Are my eyes really blue?

* Well, if you didn’t believe it before, doubt me no longer: the number-one crime in the NFL is failure to acknowledge Roger Goodell’s big swinging dick.  That’s why New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton will be sitting out 2012, why defensive coordinator (and bounty-program mastermind) Gregg Williams is indefinitely banned from the game, why other key figures (including the GM!) are suspended for part of the season, why they’re being docked two 2nd round picks and $500,000.  Obviously they had some sort of punishment coming, but this kind of pocket nuke is basically the NFL’s Cartman commish saying “RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!!”

* Redskins fans: “I KNOW THAT FEEL BRO.”

* The iPad continues to be a constant companion.  Even thrown in the bag with the work laptop, it only adds a pound and a half – the iPad and MBA together are still lighter than the old 15″ MacBook Pro – and I still haven’t felt the need to turn on the 4G data (though I will probably test it this weekend).

* Shocker: a processor-intensive system runs warm.  Consumer Reports has less than zero credibility on technical issues at this point, and no wonder: bigger battery, larger screen, more powerful graphics processors and CPU running at full throttle?  Warmth, genius.  Make sure you’re qualified before you start second-guessing.

* Haven’t been keeping close tabs on this case in Florida where the kid got shot by some neighborhood watch wannabe, but it seems to me to be concrete proof of what I’ve always said: the problem with guns isn’t the gun, nor it is the person with the gun, nor it is even with the person who needs the gun.  The problem with guns is the person who wants to need the gun, because if you want to need something, you’ll make a reason to need it.  Which is how that poor kid ends up shot.

* Speaking of a different kind of shot, Vanderbilt’s leading returning scorer from this year is Kedren Johnson, the presumptive starting point guard.  He averaged 3.1 points per game this season.  If John Jenkins goes, the Dores will return something like 12% of their scoring from this season.  There’s a MUCH longer post about this in the offing.

* MANIACAL LAUGHTER. That’s the only way to greet the news that Tim Tebow has been traded to the Gomorrah Jets.  The incumbent QB is a herpes-circuit club boy and the head coach has been in amateur foot-fetish porn.  I see no possible way this can end badly.

* Satan Manning to the Broncos is about what you’d expect.  John Elway gets his big white pocket passer, Manning gets to play behind the dirtiest line in football (which should help with protection; they never seem to call the cut block more than 4500 feet above sea level) and the whole shit and caboodle is one hard hit to the neck away from ending in tears.  One wag on Twitter compared it to unloading a Zune for a refurbished iPad, and I find no fault with that analogy.

* Lest we forget, Tim Tebow’s completion percentage last year was 34th among starting NFL quarterbacks.  There are 32 NFL teams.  That’s bad arithmetic.

* Almost time to head East for the biannual meet-and-greet with the boys of the old brigade.  This time fraught with the added emotion of last call for the 4Ps.  It’s going to be very difficult not to have a complete meltdown Saturday night – I will just have to convince myself that something else will happen, that there’ll be some kind of eleventh-hour rescue again, that it’s not the last time for real.  Because if I know for sure that this is the end…it’ll be like going up to see someone on their death bed and knowing it’s the last time.  For once, there had better be pictures.

* Twitter is six years old today.  That would make it…what, 2006?  I don’t think I was on until 2007, which is odd – I seem to remember having it while I was in my first office at Cupertino Hexachrome Fruit, although I suppose I could be thinking of Dodgeball.  It definitely took a while before there was any kind of critical mass to using it, for sure – but I had created a second account within six months of the first.  In the end, Twitter has displaced almost every other form of social networking for me – I never touch Google+ and rarely see Facebook, and I actively avoid both where possible, but Twitter even displaced the social aspect of EDSBS and has become the focal point of the Vanderbilt fandom, and it has taken a huge chunk out of IM and texting even.  And again, I think it’s down to how bloody simple Twitter is – 140 characters of text and that’s it.  You can use it from the web, from your phone, your iPad, by text messaging for crying out loud – and then build atop that with the cunning use of URLs and the API.  Dumb network means smarts at the ends.  That’s why Twitter continues to kick the shit out of all comers.

* Vandy baseball is 7-14.  By comparison, last year they only lost 12 games the entire season and only one non-conference game (the rubber match on Sunday with the Furd).  My fear is that the baseball team this year presages the basketball team next year – lot of youth, lot of talent, lot of raw and a lot of learning to play as a team.  I’m uneasy hanging my hopes for Vanderbilt athletics on the football program, but there you go.

* So Mike Daisey was a fabulist with regard to his tales of Apple.  I guess I’m not surprised, but it’s the same old issue: when you frame a guilty man, you shouldn’t be surprised if people question his guilt (see: OJ Simpson).  More irritating to me is this notion that Apple is unique in having its products screwed together in dungeons by enslaved fairies who have to glue the parts together with unicorn blood, and that somehow all other consumer electronics are licked together by adorable anime kittens.  Grow up.  China has only lately become the world’s manufacturer.  Remember what the mills were like in New England?  Or down South?  Remember Upton Sinclair’s revelations about the food industry in Chicago at the turn of the century? The transition to an early-stage manufacturing economy is not a pleasant sight, and it stays unpleasant for as long as the factory owner can get away with it. I don’t like it any more than you, and I wish it were different, but that’s the price you pay for having your life based on electronic gadgets that have to be brought in at a palatable price point.  Maybe we should have thought about this before we decided that it was okay to have Wal-Mart extort price concessions every year and force manufacturers to look offshore as a method of cost containment.

* I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that I’m happy that my messenger bags were made only forty miles up the road.  This is a good time to go back and read the fashion/manufacturing bits of the Bigend Trilogy, especially Zero History.

* Always, always, always start your out-of-office messages the day before you’re actually gone.

 

 

 

Three days in and it’s already becoming apparent: this is, once and for all, my laptop replacement. The battery life is ridiculously long. The display is amazing (desktop pictures 2048 pixels on a side are suddenly not only plausible but necessary). The performance is certainly superior to earlier models, although that may be as much a function of having a full gigabyte of RAM as the updated processor and graphics hardware. Even the Smart Cover is worthwhile and minima. As with almost anything I spend more than a year agonizing over, when I finally get it, I tend to be glad I did.

One of the things in the iBooks collection of PDFs is a copy of the 1972 essay by Alan Kay that described the DynaBook. Amazingly, he pitched a viable price point of $500 and the general dimensions of the device, not to mention the prospects possible if the keyboard itself could be displaced and the screen act as keyboard. It’s eerie. About the only thing Kay pitched that is not present here is the ability to program the device yourself and write your own code for it – and that may fairly be abstracted away as a legacy of a time when doing anything on a computer meant, of necessity, writing the code for it. Programming was all you did, if you wanted programs.

And here we come to an interesting crossroads. Some folks have complained of the iPad and iOS in general (and to a similar extent about the Mac from its earliest days) that you can’t actually do the hard stuff with it. You couldn’t write an iOS app on an iOS, not in any meaningful fashion. Maybe you could on an Android tablet, with a little work…but I’m not likely to. Nor are almost all the folks buying these devices.

Ultimately, that’s why there’s no point in me having a Linux netbook, or a generic Android tablet running a bare install of Ice Cream Sandwich. I don’t have the necessary skill set to make it worthwhile. I’m not going to modify the OS, I’m not going to write my own software, I’m not going to be riding the bare metal with no saddle. I’m going to type blog posts and read magazines and get through my RSS feeds and answer email. And for that, something that just works beats the living shit out of something I can hack myself.

The phrase that springs to mind is “casual computing.” Games like Mass Effect or Call of Duty or World of Warcraft have motion-picture budgets and require players to sink hours and days and weeks into their completion…but Angry Birds has sold seven hundred million copies. I do need an actual laptop for work, because of things like Apple Remote Desktop and file systems and Unix command lines, but for casual computing, I need…well…an iPad. With basketball season over and no need for ESPN3 streaming until Labor Day and the return of college football, the iPad can handle everything I need from a computer from the time I get home until the time I get back to the office. Unless I need to work from home, there’s no reason to take the work laptop out of its bag. I’m banging this very post out on glass, with the iPad propped up in my lap as I recline in bed.

And let’s face it, for most people, casual computing is what they do at home. Do the taxes, maybe balance the checkbook, sure, but other that that? It’s Facebook and funny YouTube clips and email blast forwards and Skyping with the grandkids. I dare say the 75% of the home computing in this country could be taken care of with an iPad – maybe not always well, but it could be done. And as for travel – I had in the back of my head that the netbook would be handy for blogging and video chat home from, say, Paris. I didn’t actually take said netbook to Europe when I had the chance. But I can blog and video chat from this thing VERY easily, and on a Euro cellular network to boot (try making that work on your Linux netbook), and there is no chance I go abroad again without this thing in my carry-on bag.

Twenty years ago, Apple had those ads with “What’s on your PowerBook? What’s on your PowerBook is you” as the tag line. Today, that’s the iPad. What’s on it? PDFs of role playing game manuals from my adolescence. The complete Bigend Trilogy by William Gibson. The last five weeks of the Economist. Four email and six Twitter accounts. All the pictures from my three trips to England. Both Iron Man movies and all six episodes of the new Sherlock series. The tools to update this blog, the list of everything (well almost) that I’ve eaten in the last almost two years, a link to Bruce Springsteen’s SXSW keynote speech, three different maps of the world, a dozen channels of streaming video of one sort or another…

At long last, we have the personal computer. When the Weekly Reader told us our future, it didn’t involve sitting down to program this bloody computer, it talked about instantly retrieving information and video calls to Mars and doing things. And that’s what you use an iPad for. You don’t program it, you do stuff with it.

This is my DynaBook. Next stop: everything.

I love our guys, but the dream of 2009 is officially dead. Winter is coming.

Also, I hope every ref in that game gets leprosy and their daughters all run away with drummers.

Turns out iPad day was a red letter day for sports. A pair of two seeds went down. Only four 15s have ever won a first round game, all between 1992 (Santa Clara) and 2001 (Hampton) – but in a three hour span, Norfolk State took down Missouri only to be surpassed by Lehigh definitely outplaying Duke. Against that, Ohio over four seed Michigan was almost an afterthought, never mind 10-7 upsets like Purdue over St Mary’s and Xavier over Notre Dame.

It’s a bloodbath. At least my bracket is still leading the friends group (I’m dead on the blog brackets) by virtue of a couple solid upset picks, but the two game lead isn’t going to get me far. Good job I have the Yahoo Tourney app on this thing.

Because this post is brought to you, of course, by the new iPad. Fingerprints notwithstanding, it’s looking good so far. Performance has definitely improved from the original, though not radically so – I suspect most processing improvements have been in graphics rendering rather than raw CPU speed. I did buy the dark gray SmartCover, which is so far so good I suppose. It’s nice having the auto lock and the easy prop-up. Connection with the AppleTV is working after a couple of false starts – happy anniversary, Harto – but GoodPlayer isn’t putting the shady copies of Sherlock Season 2 up on screen. Nor does AirPlay really work for mirroring video, although this would work a treat for Keynote presentation.

The thing shipped with 80% battery life, and was still in the 60s after all the setup and iCloud restore. Then of course I got it home and had to start from scratch with the iTunes library, but I think we are set now. Books are in the Kindle app, there are PDFs in the iBooks app, the Economist has the last two issues ready to read, and there’s video cued up and ready to watch. The other effect of finally owning this has been to unload most video off the iPhone – horses for courses. Even the lo-def video looks good, although using a nice high-contrast black and white film like Good Night and Good Luck may be cheating.

Most of all, though, it’s the size of a magazine, it weighs a pound and a half, and it adds to the sense that I’m living in the future. I didn’t take the laptop out of the bag tonight. I may not take it out of the bag at home again unless I’m working from home. I’m glad I waited a couple of years for the super-HD display and the HUGE battery to drive it. I’m also glad I got the Verizon 4G – can’t wait to give it a spin on the road to DC next week.

This is the DynaBook. It really is. This is the dream that a nontrivial chunk of Silicon Valley has chased for the last forty years. And programming tools aside, this is it – hell, Jef Raskin’s original vision for the Mac didn’t involve programming, it was damn near a utensil itself. Time to go back and re-read Insanely Great and see what the plan was, because this – which you can climb on for as little as $400 now – may have hit the nail on the head.

All that’s left is to pair the Bluetooth keyboard and get going.

When I graduated from Vanderbilt, Gil Amelio was still technically the CEO of Apple, the stock was still stooging around 15 or so, and you could be forgiven for thinking the name of the company was “Beleaguered Apple Computer.”  Now, once again, people are lined up around the block.

The funny thing to me is that people only line up around the block for the iPhone and iPad.  There’s not a mad run on the Apple stores for a new MacBook Air or a new iMac. And I don’t remember this kind of madness for the previous generation of Apple goods, or even for the iPod in its heyday – largely because, for the most part, a lot of those things were announced as “and this is on sale TODAY.”  I wonder if the week or two between announce and release was a deliberate move to get the free advertising from the lines at launch – actually I don’t wonder at all.  Steve was no idiot.

But the lines form for the iPhone and iPad, because they are personalized in a way computers never were.  Even the most cozy cuddly 11″ MacBook Air is running UNIX and is a multiuser system.  The iOS devices are a throwback to the original Mac – there’s no login (aside from the security code), there’s no multiple user IDs, there’s no computer-ness between you and the interface.  Just touch, and go – full screen, the way ‘Er Indoors prefers to compute.  The iPad has become the first truly personal computer – something as close to you as your phone.

One of these days, I’m going to sit down and look at my life in the future, twenty-five years on from when I first really started to think about it.  It’s amazing how much of it looks like something I might have imagined, right down to the do-everything handheld and the car with the red light from the dashboard idling while I look at my future-Ironman and wear my future-Barons hat.

Once again a mass of sports distraction before taking delivery of a new Apple gadget.  Only this time instead of John Isner and Landon Donovan, it’s Shaka Smart and John Jenkins delivering the goods.  Once again, Vanderbilt with a heroic postseason victory despite a less-than-100% performance; they let Harvard get in, stay in, hang around and almost battle back, but stout defense from Ezili and TWENTY-SEVEN POINTS from the Man In Black (and Gold) kept things on the right track.  Wisconsin on Saturday – a 4 seed, meaning that everything is gravy the rest of the way.

Meanwhile, at last check, the iPad is…(checks Apple Store)…in San Jose for two hours now.  So I’m definitely going to take delivery tomorrow at work, and it should be simple to get things going since I have a backup to restore with all my apps and a guest wireless account to make sure I get on without any hassle.  The real trick will be putting it down long enough to get some sleep Friday night before running the 5K on Saturday…

Look, any pundit who seriously thought Mitt Romney had a prayer in Alabama and Mississippi is stealing money.  A Yankee Mormon whose conservative credentials are suspect and who basically created Obamacare: The Phantom Menace?  This is where I remind you that the Mormons are a cult, according to Southern Baptist doctrine.  Of course he finished third.  He’s lucky to have been that high up.

More interesting, though, is that Santorum lapped Gingrich to win both states.  This should be the death knell for Gingrich, although that will only come when his rich casino backer decides to stop stroking checks for him.  But apparently everyone is finally tired of the same old shit we’ve had for twenty years from the original Republican FIGJAM – and so, once and for all, the final Newtering is complete and Little Ricky Sweatervest has finally won through to claim the mantle of Anybody-But-Romney.  Which is interesting, because for a Pennsylvania Catholic he’s pretty much locked up the fever-swamp-South wing of the GOP…which, in 2012, basically means “the GOP outside Wall Street.”  Which means once again it’s all-in against the homos, the wetbacks, public education, and that slutty slut Sluticia S. O’Slutbag and her birth control pills.

I like Obama’s chances.  Never say never, and keep the passport topped up, but I have a hard time thinking that there’s a big population of undecided voters that will say “wait, pre-Vatican II Catholic social thought is EXACTLY what this country needs for me to get a job!”  A notional Santorum ticket will do GREAT in the Confederacy, but that’s not enough states to win anymore.  And as always, this time, the Union has the hydrogen bomb.

If you’ve already had an awful day before you can even get into your office, the move is to turn around and go home. Going into work is only asking for trouble. Personally, the high point of the day was having a needle in my arm and the blood tubing draped completely across my body for an hour.

I need Jesus, and an In N Out 3×2.

5-12 matchup.  Against a 12 that should have been seeded higher.  And of course it’s Harvard.  Hope people enjoy a game with actual student-athletes playing against other actual student-athletes.

Proof, again, why this is the greatest event in sports?  Friends represented this year by: UConn, Notre Dame, Michigan State, Colorado State, Virginia, Syracuse, West Virginia, Ohio State, Alabama, Cal, Michigan, San Diego State and Kansas.  And that’s just off the top of my head.

And I have officially come around 100% on the “First Four” simply because it means two games Tuesday night and two on Wednesday.  WALL TO WALL MADNESS.

On to New Mexico!

 

ETA: Kevin Stallings has cleared himself of the charges, as far as I’m concerned.  He did figure out how to coach this team up – brilliantly, today – and he managed not to waste the most talented Vanderbilt team in a lifetime.  Jury’s out on recruiting, but we always knew this would be a rebuilding year and we can wait one season basking in lingering glory before we hunker down to it in 2013-14.  They responded to the pressure of expectations.  That’s good enough for me.

71-64.

Final.

UK’s Anthony Davis, likely the the national player of the year, was outscored by three different Commodores, including Player of the Game Jeffrey Taylor and SEC Tournament MVP John Jenkins.

I have watched these kids for five years now, more and closer than I ever did any Commodore team in the years after leaving Vanderbilt.  In 2006, I finally talked myself into believing it was okay to claim Vandy as my own, and I went all-in.  I’ve seen a breathtaker in Moraga and a heartbreak in San Jose, and that’s just in person.  I have perched on the edge of the sofa, curled into a ball in front of the laptop, done deals with every higher power known to man, frightened the neighbors and annoyed my family to no end.  I have been emotionally invested in this team in a way that never happened when I was there, even.  I let them break my heart.

And today, it all paid off.

That’s a banner.  That’s a ring.  That’s a trophy.  That’s history.  That’s never going away, no matter what, even if we endure another sixty-year drought in the conference tournament.  Today, we are on top of the pile.

I know I’ve said that the problem with being a fan is that the high of winning is never as high as the pain of losing is low.  Well, let me say through the tears of victory (and the snot of victory; it’s allergy season): I was very, very wrong.

I don’t care what we do in the NCAA tournament.  I don’t care what happens next year.  We could go 0-27 next year, and that banner will still be hanging in Memorial: 2012 SEC CHAMPIONS.

John, Jeffrey, Festus, Brad, Lance, Steve, Kyle, Rod, Dai-Jon, Kedren, Shelby, Josh, James, Jordan, Aaron.  Our heroes.  Thanks for making it happen.  At long, long last, this fandom’s paying out. =)