Are my eyes really blue?

In retrospect, they should have just carried out tuxedo fittings at freshman orientation. If you were one of the 85% of guys in a fraternity (I wasn’t), that’s 4 formals. If you’re dating one of the 95% of girls in a sorority (I did), that’s 4 formals. If you’re in the band (I was) that’s 4 spring shows, and if you’re a varsity athlete (nope) or a booster (yup), that’s four end-of-year banquets. Hell, the booster club was called the Black Tie Club.

So math it up, add in the fact that I didn’t join the band for a year or the alumni boosters for two (yes, joined before I graduated), and you still have nine instances requiring a tuxedo. NINE TIMES. Only an idiot would rent rather than buying at that point. Granted, it took me a rental or two to grasp this, but I latched on soon enough and bought something serviceable. Actually hung onto it and got use from it all through the 90s, including a number of uses after undergrad.

In fact, the last time I wore it out in public was the last NGS Prom in 2001. I could still (mostly) fit into it, which was good – not as well as I’d fit in it back in 1997, though, for real. And when I moved out here in 2004, I reluctantly left it behind for my brother in case he needed it. And I always had in the back of my mind that I’d have to buy another one…but I missed the obvious opportunity (my own WEDDING) and then didn’t have anything else come up. When you’re in the tech sector, anything with a tie is exceedingly rare…until now.

See, the wife’s company is having their holiday party Saturday in the city. I don’t know precisely what holiday this is for – Burns Night? Australia Day? The Feast of St Alberic? – but what the hell, it’s black tie, so I went out to Nordstrom and let them do their thing with the tape and the chalk, and now I have a nicely-altered tux that should work for me for the next ten years, easily.

Now I just need somewhere else to wear it…

24 years ago, on January 24, 1984, Apple debuted the Macintosh. It was supposed to be “The computer for the rest of us.” The problem is, the rest of us took to it like a duck to water, including some people who probably never should have been let near a computer. However, it was accessible enough that a grad student in a completely non-technical field could learn its secrets well enough to provide support for that “rest of us” – and for over a decade now, my entire livelihood has been bound up with the Mac.

So yeah, when people talk about how the Macintosh changed the world: exhibit A, right here.

…but I’m not.
And another candidacy goes chunk-chunk. Don’t worry, Fred – you can still find work – after nuclear war, there won’t be anything left but cockroaches, Mike Cassidy, and Law and Order reruns.

…blink, you little weasel! BLINK!!

NBC CEO Jeff Zucker puckers up to Steve Jobs’s posterior [Apple]:

Looks like that “go it alone and do without iTunes as a distribution mechanism” is going JUST GROOVY for the Nothing But Crap network. I guess giving away the resource that made The Office work in the US is the sort of blunder that can be covered by a rousing season of Celebrity Apprentice, right? RIGHT?

I have a vision of Steve sitting on his throne, watching Phil Schiller wrench Jeff Zucker’s head in a full nelson, saying “Not just yet, Phil.”

I like this vision.

WIFE: Do you want some of the teriyaki meatballs?

ME: Only if you’re going to fix some anyway.

WIFE: It’s no trouble, they just pop in the microwave.

ME: They’re pre-cooked? Hell, if I’d known that I would have fixed them for lunch this week.

WIFE (sing-song voice): Read, mother-!!!!er, reeeeead…

…a rare opportunity to prove that I’m not totally in the bag for Apple.

I didn’t get to see the keynote – I was following it online, like the rest of the peasants, idly hitting refresh every 5 minutes or so while listening to a podcast and waiting for a callback from somebody who’d installed Google Earth and thought their available hard drive space had dropped from 97 GB to 24 GB. (The truth is too saddening to relate so I won’t.) As they checked off every rumored point (turns out even the leaked video of the 1.1.3 update was spot-on), I said, wait for it, wait for it…

And sure enough: MacBook Air. I saw the device, and I saw the specs, and I immediately thought:

Cube.



The MacBook Air (MBA – what a perfect choice of initials) is sleek, stylish, woefully underpowered compared to its peers, and a horrible value for money for 99% of the consumer public. Hell, by the time you pay to add 1 GB of Apple’s expensive RAM to the cheapest MacBook, you’re still getting out for $750 less than it would cost to add Ethernet and DVD pieces to the MBA – and you wind up with a faster system in the MacBook without having to carry any extra bits.

The MBA is basically the dream machine for CEOs, CIOs, other C_O douches and VPs who wish they were. It’s fashionable, it weighs nothing in the designer carry-on briefcase, you can check your email in the first class lounge and watch movies in flight. And that’s it. No FireWire port, so forget about any serious video work. Only one USB port, so forget about any peripheral work heavier than syncing your iPhone. And if you want to use the disc sharing feature to borrow somebody else’s DVD drive, you’ll need to carry around the installer DVD everywhere.

Workstation support staff of the world, I feel your pain. Every prima donna senior manager on earth is going to want one of these things.

At least with the iPhone, you can say yes, overly stylish and expensive and attractive to the kind of swine who became Republicans because of Alex P. Keaton, but it also completely replaces a laptop for two weeks at a time. Mostly, though, it’s a secondary device. The bottom line on the MBA is this: you could not get by with it as the only computer you owned.



Apple’s done some amazing things in the last decade, but this would be the most stunning of all if it works: creating an entirely new market segment for mid-life crisis computers.

You wouldn’t have thought it this morning – winter fog, the dense kind that makes it unnerving to drive around here where people can’t even cope with rain – but as of 3 PM, the sun is out and there’s blue sky and while there’s a damp sort of cool in the air, it definitely feels like spring felt growing up – well, maybe not proper spring, but the way it used to get around the last week in February when you’d actually break out shorts and a T-shirt…right before a foot of snow two weeks later.
But I guess that’s par for the course. Spring normally starts here in February, so I guess we’re ahead of schedule. Could be worse, though – at least it’s not pouring rain.
Anything happen in the tech world today?

Transformers stank to the ends of the earth…but this post makes it all worthwhile.

I finally dug in the bag of stuff I brought back from my last job – and in it was my everyday pipe, a bag of tobacco and my pipe Zippo. So I lit up out on the porch, and here I am. It’s not as big a time commitment as a cigar would be.

Which makes me think about the hat.

January 2002. We go to NYC. Party with Tray, drink with Lisa, breakfast with Erica in Lower Manhattan – where a strong wind blew me into a shop and out with a hat. A Kangol flat cap in gray wool. Before long, I had a long gray scarf to go with it, and I had my whole Northeastern look going, representing Ireland or the North of England or Cooley High, take your pick. But out in California, you don’t need the warm topper very often, if at all.

This past Christmas, down in Alabama, I went through a bunch of stuff my mom is trying to push off on me in her continuing attempt to clean out the house. Among the things there was one of my late father’s hats that I never knew he owned. A gray Kangol wool flat cap. Which had to have been bought at least 4 years before I bought mine.

The weather’s still warmer here than in DC, but I’m wearing a gray flat cap again.

ETA: Proof that the memory is the first thing to go – apparently E. didn’t move up there until 2003. Which I guess sounds right, although everything in Lower Manhattan runs together – whether it’s shopping, dining, or throwing Lisa’s contact lens out the window. I don’t think I realized it wasn’t disposable…

Noted without comment. None needed.
BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to do?
MATTHEWS: Yes sir?
BROKAW: Wait for the voters to make their judgment.
MATTHEWS: Well what do we do then in the days before the ballot? We must stay home, I guess.
BROKAW: No, no we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today, what moved them to vote. You can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that have not been fully explored during all this. But we don’t have to get in the business of making judgments before the polls have closed. And trying to stampede in effect the process.
BROKAW: Look, I’m not just picking on us, it’s part of the culture in which we live these days. I think that the people out there are going to begin to make judgments about us if we don’t begin to temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding, in many cases, as we learned in New Hampshire when they went into the polling booth today or in the last three days. They were making decisions very late.