Month: October 2013

In a strange and chaotic world, it’s good to know that some things are reliable as clockwork…like the Atlanta Braves crapping the bed in the playoffs every single time out.  For at least the sixth time in a row, the Braves reached the playoffs only to be eliminated in the very first series.  It’s like an entire team of Peyton Mannings.

It wasn’t always like that.  The Braves went from worst record in the bigs in 1990 to the World Series in 1991, which is about the time I caught onto baseball (aside from a brief flurry of interest in the Mets-Red Sox in 1986; I regret to say I was on the wrong side of that).  My late grandfather, who was something of my spirit animal in the latter days of my adolescence, had been a huge baseball fan, and his brother-in-law was as fond of the Braves as he was the Tennessee Volunteers.  And it was on a family trip in the summer of 1991 when I caught the bug from him after a couple of nights of watching TBS.  And since this was the beginning of my sports fixation, it did no harm at all to latch onto a team whose exploits could be followed effortlessly on television or radio every single night.

And so I rolled with the Braves through back-to-back World Series losses, and through a gripping pennant race in 1993 when they spent the summer chasing the San Francisco Giants (oh, irony).  I saw my first major league game, and saw the Giants’ new acquisition Barry Bonds hit a home run so hard I swore the ball disintegrated before my eyes.  I watched Birmingham grind to a halt for three days in August as the Braves and Giants battled directly (and the Braves swept, if memory serves) and sweated out the last day of the season as the Braves handily dispatched the Rockies while the hated Dodgers got the better of the Giants.  And the Braves won, 104 games to 103.  The Braves went to the NLCS to lose to the Phillies.  The Giants got nothing.

Then the strike in 1994, then another World Series in 1995, and the Braves won.  And at that point, I sort of felt my obligations were discharged, and stopped paying attention.  And somewhere in there, I found out that the Seattle Mariners were streaming their games over the Internet, and the latter days of my Vandy career are bound up with memories of late nights with an AM-quality crackle of Dave Niehaus coming out of the PowerMac 6100 between RealPlayer buffering.

It was all American League for a while, to be honest. I met a new girlfriend from Ohio, a huge fan of baseball in general and the Cleveland Indians in particular, and so it happened that my second major league game ever was Game 5 of the 1997 World Series.  My baseball affections drifted aimlessly between the Mariners and the Royals before settling lightly on the Red Sox, and my shelves quickly creaked beneath the body of literature surrounding that most star-crossed of franchises.  Besides, it seemed like half my crazy Internet friends were Sox fans, so there you go.

And then the Giants happened.  First I saw them in 2000 on the same road trip where I first met my future wife in person.  Then we took the stadium tour together in March of 2002.  Then they went to the World Series, and they were my default team thenceforth.  I still pulled for the Red Sox when I noticed them in the postseason, but that was about it – any interest in baseball at the professional level went to the San Francisco Giants.  And in 2010 and 2012, it suddenly paid off.  It wasn’t the same as when Vandy won the SEC tournament, or would have been had we won the College World Series or the Skins gone to the Super Bowl, but it was still meaningful.  Just like 2004, when Game 6 of the ALCS found me fixed on a TV in the laundromat, endlessly repeating “Thousands Are Sailing” on a gold iPod mini as the blood seeped through Curt Schilling’s sock.

And now I have a Vandy pitcher for a local team – Sonny Gray, plying his trade for the Oakland A’s mere yards from the stadium where Festus Ezili plies his trade for the Golden State Warriors.  Maybe next year is the year I give equal love to the A’s.  Or maybe Detroit calls up some of their many Vandy selections.  Or maybe the Giants or Nationals sign David Price in free agency (the Nats arrived after I left, but I still feel a tiny pull there).

But it’s out there. And it’s a welcome bit of autumn to have around when the temperatures steadfastly insist on sticking around 80 of an afternoon and the leaves are taking their time about turning…fall is coming.

Of which more later.

So AT&T made it official: effective in two weeks, you will no longer be able to buy anything but a Mobile Share plan for your phone.  Which basically puts them in line with the rest of cellular America: you are obligated to buy unlimited voice and text, and the price differentiator is only on data.  For AT&T, a single user with 2 GB data a month (in other words, typical iPhone setup) will cost you $95 a month…in other words, $40 more than AIO will charge you for prepaid service with no contract on the same damned network.

Seriously, I have signed my last contract. It’s going to be all T-Mobile or AIO from now on, as soon as I’m left to my own devices (SEE WHAT I DID THERE).  But that brings up another interesting conundrum.  Observe:

 

New Nexus 7 (2013) with cellular data, 32 GB – $349

New iPad Mini with cellular data, 32 GB – $559

New iPad retina with cellular data, 32 GB – $729

 

New iPhone 5C, white, 32 GB, unlocked – $649

New Moto X developer edition, 32 GB, unlocked – $649

New iPhone 5S, gold, 32 GB, unlocked – $749

 

There you go.  Across the board, a new smartphone is more expensive than a tablet of similar make and capacity.  Yet because of years of contract subsidies, we’re conditioned to think that a tablet costs more than a phone.  Nevertheless, if you buy that white 5C unlocked and put it on AIO, your savings over two years? Five hundred dollars. That’s after paying full price up front for the phone.  In fact, at $40 a month, you’ve made up the upfront out-of-pocket cost in a year.  On top of that, you’re free to change between AIO and T-Mobile every other month if you like.  Hell, you could be on AIO, then switch to T-Mobile for a month when going abroad so as to have the same number and free international data roaming, then switch back to AT&T’s network on AIO when you return.  That’s an entirely realistic and feasible scenario.

But the thing is, you have to change your thinking.  It didn’t occur to me that I should be looking to replace my iPad next March. I’ve had it a year and a half, it’s running just fine – there’s no contract coming up. More importantly, there’s no monthly nut to make that won’t get any lower just because the contract’s run out.  With a contract, keeping your existing phone doesn’t gain you anything; you’re paying the subsidy rate every month whether you’re paying the phone off or not.  So the impulse is to jump on the upgrade as soon as the new phone comes out, because you may as well have the benefit of the subsidy.

By contrast – the wife will have the iPhone 5, and the iPhone 4S she still has will be left over.  If I had to give up my work phone, for whatever reason, that 4S will run iOS 7 pretty good.  Replacing the battery yourself is feasible for not much money.  And boom, there’s an entirely viable phone, running for $55 a month on AIO.  You can replace the phone whenever you need to replace the phone, not on a 2-year cycle. But for this to work long-term, people have to start thinking in terms of the full value of the phone, and wrapping your head around the prospect that a phone costs $650 – more than a tablet – is going to be a heavy lift for a lot of folks.

So over the last week or so, battery performance on the phone has deteriorated to what it was before, complete with random loss of 10% battery or dying with 7 or 9 or 11 (!) percent remaining on the meter.  So I took the phone back into the Apple Store today, they ran the diagnostics, and sure enough, the battery is now below the red line for warranty replacement.  And so they popped a new battery in there, which is a twist; in the past they just replaced an entire handset for battery issues.  I suspect that’s gone by the boards, and I’m just as pleased it has; I suspect that the 4S replacement I got once had battery issues of its own thanks to being refurb, but anyway.

So the new battery had 50% on it when I got it.  It was at 40% after I forcibly rebooted, and I hit the sleep switch and stuck it in my pocket at 1:05.  When I pulled it out next, at 1:30, it was at 32%.  In other words, it bled 8% of battery in 25 minutes of idle time in my pocket.

I said before that if Apple’s allowing real true multitasking now, then they’d better have some way to strap an arc reactor to the back of the phone or else expect mayfly-style battery life.  I strongly suspect that’s the case; apps that are not properly written to work with iOS 7 may well be strangling the thing.  Or maybe it really is down to Verizon; some of those huge battery leaks are associated with times when I’m on cellular only and in poor signal areas.  In any event, to borrow the words of Richard Hammond, “it’s pretty poor, mate.”

Obviously I’m going to run through a full charge/discharge/charge cycle with the new battery before I commit to much, and that will probably be the weekend.  By Monday, I hope to be able to test normally and see how the new battery holds up; assuming it really is new and fully capable, I ought to see a theoretical capacity improvement of around 25%.  Which means that I should be seeing close to nine hours’ battery life on mixed use, about what I had when the phone was new (and before iOS 7 came down the pike).

Key word: should.

Other things left to try: whittle down some of the iOS 7 features that are sucking down battery (which I left in their default state after getting the phone clean-reset at the Apple Store before, just for the sake of clean test conditions).  Frequent Locations has yet to do anything for me anyway and I can live without parallax.  After that, the next step is to activate the T-Mobile SIM and see if GSM without LTE is any kinder to the battery (such a step is not practical with Verizon, as the next step down is shitty-speed EV-DO which is as much a battery suck as LTE).  If that actually makes things better, then we have some negotiating to do at work.  But if neither turning off things nor using a different network has a material impact on the phone…I don’t know what comes after that.

For what it’s worth, the first rumblings from the Great Mentioner about a notional iPhone 6 suggest a 4.8″ display, which would basically be 1366×768 at the same DPI.  Which is a 44% increase in the square-footage of the display, which (to my mind at least) suggests a 44% increase in available battery volume at the same depth/thickness.  If I got an extra 44% of what I’m supposed to be getting, that would be 13 hours or more of actual use – close to 15 based on the purported stats of the iPhone 5S or 5C.  And that gets close to the battery of the Moto X, which also has a 4.7″ display in an enclosure not that much bigger than an iPhone 5…

Long story short (too late): if for some reason I have to give this iPhone 5 up, there are worse things I could do than replace the battery in my (technically now my wife’s) out-of-warranty iPhone 4S and wait out next year.

Twenty years ago, as I was tooling up to a grad school career in political science, I watched the shift happening in the GOP.  I watched the 1988 Presidential campaign, and the 1992 Presidential campaign, and how H. Ross Perot could pull 19% of the vote despite the fact that most of his supporters probably considered Bush their second choice and knowing full well Perot couldn’t land a single electoral vote.  I watched Newt Gingrich laying the groundwork for a takeover of the Congressional GOP.  I watched long-term incumbent Congressmen and Senators retire in the South, to be replaced by Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction.

And I declared then and there that we were headed for a second American Civil War.  And here we are.

We have states attempting nullification.  We have an entire party in Congress holding not only the federal budget but the full faith and credit of the United States hostage…unless the Democrats and the President willingly give up on the single biggest policy priority of his administration.  The bill passed in both houses, with a supermajority in the Senate necessitated by the unprecedented abuse of the filibuster.  It passed Constitutional muster with the Supreme Court.  The President who signed the law was re-elected handily.  The Senate stayed in the hands of the party that passed it. And more votes were cast for Democrats than Republicans in the House, but the House stayed Republican by dint of gerrymandered districts.

And yet, the House demands that Obamacare cease to exist. That’s the negotiating position: give us what we could not get by legislative or electoral means, or we will force a default.  And then, a bunch of shuck-and-jive about how a default wouldn’t be that bad, and it’s all the President’s fault because he can just pay the interest on the debt and we ought to get rid of 32% of the government anyway, la-di-da.  Which is the consequence of enabling stupidity.

Medicare. Social Security. Defense.  Pick one.  Once you’ve paid the interest on the debt, one of those is going to get hit badly if you re-order priorities, because those three plus the interest amount to three-quarters of the Federal budget. And because 32 is greater than 25, that means that you’re talking about getting rid of every single thing the federal government does, plus gouging one of those three.

This is what we get. This is the inevitable result of the golden mean, the constant search for false equivalence, the pious Villager nonsense of “both sides do it, a plague on both your houses.”  This is the price of acting as if people constantly braying about taking back the country as they demand to carry guns in Starbucks and threaten citizen juries to arrest all Congressmen are anything but fucking nutjobs who should be in a home, not treated as equal participants in political debate.  This is what happens when an entire political party crafts its message and its purpose around “live in fear,” and then is too terrified of its own sociopaths to act against them.

It’s time for the President to embrace the power of no.  No negotiations.  No bargains. No face-saving gestures.  The GOP owns this until they back down.  The United States is not a hostage for Confederates to bargain with for what they couldn’t win by fair means or force of arms.  It stops now.

Uncle Sam’s got the hydrogen bomb.

I don’t know what to tell you. Every time we think we’ve made a step forward, we stumble about five yards back. We don’t have an everyday running back, we have one receiver and that one gets keyed on constantly, and our experiment to see if you can win a game in the SEC with no linebackers is, so far, a disaster.  Much as I would love the students to all be there in the first quarter, we should start with making sure the football team is there first and work up from there.

It’s going to be an ugly year for Vanderbilt sports, what with the complete loss of our entire recruiting class from last year in basketball and a football team that looks like being .500 at the halfway mark…with Florida, Georgia and Texas A&M left to play, not to mention at a Tennessee team that’s probably good enough to beat us.  And that’s before factoring in the cloud still hanging over the school from the events of the offseason.

But the worst thought about Vanderbilt athletics is this: this may be the restoration of normal service. This is the best run of Commodore football since 1974-75.  No football coach since 1948 has more than one winning season at Vanderbilt, and we’ve beaten the Vols exactly eight times since the war.  Eight times in sixty-seven seasons.  That’s not a rivalry, that’s an abattoir. We can do well in women’s hoop, we can do really well in baseball, but let’s face it, that’s not what this league grades on, is it?

The thing is, we as fans want to believe.  We want to.  We desperately want to think that things can be different.  But nobody else does.  No other teams, no media, no neutral observers.  Everybody, literally everybody else, just assumes that we will inevitably revert to the mean and be good for two wins a season.  Teams that don’t have a conference win, teams that have been getting blown out, teams in disarray on the verge of firing their coach: they all look at Vanderbilt on the schedule and automatically write down W. We beat Ole Miss five of six coming into this season, and they still had that game down as a win.

This is a bet. We’re betting a nontrivial chunk of Martha Ingram’s money that if we pay for a good young coach, pay for his staff, pay for new facilities and pay the freight to try to be competitive with the rest of the league, we can be.  Good enough to compete, good enough not to be an automatic W, good enough that we’re not treated like a punchline, good enough to be taken seriously against Alabama and Florida and LSU and Georgia and Texas A&M and South Carolina and…

…that’s really the problem, isn’t it? We’re stuck in a conference whose schools are basically feeder institutions for the football teams, one where the SEC routinely has half the top 10 teams in the country.  Every year, we get Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and Ole Miss, plus Tennessee and Kentucky and now Missouri for our trouble, and then people give us shit when we don’t want to pile Northwestern and Ohio State on top of that.  Ask Cal how playing both the Buckeyes and Wildcats went for them, and they got them both at home. Our season is an uphill climb, every single year.  Our best performance since 1915 was good for 4th place in the SEC East, and a bowl game five miles from campus.  A top-20 recruiting class in the nation was good for a whopping ninth place in the conference.  We’ve got four-star athletes that we’ve never had before…and they’re lining up against five-stars.

Anybody who’s watched the last two years knows this isn’t the same old Vandy.  The biggest fear I have is that it won’t make a difference.  The SEC may well have reached a spot where our football program is simply not structurally capable of being a peer competitor.  We need a lot of money, a lot of time, and a shit-ton of patience if we’re going to change the culture and change the fate of our program.  I don’t know how long the money will last, but time is running out and patience may be in short supply in the places where it’s needed most.

“Common connotations: pessimism, depression, blandness, boredom, neutrality, fog, undefinedness, old age, contentment, the brain, speed.”

Just as my years in DC were definitely the Man In Black era, the timeframe of this blog could very easily be characterized as the Gray Age.  It shows in the wardrobe – the stack of American Apparel T-shirts, the overpriced Saboteur sport coat, the pricey Walk-Over suede wingtips, both pair of Converse (One-Star and All-Star Pro alike), the San Jose Giants cap, my new everyday-wear Vanderbilt hat – all bought in the last five years and all in gray.  At one point, I was even considering a brown-and-gray Timbuk2 bag just to match the general trend in my apparel.

Pessimism and depression? Hard to argue that hasn’t been a driving theme, especially the last year or so.  Blandness? Boredom? You’d have to ask my friends.  Oddly enough, this has been a time when I’ve gotten content with doing nothing.  Some of the most enjoyable times of this year have been at home by myself, completely disconnected from the Internet, watching a twenty-year-old television show or a live feed of a British news channel.

Or driving in the fog.  That thick morning ceiling of gray turned into a wall of it out by Pacifica on the night of the season opener for the Skins, when I could tune in the satellite radio and listen to the gang in DC describe the unfolding disaster.  When I left the border of Santa Clara county on 280, it was in the mid-80s and hot and bright. By the time I pulled onto the ramp for Highway 1, it was overcast and gray.  By the time I pulled into the parking lot of the famous beachside Taco Bell, I couldn’t see the ocean from the road and it was in the mid-60s and dropping.  And it was breathtakingly gorgeous.

Gray fits the ambiguity.  We had to cut Chris Boyd off from Vanderbilt football, because he did a bad thing – but he thought he was doing it for the right reasons, and he couldn’t have done a bad thing unless some other people had done a far worse thing, but nevertheless you can’t let him represent Vanderbilt anymore, but you don’t want to necessarily kick him out of school, because he technically pled guilty to a misdemeanor and only got unsupervised probation…gray. You’re not going to be happy no matter what you decide.  And then you have to turn around and think about the football team, and feel guilty for considering the implications of cutting loose a Biletnikoff-watchlist wide receiver who didn’t play a down this year because you wanted to do the right thing rather than the most advantageous thing for the football program.  

And then there’s the morning…before daylight savings ends, when throwing that dark towel over the glass of the shower eats up the early glimmer and makes it ever so slightly easier to pull out of bed in the morning. The thin ribbon of gray in the sky, before the sun gets its teeth brushed and its first cup of coffee, when it’s cool and quiet out and things really haven’t started moving yet.  It wasn’t until those dark days at NASA in 2008 when I realized that for the first time in my life, the cool quiet morning before anyone else shows up was the best part of the workday.  After years and years of a 9:30 AM start, getting in before 8 suddenly became a legitimately attractive prospect.

But I guess the most telling instance of gray can be seen around the temples, even after getting the number-one crop at the barber shop. The years are rolling by, and the evidence is there.  For the first time, I can look in the mirror and what I see at first glance is a middle-aged man.  For better or worse.

So on the day I posted that last update on my battery situation, I tested the phone again with the aforementioned settings, basically turning off everything that makes iOS 7 different.  Amazingly, I got four hours mixed use out of the first 40% of battery life.  But then it dropped another 20% in the ensuing hour.  I then put the phone in airplane mode, turned wi-fi back on, and got another two hours’ use out of it, for a total of seven hours…and then, with 9% showing on the battery, the phone died.  So seven hours of use, two of which were with no cellular at all and two more of which were nothing but audio playback.  Not good, especially when this same phone would turn in 9 hours of mixed use with almost constant audio in the past.

A trip to the Apple Store Genius Bar revealed a number of crashing apps, including system processes. It also showed a battery on the borderline of requiring a replacement, enough so that they flagged it for replacement if the problems continue irrespective of warranty status.  Well done Apple.  At that point, they wiped the phone completely and imaged it in full-on restore mode, and I set it up as new.  And I mean completely new.  Turned on iTunes Match rather than sync with the desktop, allowed photos to come down from iPhoto Stream rather than sync, downloaded apps and rearranged them manually rather than sync.  And I didn’t reinstall any of the work MDM profiles; I just manually configured the required passcode protections and such.

I also tweaked a few of the settings, but not that many.  I did turn off parallax view and put up a static wallpaper, and I turned off some of the location settings, but I left Frequent Locations and background updating turned on.  This is, after all, iOS 7 – it shouldn’t be necessary to gut the features of the OS to get a working device.  And then I let it run down to almost nothing last night before charging it overnight and setting out this morning.

Right this instant, I’m on 95% battery after 1:13 of mixed use, so maybe it worked.  Fingers crossed.  I’m hoping this will be enough to keep the thing viable for a while; I’m not exactly relishing the thought of having to convince management to get me a new device and a new carrier after less than a year.  But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t deadly curious what the wife’s presumed new iPhone 5S will do on AT&T’s LTE network relative to mine on VZW.

I can tell you this, though: a standard civilian plan on AT&T (no corporate discounts) with 450 minutes talk (plus 5000 night/weekend minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile) plus unlimited texting and 3 GB data is $90 a month.  The exact same plan (unlimited calling/texts, 3 GB data/month) on the exact same network (AIO Wireless is a subsidiary of AT&T) is only $65 a month. And since I only need 2 GB of data – an option AT&T doesn’t offer; it’s either 300 MB or straight to 3 GB – I could actually pay only $55 to AIO.

That’s huge.  I mean, huge.  There’s no contract, no 2-year commitment, and even if I paid full price for a 32 GB gold iPhone 5S, that $750 is still less than the $840 I would pay over two years on AT&T’s plan (not to mention I’m still paying AT&T $299 up front for the device).  If I go with the plan I actually want, buying the phone up front and using AIO, the net result over 2 years is a savings of $630…which is just about enough to buy a new phone after two years all by itself.

So, next steps? Use this thing for a couple more days and see how it runs.  If the battery starts to flake again, it’s worth seeing what happens if I use the T-Mob SIM…which means no LTE and possibly flaky coverage, but lower-powered GSM fallback instead of battery-thirsty CDMA.  At least it eliminates Verizon’s specific network as part of the problem, and besides, even if if I never test that out, the SIM only cost me $1.06 shipped.  Basically, the decision chain is:

IF IT DOESN’T WORK: try the T-Mobile SIM and see if moving to a GSM solution fixes or at least ameliorates the battery drain.

IF THAT DOESN’T WORK: take the phone back into Apple and see if the application crashing persists – and if it does, I don’t know what happens from there aside from “wait for an OS update and hope the wife hasn’t traded in the 4S yet”.

IF THE CRASHING IS GONE: hope against hope that they’ll take mercy on me and replace the battery, or that it will have dropped into the replacement zone on the diagnostics.  If they don’t, the plan falls back to “hope the wife hasn’t traded in the 4S yet” coupled with “hope to find someone who can replace the battery on said out-of-warranty 4S for cheap.”  After all, other than a slightly bigger screen and LTE, there’s not much to separate the 5 from the 4S…

And hopefully, everything will play nicely and I can go back to civilized conversations with normal people again. =)

We have a political party that lives in a world of its own making.  In TeaWorld, you get all your news from Fox and from an army of AM radio gasbags and from hundreds of emails with “FW: Fw: FW: fwd: FW:” in the subject line (and red dots on Snopes).  In TeaWorld, the President of the United States is an illegitimately-elected, Constitutionally-ineligible Muslim atheist [sic] from Kenya who is determined to drag American into godless socialist Islamist [sic] tyranny.  And his new health care scheme will automatically bring about the downfall of the nation and lead to Grandma being chopped into meatloaf to be served as croquettes at interracial gay weddings.

This is what they genuinely believe.  This is what their elected officials ran on.  And when you put it like that – you lost an election which was improperly stolen from you, you lost another election which was improperly stolen from you, the Supreme Court intervened on behalf of a shiftless Negro just like in the 1950s, and now the country hangs on the precipice of doom if this plan takes effect? Why the hell wouldn’t you shut down the government?  If the very survival of your country and your race will be forfeit, why not fight with every last weapon available to you?

The nilhism of the populist 90s – term limits, throw out all incumbents, the rise of Perot as the man-on-horseback alternative because he was rich and thus must be good at things – all of that was a necessary ingredient in the runup to what we have now: the refusal to govern at all. This is the necessary end result of fifty years of conservatism: the desire to break the government for the pure sake of breaking it. It’s nullification, really. It’s John C. Calhoun, it’s the South risen again. It’s the idea that despite an election, despite another election, despite Supreme Court decisions and CBO projections and the misgivings of a plurality of their own elected party, the Teatards are nonetheless entitled to have the world bend to their will, just because. 

We should have been fighting to break the stupid a lot earlier. Instead, we propped it up and walked it around and let it sit at the table.  Now, matters are worse, and the potential is there for them to get a hell of a lot worse before they get better. The only hope is that at some point, once they’ve killed the hostage, their leverage is completely gone. If there’s  actually a debt ceiling-related default, then there’s nothing left to fear; the damage is done. At that point, it’s time for Harry Reid to borrow some testicles and unilaterally do away with the filibuster, and it’s time for the Democrats to insist on a strict party-line vote in both houses of Congress and expel anyone who insists on trying to split the difference with a bunch of redneck insurrectionists.

This is why I recognize no corporeal authority save for His Majesty Emperor Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.  He was right about a bridge over the bay, he was right about the abomination of “Frisco,” and it looks like he was dead-on about dissolving Congress.