Author: Stagger Lee

Today, the VP of my old group at FirstJob is retiring. At long last, the principal source of our torment for years on end is gone.

It’s a completely hollow victory, of course. The guys who gathered in the basement in January of 1998, with nothing on the org chart between us and the enemy, are for the most part scattered to the winds. Only a couple are even in the same job they had then.

Everyone who was on staff with years under their belt and talent had pretty much flown the coop before. All that was left were the people who had just started, the people who weren’t going to walk out on their generous defined-benefit pensions, and the people who didn’t actually have the skills to go elsewhere – and this was at a time when Hooters girls were being hired at $50K to sit the help desk because everybody more technical had a better job. So it was down to just us, organized two by two like Noah’s Ark: PC hardware, PC software, Mac hardware, Mac software, PC rollout, plus a guy to handle the avalanche of incoming equipment and our lead. The Dirty Dozen, in a place with PCs running 3 or 4 different operating systems and three different forms of networking in place (four if you count the modem pool that fully half the user base needed to get onto the Internet) and three completely separate email systems, all administered by former big-iron operators who got the job because a study said their salary was commensurate with that of an email administrator.

When I say we were in Tech Vietnam, I’m only serious. And the VP was head of the Viet Cong. Petty, arbitrary, oblivious to any concept of workstation support, and interested only in not having his phone ring – despite the fact that two PC software techs plus a dog’s breakfast of systems plus a thousand users meant a nine day wait for your Windows trouble ticket to be addressed, let alone resolved – which makes the phone ring.

We fought like hell. We had to be smarter, faster, better, and more conniving than the users OR the management. And when the VP finally relented after orders from the C-suite to bring in contractors and reduce the number of tickets, one middle manager after another was brought in as well, with orders to subjugate us. And invariably, they turned on him, because we were right and he was wrong.

In the workplace, I reserve my lowest contempt for a manager who has no discernable talent or skills or knowledge, but just stirs the shit constantly – either in hopes that some order will spontaneously form out of the chaos, or so that there’s a constant stream of things that aren’t his fault so that he can roll the aforementioned shit downhill. This guy got away with it for fourteen years – finally retiring with most of his power and responsibility gone, standing up for a retirement ceremony that he didn’t deserve, because any one of a half-dozen people he fired or quashed did more in a year to save the IT infrastructure than he did in his whole tenure.

I suppose I should thank him. The chaos and bullshit he engendered forged a team like none other. But we could have burned steady for twenty-five years instead of flaming out in six. So instead, I will send him on the way from afar with the worst curse you can lay on a human being – that he gets precisely what he deserves.

For some reason, it’s all memories of September lately. Start of a new year, start of a new football season, start of a new term. Cool at night, and a new jacket to wear with it – not to mention a replacement pair of jeans, at least one or two new shirts of some sort, and in all likelihood a new pair of kicks to help cope with the endless hills and stairs of high school and college and grad school. (Reebok Phase 1 throughout high school, a Nike deal thereafter until I left Vandy.) A fresh look, a fresh start. Nice thing to be able to count on every year.

It occurs to me that you don’t often get a reset point in adulthood. Change of jobs, maybe, or when you marry or have another kid, or if you move house or to a new town. But for the most part, there’s not a time when you get a regular chance to make a fresh start of things.

The other thing that strikes me lately is that I went from a high school where everything was a half-hour drive away (or worse) to a college where everything was inside a fenced perimeter – and then a grad school where everything you’d want or need was within walking distance. Those were the years that really transformed me into a person who didn’t want to need a car for anything. And now, as we shiver through another San Francisco summer, I feel the need for a sharp new set of clothes and a reliable pair of kicks to step out under the cloudy gray autumnal sky.

Now I just need to shop through my own closet and schedule a day trip on Saturday…

“A state’s interest in an enactment must of course be secular in nature. The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose. See Lawrence v Texas, 539 US 558, 571 (2003); see also Everson v Board of Education of Ewing Township, 330 US 1, 15 (1947)…”

and

“In the absence of a rational basis, what remains of proponents’ case is an inference, amply supported by evidence in the record, that Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples. FF 78-80. Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate…”

The long-awaited iPhone 4 jailbreak is finally here. In fact, it can be done by just visiting a website and clicking a link! HOORAY WE’RE ALL FREEEEEEEEEEE–

Step back from the Amazing Freedom Sauce and think about this:

This is your OS being rewritten with the click of a webpage link.

This is, hands down, the single biggest security hole in the history of Apple products. This is a blockbuster vulnerability, as bad or worse than anything in recent years for Windows – just click one link, and damn near any code can be executed on your phone, as root – you can, in every meaningful sense of the word, get pwned.

I have absolutely no doubt that iOS 4.1 will hold now until this gets repaired – 4.1 beta 3 just dropped and probably does something to fix this. One can only hope, anyway. The fact that this is being pitched as a heaven-sent means of liberating your phone, rather than the most embarrassing flaw in a shipping Apple product of the Steve II era, speaks volumes about how distorted are the sensibilities of the tech press. Gizmodo, for instance, was hailing the jailbreak two days before decrying the vulnerability, having apparently never considered that jailbreak-by-web-site might represent a serious breach of security.

The problem is, as soon as Apple fixes this bug, it’s probably going to break a lot of newly-jailbroken iPhones. And there will be people screaming about how Apple is out to screw jailbreakers and decrying the evils of the beast of Cupertino, who sincerely believe that trying to fix the OS equivalent of Pearl Harbor is less important than making sure that Billy L33t H4xx0r can still run Cydia on his iPhone, and that Apple is wrong to fix the former at the expense of the latter. These people should kill themselves at the first opportunity, for the sake of the human race. We have enough trouble with teatards without keeping script kiddies in the gene pool.

Can we stop being shocked that Target and Best Buy threw the interests of their LGBT customers under the bus? Yes, the candidate and PAC in question are terrible on matters of equality, but they are all for tax cuts for business. And it should come as no shock when a big corporation comes to the conclusion that making more money trumps their “values”. Target is going on about their previous endorsements from HRC and the like, and that’s real sweet, but the fact that they’re willing to compromise that because of “pro-business” positions – well, it’s maddening, but it shouldn’t come as a shock.

(Who the hell is still getting consumer electronics from Best Buy?)

In the bigger picture, this is why you have to be scared about all this Teabagger bullshit (yes, I’m going to use that epithet, because fuck those redneck mental defectives). There are far too many people out there who will at least be uncomfortable with (if not outright deplore) the excesses of the movement, but they’ll go along with it because it’s on their side. And there are people who may think that Sarah Palin is a clown, or that holding hearings on whether the 14th Amendment should actually apply is abysmally stupid, or get embarrassed that elected officials endorse questioning whether Barack Obama is in fact a secret Muslim and not an American citizen at all – but you know what? They’ll still pull the GOP lever, because that’s their side.

I’m not interested in the whole false-equivalence, either. People will scream “MoveOn!” and “Michael Moore” and “International ANSWER” – but you know what? None of those entities ever had a prominent role in the Democratic party, none of them were elected officials, and certainly no Democratic leaders felt compelled to genuflect before them and rush to embrace their flakiness. Meanwhile, the Senate’s top Republicans wants to address the notion that people born in the United States shouldn’t automatically be citizens – and hold Congressional hearings on the topic. The last time the Democrats went this far off the baseline was 1972 – and establishment Washington and its kept catamites in the Beltway media are still acting as if George McGovern and his boosters are running the day-to-day operations of every politician left of Joe Lieberman. All you have to know is that individual mandates for health insurance were part of the Republican health care position in 1994, and that cap-and-trade was a Republican answer to greenhouse gasses in 2008, to know that the Democrats are if anything running to the right to try to make something happen.

So yeah. At this point, we are at the mercy of whether non-insane Republicans are willing to stand up and say “this isn’t cool.” I’m not even talking about embracing the Obama agenda – I’m just talking about simple stuff, like making it abundantly clear that Obama is an American citizen and the legitimate President, that the first sentence in the 14th Amendment is clear and unambiguous and not up for debate, that there are no such things as “death panels,” that the election wasn’t stolen by ACORN, that there is no pending government plot to take everyone’s guns and open concentration camps. I would like to see prominent conservatives come out in public and loudly proclaim, in short, that they don’t want to base our political discourse on derangement and abject stupidity.

I’m not going to hold my breath.

Too many paste-eaters are out there crowing that the Library of Congress ruling on DMCA exemptions is somehow the death-blow for Apple, and that you’ll be able to buy jailbreaks on the corner and then sue the pants off Steve Jobs when iOS 4.1 breaks them. Setting aside the foolishness of anyone thinking jailbreaking is remotely on the mind of 99% of iPhone owners, I will refute this with two simple points:

1) The ruling says that jailbreaking does not constitute a breach of the DMCA. From a black-letter law standpoint, all this means is that you can break your own phone and not be legally liable – in no way does it imply that Apple is obligated to facilitate or support this. Think of it like a car – you can rip out the engine and put in some wacky hydrogen fuel-cell drivetrain if you like, and you’re completely within your rights to do so, but you shouldn’t balk when the mechanic at the dealership says “we can’t really fix that for you.” In other words, as with so much of life – buy the ticket, take the ride. All this ruling means is that it’s legal to buy the ticket.

2) The last round of DMCA exemption rulings in November 2006 said that unlocking your phone to use with another provider is not a breach of the DMCA. That was reaffirmed in this round. For almost four years, it’s been completely legal to unlock your phone in the United States. How many carriers are selling phones unlocked? For that matter, how many carriers will unlock your phone if you ask them to? You can do it yourself, if you can figure out how, but if you call up AT&T and ask them to unlock your iPhone, they’ll tell you to go shit in a hat, irrespective of your contract status. Hell, even if you could “unlock” a phone from Verizon or Sprint and move from one to the other, you’d still need them to accept your ESN and put on their network.

Apple caved on the carrier-subsidy model after a year. Google folded in only seven months. Like it or not, if you want to tinker with your phone, you’re going to deal with the fact that the carriers have the whip hand. That’s the American way – which is why our cellular system is the most cocked-up on Earth.

Meanwhile, what you wind up with is this: you’re legally free to do whatever you want to your phone. However, nobody is obligated to help you out, and if you somehow make it non-functional, well, now you’ve climbed up there it’s a hell of a lot higher than it looks, ain’t it? And for all those who want to loop this into the Apple-is-the-new-Osama-bin-Laden meme that seems to be sweeping the Internet in 2010, two points: 1) show me a case yet of Apple going after jailbreakers in the law or courts, and 2) it wasn’t Apple who’s out there remotely removing software from their phones…

November 9, 2008:

…The $11 million Panther Stadium, carved into a hillside on the northwest edge of campus, seats 2,000 fans in the stands and dozens more on the berm in the south end zone. More than 120,000 cubic yards of dirt were moved to make room for the facility, which features a brickwork facade and a prescription athletic surface.

BSC reported 3,575 people packed the stadium, which is framed by oaks and pine trees on the perimeter and a view of a giant industrial slag pile across Interstate 20/59.

“What we all enjoy are these festival days of fall,” said BSC President David Pollick. “This is what you think of as a romantic afternoon at a liberal arts college. This is fun. And it’s a big day for us.”

The new stadium features an outdoor track and the football surface that doubles as a lacrosse field. Building the stadium allowed BSC to add five sports to its roster.

Pollick said the debt for the construction would be retired in three years because of an increase in enrollment sparked by the new sports….

May 26, 2006:

The Board of Trustees announced that they intend to pursue a move to Division III, beginning with the 2007-2008 academic year. One lame-duck season in Division I, followed by an end to scholarship athletics. In addition, they announced plans to start football in Division III, complete with an on-campus facility. In related news, the Birmingham News reports that the NCAA was approached in February by an institution, requesting anonymity, seeking to explore a move from Division I to Division III.

So the question is twofold:

1) If we don’t have the money to stay in Division I, exactly where in the FUCKING FUCK do we have the money to start up the most expensive sport a college can play, and build it a new stadium to boot?

2) Has this move been in the works for three or four months now, and if so, why has so much effort been made to keep it secret?

May 28, 2006:

…This whole project stinks to the skies, what with the complete veil of secrecy until the last minute, the mysterious “anonymous school” approaching the NCAA about shifting down to III, and the apparent willingness to shovel money into the transition despite the dire financial straits that prompted the move in the first place. There’s only one explanation: David Pollick has wanted this from day one. He always intended to do this, because his vision for BSC is that we can be the next Sewanee, the next Centre, the next Oglethorpe, whatever. Coming in under the shadow of Neal Berte, he had to do something to make his mark right away – so he stirred the pot. Risible at best, contemptible at worst. For some reason, the trustees went along – maybe some of them look forward to fewer minorities coming through the gate, I don’t know – but I have yet to find a single student or alum who thinks that moving backward is a good idea.

BSC always found the money for everything else – science buildings, frat houses, whatever – so let’s not get caught up in the whole “follow the money” approach. This isn’t about money. It never was. If there was a serious commitment on the part of the administration, donors could be found, just as they have been in the past. This isn’t about money – this is about a new president wanting to remake a school in his own image…

July 14, 2010:

Birmingham-Southern College today announced massive financial cuts to balance its budget, 110 days after serious fiscal irregularities were discovered that forced the school to cut spending by as much as $10 million a year.

The cuts include 51 staff members laid off; a decision not to fill 14 vacant staff positions; average pay cuts of 10 percent to remaining faculty, staff and administrators; suspension of the matching contributions to retirement plans; two one-week furloughs for all staff and administrators…

July 22, 2010:

The financially beleaguered private liberal arts college announced late today that, with the start of the 2011-12 school year, it will no longer offer majors in those five subjects (accounting, computer science, dance, French and German – ed.) and that, over the next year, the school will eliminate 29 teaching positions.

The school’s music program will undergo “modification.” What kind of modification is under discussion, and school officials declined today to say more about possible changes.

About 150 BSC students are pursuing majors in the five programs set for elimination, school officials said.
The cuts will result in 12 faculty positions being eliminated effective with the start of this school year, which gets under way in about a month. An additional 17 faculty positions will be eliminated effective in the 2011-12 school year…

…about the ten most influential books of your life. So I’m going to give it a shot. In no particular order except roughly chronological…

1) Our Universe, by the National Geographic Society. An illustrated atlas of the solar system and beyond, unbelievable in its artistry and comprehensive in its information. It even came with a floppy vinyl record that demonstrated the doppler effect. For a kid who was a space freak (and had plenty of classmates willing to inform him of same), it was THE book.

2) Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. An anthology of vignettes of turn-of-the-century life in a fictional Ohio town, this was an assignment for summer reading when I donked off English 11 in the summer of 1988 so I could fit AP English in later. While the books in general were pretty good – Gatsby just missed this list – Winesburg is the one that first made me think, “I wish I could write that.” Still does, over twenty years on.

3) The Moon Goddess and the Son, by Donald Kingsbury. A recommendation in the summer of 1989 from my long-distance nigh-imaginary dream girl at the time, this one had everything: non-linear plotting, near-future setting, and a concept of simulation-based historical and political analysis that did as much as anything to start making a political science major of me.

4) The Making of the President 1960, by Theodore H. White. I read this in its entirety while waiting for a scholarship interview my senior year. A landmark view of a style of politics in transition, before primaries and television made party conventions irrelevant. Subsequent installments were also interesting, but this is the one that made White as a political commentator – and conclusively bent the curve from pre-law to political science.

5) V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The greatest graphic novel of all time, Watchmen be hanged, this is the book that opened my eyes to what anarchy really means…and to what terrorism can really accomplish. Also features the most compelling anti-hero of British fiction until the coming of DCI Gene Hunt. If all you’ve seen is the movie, you really don’t know the story.

6) Griffin and Sabine (and its sequels), Nick Bantock. An obvious hook for any English minor pining after somebody far away, the combination of “epistolary novel” and artwork that you actually had to open up and touch was unlike anything before or since. I think this got turned into an interactive CD-ROM at one point, and it’s the sort of experience that would be downright transformative rendered on an iPad. The quintessential grown-up pop-up book, and one that made me realize that a bad girlfriend in the deep South was no way to go through life.

7) The Macintosh Bible, 4th ed., by Art Naiman et al. I got my first Mac in the summer of 1994 before going to grad school. This is the book that made it possible for me to use it, and thus to wind up with the life and career I currently enjoy.

8) The Nudist on the Late Shift, by Po Bronson. Ultimately, this is the reason I am in Silicon Valley. Written at the height of the dot-com boom, the stories within – new arrivals trying to make it big, sales people trying to spike the hockey stick on the last day, or a young CEO trying to take the company public – made me wonder if I could do that, and if I could do it in Northern California at ground zero of the future. As it turns out, I can. Which is kind of a relief.

9) To Say Nothing Of The Dog, by Connie Willis. The most accessible of her Oxford time-travel books, this is just begging to be made into the first truly great sci-fi-rom-com. I keep going back to it (and forcing it on the wife) just because you can hear those characters in your head, pitch-perfect. (And if you don’t think I’m desperate to make sure I live until All Clear is published…)

10) Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson. The Bigend trilogy shows Gibson working in an entirely new world, full of idiosyncratic characters, too-real-to-be-real plot twists, and chockablock with brand names – in other words, ours. James Bond reimagined for the 21st century, with secret agents replaced by nondescript young women and gadgets you could probably pick up on eBay if you searched long enough. Cayce Pollard probably informs my wardrobe over the last 3 years more than any other influence – lots of plain solid separates that could pass muster anytime since the end of the war…

The backlash against Apple is reaching gale force. Wags from LA to New York to London are convinced that the iPhone 4 is somehow the Edsel of mobile phones, and the elite of the paste-eaters are insistent that Android is just the thing to bring down dictatorial empire of Jobs. Which begs the question: uh, LOLWUT?

Apple’s explosion into mobile telephony has been a circus hitched to a tornado and no mistake. Over the last three years, Apple has made more profit off the iPhone than every other mobile phone maker has made on their entire product line. That’s an innovation right there, to bring Silicon Valley margin to a segment that was previously fixated on providing the phone free to the user in hopes that they’d make it up on minutes. More impressive, though, is the projection that Apple’s profit on the iPhone in 2010 will be double all other US phone sale profit combined – on 3% market share. Clearly, they’re making crazy paper, and people are willing to pay for their goods.

So why the nerd backlash? I suspect it’s got a lot to do with the fact that the iPhone *is* popular and is the face of the smartphone revolution, while simultaneously being a relatively tight ecosystem. It’s not “open,” it’s not “free,” it’s not got root access and the ability to load your own operating system ROM and and and and… well, you’ve still got to “jailbreak” many if not most Android phones, and in the case of the Droid X circumvent hardware protection. Let’s also remember that somebody did remotely delete applications off their phones, and it wasn’t Apple. And the platform itself is fragmenting in all directions, with multiple versions of Android in the wild and different UI layers over the top – and that with the end of the Nexus One, you can no longer go out and buy a phone running the latest version of the Android OS on the retail market. If Apple were killing off phone models after seven months, revving the OS every three and obsoleting hardware barely halfway through its contract, the Slashdot gladiators and Gizmorons would be losing their shit.

The problem for the paste-eaters is that the iPhone’s not meant for them, and it’s successful. Most people don’t care about being able to install this widget they wrote themselves. Most people couldn’t give a shit about having “root access” to the phone. And I guarantee you that most people haven’t even considered the developer model behind their phone. All they know or care about is that they like it and it works.

And this is why Apple has succeeded so far, and why the iPhone 4 issues are the biggest problem yet: Apple has blown off the usual laundry list of specs and features in favor of one criterion – user experience. The reason why the original iPhone didn’t have 3G was because the coverage was so bad and the power demand so high, there was no way to make it work without sucking. The reason why the first two iPhones didn’t do video capture is because cellphone video at the time was, at best, 320×240 and maybe 15 frames per second, and that sucks. Full-motion VGA in the 3GS, 640×480 at 30fps, didn’t suck, and that’s why you didn’t get it until then. Video calling has been around for years, and it sucked, and that’s why Apple didn’t offer it until they had an implementation that was easy to explain and simple to use – and didn’t suck.

UE.

Thus the issues with the iPhone 4, and the consternation at Apple. Reading the papers, you’d think the iPhone 4 couldn’t get a signal anywhere, and any attempt to pick it up causes it to implode. Patently not the case – I was in an elevator yesterday, bridging the antenna gap with a damp finger on both sides, and I still had 2 bars of 3G and the call sounded unimpaired. But if people think the phone is terrible, that’s all it takes – which is why Himself was so crabby at that presser. He knew what had to be done, and he did it, but he didn’t like having to answer for a problem that was nowhere near what it was being made out to be. But ultimately, I think he’ll be fine, because there’s still a waiting list for new iPhones (at least as of yesterday at the Apple Store in Palo Alto) – and people don’t line up to buy something they think sucks.

And so we fall back on the oldest of nerd tropes: that the people buying Apple are sheep, are morons, are fanboys who will eat whatever shit is shoveled out of Cupertino, that only an idiot would pay for an iPhone when you can get this amazing thing with an 8 MP camera and a 4-inch screen and 4G and a kickstand and it’s got video calling too and it’s open and you can root it and and and and…

Message to my fellow geeks: there are a lot of regular donks out there. They do not have the same priorities. They want something else, and Apple is apparently willing to give it to them. Ever since 1997, one thing has been true at Apple: the nerd market is not, cannot be, and will not be the focus of their attentions, because that’s not where the money is.