Are my eyes really blue?

…that I’ve been blogging at this address and under this name and URL for five years this month.  That’s longer than any other blog solution I’ve continuously used – whether it was LJ, or Blogger, or Blosxom or Vox or even the plain text updated every couple-three weeks back before I realized I was blogging.

It’s a good thing.  Not everything goes up here, obviously, but it’s handy to be able to trace what I was thinking when.  Match it against the contents of the iTunes playlists and fragmentary postings elsewhere and I can usually piece together what I was thinking in a useful fashion.

I’ve also been thinking about other things.  Anyone who reads this and knows me will instantly recognize me, and I’ve probably been sloppy enough that someone who really made an effort could piece it together.  I’ve also tried to carve out a little more separation in some areas of my life so that the most active part of my online existence these days doesn’t point right back here.  But I’m also sitting on a useful URL that would make a great blogging home, except that it would also be pretty transparently me – and I’m not one of these Millenials who believes that any attention is good and it’s OK to post my party pix in a Tinkerbell costume where work can see it.

I don’t want to do this for a living – I’m not sure I could do this for a living – but the notion of being sat with my feet up in a cozy little hole-in-the-wall, typing out my thoughts while the fog swirls outside?  Very enticing, whether in San Francisco or London or Edinburgh or some windswept pub out on the moors.  I think I’m in one of those phases where my life is much more about settings and characters and less about the plot.  Now all Our Hero needs is his peacoat, his Wayfarers, a new pair of Palladiums and an 11″ MacBook Air to take on the road…and two tickets to somewhere else.

It looked like it had all come together.

September, 1993. Beginning of senior year.  A schedule that was pretty much a milk run – with all of my general-ed requirements and major credits filled, I could load up on things like tennis and Intro to Computer Science, along with that Shakespeare course I’d always wanted to take.  A month working for the Dean’s office resulted in my becoming the teaching assistant for PSCI 101, so I was getting some CV-building credit.  A sudden flakeout by someone I didn’t know resulted in my being offered the post of sports editor of the campus newspaper.  And I was on the verge of finally getting shut of the girl who’d done so much to ruin the first three years – and better yet, replacing her with a bright and witty six-foot blond, just like I’d always wanted.

And that’s not even counting the external factors, like Clinton in the White House or Alabama defending a national championship or me riding a new Saturn SC2.  The music from those days is mixed – U2 meets The Music Man meets the best of Bananarama (!) – but almost without fail, it’s bright and upbeat and says “you know what, hang the last three years, it’s going to work out this time!” And for a couple of months, it actually did.

That was before I realized just what “schizoid” really meant.  Like, serious DSM-IV schizophrenia.  At least, that’s the only explanation I’ve ever been able to come up with.  And one of the great regrets of my life was not having my fairy godsister to tap me on the shoulder and say “you can’t save her, but you can still save yourself.”

I guess the critical accomplishment of the last five years was learning to be my own fairy godsister. =)

I know much was made of how the President “backed down” regarding the scheduling of his address to Congress, but after the media attention last night to the GOP debate – and to Rick Perry’s assertion that he intends to run as both Jed Bartlett’ opponent from The West Wing and as the scourge of Social Security – I’m starting to wonder again if there’s not some “pleeeeeeease don’t throw me in that briar patch” going on at 1600 Penn.

The chaos is well and truly underway.  The Big XII is finally imploding, with the imminent departure of Texas A&M to the SEC leaving only nine teams behind.  Now the rumors are starting about Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State to the Pac-16 (!) and Kansas to the Big East (where their football-to-basketball ratio will be an asset rather than a liability).  Missouri keeps getting pitched as a possible 14th for the SEC.  And this leaves Baylor, Iowa State, and Kansas State…standing without a chair when the music stops.

In 1984, the Supreme Court rules that the NCAA was in violation of antitrust law by collectively selling the rights to college football broadcasts.  As a result, 64 schools broke away and formed the College Football Association to sell their game rights to the highest bidder, while the Big Ten and Pac-10 in turn made a separate deal with ABC.  Famously, Notre Dame then went to NBC for their home schedule exclusively, and before long every conference was trying to make the best arrangement for itself…which is how we got here.  The SEC got the world from CBS and ESPN, only for the Pac-12 to get the universe from Fox, and now the arms race has hit critical mass yet again.

The situation we find ourselves in is this:

1) Conferences will be increasing their membership in an attempt to reopen their broadcast deals and negotiate better arrangements for themselves.

2) Most conferences are at 12 members already.

3) Conferences larger than 12 are inherently untenable owing to the limited number of games available in a season.

4) Conferences as large as 16 will invariably function as a joint alignment of two 8-team conferences, and will in almost all cases result in splitting up intraconference rivalries.

5) Superconference realignment for football purposes stands to have a deleterious impact on non-football sports.

6) At some point, schools will be unable to keep up with the arms race associated with major college football, either from a financial standpoint or from an unwillingness to prioritize the sport.

 

We are reaching a point where another CFA-type situation is in the offing.  The biggest-ticket programs – think the SEC exclusive of Vanderbilt, the Big-XII as of last season, USC, Notre Dame, Florida State, Miami, probably BYU and possibly Ohio State and/or Michigan, and possibly a few others – could conceivably assemble themselves as a new CFA, withdraw their football programs from NCAA sanction and set themselves up as their own thing.  Call it the College Football Premier League.  All the big-time programs – Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, USC, Ohio State, basically anyone who’s played in a national title game or more than one BCS bowl in the last decade – will go off on their own, along with the Auburns and the South Carolinas and the Oklahoma States and the Texas Techs and the other schools intent on being a football factory first.

Say, the top 64 teams, organized into four 16-team conferences for the sake of a name and a title game, but effectively playing in 8-team pods en route to an 8-team playoff for their own championship of college football.  And the rest of what’s currently NCAA Division I-A possibly reorganizing as a sort of I-AA-plus, possibly with its own championship tournament, possibly not. Either way, you can forget about the bowls, save perhaps as a sort of framework for the Premier League playoffs or a series of consolation matches among the teams knocked out.

Except for the Rose Bowl, of course, and the Big 14 and Pac-14, which probably won’t go for that Premier League nonsense.  Or maybe they will, who knows – but then, if there’s a bowl and a conference that have always held themselves to be above the rabble of mortal football, it’s the Rose Bowl and the Big Ten.  So who knows.

Either way, I doubt Vanderbilt makes the cut.  The eternal argument – serve in heaven and cash fat checks, or reign in hell and be the best of the dregs? – might be settled forcibly.  I doubt the new-look CFA is going to be all that concerned with AAU membership or endowment and research credentials; the key metric will be the ability to deliver eyeballs on Saturday afternoons…

They’ve got it down to a science in Boise.  Get a season-opening game against a big-name program of suspect quality, win big on national television, and glide to an undefeated season, constantly moaning about disrespect and being ignored and not getting a fair shake – while getting a half-dozen ESPN games and opening the year ranked #5.

Nobody is saying that Boise State wouldn’t do just fine in another conference – even in the SEC or Pac-12, they’d probably be good for at least 9 wins a season – but the notion that they could roll undefeated through any conference but the WAC, year after year, is risible.  But they are the darlings of ESPN, so now we get to hear all about them for another four months.

You know, sports is really taking more from me than I take from it lately…

The mall is an easy place to see what’s doing with the tablet business. It seems like every other shop has some Honeycomb-based Android gadget on offer. Telling, though, is the fact that they’re all 10-inch models. So much for the notion that cheap 7-inch tablets would eat the iPad’s lunch. Ironically, the rumblings about the new Amazon Kindle based on an Android fork are making me interested in the 7 again. A 7 might fit in a jacket pocket. An iPad or its imitators? No chance.

Sony has some new tablet that’s thick and round at one edge, a bit like a folded magazine or a regular tablet with it’s cover open. My immediate reaction, unfortunately, was to blurt “You’re not serious.” I don’t think a wedge-shaped tablet is the key to consumer electronic resurrection for Sony, alas.

All these tablets – whether at T-Mobile, AT&T, the Sony store, the Verizon kiosk or the Samsung display – are a widescreen 10.1″ that strongly suggests they are meant to work horizontally first. The vertical orientation was not comfortable for the DSC-in-law and I suspect the round side of the Sony was an attempt to cope with that.

Maybe Ice Cream Sandwich is the answer. Having a unified Android release for all devices might help clean up some of the fragmentation issues – and hopefully put an end to the custom UI blight. But the fact that Amazon is choosing to fork – and the Great Mentioner is higher on the putative Kindle tablet than any iPad competitor yet – suggests that once again, the key to a mobile device is cutting out the carrier and designing the whole widget yourself.

Are you Superman disguised as Clark Kent, or are you Clark Kent disguised as Superman?

“It is still the single most breathtaking play I have ever seen not because of the raw athleticism, but because it was never over for George Teague. To hell with the flags, or the angles, or the score: if Lamar Thomas were streaking toward an endzone a thousand miles away, guided toward it only by the sun, the stars, and a compass in his soul pointing towards the goal line, George Teague would have found him and stolen the ball and run the other way until he died exhausted and alone.

“It happened on a down that appears in no stat line, no sheet of formal records. The turf is Astroturf, the game a glorified exhibition put on by a corporation hiding under the guise of a non-profit, involving players likely violating the rules of amateurism, beaming through satellites to flicker on the television of a fake house in a fake neighborhood in a fake state to a family in the last stages of living under the same roof. And yet it still stops my heart when I watch it. George Teague doesn’t give a shit what down it is. He gets the ball, or he dies.”

-Spencer Hall, “God’s Away On Business”

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

This time, things will be different.

That’s been the message for months now.  This time, we’re not going to hire whatever random school’s assistant will take the job.  This time, we’re not going to pay lip service to “winning the right way” and promptly drop ten games. This time isn’t going to be another dose of “Same Old Vandy.”

Now is different.  Now we have a young, energetic coach who believes in the program and wants everyone else to believe.  Now we have upgrades to the facilities, to the tailgates, to the locker rooms.  Now we have multi-star prospects poached from big-ticket programs, guys with three and four and five stars who mockingly try on a Vol hat before declaring “it doesn’t fit” and choosing us.  Now, we have YouTube video going viral and Twitter accounts whipping up the faithful and blogs to bang the drum.

And now, it’s our turn.

We have been made a promise: that things are going to be different.  Now it’s our turn to hold up our end of the bargain.  We have to watch.  We have to show up.  We have to be black and gold from stem to stern.  We have to scream, and shout, and sing, and carry on like it’s the end of the world.

If you’re a student, use your tickets.  Make it the whole day.  Start early, stay late, on time and on target.  If you’re a season ticket holder, fortify yourself however it takes and be prepared to be leather-lunged and sore-footed by day’s end.  If you’re local, and you haven’t got tickets, climb over the fence.  If you’re not local, tune in.  Find the stream.  Find a radio.  Wear your black and gold.  Throw up the VU at everyone and no one.  Blog.  Tweet.  Don’t let anyone in a Commodore shirt walk across the street from you without “WHO YA WIT!” even if you’re three thousand miles from campus.

We don’t know how this is going to work out.  Nothing is certain, and we could still find ourselves looking up at ten losses despite everything.  This is a bet – that we can change the course, that we can turn this thing around, that we can transform Vanderbilt football into what it once was, what it should always have been, what it can be going forward.  But James Franklin, his staff, his administration and his student-athletes are going to lay it all out there to make it happen.  They have promised us everything they’ve got.

What are you prepared to do?

“It’s like when you take the pan of brownies out of the oven because you think they’re done, but they’re not done, and you just end up with a gooey mess.”

I tasked my double-second-cousin-in-law with the initial test of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″ because she’s the only one in the household who carries an Android phone.  (The rest of us rock two iPhones and a Blackberry Torch.)  After a little playing around, I thought that I should staff the evaluation out to someone who was already familiar with Android, so as to diminish the familiarity bias I have for iOS.  And since she’s never used an iPad either, it was a true test of the utility of the Android tablet qua tablet rather than in comparison to anything else.

The early reviews were not good.  The settings were complicated, and everything seemed to take an extra step.  The thing was too difficult to hold in portrait mode (probably due to the wrist leverage from its length) and everything was generally optimized for landscape anyway, which sort of undercut the Kindle app.  But the Kindle app itself was fine, and she was able to create and start up an Evernote account without a fight.  Plus streaming video from SyFy seems to work just fine, and she seems to be happy with the Redfin app (they are house-hunting, as you would expect anyone living with me to do).

For my own part, I was a little put off by the inability of one of the flagship Android devices to run the Economist application, which was annoying.  But then, maybe I didn’t have the download preferences set properly to allow non-Market downloads, which might be necessary.  I did find apps for Twitter, Foursquare and Evernote without a fight, although the UI was not as satisfactory for any of them.

Most puzzling, though, was the utility of the Google apps themselves.  The Maps app was fine until I got into Street View, at which point I could only navigate by dragging the little pegboard man to a new place – where the view would then be reoriented.  The tradition “just click on the line down the street to advance down it” familiar from the web – or the iPhone – wasn’t there, and that was a little surprising.  The Google Reader app, meanwhile, wasn’t materially different from the mobile version of the Reader website.

Long story short: it’s not terrible or unbearable by any stretch.  They seem to be enjoying it perfectly well.  But after a night and a day of experimenting with the combination of the latest OS and the newest hardware, I would be hard-pressed to offer a typical civilian user a good reason to take it over an iPad.  The only legitimate cases to be made for it are either highly technical or ideologically colored; it’s not going to win on price, weight, screen clarity, speed, app selection or ease of use. Although if you’re willing to use your Google account for everything, it does do a superior job of integrating with those services (and backing the tablet up to same).

So…will keep poking away and see what’s doing.  But I’m not expecting this to make a major dent in my current mobility assessment.