bulk or inconvenience. I even like the lightning connector and am already kind of sick of needing the adapter all the time…

All in all, a good move, made at the right time. Happy I waited it out, but happy I did it, too, and the wife will have the benefit of the 4S by the end of the holiday season.