Are my eyes really blue?

I just got done watching the Celtic match from the weekend, where the highlight was Celtic’s 3-goal outburst in 5 minutes. Among them was another sterling free-kick from Shunsuke Nakamura, who is just incredible – Beckham wishes he could bend it like #25. And it’s amazing to think that 40 years ago, Celtic won the Champions League with a team composed entirely of players who lived within 30 miles of the stadium. Now, their most electrifying player is a 150-lb Japanese midfielder, and I’m watching them on satellite from California.

And now I’m watching a Premiership match. It’s Everton and Spurs, two teams in the second tier of my interest, but think about it – I’m watching the Premier League, from England, live from my recliner in my house in California – which I live in because I met and married a girl from Silicon Valley, who I met as the result of a group of Internet friends who led me to live in Washington DC at the time…

How different is it now? Twenty years ago, there was no public access to the Internet, no cheap mobile phones, no digital satellite TV, and long-distance telephony was expensive, not something given away as a free spiff to encourage you to get the service. Twenty years ago, if you chanced to meet a girl who lived a few states over, you were limited to cards and letters and hoping your parents wouldn’t notice the phone bill. Now we live in a world where long-distance relationships are practically routine, and living in DC and carrying on with a girl in California is hardly more difficult than carrying on with a girl in Baltimore.

So at some level, I am wildly envious of the kids these days, especially any who were in my situation in their youth – sure, maybe you’re stuck in some semi-rural exurban backwater a forty-mile drive from your friends, but as long as there’s a computer, a broadband connection and a $20 prepaid mobile phone, you don’t have to be alone. That right there should be all the justification we need to make sure there’s broadband everywhere in this country. Not the normal policy prescription, I know – but it’s stunning to imagine how profoundly different my life would have been in my teens and 20s with the application of 2007 technology.

Of course, as soon as I say that, the wireless router hangs. It’s not all cloudcuckooland here…

Celtic, Morton, Newcastle and the Redskins all win on the same day. hopefully a harbinger of Saturdays to come.

I don’t think people really grasp the extent to which penguins have been working to infiltrate our society. It’s been going on for years now, and nobody seems to have noticed. To understand the threat, we have to go back and see where it began.

The earliest days of the penguin plot against America can be traced to the 1980s. It was not an obvious conspiracy. Pengo looked for all the world like a bad Dig-Dug clone, not the penguin foray into computing. Opus seemed like an amusing cartoon character, not an attempt to insinuate the penguin into the consciousness of newspaper readers as an amusing and harmless creature. And Mario Lemieux seemed like a swift-skating sniper, not the human face of the flightless waterfowl empire slowly biding its time for takeover. Coincidences? How can anyone possibly think so?

But the penguins’ long game would not come to fruition for decades. Having softened up a generation and made them receptive to the notion of the penguin, they were content to lie in wait…for the children.

Don’t believe me? Look back on the last three years and watch the dominoes fall like hammer blows against the foundation of human society:

2005: The penguins, in cooperation with the French, launch the cinematic assault known as March of the Penguins. Produced in cooperation with the nest of treasonous vipers known as the National Geographic Society, this stunning piece of propaganda was a lightning strike into the heart of American political culture, seducing the right with its depiction of monogamous mating in even the most trying and tempting condition while luring in the left with…okay, I have no clue, but it won an Oscar so clearly Hollywood took the bait hook, line and sinker. Morgan Freeman narrated this picture and if you have the voice of God, you have won a smashing coup on the “hearts and minds” front.

2006: Happy Feet. With the willing collaboration of the Hollywood fifth column (see above), the penguins produced a staggering work of self-engrandizement that would have put Leni Riefenstahl to shame. This all-singing, all-dancing festival of manipulation was every bit as potent as its predecessor – conservatives were so distracted by the message of environmentalism that they failed to grasp how the film is objectively pro-penguinist. And Hollywood – well, they gave this film an Oscar, snubbing a Pixar feature for the first time ever. Think of that – in only two films, the penguins managed to triumph over the forces of Steve Jobs. At this point, any thinking person should have been terrified – but worse was yet to come:

2007: Surf’s Up. it’s a penguin movie – about surfing! Penguins don’t surf! From the days of Pablo and Chilly Willy, we have known that penguins are cold-weather creatures, yet here they are depicted in warm climates – and we accept this depiction. When the penguins reach our shores, we will not be alert, we will not be aware – for we will have come to assume that it is perfectly normal for penguins to inhabit temperate or even tropical climates!

At this point, it hardly seems worth it to mention the Discovery Channel’s insidious Planet Earth – a slow, steady drip drip drip of penguinism to keep us lolled into complacency. But that’s not the worst of it by far. No, indeed – the penguin menace extends into cyberspace. Club Penguin – a massively multiplayer online game that targets kids! It teaches them to build igloos! It teaches them to waddle around in the show! IT FEATURES A SECRET AGENT PROGRAM! Right under our noses, our children are being turned into the fifth column for the forthcoming penguin onslaught – and we are paying them to do it! The Disney corporation gave Club Penguin $350 million – with the promise of another $350 million if profit targets are reached – to place this program under the Disney banner! Right now, the ice that freezes Walt’s head is the training ground for the enemy within!

The penguin menace is real, my friends. We know they exist. We know they are plotting. The evidence is incontrovertible and plain as the beaks on their tiny speckled faces. The only question – the unanswerable question, the horrifying unknown –

WHAT DO THEY WANT??

I’ll have plenty of time during my week of recovery to play with online stuff…so I have reverted to Flock as my go-to browser once again.  Version 0.9 seems to be a lot cleaner than before – and if it can actually replace Camino, NNWL and ecto, that would be nice.  Funny – I can remember when Netscape Navigator 3 was your browser, mail client, newsreader and web page designer – now I have an all-in-one web browser, blogging client, feed reader…plus ca change…
Anyway, yes, I go in to get my knee scoped on Friday, hopefully reversing (or at least stalling) two decades of damage from my brother’s post-hole-covered-with-leaves stunt from the latter days of the Reagan administration.  Thanks for nothing, bro ;]

Blogged with Flock

We’re back in business, baby! Look out First Division!

I was asked today what I’d like to see in the iPhone. Leaving aside flights of fancy like direct download from the iTMS, a terminal client, a VNC client, text dictation, etc etc, I narrowed it down to a tiny handful of things that I think are reasonable expectations:

* Phone-side spam filtering, ideally feeding back to Yahoo or Google or whoever

* Support for the receipt of MMS. (They can always be sent in the form of e-mail, but not being able to receive them to a number kind of stinks)

* Multi-recipient SMS. (I admit, it breaks the carefully-crafted chat metaphor, but sometimes you gotta.)

* Some way to get text into the Notes app other than endless tapping. (Although I wouldn’t be surprised to see this sync with the Leopard version of Mail.)

My suspicion is that we’ll see a lot more things happen about the time that Leopard drops, especially in the sync area. Remember, it was supposed to be out by now, and inasmuch as the iPhone runs a version of OS X, it’s definitely Leopard (CoreAnimation is a critical part of the UI, and that’s 10.5 all the way). I wouldn’t mind seeing the new Movies widget in Dashboard as an iPhone app, though all things being equal I’m not sure I’d use one of the four remaining squares on that.

You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about ringtones. Not that I wouldn’t mind having Yakety Sax or the Vandy version of Also Sprach, but honestly, I almost *like* the extremely limited selection of ringers – it’s a nice backlash against the endless stream of bad hip-hop clips at $3 a throw. In fact, one of the best things about the iPhone is that AT&T was denied any control over UI or apps load – so it’s not burdened with “Cingular Video” or “My MEdia” or a 5-provider java mail client that replaced the perfectly useful open Moto mail piece. AT&T is a bug, not a feature, and if I had my way I’d be using this trick on T-Mob instead of Big Orange…but it wasn’t my call.

I’m still enjoying the hell out of the iPhone, make no mistake, but I find it’s not replacing the laptop when I’m at home on the couch. That’s not entirely surprising, just because 1200×800 beats the hell out of 480×320 any way you cut it. Especially when trying to catch up on a dozen feeds at once. But I am irritated that i can’t just touch the laptop screen and zoom in on Safari. =)

Now I’m just being an ass. 🙂

i get my iPhone tomorrow. Probably. At least that’s the plan. Likely as not I will be spending most of the day troubleshooting and raising hell with wireless procurement trying to get my account sorted. But hey, whatever it takes. By this time tomorrow night, the laptop will no longer be my primary connection to the Internet. Now all I need to do is make sure the Google secure Wi-Fi network works on it..

Also, here’s a tip: when choosing a co-location facility, make sure that their backup power actually comes on when the power goes out. That’s why I co-loc with my brother-in-law and not 365 Main ;]

There’s now a place in my building to go get coffee. This is a huge breakthrough. I had previously considered trying to rig things up with a French press and a bag of coarse-ground Kenya AA, or a funnel and some paper filters – we have a water cooler that does some sort of hot-water output which I had previously used for tea, but the infrastructure associated with coffee made it too tough to get the black gold until now.

Funny thing was that the guys in the shop at my last job had to have their coffee, and we had an actual pot down there as well as the stand upstairs, but I never had the compulsion to drink it that I have picked up in the last 3-4 months. I don’t know how that came about, and I apologize for repeating myself, but coffee to me is where boba tea was for my wife 5 years ago: every waking minute is spent drinking one or figuring out where the next one is coming from.

Coffee has a civilizing effect on me. I don’t know why that is, but if you go back far enough, you can see it working on me in high school, when the ground-up-dirt-and-all-with-no-milk-or-sugar brews in AP Physics got me my last A in a science class. Or in college, where the 4-cup coffepot at 8 AM was the only thing getting me to my early class January of my freshman year. Or now, where for 2 bucks or less I have a distraction, a stimulant, and a 30-second time out all in one. Not just good, good for you. Or so I hope.

My iPhone arrives at the end of the month. This will be my third pass at a smartphone in the last four years. The first was the SonyEricsson P800, which was an interesting touchscreen-based device but one which was ultimately too flawed to be useful. The second was the Nokia 6620, which was just too bloody big. But his is dead solid perfect…from all my testing. Most of all, it’s a complete replacement for my laptop 95% of the time…which begs the question, do I even keep a laptop? Couldn’t I just get by on the iMac at home?

It’s going to be quite a summer down the stretch…