Are my eyes really blue?

Back to the iPad, borrowed for a couple of days to test the efficacy of blogging right from the website. I think if somebody were willing to carry the physical Bluetooth keyboard, it would be simple to use this for anything I’d do on a laptop or even a net book traveling. Maybe not video Skype, but try doing that on an Atom processor anyway.
I’m not taking eier the pad or the netbook to Europe – not worthwhile given that I’ll be limited to whatever wifi I can find or steal, and best to just stick with the iPhone in permanent airplane mode for that. It sort of worked last time around – I don’t think we set foot in one single cybercafe, unlike the honeymoon where the easyInternet on the Strand across from Charing Cross was our home away from home four days of our first married week. Don’t look at me like that, it was her idea as much as mine…
More and more, too, it looks like there won’t be a change in my phone arrangements. Having work reimburse me for my phone ultimately costs half out of pocket what it would cost to have a work phone and pay the extra rate for personal use. It also doesn’t look like the new iPhone is going to offer the T-Mobile band for 3G, which makes unlocking kind of pointless. So we’re right back where we always were, paying the upgrade on a new iPhone when it comes out and sitting through another two year indenturement to AT and fucking T. Not that I blame Apple – I’ve explained repeatedly how Cingular was the only game in town, being the only dual band carrier, and the fact that we essentially have hardware lock-in even without subsidy locks is just more proof that we are the most backward country on Earth for phones. It still sucks out loud, though…
Ok, the ipad just went to sleep in my lap. Obviously i don’t have that much to say tonight so i will try to hit send…

Gordon Brown is resigning as Prime Minister, which means that the Tories and the Lib Dems must have an agreement in place by which David Cameron can form a government.  So the Sturdy Golden Bear Party (blue + gold SEE WHAT I DID THERE) is ready to ride.

This is a huge, huge, HUGE gamble by Nick Clegg.  The Lib Dems have a far stronger left-libertarian streak than Labour, especially since LibDem and Labor come to the left from two different-ish traditions.  There might be common ground for the LibDems and the Conservatives on some topics, but not on a lot of things that matter – and matter a LOT to LibDem voters.  Nick is going all in with Old Nick, so to speak, because this is the best chance the LibDems will ever have to force electoral reforms that could get them a more permanent place in government with an elected party commensurate with their percentage of the electorate.

But.

If the deal is for a referendum, they are screwed – Labour voters will not want to support a party that sold out to the Thatcherites, and Conservative voters will never support any mechanism that would make the Tories a permanent minority in Parliament (as any real proportional voting system will inevitably force).  What they need to have is a commitment from a Cameron government to implement some sort of reform right up front, whether Instant Runoff (as seems most likely) or something else.

So yeah.  This is a bet – that the future of the LibDem party can be staked on a deal with a Conservative government eager to push in the opposite direction of almost everything the LibDems hold dear.  I stand by my prediction that we’ll have another election by Christmas – and that by then, Clegg and the Liberal Democrats may well wish they’d forced the Tories to govern as a minority government and held their cards until the next round.

Spoilers abound, so beware of the click-through…

Continue reading “Iron Man 2”

Come now the usual whiny contrarian types with their cry of “It’s your own fault!  Anything you put on the Internet is fair game!  You’re stupid if you think you have any privacy on the Internet!”  I’m not linking them because they don’t deserve the press; instead I will simply say: eat a dick.

I don’t “put private information online.”  Simple.  I did put things in a proprietary service that offered explicit granular levels of privacy and control over who could access what, and which was completely off-limits to non-members.  If that service suddenly decides to revoke those privacy controls, without warning, and leave me with no recourse to control my own data on a service that was explicitly non-public previously? That service is run by cocksuckers who should eat shit and die in a fire.

I have tried to get rid of as much of that information as possible, but I have no faith whatsoever that it has not been retained for future marketing purposes by said service.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice – isn’t going to happen.  The truly obnoxious thing is that other services – Tumblr, Twitter, etc – don’t really care how you identify yourself, whereas Facebook made such a big deal of true identity that their changes of policy have now become great whopping privacy violations.

So yes, this is serious.  This is not a bunch of “whiny, entitled dipshits” (TechCrunch has a lot of fucking gall to call anybody else whiny or entitled) – this is a breach of trust, pure and simple.

I’m stuck with Facebook for at least a couple more months because that’s where my reunion is being organized.  But if you’re not already on it, you’d be a fool to join now – and if you’re on it now, you’re an idiot if you don’t have an exit strategy in mind.

I’m going abroad for a couple of weeks, and in that time, posting here will be necessarily limited – if not nonexistent.  I fully intend to keep up with the Tumblr equivalent of this site (don’t forget, the name has changed) but if you know who I really am, you should be able to see the public feeds that will be available (check Facebook for details closer to time).

My question is: would anybody be interested in following via something like Loopt, Latitude, Foursquare, or what have you?  And if so, what do people use for that sort of thing?  I’ll have the iPhone, but with the phone bit turned off, so it’s going to be a glorified iPod Touch – but that’s still going to be my primary internet access and I’ll just have to rely on the availability of Wi-Fi in Western Europe…

Keith Olbermann wrote this in 1997, back when he and Dan Patrick made Sportscenter one of the best shows on television.  Not best sports show, or even best newscast – best shows, period.  And since we are thirteen years on, it may be time to start thinking about who our Ninth Man is…

 

Baseball is often criticized for having an obsession with its own history. Yet, these days, it seems that history alone separates it from every sport. As the character portrayed by James Earl Jones said in the movie “Field Of Dreams,” America has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, erased again,
rebuilt again — and all the time baseball has been there.

For better or worse, history, in baseball, is a living thing. And in this spring training, history walks the camps looking for one player to claim as his own.

He is out there somewhere, in Arizona, maybe in Florida. His may be a name we already know; it may be one we do not. He is probably 20 or 21 years old, maybe 22. And he will make his big-league debut some time this year, or spend his first full season in the bigs this year — and he will retire in the year
2016 or 2017. He will be the grand old man of baseball. And they will say, he’s so old that the year he broke in, Eddie Murray was still playing!

He is out there somewhere, in Arizona, maybe in Florida. And to him is about to be passed — the torch. He will some day be the senior player in the game, representing an era at its end. And he will be the ninth man.

Murray, beginning his 21st season, is the eighth man. That’s because he is so old that, when he broke in, Brooks Robinson was still playing. That was in 1977; they were teammates.

And at that time, Robinson, the grand old man of the game, had been playing so long that when he broke in, Bob Feller was still playing. Feller is the sixth man. Because, when Brooks Robinson broke in, Feller had been playing so long that when he was a rookie in 1936, Rogers Hornsby was still playing.

The fifth man. Hornsby had been playing so long that when he was a rookie in 1915, Honus Wagner was still playing; Wagner was the fourth man. He had been playing so long that when he was a rookie in 1897, Cap Anson was still playing. Cap, of course, was the third man. And when Wagner broke in, Cap
Anson had been playing so long that when he was a rookie in 1871, Dickey Pearce was still playing.

The second man. When he was a rookie in 1855, Doc Adams was still playing. And Doc Adams was a member of the Knickerbocker club when on June 19, 1846, it played the first recorded game of baseball as we know it.

He was the first man.

Adams.
Pearce.
Anson.
Wagner.
Hornsby.
Feller.
Robinson.
Murray.
And now, someone new.

He is out there somewhere, in Arizona, maybe in Florida. His may be a name we already know. It may be one we do not. Now, he is only at the beginning. But some day, he will be … the ninth man.

Read the whole thing. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/#ixzz0nJN7bcfO

The LibDems didn’t finish down 3 seats, all right, they finished down FIVE.  What a kick in the bollocks.

I do stand by the second guess, though – I don’t think there’s a sustainable government to be formed.  Labour won’t get to keep playing until Brown is out of the picture, and a Blue/Yellow team, while attractive visually to Da Wife, will not be able to hold together once things like Europe and electoral reform are on the cards.

New election by Christmas.  I’m nailing my colors to the mast on this one.

 

ETA: This is the UK’s version of 2000 – in the absence of an outright majority, both sides are going to try to win this thing on television.  The Constitutional process, such as it is, gives the Prime Minister the right to attempt to form a government – but the Tories did finish with more votes and more seats than Labour, and might well be able to scrape together a minority government without allying with the Lib Dems (and these two parties will NOT be able to stay together long as mentioned above).  I have a tough time disagreeing with the Conservative assertion, backed by Nick Clegg in theory during the campaign, that the party with the most seats should be given an opportunity to do a deal – and while negotiations appear to be underway, I don’t doubt that the Lib Dems will at least give Labour an opportunity to make their own pitch before they make any firm commitments.

 

Two predictions:

1) The LibDems won’t actually finish down 3 seats.

2) There’ll be another election by the end of the year.

 

Personally, I think the best outcome would be a hung Parliament and an awkward Tory-Lib Dem alliance until things settle down some.  Although it’s truly ironic that after making his name as a financial wizard, Gordon Brown will be turfed out for a financial meltdown that’s mostly come and gone – and then be gone when things turn bad again.  It’s almost Shakespearean.

I don’t talk too much about my job here. I mean, I do discuss my previous ones from time to time, mostly in the context of people I knew and experiences I had, but I find it’s not too healthy to blog about your current line of work. Which is something I learned at one of those previous jobs, albeit indirectly.
My current job is actually going well. From a stress standpoint, it’s lower than I’ve experienced in a long time. I get to do more or less what I’ve done for thirteen years, albeit with the advantage of those thirteen years of experience. Less Nuke LaLoosh, more Crash Davis, if you know what I mean. Every man reaches a point where he has to stop being Nuke and try to be Crash.
In years past, I would have gotten the big head when the subject of my performance came up. Hell, I did get the big head, literally; I went up a quarter-inch of hat size between arriving in DC and leaving seven years later. I awarded myself multiple championship belts (won the tag team titles with three different partners, retired the Hardcore Title and spent 2003 as MVP and Intercontinental Champion), and I grumbled about how Superman must fly off after saving Lois Lane for the hundredth time and say “This is bullshit, why can’t that bitch stay out of burning buildings?”
Lately, though, it’s different. In a year and a half I’m at more or less the same confidence level it took me five years to achieve in my first job – not challenging for the top spot yet, but give it time – but I’m a lot more circumspect about it. I wince at things like “Mac guru” and “computer genius,” and when I was introduced to the boss’s boss’s boss’s boss yesterday as “our Apple wizard,” I pointed out “you know, most wizards wind up burned at the stake or slaughtered by Voldemort.”
The thing is, I don’t think it’s healthy for people to think of their IT staff as some kind of mystical beings. Smart? Sure. Sharp operators? Probably. Peer staff whose business recommendations should be heeded rather than blithely ignored until something goes on fire? Absolutely. But here’s the thing: if people think you are magicians, eventually, they will expect you to do magic.
It’s not a good thing when employees are ignorant of basic computing functions and the help desk indulges them for the sake of looking like gods. When you find yourself flung back in time, the medieval peasants will worship you like a god right up to the point where you fail to resurrect the little girl who broke her neck falling down the well. Then the torches come out. There will inevitably come a day when somebody does something that makes their computer take a dirt nap, and their vital data goes with it, and they never backed up. At that point, I can take their confession, but I probably can’t raise the dead, and it’s better that they know that now so that the beheadings don’t start when that day comes.
Call it the sudden onset of senile sanity, but I don’t really want to come charging out of a burning building with the vital grant CD in one hand while the grateful masses fling money and flimsy underthings at me. I’m at a point where I’d just as soon make sure everything passes fire code inspection, then sit back at the firehouse and pet the Dalmatian while the young guys wash the truck again – because nothing’s burning down right now. Maybe the way to reconcile the need to be a stupendous badass with the need for people to keep out of your shit is to just give up on both.