Month: May 2011

2001 was a bad year all around. The dot-com collapse, the beginning of the eight-year regression under Bush, and the chaos of September 11 all combined to create a general malaise that poisoned the entire decade. The most poignant tweet of the night Bin Laden was shot was something along the lines of “Can we start the 21st century now?”

It really doesn’t much feel like we won, looking back. We’re still getting the anal probe at the airport, as security measures are just barnacled on rather than evaluated and re-thought. Nobody seems to be moving on getting us out of our current armed engagements abroad – nor do I expect them to, given that anyone who talks about pulling out troops gets tarred as a Defeatocrat. And the “scared of everything” model of politics has extended from merely the threat of international terrorist blowing up the local Wal-Mart to a full-blown panic over everything from gay people to the secret Muslim in the White House to the government-indoctrination camps known as public schools*…seriously, it’s reached full-on whuckery** out there.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. The iPhone 4 still feels like a slice of the future, and it’s neat that I was able to stand up with my surrogate sister at her lesbian wedding and nobody blinked an eye (even if the state of California got whucked itself for the moment), and it’s cool having On Demand HD…but at the same time, it feels like the future is more unevenly distributed than ever, especially when I pass through the ancestral lands.

Plus, no long coats. Every single TV show I ever saw signifies “near future” with a plethora of long coats. Still waiting on mine.

* I am not shitting you. Rick Santorum said this. This is a former Senator who wants to be President.

** “whuck” – contraction coined by Tim Goodman for when you need something better than WTF but can’t spell it out.

Apple’s Massive New Data Center Set To Host Nuance Tech; Partnership Announcement Due At WWDC

Called it yesterday? Called it yesterday.

Yes, again. Because I really do think about this S all the time.

In 2007, the all-new iPhone was meant to be a phone in an iPod. Or vice-versa. Apple couldn’t very well shed the ability to play media content, could they? Consequently they had to use tethering to get media onto the device, and you’d much rather do that with USB2 than try to do something over Bluetooth. Because let’s be honest – the idea of a consumer smartphone was still new-ish, aside from the Sidekick, and the first iPhone had to be both overbuilt (thus the protected headphone jack and the solid metal back) and limited in its capabilities for simplicity (one screen, no apps, not a lot of enterprise features, and nothing borderline like then-poorly-deployed 3G or anything else that would suck down the battery). Factor in the desire to exploit the existing iPod infrastructure – the existing dock ports, sync cables, assorted accessories, and of course iTunes as the computer-side interface – and you can see why the iPhone has, from the beginning, been linked to a computer.

By contrast, Android phones have, from day one, been tied to Google services – which only exists on the web. No application on the desktop, no required OS or hardware, no legacy technology to support – purely a cloud proposition, especially when you consider staffing out some of the CPU work (a la the voice recognition and dictation in Nuance’s Dragon speech apps for smartphones). So from day one, the notion that you’d need to connect an Android phone with a cable to a PC for anything simply wasn’t there. (Especially given what an afterthought the Android media players were for the first couple of years.)

As a result, this has carried over to tablets. If you buy a Samsung Galaxy Tab, or a Motorola Xoom, you pull it out of the box and go. Android makes it possible to build a completely free-standing device, especially if one was to use Google ID to instantly configure & sync with the whole range of services. By contrast, even the iPad 2 still calls for an iTunes connection as soon as you fire it up.

This, to me, suggests where Apple needs to go next with iOS 5. Right now, the iPad 2 still runs rings around its competition, and I say that with confidence after dawdling around Best Buy checking out the aforementioned Tab and Xoom (and the Blackberry PlayBook, ha*) – but the fact is, you can’t just pull an iPad out of the box and go the same way you would an Android tablet (or, for that matter, a netbook). This needs to change – and one of my hopes is that this new notional MobileMe replacement will include some sort of cloud storage sync solution such that you can buy an iPad, open it up, attach to a network, and immediately restore your settings and some data (bookmarks, mail config, the like), even if 14 GB of apps and music and movies would be impractical.**

The other thing I’m hoping for is more voice control. Right now, the system itself is largely limited to voice-dialing and controlling the music playback functions. I’d like to see something more Android-ish with the ability to dictate into any text entry field, and the fact that Apple has long since purchased Siri gives me hope that they’re working on that – not just in terms of speech-to-text, but in terms of being able to parse your meaning and turn “need a table for two at seven” into a localized OpenTable search with reservation options. (If you have an iPhone 4 and don’t have Siri, well, run don’t walk. It’s remarkable.) If the thing could read back incoming tweets and let me respond…well, that way lies madness, obviously, but hey, why not give it a whirl?

The Kindle, by the way, is still the best thing for reading – although I don’t find myself using the browser as much as I had expected to. Despite the Webkit-based browser, it’s still too tricky to get anything more complex than Google Reader up and running. (Maybe I should just get rid of two-factor authentication, because it means I have to have the iPhone with me all the time, and at that point you may as well just use an RSS app there.) But it’s great for reading, especially when you’re in a mood that means you need the entire Bigend Trilogy by William Gibson available.

* The Playbook is a joke. Something smaller and more expensive than an iPad that requires a Blackberry tethered to get your damn email? To hell with that. RIM is in deep shit and has no idea how bad it is.

** Especially in a world where your home internet access is capped. It’s going to suck trying to restore your device when it’s going to take a double-digit percentage of your allowed bandwidth for the month. Hell, I’m already doing a large chunk of my downloads and such over the network at work rather than at home, especially Mozy backups, against the day that AT&T starts metering our UVerse service. Screw you, AT&T…

When I was in grad school, I had a pager. It was a cheap little Motorola thing, which if memory serves was free with something like ten Mountain Dew bottle labels (which I could easily produce in, like, an evening) and it was meant to be the key to some sort of promotional program. As it happens, it was also keyed to the local area (as most such devices were at the time) and was no good outside of Nashville. I didn’t give the number to my then-girlfriend, because the last thing I needed was for her to be able to ping me anywhere, but I didn’t really have anyone else to give the number, either.

I mention this because I’m still keeping Tuesday night as shutdown night – turn off the laptop, put away the iPhone, switch off the wireless on the Kindle, and limit myself to whatever’s on TV or what’s in a book or magazine or (gasp) actually go out and do something. And for those nights, I have my backup phone and my Google Voice number, which only a couple of people have so that I can be reached in an emergency. And the thought went through my mind last night that an actual pager would be a handy thing to have for such evenings – nothing even that complicated, just numeric paging and maybe voice mail. And then it occurred to me that while the old black plastic Dew Beep pager was nice, it might be even nicer to have one of the sleeker translucent-colored-plastic Motorola models from later in the 90s, or the elusive one-line-text Motorola Jazz…

And then I look at my Moto F3, or my Nokia 1112, and it occurs to me that there are things I used to covet which I still DO covet, despite the presence of technology that’s far in advance of them which I already possess. I mean, with an iPhone 4, there’s very little need for a Sony Ericsson K710. And the iPhone will run freakin’ rings around any old Blackberry-style keyboarded device like the $100-ish Nokia I was looking at for an emergency iPhone replacement when I thought my wife had lost hers. And hell, the iPhone pummels the old second-gen metal-case iPod Nano (or the original gold-metal iPod Mini). But I still would jump at the chance to grab either of them.

Actually, now that I think about it, there are bits of me that still perk up at the notion of the PowerBook 1400, the first “low-end” PowerPC-based portable Mac (which replaced the nightmare-inducing PowerBook 5300 series). Or the shiny silver Siemens S40 phone that I saw in a Cingular shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto, in June 2002, which really tripped my “I must get to GSM as quickly as possible” urge. Which in turn points my mind back to PowerTel, in the days when GSM was wildly new and unheard of – the notion that you could pop this credit-card out of your phone and put it in ANOTHER phone and carry right on? MADNESS.

Maybe this is what passes for a mid-life crisis for me. Other guys run out and get hair plugs, motorcycles and Hooters waitresses – yer boy slumps in his chair and covets a pager.

[T]rust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked…

The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday…

Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself…

Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s…

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young…

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth…

When Mary Schmich’s column in the Chicago Tribune was published in June of 1997, I didn’t see it. In fact, I first ran across it when Baz Luhrmann remixed the Romeo + Juliet version of “Everybody’s Free” with the whole column spoken over it, and Lou Brutus played it one morning on HFS in the spring of 1999.

It was too late, of course. Those were things I needed to hear then, and still need to remind myself now – but when I really needed to hear them was in 1990, and again in 1997. In one case I was headed into higher education, and in the other I was being cast out of it. When I first walked the aisle in a mortarboard and gown, it was secure in the knowledge that I was headed to bigger and better things; when I left my old apartment for the last time – fourteen years ago this week – it was staring into an abyss: 25 years old, academic career prematurely terminated, six thousand bucks in credit card debt and no prospects for employment beyond “office temp”.

It staggers me to think that I’ve now been out of higher ed twice as long as I was in it – hell, that I’ve been out of it longer than I was preparing for it. You’d think that pushing 40 (or reeeeeally dragging 30) would mean that your college years were no longer definitional, but in some ways I’m still living in the shadow of decisions that were made in 1989, for better or worse. In one way, fourteen years doesn’t seem like nearly enough for how long it’s been – but at the same time, when the light’s right and the wrong song comes on the iPhone, I tend to forget I’m not twenty-something years old.

The point of all this is that graduation is completely the 180-degree-opposite time to be offering advice for the future. College is the real world, even if it’s not the whole world – and it’s a warning you need well before you arrive, not an admonition once you’re departing.

Yes, I have the same shirt on I had that day. It’s a nice shirt. Durable. Also has the logo in the old font, which I like better. Classic.

The funniest thing ever would be if Seth Meyers opened Weekend Update with a graphic of Bin Laden and said “Well don’t I feel like a jackass now.” and waited for the 3-minute crowd pop to die down. Come on, it’s NYC. You had to know they would go batshit. DC too. Hell, I wish I could have been there.

My big hope out of all this is that maybe it’s going to be an end to the September 12 mentality. No more pants-shitting terror, no more blind panic, but a calm, reasoned evaluation of the threat and the response. Terrorists are not Magneto, they are not vampires or zombies, and they can be handled in a rational manner by government and public alike. I have to say that the most gratifying thing about this operation was that it was a long play with the CIA and military working hand-in-glove, something that hasn’t happened before – and instead of rushing in on the eve of the elections in November to score points, they took their time and waited until they could do it right.

That is how you get to say Mission Accomplished.

As I said on EDSBS last night, this isn’t the championship, this is just one win in a long and grueling season. But it’s a big win, and we’re going to take a day to smoke and lift a glass to absent friends. We can get back to grinding tomorrow when the moment’s over.

Every September 11, I’ve dinged the President for unfinished business. Today the loop is closed.

The damage is done, obviously. Thousands dead on September 11, thousands more dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a pretty dismal decade in terms of response. What with the kid-chasing-a-soccer-ball approach to airport security, the quagmire of Saddam Hussein, the overwhelming stench of fear that fed the Stupids for years…it’s not the solution to all our problems by a long shot. But it does provide a pivot point – if the administration decided that we could start drawing down troops in Afghanistan now, it would be a hell of a lot easier to get away with. Maybe we can move on that – it would be nice.

But right now, all I can think about is Ann and Joe, who we lost on the plane that hit the Pentagon, and my friends, who all got up on the morning of September 12 and posted on time and on target while the Pentagon continued to burn, and my wife, who moved TO Washington less than two months later despite everything.

It’s a really good night.

The last time I was in New Orleans was for a wedding in February 2006. It was two months delayed because of the big K, when the bride and groom evacuated with the dress safely tied up in a trash bag. The streetcars weren’t running, the only people in our hotel besides wedding guests were SBC workers restoring phone connections, and I was able to walk up to Arnaud’s in jeans at 8 PM without a reservation…and get seated immediately.

The only repeats this time, I believe, were Cafe Du Monde (of course) and the Carousel Bar. I have come to the conclusion that most Sazeracs outside New Orleans are far too unsubtle about the bitters and the absinthe (or Herbsaint or Pernod or whatever). It’s a rye whiskey cocktail; you should be able to taste the rye, and both Carousel and a new-to-me place called Cure did a phenomenal job. (Although I think a trip to Bourbon and Branch for a refresher drink is in order soon.) New pickups included Crabby Jack’s for po-boys, Port of Call for burgers, and Cafe Atchafalaya for Easter brunch, complete with build-your-own-Bloody-Mary bar. A success, even if the bartender couldn’t tell what’s in a Cuba Libre.

Perhaps it helped to be primed by Mobile, but New Orleans – especially in and around the Garden District – felt old. More than in years past, I felt the reason the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland is in New Orleans Square – or why Blue Bayou is the opening of Pirates of the Caribbean. The image of a big old house, with the gaslamp still hanging and flickering in front of the door on one side, with porches top and bottom – yeah. That was cool.

New Orleans strikes me as a place where socializing is critical. Yes, there’s amazing food, phenomenal drink, awesome music – but you are clearly meant to go out and do these things with people. A solitary sort of person, I think, is going to struggle with the lifestyle. By contrast, I think I would do remarkably well there as long as I knew plenty of people, because if your favorite principal form of recreation is hanging out, you could hardly do better than the 504. Not for the first time did I wonder how things would have been different if I’d done as many of my high school fellows did and decamped for the city that is both the South’s Las Vegas and its San Francisco at once.

Easter Sunday itself was interesting. Holy Name, on the campus of Loyola University, has learned a great deal more than many places I’ve been when it comes to handling large crowds for Holy Communion on the big days. I’ve never seen a church that size turn over so many parishioners at once. But even more than that – and more than the impressive array of big hats and seersucker – the whole Mass had, well, a triumphal feel to it. Exactly the sort of feeling that you should have expected from what is essentially Christianity’s Rose Bowl national championship moment. It was…uplifting.

Even the heat and humidity didn’t bother me as much, largely because I knew damn well I was going to New Orleans. 85 degrees and sticky is acceptable for a city built below sea level on the Gulf Coast, especially in late April. It’s NOT acceptable in the Bay Area when I pay a ridiculous amount of money to avoid just that sort of thing, which is probably why I’m indoors right now with the lights off to avoid the beating of the direct sun from a cloudless sky. Yes, DSC-in-law, it will get plenty hot out here, fear not.

I have to say, too, it looks like getting fully stuck into supporting the New Orleans Saints is going to be an easy jump, now that they’ve added a Heisman winner from Alabama and a Cal sack machine in the first round. Throw the satellite radio into the mix, add the fact that my Redskins bar is no more and consider the possibility that Sonny and Sam might not be on the mike when the football starts up again…well, I already own plenty of black and gold. While there is no cure for Redskins herpes, adding a football team that’s having some success to the current crop of WTF in the house might make the autumn easier to take (since that’s the real warm season in these parts).

Would I go back? Yeah, I would. I could think of a lot worse places to winter…