Month: March 2012

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. =)

I had my second run on the smoker today.  Couple of pork shoulders went in at 8 AM, a couple racks of ribs in front of them at noon, and by 6 PM it was dinnertime.  No sauce, just a rub of the wife’s devising, and nothing fancy on the wood – just white and a little red oak. And like last time, it went down a treat with the people to whom I fed it.

There’s a pattern forming: rub down the pork shoulder the night before and put it in a bag in the fridge overnight.  Come up with a gallon of Arnold Palmer somewhere – either bought in a jug from Safeway or just get a bottle of tea and a bottle of lemonade from Whole Foods and mix.  Plus coffee to start off with.  And the fire gets lit at 7:45 and is usually good to go just in time to insert the aluminum pans with the shoulders in them at 8.  Then tend the fire for a while with Absolute Radio’s Rock and Roll Football coverage, including the whole of Ian Wright’s call-in show, which takes me through to about 11.  After that, just play music on the iPhone, catch up any remaining podcasts, doodle around on the computer, read the Kindle.  Open and rub down the ribs at 11:45, on the rack in the smokebox at noon, and then it’s just sitting around waiting and tending the fire.  Don’t let it drop below 150 or get much over 180, and I still don’t have a really good sense of the wood.  The afternoon wasn’t as predictable as the first time, and the fire seemed to run hotter.

It’s also cold. I don’t know how much of that is just cool weather and overcast skies, how much is sitting still in a reclining chair at 8 AM, and how much is made worse by the Arnold Palmer blend, but my designated smoking outfit tends to be a t-shirt, then the soft-shell, then a canvas jacket over that, creating the look of a heavy work coat.  Which makes sense to me; a blanket-lined Carhartt is about what I’d expect to wear running a smoker in winter.  Makes for a lot to wash when I get home, though – the wife claims that the smoke effect is if anything stronger (though less unpleasant) than the days when I’d come home having smoked two cigars.  I’m a little curious how it’s going to be this summer.

I’m also a little curious how the iPad is going to work out.  I have Wi-Fi in the yard where the smoker is, so that’s not a problem, and the iPad should last a hell of a lot longer than the MacBook Air has done.  Will I end up with iPad and iPhone running simultaneously?  Probably.  Might still staff out books to the Kindle just for battery purposes.  But no matter what the reading material (or surfing options), it always adds up to a quiet, relaxed afternoon with plenty of five-space.  Time to myself in a good cause – or at least a good cause as far as the folks at dinner are concerned.

There’s very little to it.  All the work is in assembling the rub and applying it to the meat.  Once the fire is lit and the meat’s in its box, the rest of it is just hanging out waiting with an eye on the thermometer and occasionally pitching a log into the firebox.  No basting, no swabbing, no rotating anything – the smoke does the work and I just sit there with my feet up.  Odd, that I should find a new hobby less than a week before turning 40 and take to it so readily, but I admit I have – it’s almost dead solid perfect, even if it means getting out of bed at 7:30 Saturday morning.  It gives me alone time and plenty of it, followed almost immediately and of necessity by social time.  I don’t even need that much of the meat myself – but there’s plenty to go around, and I cooked.  I never cook.  At best I might throw a steak on the grill for ten minutes. But this is dinner I made, and people like it, which is gratifying and positive reinforcement for the future. And there’s one imperial shit-ton of wood already there, enough for at least a half-dozen more runs.

Once a month, minimum.  Not a bad habit to get into.

The wife directs me this morning to this blog post, which makes a case that people who are not that smart are incapable of recognizing that they are not that smart.  With nontrivial consequences for things like, oh, democracy.  Or climate change and the denial of same.

If you have been reading this blog longer than about thirty seconds, you will realize that I find this shocking NOT AT ALL.  Couple that knowledge with the fact that one political party in this country has been hard at work milking the venom of anti-intellectualism for decades now, and you can see not only how we got in this mess but why our prospects for escaping it are limited at best.

To complete the parody quote from the title… “I see dumb people. Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other.  They only see what they want to see.  They don’t know they’re dumb. All the time.  They’re everywhere.”

And they will be the death of us, if we let them.

I wiped the iPhone last night.  The home button has become incorrigible, even after getting air-blasted by the good folks at the University Ave Genius Bar in PA, but yesterday the Music app went completely clowner-cockwise.  You’d pick a song and nothing would happen.  Fast forward, reverse, nothing.  So you’d pick another song, and it would immediately skip ahead to the next song – and if you tried to reverse, you’d get everything that LOOKED like the first song but the second song playing.  And if you tried to fast-forward, it would skip right ahead to the third song,  And it would never play more than about four tracks before stopping dead again.

So I took the final measure you can take with an iPhone: wipe it clean and set it up as new rather than restoring from backup.  I took the opportunity to pare down the load on the iPhone substantially – it’s probably carrying half the apps and half the video it had earlier and there’s a good 6+ GB of free space on it now.  It made for a healthy exercise in getting rid of all the stuff I feel compelled to schlep around but never actually use for anything, and we’ll see what the results are like.  But so far, everything seems to be healed.  Maybe the move is just to blow the phone away once a year and try to mop up afterwards.

Meanwhile, I have the work iPad doing just the reverse – I am setting it up with everything I want/need/think I need and backing up to iCloud with the idea that I will collect my new iPad from UPS a week from today and promptly restore it from said backup. This will also allow me to work on determining what apps need to move to the iPad more or less permanently (hint: Netflix, Crackle, Hulu+, GoodPlayer, etc etc).

It’s amazing in retrospect that we ever tried to do this nonsense on a 220×176 phone display.  I remember looking longingly at the W600 from Sony Ericsson, that switchblade-format device with the handle-style antenna, and putting the J2ME version of Google Maps on it at the AT&T store to see how practical it was.  I had Opera Mini on my old Moto V630.  I tried to make do with the P800 and the Nokia 6620, in the search for something that would do Bluetooth AND speakerphone AND high-speed EDGE data AND get my email AND run rudimentary applications AND take pictures (and maybe even video).  And then I took possession of my first iPhone in 2007, free of charge, and the days of phone glee were more or less brought to a screeching halt.

I just wanted to live in the future.  Now I do. =)

January 27, 2010:

…I haven’t been so disappointed in an Apple product – well, ever. The day the iPhone was announced, I was crestfallen at the release date, then resolved to have the money saved up by day one. The day the MacBook was released, I was in my boss’s office begging for the high-end black model. Today, I don’t really understand what this thing is good for….

…here’s the fatal flaw: if you have an iPhone, you have 90% of this already. Do you really want to pay out double the money again, plus an extra $30 bill every month, just to do it on a larger screen?…

…it’s an interesting idea, but right now, at the current price points, the marginal utility for me is nonexistent. I just wonder how many other people will find a reason to give it a whirl anyway…

Well. Erm. This is awkward.

Let’s see what I said after I slept on it.

January 28, 2010:

* The common thread among those who have seen and touched and used the iPad is that “you won’t truly understand until you handle it; words and specs and YouTube video doesn’t do justice to the experience of using it.” My regard for Stephen Fry is such that I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this front.

Lesson learned: trust Stephen Fry. In fairness, going from 1024×768 to 2048×1536 on the same display will probably make things even more visually impressive.

 

* Everyone seems to think that $499 is not a bad price to pay at the entry level for this thing. That’s as may be – no one has ever accused me of having a good sense of the value of money one way or the other, and I will agonize for literally months over a $20 Nerf gun but think nothing of donking off $20 worth of coffee and soda in a day – but my comparisons are to things like a $299 netbook, or $199 iPod Touch, or $200-something Kindle 2 that comes with free lifetime wireless access. Against that, $500 is kind of steep no matter how you slice it.

This has actually stood up.  Nobody, but nobody, has brought in an iPad competitor at an appreciably lower figure – there’s always some sort of compromise on size, or weight, or performance or battery life. The only folks who have undercut this in any meaningful way are the Kindle Fire team, who did it by going to a 7″ tablet with a forked version of 2010’s Android rev and explicitly abjuring anything but media consumption (of which more later).  I’m a little surprised (but pleasantly so) to say that the price point hasn’t budged across the board three generations later.  Meanwhile, the netbook has been exposed…

 

* I played around with a Dell Mini 10 running Windows XP this afternoon. I think the search indexing was running some of the time, which didn’t help, but the general feel was: OH. DEAR. GOD. SO. SLOW. I wonder if it would be any better with Xubuntu on it instead. The keyboard on the Mini 10 is the best I’ve seen yet on a netbook, and even pwns the keyboard on some of Dell’s full-sized small-business offerings (Vostro 1520, I’m looking at you…and contemplating using the bathroom) but if that’s as fast as it gets…maybe the fundamental problem is that things like the iDevices or the Kindle have a purpose-built Device OS rather than a full-size Computing OS (such as Windows, etc), and as such can run their own apps and things faster on less powerful hardware than trying to coax Windows performance out of an Atom N270. (God help you if you try to watch QuickTime movies on that thing…)

This is how Apple made the tablet work in a way no one ever had: instead of trying to scale Windows down, scale a phone OS up.  I don’t need to re-link all my posts about my six-month experiment with the netbook; suffice to say that it was a compromised and compromising experience and I was never able to use it.  Even the original iPad clubbed it for screen resolution and use of said screen alike.  The hottest device of 2009 has ceased to be a thing in any meaningful way, because everyone’s rolled over to tablets, because you can’t seem to make using Windows on an Atom processor and a 1024×600 screen a remotely tolerable experience.

 

* The thing I always come back to is…blogging. You wouldn’t ever want to blog on an iPhone. Twitter, Tumblr, sure – but nothing over 100 words. Looking at the Kindle, I’m not sure you’d want to blog on it even if you could – the keyboard is made for a long session with a surgeon about the damage you’ve done to the ligaments and tendons in your thumbs. And looking at the iPad, I still don’t see how typing on a flat glass screen is going to work.

Well. Erm. I did it.  Repeatedly.  And banged out longer posts on the Bluetooth keyboard as required.  And that was all without the useful aid of the tilted SmartCover for setting it on a flat surface and typing at an angle instead of looking flat down.

 

* Devices like the iPhone/iPod Touch/Kindle/smartphones generally – they are meant for consumption, not creation. You read on them, you surf on them, you do a little communicating on them, but you don’t use them to hammer out the Great American Novel*** or design your website or handle your taxes. For all their weakness and lack of power, netbooks actually give you some small opportunity to produce; if the iPad turns out to be unsuitable for same (iWork or no iWork), it really will be consigned to the Kindle/overgrown iPod Touch category.

Well, um…iWork (all three programs).  Garage Band. iMovie and now iPhoto.  Put another way: I could take the new iPad to Punxsutawney and shoot the threequel to 02:02:02 next February on the iPad, cut up the video in its entirety on the iPad, and publish it to the Internet through Vimeo on the iPad. Sure, it’s probably no good for Framemaker or Oracle developers, but the idea that the iPad is only suitable for consumption is deader than Rick Perry’s campaign.

Flash forward to when I finally got to handle the thing:

April 5, 2010:

I’m not having quite the OMG IT IS THE FUTURE experience that I see in the reviews, but it is a nice piece of work. It’s not $500 nice, for sure, but this is going to kill a lot of what would have been Kindle and Nook sales. It will also light a fire under somebody to get an Android-based tablet experience out the door sooner than later. From a philosophical point of view, though, the thing I can’t stop thinking over and over is “it’s the Dynabook”. Alan Kay’s landmark vision of a super-thin 9×12 tablet weighing not more than two pounds was a theory that drove the development of portable computing for the better part of a half century. And now, this is pretty much it. If Apple gets an edu discount going on these things by August, they are going to sell a trillion of them…

April 6, 2010:

…It’s got sex appeal, make no mistake. You could go out to a public park with a baby, a beagle puppy and a big-eyed stuffed turtle and you wouldn’t draw the crowd an iPad does. It certainly hits all Apple’s usual markers for industrial design….I think the biggest impact of the iPad is yet to come – I don’t think the apps that are going to make it indispensable exist yet. I think much will depend on what happens with the developers who just now have one in their hands. I also think much will depend on what gets discussed on Thursday, when the iPhone 4 talk takes place in Cupertino. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more consolidation in what is emerging as OS X Mobile, for lack of a better word – in stark contrast to the fragmentation currently happening with Android….

April 8, 2010:

…It’s quite a gadget. It certainly seems to obviate the need for a dedicated e-book reader. It’s incredibly easy to pull out and use in a way you’d never use a notebook, just because of the whole folding action and the space it takes up. (I really wish I’d had this trick on the trip to DC.) And by using a phone OS, it’s incredibly fast to get going – button, swipe, 4 digits, Safari, and boom goes the dynamite. As opposed to: open, wait for login box, log in, wait for desktop, double-click icon, wait for app to load…it’s like an iPhone, just pull it out and go, except that the processor is so much faster and the screen so much bigger that you actually get to work and see things sooner and easier. The 4-way screen rotation is great – work from whatever angle you pulled the thing out….Long story short – does this sound familiar? Steve Jobs delivers new product. Not a completely original concept, but the first real consumer-friendly approach, easy to use and sexy as all hell. Looks like a premium product, and priced like one; right off the bat it’s too much money for not as much functionality as you might like, but from day one it becomes the new standard that everyone else is chasing…

 

Which is why, after three and a half hours of struggling with iPhone and laptop to try to hit the most slammed site on the planet (while simultaneously struggling with the worst sort of corporate brainstorming-team nonsense), I closed the deal on a black 32 GB Verizon 4G new iPad, engraved “My Dynabook.”

It’s replaced the laptop.  I don’t have personal material on my work MacBook Air anymore, aside from the contents of MarsEdit and Evernote for convenience’s sake.  No iTunes content, no other personal files aside from things I occasionally scrape into a folder and upload to Box.  Hell, even Safari doesn’t have my bookmarks in it, and there’s damn sure none of my non-work email there.  This device is, for the most part, secure.

But how much easier to get all my personal stuff moved to a 1.4-pound slab the size of a magazine, which I can pull out of a bag and instant-on most anywhere?  Which will let me buy a wedge of 4G data in the US faster than my DSL was until Christmas 2010, or buy a SIM off Orange or O2 next time I’m in the UK and go just as wireless when the Wi-Fi runs out?  Which will last all day without having to remotely think about charge?

In the end, it came down to what is my next laptop, and between an 11″ MacBook Air and an iPad – when I already have the work laptop to handle work stuff, the move has to be the iPad.  Pocket the hundreds of dollars saved, and enjoy the ride into the future of computing.

 

 

 

Before we drop tomorrow morning, a quick summary of where we think we are:

 

1) “iPad HD”, not iPad 3 or anything like.

2) Retina Display, 2048x(768+768 I don’t have time to figure it).

3) LTE 4G.

 

And that’s about it.  Nobody appears to be expecting much else.  Probably a processor bump of some sort, maybe more RAM or an improved camera.  Really crazy stuff such as an 8-inch model seems to be right out.  Tertiary rumors include an improved (1080p capable?) AppleTV, which would make sense.

As it is, if that’s all there is, that’s still enough for me to take the plunge at last.  Probably with “My Dynabook” engraved on the back, because I truly believe Steve thought this was his crowning achievement – Alan Kay’s vision brought to life at last.