Author: Stagger Lee

I found myself in Best Buy again today, looking at the tablet selection, and debating what the best move would be for me.  Being as I have a phone, the 4- and 5-inch tablets are pointless (and Samsung’s assumption that they’re going to put the smack down on Apple with a 5-inch tablet with a stylus is the funniest fucking thing I ever heard in my life. They should call that doorstop the Galaxy Newton) and if you’re going to 10, you may as well have an iPad and get much better value for money.  So my sweet spot is in the 7-8 inch tablet space, which appears to be the area the Android business is congealing around.  Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet, whatever.

The first thing you get is that it’s basically impossible to test a tablet in Best Buy, because they’re all on these stands – a straight post with a tilted hole for the humongous plastic thing bolted to the tablet, so that you’re presented with the tablet at a nice diagonal in portrait mode.  The flip side of that is that it’s impossible to test things like touch typing, because you can’t lay it flat on the table – nor can you even really rotate it to landscape mode on the post.  Strike one.  Then you’re at the mercy of whether the Wi-Fi is activated and whether it works.  Strike two.  And once you get past all that – what?  How are you supposed to evaluate an email client or a Foursquare app or Netflix if you don’t want to type your own account information into a public Android device that has God only knows what in the way of security or clean refresh?

The other problem with the tablets in this space is that they’re all Android and all running a mishmash of operating systems.  Some are Honeycomb, some are still using Gingerbread, and they all have the manufacturer’s own UI layered over top of Android proper.  Hell, even the 8″ Vizio tablet at Costco for $200 has its own custom Vizio UI.  The only way to get a pure Android UI is to either buy a reference device (i.e. Nexus) or a developer device from Google, or else roll the dice on a company too small and poor to build a custom UI of their own – in which case you’re probably not going to be getting a current version of the OS anyway.

“Open! Open! Open!  Android is open!”  Which is fine if you’re prepared to code and compile yourself an OS version for your device.  For the remaining 99.99% of tablet users, it means looking online to see if there’s a Cyanogen version for your device and what features don’t work yet if you run it, or whether they’ve managed to jailbreak the manufacturer’s protection scheme to even start trying, or which programs are compatible and which markets work for you.  Only Amazon seems to have really figured this out, and they did it by pulling an Apple – forking the code, creating their own branch of Android, putting it on a single device and curating their own dedicated app store.

There’s a forthcoming book all about Apple’s cult of simplicity (and how to apply it to your own work and business) – and it really is true.  Compared to the crowded and cluttered keyboards I dealt with today, the one on the iPhone is clean and clear.  There’s one home button, it’s big and mechanical and hard to miss, and it does the same thing every time on every device – as opposed to completely different arrangements in Android 2, 3 and 4.  When you go to the Apple store, you’re not dealing with a post and a big metal thing, you’re picking up a tablet from the table (with a discreet wire tethering it at one corner) and using it more or less like you would – because it’s populated with software, with mail, with pictures that you can test and manipulate and even delete if you like.

Simple isn’t easy.  Simple is hard.  Simple takes work.  Apple, from the beginning of the Mac era, said “we’re going to do the work to make this simple so you don’t have to.”   So far, the Android cluster is more than willing to leave the work for me.  And as somebody who does tech support all day for a living, the last damn thing I want to do is come home tonight and troubleshoot my own shit for hours on end.

So as much as I would like to experiment with Android – real, true, unadulterated Android – I have to concede that it’s going to be basically impossible, barring a sudden rush of reasonably-priced Ice Cream Sandwich-based tablets worth sinking $200 or $300 just for the sake of playing around.  And the odds are pretty good that before that happens, Apple will drop yet another $500 tablet that makes all the $200 and $300 look like a false economy.  And for a device that may only be viable for two or three years, the last thing you need is to scrimp on cost up front and then go around gimped for a couple of years with no upgrades on the horizon.

Of which more later.

The latest racial flap at ESPN only bears home the point: ESPN is too big.  Too powerful, “too big to fail,” an inappropriately oversized part of the economy of sports.  ESPN has immense power, which generally gets used in the service of (in no particular order) the Yankees, the Red Sox, Duke basketball, Brett Favre, Tim Tebow, USC football, the BCS, Boise State football, UConn women’s basketball, the NFL generally, SEC football teams with 10 or more wins…and now Jeremy Lin, who has the peculiar luck to be a massive novelty – an Ivy League point guard of Asian descent in the NBA – who just happens to be having his hot streak in New York.

You frequently hear it said that ESPN doesn’t care about anything past the East Coast, or south of the Meadowlands, or outside the New York-Boston axis.  And if you’re not on the chosen list, you probably have a case.  But ESPN has the BCS, Monday Night Football, they operate the SEC Network, they have the NBA, they more or less own the entire bowl game system, they have a lot of major league baseball, and they have a disproportionately huge grip on coverage of college sports.  Contractually, there’s no way for Fox Sports, or Comcast Sports Net, or the NBC Sports Network Formerly Known As Versus to keep up.

The Big Ten went first, creating their own channel, but the Pac-12 is out to do them one better.  In six months, they will launch not one, not two, but SEVEN networks – a national Pac-12 channel and one regional channel for each of the traditional pairings (Washington, Oregon, Arizona, NorCal, SoCal, and now Mountain for Colorado/Utah).  They will be available on the four largest cable systems in the country from launch day.  They will be available for streaming to your computer, or iPhone, or iPad.  And they will make it possible for a fan of a Pac-12 school, in theory at least, to literally see every single sporting event in which his school participates.

This is no small undertaking, and the repercussions are huge.  The Pac-12 owns 100% of the network – it’s operated by Fox but the money is going to Walnut Creek.  It will immediately have a hammerlock on coverage of possibly the best Olympic sports league in the world – if Cal alone were its own country it would have easily been a top-10 medal winner in each of the last two summer Olympics – and the right and ability to sell that coverage abroad.  It can generally feature a national contender in almost every collegiate sport – Stanford alone boasts a total of 101 NCAA national championships to date.  Your history, or geography, or comparative strength, nothing matters – if you’re a Pac-12 athlete, you’re going to be playing for a potential national audience every time out.

Five years ago, the Pac-10 was perhaps the most lackadaisically-run conference in college football.  The cable contract was with Fox Sports, and if you weren’t the Pac-10’s number one football game, nobody in the country was likely to see you.  Top-5 teams were relegated to Saturday nights at 10:30 PM Eastern time on a channel in the high 600s.  And bowl games?  Aside from the Rose Bowl, the Pac-10 couldn’t care less.

Now, every Pac-12 football game will be televised.  The conference has the most electrifying broadcaster in college sports, Gus Johnson, as its number-one play-by-play man.  Bowl tie-ins go deeper than fifth place.  And just in time for the 2012 football season, there’ll be a way for anyone with an Internet connection to see the games.  And all of this depends on ESPN not at all.

When someone expressed incredulity that the Pac-12 studios would be in San Francisco, Spencer Hall – the best living college football writer – replied “Of course, that’s where Starfleet headquarters is.”  He knows.  The Pac-12 has run out to the leading edge of the future of college athletics broadcasting, and they’re going to jump.

Well, they’ve only gone and done it now.  It looks as if the GOP is actually going to nail its colors to the mast in 2012 on the proposition that employers should have the legal right to refuse to provide health care on grounds of “moral conviction”, and that any company of any kind or any size can get out of paying for contraceptive care as long as the boss is sufficiently Catholic.

I mean, look at what happened here.  The bishops went mental saying that Catholic entities like hospitals shouldn’t have to pay for birth control.  Obama backs down, saying that insurers will have to bear the burden of providing it free of cost so the assorted institutions aren’t on the hook at all.  And the bishops’ response  – aided and abetted by the GOP in the Senate – actually doubles down, saying that NO company should be obligated to pay for birth control.

Meanwhile, the backer of Rick Santorum’s primary SuperPAC* goes on TV and rolls out the terrible prehistoric crack about the aspirin between the knees as birth control, which was probably funny for about ten minutes in 1961 but could not possibly do more to cement the fact that the Republican ethos in 2012 is that most Southern of beliefs: we can make things the way they used to be.

This is it.  When they invoke the past, that’s what they mean.  Not a manufacturing base that was heavily unionized, not a top marginal tax rate of 91%, not nuclear-tipped stalemate against the Soviet Union. What they’re peddling is cultural hegemony.  Homosexuals back in the closet.  Negroes quietly in their place.  Ladies who know their place is in the home.  That’s the pitch.  They can’t run on a rapidly improving economy, with GM posting record profits after the federal restructuring and unemployment slowly waning and Apple passing oil companies in revenue while carrying the S&P 500.  They can’t run on foreign policy, with Bin Laden and Qaddafi’s faces painted on the “kills” fuselage of Obama’s administration.

So this is it.  Pleasantville.  They’re pushing all their chips to the middle of the table and betting that enough people want to live through Mad Men again that they can knock off a President who isn’t even the right color.  As stunning as it is, we’re apparently going to spend the spring 0f 2012 re-litigating Griswold v. Connecticut and exhuming pre-Vatican II debates about the Pill, fifty years after the fact.

That’s your choice this year. That’s the whole campaign, that’s the motto and the mission statement for Team Obama, that’s all you need to run on:

Forward, not backward.

 

 

* Santorum is out lashing back and saying that he’s no more on the hook for what Foster Friess says than Obama is for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  Maybe, maybe not, but Wright wasn’t the guy bankrolling the Obama campaign, so that dog won’t hunt, son…

So people* ask me “Now look here, son, you were the biggest foe of Verizon imaginable six or seven years ago.  How come all of a sudden you’re angling to get on with them and ditch AT&T?”  Well, there’s a very good reason – things have changed.  Three things, actually, and I will enumerate them as follows:

1) HARDWARE LOCK-IN.  At the time that I wanted nothing to do with Verizon, there were THREE (3) GSM carriers in this country, and an unlocked phone gave you the promise of moving between AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile more or less at will since almost all phones had 850 and 1900 Mhz capability.  Fast-forward to the present day, and there are only two GSM carriers, using different frequency bands for 3G coverage – AT&T in the 850/1900 space and T-Mobile solely in 1700 Mhz.  And there is only one phone in the world that I know for a fact has the ability to do 3G in both bands – the GSM Galaxy Nexus, which is not available in this country.

So at this point, SIM locking is a formality for going abroad – you have absolutely no portability between US carriers anymore unless you’re willing to use your phone at the hottest speeds of 2006 on whatever is the “other” carrier between AT&T and T-Mobile.  And at that point, you may as well pick whoever you can live with for two years.

2) APPLE. The iPhone is unique among American mobile phones in that it shows no marks of the carrier – there is no branding (you will never see an AT&T or Verizon logo etched on an iPhone), there are no carrier apps that can’t be uninstalled, there is no standard carrier UI (like Verizon was forcing onto all their regular phones four years ago), and the carrier has absolutely no sway over what gets installed (there is no locking out Bluetooth, as Verizon famously did with the Moto V710, or anything like Verizon’s neutering of Google Wallet on the Nexus Galaxy). The iPhone device experience is the same on any carrier – which means at that point, you’re down to…

3) THE NETWORK.  Verizon’s network was never optimized for data coverage.  Most of their “largest nationwide network” was still relying on analog footprint for a very long time, and the EV-DO-based 3G famously doesn’t allow for simultaneous voice and data transmission.  And in fact, to all analysis, the top speed on EVDO is slower than the top speed on WCDMA/UMTS-based 3G (a la AT&T).

But.

AT&T has simply failed to keep up with the network buildout required to support the world’s most popular phone.  To this day, there is still a spot on the Mountain View-Palo Alto border that is a completely dead zone for AT&T.  Their network is famously unusable at Cal football games (where AT&T is a corporate sponsor of Golden Bear athletics).  The situation in San Francisco (and to all accounts New York) is tragicomic in the extreme – it is a cliche of modern life in the city that you will not be able to get a signal on your iPhone in any meaningful way.

Meanwhile, Verizon has turned over most of their analog coverage and has maintained a superior network in the Bay Area – and more to the point, is rolling out the same LTE-based 4G as AT&T but faster and farther.  It’s safe to assume that if a 4G iPhone does appear, it will be more viable faster on the Verizon network than on AT&T.  And in the meantime, Verizon still tops customer satisfaction posts for network performance in the Bay Area.

 

So there you have it.  Things changed – and in many cases not for the better, certainly not for the consumer – and the aggregation of those changes has turned Verizon into the preferred instrument going forward.  If the iPad 3 is indeed interoperable between GSM and CDMA, such that it could be used here on Verizon and abroad on GSM, that’s absolutely going to be the chosen route. (After all, it doesn’t matter if I can’t talk on my iPad, does it?)

Besides, Verizon Wireless is the official wireless provider of the Vanderbilt Commodores…

 

 

* Nobody asks me this, except the wife, and I think she’s just going for the zing. ;]

I think a lot of sites are burying the lede here – the fact that Mac OS X is going to a new annual refresh cycle is a massive shift in the way things work.  The iPhone-ization of the Mac ecosphere continues apace, not least with the release of a beta of Messages to replace your iChat. (Significantly, the Messages beta did not come through the Mac App Store…which is as effective a way of saying THIS IS NOT YET OFFICIAL as I can think of, bar shouting or flying a banner over the Rose Bowl.)

I don’t know quite what I think of this.  It really does look like the 11″ MacBook Air is going to become the keyboard-equipped non-touch iPad Pro, and more than ever, the iPad 3 (notional as it may be) looks like a viable option if I need a personal portable device with more oomph than an iPhone.  More to the point, the iCloud-centric nature of Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) means that an iPhone, an iPad and a Mac mini at home will make for a perfectly viable peer computing experience.

Which makes sense.  After all, according to a report today, Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 than they’ve sold Macs…ever. Combined.  At this point, it’s pretty obvious which way the future lies for Cupertino.

The first signature piece of outerwear I remember having was a jacket covered in patches.  All sorts of patches – shuttle mission patches, military squadron patches, a UPS logo, the patch of my dad’s hunting club, you name it.  That stuck around for most of elementary school, to the point that the whole load of patches got transferred to a new jacket when the old one got to be too small.

After that – inevitably – came the Members Only jackets – first a copper-colored JC Penney knockoff, then an actual dark-teal one, then another in a sort of slate blue, right up through the end of high school.  If you want the iconic look for me in the “great years” phase from 1988-90, it’s that last Members Only jacket with the sleeves jammed up over a short-sleeve highly-purple madras button-up, with jeans and white Reebok Phase 1s topped off with a gray fedora – as often as not with several cards jammed in the band depending on how the team was doing. (By May of 1989, there were four aces.) There are pictures.  But none that are going online, I can assure you.

There was also the first leather jacket – a gray number with a ridiculously huge square collar, my only significant Christmas present from the 1986 worst-Christmas-ever debacle.  It stuck around through the end of college, believe it or not.  Actually I suppose college is when the real madness took over – one attempt after another at finding the one perfect standout piece of outerwear.  There was the plain black jacket that I can only assume was meant to be somewhat nautical, there was a huge lightweight but sweltering-warm Helly Hansen number bought for the trip to Central Europe in January 1992, there was the throwback Redskins jacket that hangs in my closet to this day, there was a Braves windbreaker that was a birthday present, there was the black-and-white varsity letterman jacket bought my senior year with the express purpose of making it some sort of heirloom for my progeny (see how that worked)…just a lot of nonsense all around.

And then Vanderbilt – where I did buy the huge bulky Starter pullover jacket, and the famously monstrous mid-length hooded leather coat known as “the Elk”.  But the main go-to were the sport coats, of which I can remember five without even thinking hard.  I suppose it’s what I expected grad students to dress like, and I did the best I could with them, but ultimately they didn’t really fit what I needed.

The standout item of my DC years was the birthday gift from my last ex-girlfriend on my last birthday with her: a USWings-brand Indiana Jones jacket.  I wore other things – still used the Elk in snowy weather, bought a big black oilcloth duster for the rainy season, took over the oversized Vanderbilt ski jacket I had given my dad – but that Indy jacket is the thing people think of when they remember my appearance in DC.  And given where I was working, I suppose it was an appropriate item.

That jacket’s in the closet now, along with the suede jean-jacket I bought in a fit of madness at Christmastime 2004, because leather jackets are too much bulk for the purpose when the temperature never drops below 40 degrees and winter always comes with rain.  Honestly, the simple black shell does for most everything, and if not, there’s the peacoat.  Or the multi-layered Eddie Bauer rig that carried me through two trips to Britain.

But now I’m on my third sport coat – in addition to the mandatory blue blazer, I have the Saboteur Invincible that I bought a while back with some of my gunrunning proceeds.  Gray, red silk lining, functional buttons, waterproof, invisibly taped seams…yeah, high tech fashion.  But now I have splashed out and bought the much-debated seersucker jacket, after about a decade of beating around it.

Ultimately, I haven’t really found a definitive jacket out here, unless you count that shell – and not least because it’s rare that you need heavier than that. It’s lightweight, it ties around the waist or stuffs in your backpack without a fight – I even took it to Europe last summer where it proved to be all I needed the whole two weeks. Everyone out here has the shell.  Maybe that’s why I resist it – I’m looking for something more…well, me.

And it hasn’t worked.  I have the Vanderbilt softshell, which is nice but not actually rainproof and is impossible to stuff in a bag.  I have a light canvas sort of jacket which is nice and roomy, but is just the wrong shade of off-white and suggests a light poplin coat on a senior citizen in a peaked white gimme cap sitting at Jack’s waiting on a sausage biscuit of a morning.  And I have, on diverse occasions, actively contemplated trying to manufacture the modern version of the patch jacket, being as I have patches from DC Job and Government Contract Job and could probably find a jacket that already has the Apple logo on it somewhere.  Hell, I tried on a tall-size MA-1 bomber jacket to see if it would do, but it doesn’t.  No handwarmer pockets and the elasticated-waist look just doesn’t suit me anymore.

In the end, I think the search for the perfect jacket is, like the quest for the ideal all-purpose footwear or the perfect pen or THE watch, a surrogate for the search for an identity.  The costume, the armor, the signifier that probably imprinted on my brain in the age of the Fonz and stuck around ever since.  I don’t know why I keep casting about for it, but there you go – I’m sure something that would work is out there, assuming it’s not in my closet already…

That one hurts.  If we don’t spot them a 13 point lead at halftime…if we can shoot better than 65% from the free throw line…if we can have more than one guy off the bench scoring points (note: assuming John Jenkins turns pro, we got exactly zero points from players who will be back next season)…if we can hit a single shot in the last four minutes of the game…

I’m not going to kick about the officiating.  This is the SEC.  You get the calls if you’re Kentucky in basketball, or Alabama or Florida in football, and you just have to live with it.  It’s about what I expect, and I don’t expect it to ever get any better.  What’s more troubling to me is the fact that Kentucky will probably send most of the squad to the NBA again, and reload with Alex Poythress, among others – here we are with five seniors and a junior, four years of chemistry and teamwork and trying to make the best unit we can, and Kentucky can just go out and grab the best four or five high school players in the country, milk them for a year before they go to the NBA, and roll all over in the meantime.  I’ve said it before but it bears repeating – we’re not playing the same game, and that’s why it always seems like we’ve seen this movie before.  Over and over and over.

Five home losses.  I can’t remember the last time we lost five games at home.  We gave them everything we had, and it’s just not enough.  Just like Vandy football against Florida or Tennessee, like Cal against USC, like the Redskins against…well, everyone.  I don’t know why I even watch sports anymore…but I’m staring to grasp why there are so many bandwagoning sons of bitches out there.

Future Problem Solving, junior division, grades 4-6.  In 1984, my sixth grade “team” (really just four donks) competed in the three national problems and finished first in the nation in two of them, which meant we got to go to Coe College, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for the big national final competition.

The way it worked was this: you had a “fuzzy situation” – a description of some future concern like an orbital prison, or a vaccine for 12 different diseases, or things like that involving genetic engineering or what have you – and determine how to solve various issues associated with it.   I don’t remember the details or very much about it, because that was almost thirty years ago, and it’s beside the point.

The point is that was the first real trip.  That was the first time in living memory I had been outside the South (I was too young to remember the California trip at age 10 months).  It was my first time on an airplane.  First time changing planes in Chicago (O’Hare hasn’t changed much).  We were housed in dorms, with a huge lobby that had free soda and a huge screen playing MTV…which I had never seen before.  I must have seen the videos for “The Reflex” and “Legs” and the trailer for “Top Secret” about a thousand times in that week.

I don’t remember how we did – we certainly didn’t place in any exceptional fashion, because I would have remembered that.  Instead, I remember things like spending an inordinate amount of time working on Star Frontiers characters and modules – by 1984, it had completely displaced Dungeons & Dragons in the Young Gifted Nerd Role Playing Game rotation – and being intrigued by this new thing I’d never seen called “Dominos Pizza” where you called a phone number and they BROUGHT YOU A PIZZA.

And strangely enough, there was a dance.  Or mixer, or something – I don’t know what they called it exactly.  All I know is that there was music, and some people in Devo-esque trash bag getups, and I clearly remember thinking that something was definitely wrong and this event wasn’t working for me somehow.

And then, at the pancake restaurant in O’Hare on the flight back, I asked for hot tea and I got a mug and some sort of metal pitcher of hot water, and I was lost.

Different times.

There’s a lot of shit going on right now with Vanderbilt basketball.  My hammering of the hornets’ nest released a low-grade fug that everyone acknowledges was there all along, made worse by the whole “the future is now” problem.  It may not make sense to judge our coach on the thin sample size of tournament games in March, as some have objected, but the problem is that we have seven losses already – four of them at home, where we’re never supposed to lose.  It’s all well and good to say that winning twenty-some-odd games a year is worthwhile, but when we’re not winning, it’s not good enough to turn around and say that the postseason will redeem us…unless it does.

And ultimately, that’s the issue with a team like Vanderbilt.  You can win games in the regular season, you can have big upsets (four straight times we’ve knocked off a #1 team in the country, and six of nine all time – and don’t forget the five straight wins against top-25 foes in 2007), but they don’t hang banners for a Very Good Season.  Either you win the SEC regular-season crown (last accomplished in 1993) or you win the SEC tournament (last accomplished…1974?  Maybe?) or you do something impressive in March Madness.  I suppose you could run the table and win the NIT (1990) but that would be one hell of a letdown for a team that came into the preseason as a top-10 squad with rumblings of Final Four potential.

So in the end, you’ve got to win something.  Like baseball winning the regular season and the tournament in 2007 (before getting ignominiously dumped out by Michigan).  Like baseball winning the Super-Regional last year against an Oregon State squad that was inexplicably ranked above us for most of the season.  You need an accomplishment.

And for my sports teams, accomplishments have been tough to come by.  Cal did technically win a piece of the Pac-10 title in 2006 – and may be retroactive 2004 champs as well – but there was no Rose Bowl berth, so it hardly seems like an actual title.  Vanderbilt basketball’s shortcomings once the calendar hits March are well-documented in this space.  Vanderbilt football measured accomplishment mostly by whether they covered the spread on a top-25 foe, until this season – but nobody expects us to be challenging for the SEC championship and it would take a miracle on the order of turning water into Pappy Van Winkle 23-year-old bourbon.  And the Redskins last won a Super Bowl in 1991 – and have a total of three playoff appearances in the two decades since.  At least Celtic could be relied on for something every year – a league title, or some sort of cup – but that was my most tangential connection of all, and even that went by the boards once Gordon Strachan left the bench.  And as if to mock me deliberately, God has seen fit to grant Alabama not one but TWO national championships since I disavowed the Crimson Tide for anything but Auburn and Tennessee games.*

Which begs the question: why that?  Why not something more substantive?  How about getting Barack Obama in the White House?  Well yeah, that was awesome, but it was substantively ruined by Prop 8 the same night.  Passing the health-care bill?  That was a shitshow, a half-assed job made necessary by the incompetence of Harry Reid and the continuing effort of the Village and their amen corner on cable news to call a spade a fucking shovel.

Well, what about me?

I don’t talk much about work here, for obvious reasons – in Silicon Valley, blogging about your current job is what’s known as a career-limiting move – but when I took this one, I had a simple plan.  Year one – rookie of the year.  Year two – most improved player.  Year three – MVP.  Year four – The Wolf, a la ‘Er Indoors at her job. (Or me back in DC that last year, to be honest.)

Well, to cut a long story short, it happened.  About a month ago, I got called into the office and handed a letter containing an embarrassingly glowing review and a serious off-cycle raise, to the tune of almost 10%.  It would be tough to come up with a more convincing case that I nailed the year-three target dead center.  And I celebrated, sort of.  We all went to dinner and didn’t skimp on the booze, I bought myself a fine bottle of St George absinthe and an expensive new pair of jeans, and – as is traditional now for any pay increase – a new Nerf gun (the aforementioned Jolt-EX1, which goes in my bag everywhere my laptop goes now).

But it’s not the same.  Setting aside the years and years of humility bashed into my brain as a kid, it’s not the sort of thing where you wear the championship T-shirt around.  I don’t have the HOLY SHIT WHOOP ASS songs on the iPhone playlist a la Primal Scream’s “Country Girl” or Led Zep’s “Good Times Bad Times” or M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” that went along with previous Vanderbilt successes in recent years.

Why not, though?  Why not pick a couple of appropriately ebullient tracks to boom loud while throwing together the championship ensemble with the new jeans and the notional seersucker jacket** and hell, the Vandy Brooks Brothers button-up, and just swag out and enjoy the moment?  Well, for one, it doesn’t emotionally feel like that big a deal – it’s not something that you see your other fans for the next few months and fist-pump and cheer about.  And for another – the moment’s over.  Year four is underway and it’s a monster, and there’s no time for sitting around woofing about how great year three went.

All of this dovetails nicely with the upcoming birthday.  This isn’t the ancient world, where living to thirty-five made you a wizened old veteran – pretty much anybody can turn forty these days, happens all the time.  It’s sure not the sort of thing I’m going to go around being pumped about for months afterward, the way you tend to at sixteen or twenty-one.

Championships don’t come around that often, not even vicariously (unless you’re the Yankees, or Duke, or Manchester United, and looked at from that angle it’s no wonder they attract so many bandwagoning sons of bitches).  In the end you have to make your own championship. And celebrate accordingly.  And it all comes full circle back to the problem of seeking external validation.

It should be obvious by now that imaging a new PC is a long, slow, tedious, agonizing process that takes hours and leaves plenty of time to talk shite on the internet.

 

* Yes, the Giants, but even though that was a landmark World Series win in 2010, and I was happy, and the wife even went to the parade – it’s not like I was ever stuck into them the way I was with any of the other sports I mentioned, even Celtic.  I’ve been to maybe half a dozen games ever and I watch maybe two or three regular season games a year when I can be arsed, so I didn’t have the emotional investment that most of San Francisco had.

 

** Notional my ass, 30% off at Nordstrom.com.  I bought that shit.

So unless something huge changes between now and summer, the plan is still to ride out the existing contract on the iPhone and then go to a work-provided sixth-gen iPhone on Verizon, which would hopefully feature the ability to roam abroad on my own SIM.  While I wouldn’t object to a slightly larger viewable area, I sure as hell don’t want one of the twenty identical Android slabs I saw at Best Buy on Monday at lunchtime.  The fact that Samsung thinks they’re going to put the smack down on Apple with a 5″ tablet of the exact sort that Dell busted HARD trying to sell? Go back to running the photocopier, boys.  Enjoy your Blade/Blackjack/S3 or whatever.

After another couple days trying to use the iPad, I can again say – it’s definitely easier to type on than a 7″ tablet would be, and it’s easier to pull out of the bag for daily goofing off than would be a laptop.  But you’re back to the bag problem, and daily carry.  And a 7″ tablet is too small to type on or effectively use as a laptop replacement in any way…which in turn takes us back to the Kindle Fire, except it lacks the GPS navigation that I keep keying on as a prospective use for a notional tablet.

Maybe I just need to try to do the things I think I need an iPad for…on the iPhone.  Naturally it’s easier to read the Economist on the iPad, but it can be done on the phone without as much aggravation because you’re dealing with shorter-form text than you’d get from a book (which is why I still need the Kindle 3rd edition).  Maybe I need to try to hit that for RSS more often, but the lack of a touch interface (never mind the sluggish performance) is off-putting at best and unworkable at worst.

I need to be jotting down the things that I balk at using the iPhone for and seeing what the real-world use case is like for those things.  Then we’ll see how much I really need to be splashing out on some notional third-generation iPad.  Especially when I could throw that cash on a nice seersucker suit ;]