Month: December 2010

Well, Google hasn’t been half shaggin’ busy this month, have they? Google Books was inevitable, and is quite frankly redundant in a world where I’m already stuck into Kindle for fifty books, but the rest of the week’s announcements merit some attention.

Android 2.3 (codename: Gingerbread) looks pretty damn nice. There seems to be a bit of Snow Leopard-ing happening here: more features, sure, but the bulk of effort put on refining and polishing what’s there already. The UI is cleaner, the keyboard on-screen is greatly improved, the power management is supposedly quite a bit better, things like that. Some of the features are very impressive – built-in support for wi-fi sharing of your 3G connection, or SIP support for easy-peasy VOIP – but the fact that even Google concedes up front that carriers will probably strip those functions out should tell you all you need to know about what the weak link in Android is.

Samsung’s Nexus S looks like a treat, too. The latest “pure Google experience” reference phone comes with Gingerbread and no carrier tweaks, and can be bought unlocked…for the same $529 as the original Nexus One. The good news is that Google has gone to school on the bust that was the direct-sales model for the Nexus One, and the S will be available at Best Buy. You can also get it for $199 on T-Mobile – which is probably the way you should go; with no 850/1900 G3 or any CDMA support, the only reason to buy it unlocked is if you want to go month-to-month on T-Mob; even the unlocking isn’t that much of a feature when T-Mobile themselves will gladly unlock your phone 90 days into the contract. Feature-wise, it’s more or less on a par with the industry standard: gigahertz processor, dual cameras with 5.0 MP and HD video on the primary, 16 GB built-in storage. The curved glass of the AMOLED display is intriguing, certainly, and if the Gingerbread modifications to power management work out, it should be an all-day gamer on par with the iPhone 4. I think the guy at TechCrunch was right: it won’t make you throw your iPhone 4 in the sink, but it will absolutely make you want to move from any other Android phone.

The last thing is the Google Chrome OS-based device, netbook or whatever. I think this one is a year late; this time last year, a lean whippy cloud-based netbook for $199 would have been a game-changer. Instead, we’ve got a 12-inch netbook that will come along “sometime in 2011” with a browser-based and “web apps” and some sort of pervasive Verizon connectivity (though you can bet THAT will cost you – 100 MB a month ain’t shit if you’re using anything stronger than a smartphone).

Now, in a world where everybody wants tablets (and desperately wants Android to support bigger than 480×800 resolution), a netbook with virtually no storage and a working model based on permanent persistent Internet access may be a tougher sell. My question is how viable are “web apps” in a world where you have, well, a web browser? Apps make a lot of sense for a smartphone, because you have to repackage for a 4″ screen form factor and work around things like Flash and Java, but many of the things you’d use an app for on, say, the iPhone – Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Texts From Last Night – work just as well if not better as their respective websites. Then again, an OS designed to run in a browser may require an app-based solution to work effectively with a tablet – so now you have to wonder whether there’s a two-prong approach with Android and ChromeOS as competing visions of how to do tablet computing.

And then there’s the money angle – what are people prepared to pay for these things? I recall saying last year that there’s no reason Google couldn’t bring these things in for $200 or less. Obviously this was in a pre-iPad world, but I think the price point is still somewhat relevant – factor in the webcam and the 3G modem and you make up for the offset cost of cheaper RAM and Flash storage. If Samsung can deliver this for $199, then this is the purest vision of cloud computing yet: you have just enough hardware and software to run the interface, which in turn points out to the cloud for storage and apps and probably not a small amount of processing power; after all, you can do the heavy lifting elsewhere and just send the results back to the UI, which lets you get by with very little onboard CPU…

Google will probably still sell a million of these. It’s your grandmother’s laptop, basically – as long as the connection’s live, the OS is ridiculously simple and reinstalls itself at the first sign of a glitch, and everything else is a webpage. It’s definitely a unique vision for where computing is headed, spearheaded by the one company with the cash to burn on it and the most to gain from being your one-stop cloud for everything.

If/when Google and Facebook finally get together, brace yourself.

ETA: One big thing I missed initially: it looks like we’re going to be six months until these things ship to the general public. That’s six months for more tablets to ship, almost certainly including a notional iPad 2. We’re going to get the Chrome OS netbook fully a year and a half after the thing was announced. I’m not sure how big a bet I’d want to put on these things given that bit of information.

When I first moved to Nashville, there was a mall at every point of the compass and one practically under me. Rivergate to the north, Cool Springs Galleria to the south, Bellvue to the east and Hickory Hollow to the west, and Green Hills just down the road. And I spent a lot of the 1994 Christmas season darting between them.

Green Hills was closest, and hands-down the most posh. (Ten years later it would get Nashville’s first Apple Store.) It lacked a bookstore, but it was right down the road from Davis-Kidd and not far from Bookstar, so there were plenty of options for that anyway. It was there that I would duck into Mozarella’s, sit at the bar, order a loaded baked potato with potato soup, and get filled up quick while bypassing the half-hour wait for an actual table. For me, this was quite the innovation, which should tell you something about how thrilling my life was.

Rivergate, in the north, was the oldest mall – it had the same feel as Eastwood Mall back home. One level, old buildings, but it was a huge sprawling ramble of a mall. Hickory Hollow, in the west, was your typical bog-standard two-story suburban mall, while Bellvue, to the east, was a smaller more boutique-type mall whose exclusive stores started moving to Green Hills or Cool Springs Galleria, south of town and HUGE. It was still possible to leave the office at 4 and hit all five before they closed, even at the height of the Christmas madness, because I was just that bloody minded.

I think part of it was just that the malls represented a big chunk of novelty – a new town meant new TV and radio, new stores, new highways and byways to learn, and I wanted to just run around and soak up the difference, whether it meant Caster-Knott or Dillard’s for department stores or Boston Market for dinner or Lightning 100 on the radio or the Channel 4 local news or the pseudo-beltway of 440-to-40-to-24-to-65. New side-routes to learn (the “invisible beltway” of assorted pikes and parkways), new hole-in-the-wall dining (the taqueria on Nolensville Road), and to cap it all off, positioning such that a whole array of clear-channel AM broadcasts became clearly audible, from St Louis and Cleveland and Cincinnati and New Orleans. In short, instead of just being in a new and different bubble, it felt like the jumping-off point to a bigger and wider world.

Bellvue’s closed now, and Hickory Hollow and Rivergate are reportedly circling the drain. Nothing really stays how you left it. But it’s hard not to think of Christmas and not think of dashing through the malls, picking up the leather coat that became the Elk, splashing out on more Vanderbilt stuff just because I went there and I had room on the credit card – the only holiday where I went from the Herd back to the Argonauts without missing a beat and belonged twice over. And because surprisingly, Northern California’s mall scene is nowhere near what I would have anticipated all those years ago…

So here’s how it would look twenty years ago, before even the Bowl Alliance was a gleam in someone’s eye, and the Big East was a basketball league:

ROSE: Oregon vs Wisconsin. 1 versus 4, and a real banging matchup natch.

SUGAR: Auburn vs TCU. 2 vs 3, setting up nicely for the winner to be national champion if Oregon falls.

ORANGE: Virginia Tech vs Oklahoma, which should work out nicely for the Hokies.

COTTON: Arkansas vs Stanford, which ought to be an offensive barnburner.

FIESTA: Boise State vs, I don’t know, Ohio State or somebody, who cares.

NOWHERE CLOSE TO JANUARY 1: Connecticut, which at 8-4 shouldn’t be anywhere better than the Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl.

What have we learned, kids?

1) The BCS doesn’t make anything better, and has a way of screwing good teams while helping out those that don’t deserve it.

2) Conference champions don’t deserve automatic berths in BCS bowls just by virtue of being a conference champion.

3) The Big East, by virtue of adding TCU, may now be the equal of the new-look Mountain West (Boise, Nevada, Fresno State, Air Force, and San Diego State all have at least the same record as Connecticut).

4) The WAC is no longer of any concern for BCS purposes, seeing as how it’s filling out its gaps with teams that are still in I-AA this year.

5) This is the weakest season in years for the Pac-10 (which couldn’t fill its bowl allotment) and the SEC (which was supremely lopsided) – and yet their champions, probably for just that reason, are the two undefeateds meeting for the title…

6) …on January 10. There are bowls now scattered over a span of almost three weeks. This is ridiculous.

7) New rule: now that there are 12 regular season games, you should have to post 7 wins to be eligible for a bowl. Any bowl left without teams shouldn’t be played anyway. A bowl is not a participation trophy.

8) Once again, look me in the eye and tell me that what we have now is better than how it was 20 years ago.

January 9, 2008

…for the last couple of years, I’ve been repeating the trope that elsewhere in the world, when you ask somebody “Tell me about yourself,” they will start off with something like “I’m from Tokyo,” or “I’m Jewish,” or “I’m a Celtic supporter,” or “I love to knit,” or something like that, but that in America, they will inevitably lead off with what it is they do for a living. I don’t know where I heard this or I would cite it properly.

However, I was doing some rough math earlier while out on a walk. Figure the alarms start going off between 6:30 and 7 AM – let’s call it 7, because both phones and both wristwatches are bleating their hellish symphony while those chuckleheads on the tube are clucking away at the latest doings of that Spears whore, and if you can sleep through all that, you probably need to check into rehab yourself. So 7 AM. Figure you’re in the office by 8:30, but it’s not exactly quality personal time in between – shower, get dressed, try to figure out where you’re supposed to be this morning, maybe take five minutes personal time getting your coffee on the way in. Then 8 hours on the job, plus an hour lunch, which let’s face it, unless you’re out with the Rifles of the EUS at the pizza place, isn’t really quality personal time either. So home somewhere between 5:30 and 6. All in all, let’s call it roughly 10 hours a day sucked up with work, or at the very least, where work is looming unavoidably.

So home between 5:30 and 6, nothing to do for tomorrow. Now what? Figure about five hours to yourself, for your home life, for your lovely bride and a nice dinner and whatever TiVo caught for you, and occasionally you have folks over for a nice dinner or maybe you run out to an Adult Bible Study class (stop laughing. STOP IT) or who knows, maybe you just park yourself on the porch and smoke and make fun of people trying to parallel park in your street. Then off to bed sometime between 10:30 and 11 and thrash about trying to fall asleep knowing that in 7 hours, the cacophony is going to strike up again.

So on a typical weekday, work rules about 2/3 of your waking life. Weekends are better; you generally get the whole thing, which is nice. But in a typical six-days-and-on-the-seventh-he-rested, you’re putting in 50 hours for work and taking 55 hours for yourself, with 49 in sleep mode. (49-and-a-half if the priest is really droning at Mass.) So if work is taking up…calculator widget…47.62% of your waking life as an adult every week, it stands to reason that your job will be a pretty big part of who you are, right? I mean, being a Redskins fan is normally what, 4 hours on gameday plus maybe 10 or 15 minutes of website and news reading other days? Say 6 hours a week during the season when you’re really being a fan to the exclusion of all else, and in the off-season, probably 2 hours a week max unless you’re watching the draft, and if you’re watching the draft, you are a sad, sad little man. But even during the regular season, the Redskins, your pride and joy and a huge chunk of your life for the last, oh, 18 years (good GOD how has it been 18 years?) – the Skins take up right about 12% of the time that your job does.

So in the final analysis, your job cannot be something that contributes to your net total of misery. Maybe you have to cut the grass, which is godawful and is 2 hours of your life that you’ll never get back. Maybe you have to meet with the tax attorney – another 2 hours of misery. Maybe you screwed up and wandered into a theater showing The Thin Red Line – THREE hours you’ll never get back AND they fleeced you our of twenty bones in the process. But if your job is making you miserable, that’s almost half your waking life and two-thirds of your weekday pounding away at your soul.

So at the very least, you have to find a job that doesn’t make you wake up every morning going “Oh God, not again.” It doesn’t have to be your life’s purpose, it doesn’t have to fill your heart with joy, but at the very least, it has to be something you can just do without sinking into misery…

After almost a year of chucking and ducking and paperwork management and assorted bullshit, I have finally got all my retirement monies out of previous 401(k) arrangements and into a rollover IRA…with an actual professional manager running it. It’s mildly amusing to me to see “wealth management” in this guy’s business name, as the amount I’ve got him running probably amounts to a germ on a mite on a chigger on a flea on a hair on a wart on a frog on a knot on a log in the sea of finance.

If I’m honest, that’s unsettling right there. I was in grad school until age 25, then blew off the whole notion of “retirement savings” until I turned 33, got married, and got a full-time staff job out here. That’s a non-trivial amount of time to let something go – even a rudimentary index fund should have almost doubled my money by then – and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I don’t see how I’m going to be able to retire before 60 at least (and from the looks of things, they’re really trying to push that closer to 70). But then, twenty years ago I was just getting out of high school, which doesn’t seem like THAT long ago…which is disturbing. I want plenty of time for the money to build up, and plenty of time before I get old, but then, I want to be able to make something of my retirement when it happens…

Shit, this is going to get existential in a hurry. Better cut it off. What’s left over in the bin from NaBloPoMo?