Author: Stagger Lee

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.

To any observer of the NFL, it should be obvious what’s on the way: Fines. Suspensions.  Probably lost draft picks, possibly other things cooked up by the league.  In a truly ironic twist, the New Orleans Saints are about to die for the sins of the NFL – or if not die, suffer mightily, at least.

Because this isn’t new.  Apparently Gregg Williams and his bounty system have been all around the league, from the Titans to the Bills to the Redskins before arriving in New Orleans.  The only difference now is apparently somebody snitched.  But it would be a fool who assumed that this was limited to teams where Crazy Blitz Man was defensive coordinator or head coach – the Eagles famously ran afoul of the “bounty” rules in the late 80s and early 90s under Buddy Ryan, and the idea that a player would be incentivized to disable an opponent…well, let’s be honest: that’s called defense, and it gets incentivized every time ESPN shows another highlight clip on the “Jacked Up” segment or a particularly hard sack is on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

They’re not playing two-hand touch out there. That used to be the defense; now it’s the indictment. The NFL has always gloried in its image as modern gladiatorial bloodsport, the finest of real men battling for victory, while murmuring that we should pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, or his MRI results, or his early death or mental illness or inability to walk.  Everyone knows what this game has become; the Saints defense was just paying accordingly.  But now, because the most important thing about the NFL is that everyone knows what a big swinging dick Roger Goddell is, the Saints are going to take it in the ass.  Because if they don’t, people might start to ask what kind of league this is, and why the interest in player health and safety is limited to making sure no under-the-table money contributes to the future lack of either.

Vanderbilt’s own Chris Marve, linebacker par excellence, is no dummy – he announced today that he’s passing on the NFL and heading for law school.  Of all his moves, this one is probably the best.  Meanwhile, it’s time to start asking how long this can go on in a world where parents are becoming ever more reluctant to let their kids play the sport, and whether the NFL’s move toward glorified Nintendo football eventually winds up with a sport that exists as one big 7-on-7 passing drill.

ETA: crap, Deadspin got there first.

 

The telling thing isn’t that AOL is suspending its advertising on the Rush Limbaugh show.  The telling thing is that AOL was an advertiser.

El Rushbo has managed a pretty sweet gig these last twenty years or so – he gets to be the id of the Republican party, without ever having to face a ballot box.  He is the exemplar of what the GOP stands for in the modern era: talk-radio bluster, safely insulated from little things like consequences.  Until he, like his Presidential candidates, inexplicably decided that 2012 was the year to nail the colors to the mast on the issue of birth control.

(Quick step back: Griswold v Connecticut is the dispositive Supreme Court decision here – in 1965, the Supreme Court threw out the Nutmeg State’s anti-contraception law by a 7-2 vote, finding that the right to privacy trumped any state interest in regulating contraception.  The reason the GOP is fighting to re-litigate Griswold is because the vast majority of modern law around privacy derives from findings in Griswold, and if you somehow kick the tentpole out from under Griswold you suddenly disrupt Roe in every way that matters.  Griswold is perhaps the only finding not concerned with black civil rights that occupies pride of place in the right wing’s hierarchy of “judicial activism”.)

In any event, Rush said some terribly uncouth things, because, well, that’s what he does.  And the hue and cry was palpable, more than it’s been in a long long time, and advertisers started jumping ship.  And so, at the very end of the Friday show, a mealy-mouthed sorta-apology was shat out, and…advertisers kept jumping ship. Right up to this morning when AOL announced it was suspending advertising on the show.

Nobody uses AOL.  This is a patently false statement, reeking of techno-elitism and Silicon Valley insider thought, but I’m going to repeat myself: nobody uses AOL. The only folks using AOL are people who haven’t needed to make any meaningful change in their online presence in, say, 10 years or so.  And in 2012, that overwhelmingly means…the Old Ones.

Jon Chait nailed this a couple weeks back: this really is last call. The GOP base is getting whiter, older – and shrinking.  This may be their last chance to capture the triple-play: Supreme Court, Congress and the White House, and even if it means holding their nose and voting for Romney, they will turn out in force. Because even Romney will serve as an agreeable rubber-stamp for the motive force of the Congressional GOP, which is what George W. Bush was intended to be until Osama bin Laden stopped the 21st Century dead in its tracks.  But if the Democrats hold on and Obama holds on, the odds are slim that the GOP will ever get a chance to pull the wheel hard to the right again.  The last chance to forestall gay marriage, to derail the health-care plan, to build the fence around the United States, to let Israel have sway over Middle East policy and cut taxes and preserve the vision of Nixonland – if the GOP doesn’t get its shot in now, the numbers are against them going forward, and the 50-year project of Kevin Phillips and the Emerging Republican Majority is cooked.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

So the Old Ones are calling the tune, and the GOP is dancing ever faster – and then, the country looks up, and all of a sudden we’re arguing about birth control pills.  And the Old Ones are against it, because they’re against sex in general and certainly against anything that grants agency to women beyond a future as a housewife, and the parts of the country not looking to live in 1952 say “wait, WHAT?”  And then George Will nails it to the wall on Sunday: “these guys want to bomb Iran but they won’t stand up to Rush Limbaugh?”

But that’s what happens when the intellectual engine of your movement is a drug-addled lard-ass bigot with a megaphone: eventually you lose the ability to cope with anything more difficult than a sport-talk zinger.  And then the rest of the world decides to move on.  AOL knows where its customers are…and they’re punting.  Because not even a fellow relic of the 1990s wants to get Rush all over it.

And speaking of the 1990s…but more on that later.

 

(Special thanks to Brandon Flowers, Dave Keuning, Mark Stoermer and Ronnie Vannucci Jr, who probably didn’t realize they were saving me the trouble of writing my own autobiography.)

 

It started with a low light
Next thing I knew they ripped me from my bed
And then they took my blood type
They left a strange impression in my head

You know that I was hoping
That I could leave this star-crossed world behind
But when they cut me open
I guess I changed my mind

And you know I might have just flown
Too far from the floor this time
‘Cause they’re calling me by my name

And they’re zipping white light beams
Disregarding bombs and satellites
And that was the turning point
That was one lonely night

Well, now I’m back at home and
I’m looking forward to this life I live
You know it’s gonna haunt me
So hesitation to this life I give

You think you might cross over
You’re caught between the devil and the deep blue sea
You better look it over
Before you make that leap

And you know I’m fine
But I hear those voices at night
Sometimes they justify my claim

And the public don’t dwell on my transmission
‘Cause it wasn’t televised
But it was the turning point
Oh, what a lonely night

My global position systems are vocally addressed
They say the Nile used to run from east to west
They say the Nile used to run from east to west

I’m fine
But I hear those voices at night sometimes

The star maker says it ain’t so bad
The dream maker’s gonna make you mad
The spaceman says, “Everybody look down
It’s all in your mind”

 

And after all that, here we are.  3,653 days after turning 30 in a cloud of angst and regret, Yer Man will turn 40 tomorrow.

What kind of a decade has it been?  Eventful, to be sure.  Setting aside world affairs – war in the Middle East, economic calamity, BLACK PRESIDENT, the explosion of mobility computing and Apple’s rise to the largest company in the world – it’s been a little crazy for me.  I caught the fever for California, clocked an MVP year in DC, then swapped one household name for another and moved 3000 miles.  I got married.  I got an office.  I got my knee scoped, twenty years too late, and changed jobs two more times as part of what I can only describe as the worst fit of clinical depression I’d had in two decades not tied to the death of a parent.  I got a raise.  I got drugs. I got a Rabbit.  I got an iPhone or…um, six.

Looking back, I’d say that I’ve accomplished exactly one thing on my own in ten years: I luck-boxed into a contract position at Apple which turned into a staff hire.  Other than that, my luck has mostly been other people: the guys I fought shoulder-to-shoulder with from 1997 to 2004, who made it possible for me to make my way in Silicon Valley and survive for seven years and counting.  The boss in California who wheedled an interview with not one but two different post-Apple employers to make sure I wouldn’t starve. The surrogate big sister I never thought I wanted until she moved in with us for a year. The cousins who gave me real honest-to-God blood family again. The merry band of high school mutants that rose from the dead twenty years later to give me back an anchor in the past. The cloud of Cal and Vandy supporters who took my nonsense drivel seriously and made it possible to resume my career as a sportswriter seventeen years later. The coven of geniuses in Cupertino whose vision and drive made possible the gadgets on which I can still make my living fifteen years after Michael Dell argued for shutting down Apple and giving the money back to the shareholders (which might be the best move for Dell in 2012).

And behind it all, every step of the way, from the icy sidewalks of Northern Virginia to the cold foggy deck of the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, from the humidity of a Southern highway to the chapel and officer’s club on Treasure Island, from the Caltrain platform to the Jubilee Line on the London Underground – her.  The one who keeps the dream alive, even on the days when I’m not exactly sure what the dream is.

Maybe the things I want for my birthday aren’t things I can have.  But the things I’ve got, I wouldn’t trade for nothin’.

Two years ago, I flew back from a trip to Washington DC to see my old gang.  We met, we hollered, we closed the pub again – but I also got to see their families, play with their kids, and see life beyond the daily battles of seven years ago.  And as the plane was taxiing back into SFO, I heard this song on the in-flight entertainment, and I had one of those moments of epiphany, and I decided – it’s okay to grow up.

And so – forward, as gracefully as I’m capable of, which is honestly not that graceful.  Stick around – if nothing else, the spectacle ought to be entertaining.

(13) FLORIDA   67

VANDERBILT   77

FINAL

 

We finally get a home upset over a ranked opponent.  On Senior Night.  The guys playing their last home game all stepped up in a big way – Jeffrey Taylor and Brad Tinsley in particular just willed this team back in front of Florida and would not let up.  You could tell the 44 Special wasn’t going home without the win – and the ESPN camera caught him in the last minute of the game blinking back tears and swallowing the odd sob.

These guys were the most heralded recruiting class in Vanderbilt history. And yet, not one of them has ever won a game in the NCAA tournament. You can see it in their eyes – midnight is coming, and they are going to do everything in their power to stop their clock striking twelve.

Since 2008, March has meant disaster for the Commodores – the Stallings era has meant a loss in every season finale bar one, and the team has yet to make it to the SEC title game.  And then there’s the one-and-done streak.  But for the first time all year, I’m starting to believe that if by life or death the Dores can stave off elimination, they will.

It’s going to be a big month.

“Don’t cry…it’s only a teenage wasteland.”

That was my senior yearbook quote.  It was truer than I knew – I meant it as a sort of “don’t worry, this will all be over soon enough” but in retrospect, it’s more like “look, this is real life, the whole world is like high school – so you may as well learn not to cry over it.”

My original concept for this post was six-plus months in the making and pushing 8,000 words.  After reviewing it, I decided it was the most pathetic self-serving sorry-for-myself whine-tasting imaginable, so I figured I would hit the high points and try to squeeze something good out of it.  So here goes.

Looking back, the two formative traumas of my life were easy to pick out: the mistake of undergrad and the premature loss of my father.  Given that I spend most of my life wanting to go to college, it’s not surprising that I would feel the void for years when it didn’t work out – and after bombing out of grad school and losing my father almost a year later, it’s not surprising that I sort of went bye-bye for about a year and change.  So – time to start unpacking this. What did I want out of my college experience? The Real Genius scenario. A girlfriend (which didn’t exactly work out. Twice). A sporting affiliation – tailgating, rush the court, wear the colors, paint the face. Hanging out on the dorm quad. Prank hacking a la MIT. The gang, the clique, the crew, whatever.

The person I am today was, for all intents and purposes, born in greater Washington DC.  With no college friends, my family disrupted, an undergrad experience I didn’t want to claim and a grad school stint I didn’t feel I could, I basically started life fresh and rebuilt myself there.  And I put together a team and a gang and an experience there that almost made up for college – I sort of made the EUS into my college pals, with the Redskins as our varsity team and the 4Ps as our dorm quad. Guys graduated (Casman, the Lyon King, etc) and new talent came on (Fred, the Scotsman, the Daves). I had different “roommates”, different girlfriends, and eventually “graduated” myself and left town (right down to all of the graduation imagery in my iTunes playlists at the time and my parting email to my co-workers). So can I somehow persuade myself that was enough? That the seven years in DC can backfill for those seven lost college years?

My problem, ultimately, is that I don’t have the memories I wish I had from the college years.  Or maybe it’s that I did get everything I dreamed of, but in an extremely delayed and deconstructed form – and if you’re wrapping up your college experiences ten years later than normal, it stands to reason that you’d be in denial about how old you really are.  At some level, I think I must still believe I’m in grad school – that I can drink ALL THE DRANKS, stay up late, stand and scream nonstop through three-hour ballgames, go bounding up the stairs two at a time – and because I spent so much time living alone and keeping vampires’ hours, waited so long to get married, have no kids, work in a college environment, have Cal football tickets, blog about Vandy basketball, swap tweets with players half my age…at some level, I almost convince myself I’m still in that space. But I’m really not.  I’m a little wobbly after two quick drinks, I need to be in bed before midnight, I stay seated for everything but third down on defense, and most weekends I just want to be away from folks and in my own home.

I think part of the delusion is fed by that big black hole in my 20s – having failed to use up my full allotment of insouciant youth, I think I should somehow still be entitled to it.  Like it or not, though, that youth shit has an expiration date.  A while back, I told my wife that I’d rather be 60 and trying to act 40 than to be 40 and trying to act 20.  There’s just something about switching from a 3 to a 4 in front that changes things, that makes things more foolish, that makes some things seem more immature than ever.  A 30-something can still brandish a Nerf gun behind the desk to ward off his co-workers.  A 40-something just seems ridiculous. At 40, the songs of your childhood creep into oldies range and you start worrying about the health of your parents and their friends.  40 is where the end of teenager-dom – which I clearly remember being full of regret and nostalgia for me – is officially half my life ago.

Forty is the age that forces you to stop pretending.

Let’s be honest – on paper, I should be great at being 40.  I’ve spent my whole life being too mature and responsible for my age.  I’ve been smoking a pipe off and on for twenty years already and drinking whiskey on the rocks for at least fifteen.  I would stand in the pub as a single young late-twenty-something and have sweet young things telling me how much I reminded them of their grandfather.  But I have to accept that yes, I did let some of the best years of my life run out from under me, and they’re gone for good – and more importantly, I have to figure out how not to resent it or dwell on it.

I’ve spent years and years mulling over how to solve that puzzle – that there must be some solution which would make it all make sense, make it all worthwhile.  Because that’s what I’ve done my whole life.  Pick the correct answer.  Solve the word problem.  Troubleshoot the glitch.  There’s some piece to figure out that makes everything work again, scores the point, provides the solution – and if I find the magic formula, it not only makes everything worthwhile, it fixes everything – and the void’s not there anymore.

The only problem is with trying to find the solution is that this time there isn’t one. At some point, you have to find a way to acknowledge that shit happens, that life is full of randomness and it doesn’t always work out or even mean anything, that we live in a world of chaos and entropy – and you have to find your own light.  And for someone whose worldview has always depended on consistent rules and logical solutions, the real world is ever more difficult to cope with.

And thus we get to where I am now.  I have an amazing wife, and a good solid job, and a nice house and a pretty good car.  I have 12Mbps broadband at home, and HD television, and a lightweight laptop at work and a miracle of a cell phone in my pocket.  I have a little bit of a reputation as a Vandy blogger, and real-life friends and acquaintances that serves me for a social life of sorts.  I have a routine, and a place to lay my head, and I try not to think too far down the road.  The goal is to live in the now, in the moment – free of both the tyranny of memory and the trap of expectations.

That’s not a problem with a solution either.  You just do it, and hope nobody looks too closely at how.

Or to put it another way, there’s another line from the same Who song that should be the yearbook quote as I graduate from my thirties. If I can live by that, I ought to be just fine.

“Don’t need to fight to prove I’m right/I don’t need to be forgiven…”

About a decade ago, I went through a phase of Zippo lighter collection which lasted about a year or so, maybe slightly longer.  It started with an outlier – a brass pipe-lighter Zippo bought in 1997 – and really picked up around late 1999 with the second Zippo, a black-finished Guinness lighter.  I wound up with seven or eight, once buying a really old Vanderbilt-engraved Zippo from eBay, but never bought another one after buying the Zippo with the pewter image of an eagle head (a Harley-Davidson design) in September 2001 – it remained my principal carry lighter until well after moving to California.

Along the way, I had the thought that I was buying these with some notional future progeny in mind – not necessarily my own, mind you, but a nephew perhaps (I had just obtained one).  A couple of the lighters were millennial commemoratives – one in a titanium alloy and one with a nice satin finish – and it made me think that, like my misbegotten varsity jacket from senior year of undergrad, I could pass them along to somebody else who would think it was cool to have Uncle Stagger’s lighter or coat or what have you.

And I could do that, because the basic design of the Zippo hasn’t budged in almost a century.  You could go out and get an old crackle-finish World War II army lighter, pop a flint in it, fill it with anything flammable – gasoline, Ronsonol, fingernail polish remover, you name it – and strike it and light a fire.  It’s as elegant a design as you could ask for: simple, reliable, a minimum of moving parts and an even smaller minimum of consumables.

Naturally the lighters went with the pipes – nineteen of them, in a rack probably as old as me, most of them older than me and bought by my late father in his college years or the decade thereafter.  I have smoked all of them at least once, mostly in that same rough era from 1999 to 2001, but ultimately wound up buying and carrying assorted pipes of my own for fear of damaging any more of his (like the Walt Disney World pipe, which is literally irreplaceable and which I broke already, damn my luck).

And to round out the catalog of vice, there’s the Browning Sweet Sixteen, the last real gun I own, kept safely away in Alabama (because I don’t need it here, because nobody here wants to kill people like me). It was originally my grandfather’s, bought – when? Who knows?  The Browning A-5 semiautomatic shotgun is a design that goes back to 1898 – it’s nineteenth century technology.  But then again, the Marines in Force Recon are still using a firearm whose basic design is a hundred years old.

All this springs to mind because I have about decided that based on current rumblings and speculation, I’m going to go for the notional iPad 3 if and when it comes out – simply because I’ve decided I need a personal portable computer and a second laptop is just idiotic.  Factor in the superior battery life relative to the 11″ MacBook Air, possible higher screen resolution, potential LTE support and Verizon/GSM interoperability (assuming it follows the iPhone 4S), the A-GPS support, the possible integration of Siri, and a presumable bump in speed, memory and overall performance – and then the cost difference destroys the laptop for good.

But how long can you expect it to last and be viable?

As it stands, we are more or less conditioned by our cellular provider to expect to turn over phones every two years.  It’s almost impossible to get a contract shorter than 24 months now; for a while Verizon even had a “New Every Two” promotion which explicitly encouraged you to switch your phone with your contract renewal.  The iPhone has followed the same path; if you have last year’s iPhone you’ll probably not feel a burning need to have the newest model, but if you have the one before that you’re really going to want to make the move.  (Apple’s ability to keep this up for three years now has been effective to the point of sinister.)

The iPad, though, has remarkably similar innards to an iPhone.  Features and processor tend to hop back and forth; a new processor debuts in the iPad and turns up in the iPhone six months later while the iPhone’s front-facing video chat pops up in the new iPad six months after that.  Based on that, you would expect this notional iPad 3 to be interoperable between Verizon and GSM services and offer Siri support, but the rumblings of LTE mean anything’s possible in terms of network support.  You just know Apple would love to ship one unit for everyone, though.

I say all that to say this: it’s possible that we could wind up in a world where we replace iPads every two years instead of laptops every three to four.  It would be about the same cost financially, most likely.  Maybe the original iPad can have a third year coaxed out of it; we’ll have to see what iOS 6 is like when it finally drops.  Maybe the original iPad can keep going just fine with iOS 5 so long as the battery holds out.

But then what?

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: our industry isn’t built to last. The most enduring standard we have is cat-5 cable for networking; that’s been the done thing for a good fifteen years now.  I suppose you can make a case that USB has stood the test of time, having aced out ADB and PS2 connectors to become the universal peripheral standard and even picked up pretty good speed in its USB3 form.  But in my computing lifetime, I’ve seen the rise and fall of the 3.5″ floppy, the Zip disk, the AAUI connector for Ethernet, the CD-ROM, the Apple Display Connector – hell, I bought the first model of PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh and I was there the day they turned the key and went Intel.*  And I’ve learned that if your computer is more than about five years old, you can pour all manner of money into repairs and upgrades, but it’s going to be made obsolete.  You’ll need a newer OS, or a newer version of Office, or a newer browser that requires a newer OS, or something, and then your goose is cooked.

When I was leaving DC for the West, almost eight years ago, the new hotness was the Powerbook G4 12″, also known as “the blogger’s delight.”  It was compact, powerful, everything you needed in one easy package, and they sold like mad.  I coveted it like nothing before, and when I had the opportunity (in August 2004), I asked for it on the first day and clutched it to my bosom as if I would never let go.

Now, seven years later, that laptop cannot run the current version of Mac OS.  Or the one before that, or even the one before that.  It’s stopped dead as of mid-2007 as far as the operating system is concerned, which means you can forget about modern versions of Firefox.  You can forget about Google Chrome, period.  Or Office 2011.  You need an external camera attached for videoconferencing.  Its wireless tops out at 802.11g and its display is rigidly fixed at 1024×768, and God help you if you’ve gotten the LCD to last this long.  Hell, the machine that replaced it as the blogger’s delight – the first black polycarbonate MacBook – has a cracking case and struggles to run Lion itself, and its entire product line no longer exists.

Someone – I wish I could remember who and cite them properly – wrote of the first iPhone, on the day of its release, words to the effect of “It saddens me to hold this magical thing and realize that in five years it’ll be gathering dust in the back of a drawer.”  And sure enough, we’re five years out from that world-changing announcement, and my original iPhone is tucked in a box for safekeeping with my DC work badge and my first brass Zippo and some other priceless personal treasures.  It’s dented, it’s scratched, the battery’s probably done for, and even if you fired it up, you’re stuck with the OS version before last.

Maybe it’s a memento mori from bearing down on forty at breakneck speed (one week to go!), but the older I get, the more inclined I am to want to buy something that I could use for the rest of my life.  Like my peacoat.  Or my Timbuk2 bag (and oh how I wish I still had the original).  Hopefully there is a day coming where you can just keep upgrading one piece at a time – I know there was talk of a recyclable laptop project at Stanford that was completely modular and theoretically upgradable in perpetuity, and it’s thoughts like that which make me want to keep an eye on Linux and the idea that somebody could roll me an operating system to run on standard parts anywhere.

But maybe this is what Moore’s Law drives us to.  We find ways to use the increasing processor power, or ways to squeeze more out of it while saving energy, and we end up with entire categories of product we never knew we needed and now can’t do without.  And the rate of change is so fast – you could still get away with tooling around in a 1956 Chevy Bel-Air Nomad, but heaven help the geek who wants to try to get through the day on a 2004 Nokia 6620.

 

* No, seriously – I was in the Apple booth at MacWorld San Francisco 2006, when they announced they were shipping Intel-based hardware starting that very day, and I drove a pre-production unit back to Cupertino to put on a plane.  It was a unique experience.