Author: Stagger Lee

Twenty years ago, as I was tooling up to a grad school career in political science, I watched the shift happening in the GOP.  I watched the 1988 Presidential campaign, and the 1992 Presidential campaign, and how H. Ross Perot could pull 19% of the vote despite the fact that most of his supporters probably considered Bush their second choice and knowing full well Perot couldn’t land a single electoral vote.  I watched Newt Gingrich laying the groundwork for a takeover of the Congressional GOP.  I watched long-term incumbent Congressmen and Senators retire in the South, to be replaced by Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction.

And I declared then and there that we were headed for a second American Civil War.  And here we are.

We have states attempting nullification.  We have an entire party in Congress holding not only the federal budget but the full faith and credit of the United States hostage…unless the Democrats and the President willingly give up on the single biggest policy priority of his administration.  The bill passed in both houses, with a supermajority in the Senate necessitated by the unprecedented abuse of the filibuster.  It passed Constitutional muster with the Supreme Court.  The President who signed the law was re-elected handily.  The Senate stayed in the hands of the party that passed it. And more votes were cast for Democrats than Republicans in the House, but the House stayed Republican by dint of gerrymandered districts.

And yet, the House demands that Obamacare cease to exist. That’s the negotiating position: give us what we could not get by legislative or electoral means, or we will force a default.  And then, a bunch of shuck-and-jive about how a default wouldn’t be that bad, and it’s all the President’s fault because he can just pay the interest on the debt and we ought to get rid of 32% of the government anyway, la-di-da.  Which is the consequence of enabling stupidity.

Medicare. Social Security. Defense.  Pick one.  Once you’ve paid the interest on the debt, one of those is going to get hit badly if you re-order priorities, because those three plus the interest amount to three-quarters of the Federal budget. And because 32 is greater than 25, that means that you’re talking about getting rid of every single thing the federal government does, plus gouging one of those three.

This is what we get. This is the inevitable result of the golden mean, the constant search for false equivalence, the pious Villager nonsense of “both sides do it, a plague on both your houses.”  This is the price of acting as if people constantly braying about taking back the country as they demand to carry guns in Starbucks and threaten citizen juries to arrest all Congressmen are anything but fucking nutjobs who should be in a home, not treated as equal participants in political debate.  This is what happens when an entire political party crafts its message and its purpose around “live in fear,” and then is too terrified of its own sociopaths to act against them.

It’s time for the President to embrace the power of no.  No negotiations.  No bargains. No face-saving gestures.  The GOP owns this until they back down.  The United States is not a hostage for Confederates to bargain with for what they couldn’t win by fair means or force of arms.  It stops now.

Uncle Sam’s got the hydrogen bomb.

I don’t know what to tell you. Every time we think we’ve made a step forward, we stumble about five yards back. We don’t have an everyday running back, we have one receiver and that one gets keyed on constantly, and our experiment to see if you can win a game in the SEC with no linebackers is, so far, a disaster.  Much as I would love the students to all be there in the first quarter, we should start with making sure the football team is there first and work up from there.

It’s going to be an ugly year for Vanderbilt sports, what with the complete loss of our entire recruiting class from last year in basketball and a football team that looks like being .500 at the halfway mark…with Florida, Georgia and Texas A&M left to play, not to mention at a Tennessee team that’s probably good enough to beat us.  And that’s before factoring in the cloud still hanging over the school from the events of the offseason.

But the worst thought about Vanderbilt athletics is this: this may be the restoration of normal service. This is the best run of Commodore football since 1974-75.  No football coach since 1948 has more than one winning season at Vanderbilt, and we’ve beaten the Vols exactly eight times since the war.  Eight times in sixty-seven seasons.  That’s not a rivalry, that’s an abattoir. We can do well in women’s hoop, we can do really well in baseball, but let’s face it, that’s not what this league grades on, is it?

The thing is, we as fans want to believe.  We want to.  We desperately want to think that things can be different.  But nobody else does.  No other teams, no media, no neutral observers.  Everybody, literally everybody else, just assumes that we will inevitably revert to the mean and be good for two wins a season.  Teams that don’t have a conference win, teams that have been getting blown out, teams in disarray on the verge of firing their coach: they all look at Vanderbilt on the schedule and automatically write down W. We beat Ole Miss five of six coming into this season, and they still had that game down as a win.

This is a bet. We’re betting a nontrivial chunk of Martha Ingram’s money that if we pay for a good young coach, pay for his staff, pay for new facilities and pay the freight to try to be competitive with the rest of the league, we can be.  Good enough to compete, good enough not to be an automatic W, good enough that we’re not treated like a punchline, good enough to be taken seriously against Alabama and Florida and LSU and Georgia and Texas A&M and South Carolina and…

…that’s really the problem, isn’t it? We’re stuck in a conference whose schools are basically feeder institutions for the football teams, one where the SEC routinely has half the top 10 teams in the country.  Every year, we get Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and Ole Miss, plus Tennessee and Kentucky and now Missouri for our trouble, and then people give us shit when we don’t want to pile Northwestern and Ohio State on top of that.  Ask Cal how playing both the Buckeyes and Wildcats went for them, and they got them both at home. Our season is an uphill climb, every single year.  Our best performance since 1915 was good for 4th place in the SEC East, and a bowl game five miles from campus.  A top-20 recruiting class in the nation was good for a whopping ninth place in the conference.  We’ve got four-star athletes that we’ve never had before…and they’re lining up against five-stars.

Anybody who’s watched the last two years knows this isn’t the same old Vandy.  The biggest fear I have is that it won’t make a difference.  The SEC may well have reached a spot where our football program is simply not structurally capable of being a peer competitor.  We need a lot of money, a lot of time, and a shit-ton of patience if we’re going to change the culture and change the fate of our program.  I don’t know how long the money will last, but time is running out and patience may be in short supply in the places where it’s needed most.

“Common connotations: pessimism, depression, blandness, boredom, neutrality, fog, undefinedness, old age, contentment, the brain, speed.”

Just as my years in DC were definitely the Man In Black era, the timeframe of this blog could very easily be characterized as the Gray Age.  It shows in the wardrobe – the stack of American Apparel T-shirts, the overpriced Saboteur sport coat, the pricey Walk-Over suede wingtips, both pair of Converse (One-Star and All-Star Pro alike), the San Jose Giants cap, my new everyday-wear Vanderbilt hat – all bought in the last five years and all in gray.  At one point, I was even considering a brown-and-gray Timbuk2 bag just to match the general trend in my apparel.

Pessimism and depression? Hard to argue that hasn’t been a driving theme, especially the last year or so.  Blandness? Boredom? You’d have to ask my friends.  Oddly enough, this has been a time when I’ve gotten content with doing nothing.  Some of the most enjoyable times of this year have been at home by myself, completely disconnected from the Internet, watching a twenty-year-old television show or a live feed of a British news channel.

Or driving in the fog.  That thick morning ceiling of gray turned into a wall of it out by Pacifica on the night of the season opener for the Skins, when I could tune in the satellite radio and listen to the gang in DC describe the unfolding disaster.  When I left the border of Santa Clara county on 280, it was in the mid-80s and hot and bright. By the time I pulled onto the ramp for Highway 1, it was overcast and gray.  By the time I pulled into the parking lot of the famous beachside Taco Bell, I couldn’t see the ocean from the road and it was in the mid-60s and dropping.  And it was breathtakingly gorgeous.

Gray fits the ambiguity.  We had to cut Chris Boyd off from Vanderbilt football, because he did a bad thing – but he thought he was doing it for the right reasons, and he couldn’t have done a bad thing unless some other people had done a far worse thing, but nevertheless you can’t let him represent Vanderbilt anymore, but you don’t want to necessarily kick him out of school, because he technically pled guilty to a misdemeanor and only got unsupervised probation…gray. You’re not going to be happy no matter what you decide.  And then you have to turn around and think about the football team, and feel guilty for considering the implications of cutting loose a Biletnikoff-watchlist wide receiver who didn’t play a down this year because you wanted to do the right thing rather than the most advantageous thing for the football program.  

And then there’s the morning…before daylight savings ends, when throwing that dark towel over the glass of the shower eats up the early glimmer and makes it ever so slightly easier to pull out of bed in the morning. The thin ribbon of gray in the sky, before the sun gets its teeth brushed and its first cup of coffee, when it’s cool and quiet out and things really haven’t started moving yet.  It wasn’t until those dark days at NASA in 2008 when I realized that for the first time in my life, the cool quiet morning before anyone else shows up was the best part of the workday.  After years and years of a 9:30 AM start, getting in before 8 suddenly became a legitimately attractive prospect.

But I guess the most telling instance of gray can be seen around the temples, even after getting the number-one crop at the barber shop. The years are rolling by, and the evidence is there.  For the first time, I can look in the mirror and what I see at first glance is a middle-aged man.  For better or worse.

So on the day I posted that last update on my battery situation, I tested the phone again with the aforementioned settings, basically turning off everything that makes iOS 7 different.  Amazingly, I got four hours mixed use out of the first 40% of battery life.  But then it dropped another 20% in the ensuing hour.  I then put the phone in airplane mode, turned wi-fi back on, and got another two hours’ use out of it, for a total of seven hours…and then, with 9% showing on the battery, the phone died.  So seven hours of use, two of which were with no cellular at all and two more of which were nothing but audio playback.  Not good, especially when this same phone would turn in 9 hours of mixed use with almost constant audio in the past.

A trip to the Apple Store Genius Bar revealed a number of crashing apps, including system processes. It also showed a battery on the borderline of requiring a replacement, enough so that they flagged it for replacement if the problems continue irrespective of warranty status.  Well done Apple.  At that point, they wiped the phone completely and imaged it in full-on restore mode, and I set it up as new.  And I mean completely new.  Turned on iTunes Match rather than sync with the desktop, allowed photos to come down from iPhoto Stream rather than sync, downloaded apps and rearranged them manually rather than sync.  And I didn’t reinstall any of the work MDM profiles; I just manually configured the required passcode protections and such.

I also tweaked a few of the settings, but not that many.  I did turn off parallax view and put up a static wallpaper, and I turned off some of the location settings, but I left Frequent Locations and background updating turned on.  This is, after all, iOS 7 – it shouldn’t be necessary to gut the features of the OS to get a working device.  And then I let it run down to almost nothing last night before charging it overnight and setting out this morning.

Right this instant, I’m on 95% battery after 1:13 of mixed use, so maybe it worked.  Fingers crossed.  I’m hoping this will be enough to keep the thing viable for a while; I’m not exactly relishing the thought of having to convince management to get me a new device and a new carrier after less than a year.  But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t deadly curious what the wife’s presumed new iPhone 5S will do on AT&T’s LTE network relative to mine on VZW.

I can tell you this, though: a standard civilian plan on AT&T (no corporate discounts) with 450 minutes talk (plus 5000 night/weekend minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile) plus unlimited texting and 3 GB data is $90 a month.  The exact same plan (unlimited calling/texts, 3 GB data/month) on the exact same network (AIO Wireless is a subsidiary of AT&T) is only $65 a month. And since I only need 2 GB of data – an option AT&T doesn’t offer; it’s either 300 MB or straight to 3 GB – I could actually pay only $55 to AIO.

That’s huge.  I mean, huge.  There’s no contract, no 2-year commitment, and even if I paid full price for a 32 GB gold iPhone 5S, that $750 is still less than the $840 I would pay over two years on AT&T’s plan (not to mention I’m still paying AT&T $299 up front for the device).  If I go with the plan I actually want, buying the phone up front and using AIO, the net result over 2 years is a savings of $630…which is just about enough to buy a new phone after two years all by itself.

So, next steps? Use this thing for a couple more days and see how it runs.  If the battery starts to flake again, it’s worth seeing what happens if I use the T-Mob SIM…which means no LTE and possibly flaky coverage, but lower-powered GSM fallback instead of battery-thirsty CDMA.  At least it eliminates Verizon’s specific network as part of the problem, and besides, even if if I never test that out, the SIM only cost me $1.06 shipped.  Basically, the decision chain is:

IF IT DOESN’T WORK: try the T-Mobile SIM and see if moving to a GSM solution fixes or at least ameliorates the battery drain.

IF THAT DOESN’T WORK: take the phone back into Apple and see if the application crashing persists – and if it does, I don’t know what happens from there aside from “wait for an OS update and hope the wife hasn’t traded in the 4S yet”.

IF THE CRASHING IS GONE: hope against hope that they’ll take mercy on me and replace the battery, or that it will have dropped into the replacement zone on the diagnostics.  If they don’t, the plan falls back to “hope the wife hasn’t traded in the 4S yet” coupled with “hope to find someone who can replace the battery on said out-of-warranty 4S for cheap.”  After all, other than a slightly bigger screen and LTE, there’s not much to separate the 5 from the 4S…

And hopefully, everything will play nicely and I can go back to civilized conversations with normal people again. =)

We have a political party that lives in a world of its own making.  In TeaWorld, you get all your news from Fox and from an army of AM radio gasbags and from hundreds of emails with “FW: Fw: FW: fwd: FW:” in the subject line (and red dots on Snopes).  In TeaWorld, the President of the United States is an illegitimately-elected, Constitutionally-ineligible Muslim atheist [sic] from Kenya who is determined to drag American into godless socialist Islamist [sic] tyranny.  And his new health care scheme will automatically bring about the downfall of the nation and lead to Grandma being chopped into meatloaf to be served as croquettes at interracial gay weddings.

This is what they genuinely believe.  This is what their elected officials ran on.  And when you put it like that – you lost an election which was improperly stolen from you, you lost another election which was improperly stolen from you, the Supreme Court intervened on behalf of a shiftless Negro just like in the 1950s, and now the country hangs on the precipice of doom if this plan takes effect? Why the hell wouldn’t you shut down the government?  If the very survival of your country and your race will be forfeit, why not fight with every last weapon available to you?

The nilhism of the populist 90s – term limits, throw out all incumbents, the rise of Perot as the man-on-horseback alternative because he was rich and thus must be good at things – all of that was a necessary ingredient in the runup to what we have now: the refusal to govern at all. This is the necessary end result of fifty years of conservatism: the desire to break the government for the pure sake of breaking it. It’s nullification, really. It’s John C. Calhoun, it’s the South risen again. It’s the idea that despite an election, despite another election, despite Supreme Court decisions and CBO projections and the misgivings of a plurality of their own elected party, the Teatards are nonetheless entitled to have the world bend to their will, just because. 

We should have been fighting to break the stupid a lot earlier. Instead, we propped it up and walked it around and let it sit at the table.  Now, matters are worse, and the potential is there for them to get a hell of a lot worse before they get better. The only hope is that at some point, once they’ve killed the hostage, their leverage is completely gone. If there’s  actually a debt ceiling-related default, then there’s nothing left to fear; the damage is done. At that point, it’s time for Harry Reid to borrow some testicles and unilaterally do away with the filibuster, and it’s time for the Democrats to insist on a strict party-line vote in both houses of Congress and expel anyone who insists on trying to split the difference with a bunch of redneck insurrectionists.

This is why I recognize no corporeal authority save for His Majesty Emperor Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.  He was right about a bridge over the bay, he was right about the abomination of “Frisco,” and it looks like he was dead-on about dissolving Congress.

In an effort to spare my lovely bride from the banjo-playing donkey that starts up in her head every time I start droning on about phone battery issues and how I want to sort out my cellular situation, I am going to attempt to get it all down in print here.  Love you, sugar ;]

* Battery is still at the forefront of my mind because iOS 7 on the Verizon iPhone 5 isn’t getting any better.  Ars Technica repeated their tests yet again and saw only a slight improvement when going to an AT&T phone, and no improvement when disabling cellular connectivity or Background App Refresh altogether.  They point out that the new iPhones are not that much better – there’s just something about the iPhone 5 and later that doesn’t work well with their looped-Safari-browsing test.  Which test, as they say, makes up for what it lacks in reality with what it provides in reproducibility and consistency across devices.

* In my week out of town, I always had the charger pack attached to the phone, but I only had to enable it once.  For the most part, I wasn’t hitting the phone as hard as usual, especially because I was doing all of the driving when I wasn’t tailgating hard or stuck on a plane with no network. I ended up only flipping the switch on the battery pack once, but I also routinely ran the phone below 20% before plugging in for the night.  Fortunately, we slept in a house with a Verizon tower in the back yard pumping out a strong 5 bars, so it could have been much worse.

* Before I left town, I hard-wiped the phone and reinstalled iOS 7, setting up from scratch with no restore from backup. While out and about, I upgraded to 7.0.2.  I also turned off all of the following: screen animation, Siri raise-to-speak, background app refresh, auto-brightness (set to about 33%), Bluetooth, all system location services save for compass calibration and cell network search, Frequent Locations, and iTunes Store auto-update.  The only apps with Location Services enabled are the ones that need it – transit apps, weather apps, and a couple of location-aware journaling apps like Instagram.  In short, I’ve more or less disabled almost all the new feature in iOS 7; no slick 2.5D parallax view or self-updating apps or traffic alerts in the Today screen for me.

* With this setup, my phone dropped from 98% battery to 88% battery in a stretch where it only played podcasts for an hour and a half (the actual elapsed time was longer, but I didn’t play continuously).  In this iPod mode (but with networking still alive), the battery dropped 1% per nine minutes.  After I ran out of podcasts, I disconnected the headphones and only used it to check the usuals – Reeder, Instagram, mail, the like – and in 14 minutes of active use dropped the battery another 6%.  Worth noting: an hour of audio playback in airplane mode while traveling only consumed 1-2% of battery.

* The original iPhone review by iLounge found serious issues with battery life in low-LTE areas. In places with only two bars of signal, they found battery life to be effectively halved. Given that I can’t seem to find more than three bars of Verizon LTE most places, that probably doesn’t bode well.  I have the T-Mobile nano-SIM, and will probably set it up in a day or two to see what happens when I try GSM with no LTE on the same hardware.

* It’s not lost on me that taking the iPhone from 1136×640 to 1280×720 would mean an approximately 25% growth in screen acreage…which conceivably also means a 25% jump in size of battery.  That alone might be a reason to wait for a notional iPhone 6.

* Things left to try: getting through the day in WiFi-only mode (no cellular networking at all), turning off LTE altogether, seeing what happens with the T-Mobile SIM.

There was a time when I actually enjoyed air travel.  Even after September 2001, when I started needing two or three drinks before and after I got on the bird, it still wasn’t the worst thing. There was the excitement of jetBlue, after all, and besides I had to fly if I wanted to go to California to see my girl every now and then.  It was manageable.

Not anymore.  Having just returned home from yet another two-legged flight through a hub, I have come to some realizations, and they are as follows:

 

* There are no good hubs.  Chicago gets blizzards, Houston gets hurricanes, Denver gets ice and weird atmospherics because there’s not enough air up there, and Atlanta is, well, Atlanta.  When I was back and forth from Dulles to the Bay, it was eminently manageable because it was a direct flight.  But if I have to change planes and go up and down twice, that’s too much.

* Flying has become like everything else: as long as you have tons of money, it’s no problem.  You can buy your way out of bag limits, you can buy your way out of the ritual goosing by the TSA, you can buy your way to the front of the line to board, you can buy your way into human-sized seating accommodations.  And you have to, because almost everything is monetized now.  You actually have to pay to sit in the exit row, for crying out loud – I suspect it’s only a matter of time before they say that they’re out of overhead space, so you’ll need to check your remaining carry-on bags, and whip out a credit card reader so you can pay for not having the foresight to realize that there’s never enough carry-on space overhead.

* There is no non-dickish way to put your seat back.  And as soon as you are a dick and put your seat back, I literally can’t reach into the seatback pocket any longer.  To the douche with the puberty-stache and his ditz girlfriend with her Louis Vuitton bag who couldn’t wait until we stopped climbing to put your head in my lap: I hope you give each other herpes.

* You don’t go aboard the Embraer Regional Jet, you put it on like a jacket.  Nevertheless, that tiny little thing is a superior flying experience to an overstuffed 737.  It’s impossible not to feel like you’re being cattle-hauled.  Southwest is worse.  This is one time where fascism really works: work out the boarding formula, issue a number based on seating, and line up and board as you’re told.

* There’s not a lot of premium for being a competent flyer.  You’re going to be stuck with all the amateur hour people who only ever fly on alternate holidays annually, which is why I won’t fly at the holidays anymore. If you had to pass some sort of test on “am I capable of being a civilized passenger” and could then fly exclusively on Virgin America and it would go where you needed it to, life would be amazing.

* The smartphone was the worst thing ever to happen to flying, because now people think that it’s a Stalinist-level government oppression to be made to turn the phone off.   The whole “turn your phone on once we’re taxiing on the ground so you can call for your pickup in this post-9/11 no-meeting-at-the-gate world” has been transformed by the iPhone.  Now the aforementioned douchebag can be checking his Instagram before the wheels even hit the ground.  It even appears the FAA is on the verge of shrugging and letting all non-transmitting electronics run wide open all flight. Not that it’ll be enough for people who just have to be allowed to talk and text in the middle of takeoff.  The closest I ever came to a legit air-rage event was in 2002 or 2003 when the woman behind me was still talking on her phone as the engines roared up to 100% and we started speeding up to take off; had I not been strapped in I’m sure I would have attempted to seize and smash the phone.

 

In short, flying has become a concentrated dose of everything that’s wrong with living in America in the 21st century.  No wonder it’s gotten to be too much to bear.  At this point, unless physically impossible – think Hawaii or London or Tokyo – I will take the train over the plane 100% of the time, given the time and opportunity. But that would mean taking rail seriously, which hasn’t happened outside the Northeast since the 20th Century Limited went out of service…

Today in 2008, the first Android phone launched – the G1, built by HTC and sold via T-Mobile.  It was, in many ways, the first legitimate challenger to the iPhone.  It was interesting, at a time when the dominant smartphone platform was still Blackberry and when Google’s “don’t be evil” could still be taken sort of seriously.

Today in 2013, Blackberry is selling itself to a Canadian private-equity firm for pennies on the loonie in an attempt to buy time to gather itself and focus entirely on enterprise. It’s possible they could become a specialty maker of highly-secure email devices for the enterprise market.  It’s more likely that they’ll be shut down and sold off for parts, especially some potentially valuable patents surrounding push email.

Android has basically been a carrier’s dream. It ended Apple’s sudden chokehold on the “consumer smartphone” and allowed OEMs to offer their own “good enough” smartphone experience, while simultaneously letting carriers enforce their own requirements in ways Apple wouldn’t allow.  Proprietary skins, un-deletable apps, a Verizon logo on every flat surface – all possible with Android.  More importantly, however, the need to clear both the manufacturer and the carrier created the biggest obstacle to using Android for me and countless others: one has to buy an Android phone knowing full well that it may be the newest version of Android that phone will ever be able to run.

By contrast, all the non-hardware-specific features of iOS 7 are available on the iPhone 4 I’m using as a tackling dummy.  Obviously I want most of the exotic location services turned off to spare a three-year-old battery any further trauma, and I certainly wouldn’t want to use it as a daily driver, but it still works.  By contrast, try loading up a Nexus One – it caps out at the Gingerbread version of Android, which is currently two major releases behind with a third in the works.  It would be the equivalent of this iPhone 4 being left behind with iOS 5 – which actually wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but anyway.

But through fits and starts, it’s gotten past “good enough” – and with a dedicated in-house manufacturer in Motorola, we’re finally starting to see some serious potential from integration of hardware, software and services.  Scary, sure, but also the existence proof that such an integrated package is possible.  Next up: figuring how to do it without giving everything you are to the Beast of Mountain View.

But hey, you don’t get innovation without somebody to push you.  So from Donut on through Kit Kat – happy birthday to the whole dessert cart.

Well, it’s not just me: Ars Technica has reproduced a bug (ExtremeTech link for conciseness) that demonstrates that the Verizon iPhone 5 is absolutely pummeled by iOS 7.  Battery life is decreased by over one-third in normal use, which has been borne out by my experience in the last couple of days of using it – normally my mixed use projects out to about 9 hours of email, RSS, podcast playback, Instagram, maybe a little Twitter, maybe some texting.  Yesterday, it was below 15% after five hours.

Needless to say, this is an untenable proposition.  On days when I’m at my desk all day, I can just leave it plugged in, which is fine – but on days when I’m out and about, the phone stands to be deceased completely by 6 PM.  And quite frankly, it’s 2013 – I fully expect to be able to go from waking up to turning in without having to plug my phone in.  I was more or less able to do that on the iPhone 4 and 4S, and on the 5 until now, so it’s entirely possible without having to go over to one of those Android phones with the 3000 mAh battery.

Thoughts:

* I was able to buy a nano-SIM from T-Mobile for 99 cents, which should arrive next week.  At that point, it will set me back only $3/day to test out how my unlocked iPhone 5 works with T-Mob’s network here – no LTE, certainly, nor 1700 Mhz coverage, but at the very least I should be able to ascertain whether Verizon carrier settings or CDMA technological limitations or LTE power consumption are to blame.

* My phone and service are provided by work.  Given that it’s been only 10 months, it’s not likely that they’d look kindly on replacing the thing already, especially if this is something that can be fixed in software. Also, with the pace of purchasing, I suspect there could be a software fix out before a new phone/service could be ordered and delivered by work.  Traditionally, the first update for a new iOS version arrives between 3 and 6 weeks after the initial launch, so there should be a widely-available 7.0.1 (actually more like 7.0.2, since 7.0.1 is the iPhone 5S/5C version) by the end of October.  No chance work could deliver a new phone by Halloween, even if I were willing to go with a 5C…or something else.

*This is where I get intrigued again by the Moto X, and the prospect of somehow obtaining an unlocked one which I could then throw on AIO Wireless for $55 a month (less $25 a month work subsidy for use of a personal phone…effectively giving me my old AT&T service back for a dollar a day with no contract) is tempting.  But even setting aside the very poor camera on the Moto X, I’m tied to enough of the Apple ecosystem that shifting would be painful. I don’t know how much of the Google ecosystem I would be obligated to, and I don’t know how difficult it would be to keep using my existing music supply despite the greatly reduced proportions of DRM.

* AIO Wireless throttles their LTE to 8 Mbps.  That’s not necessarily a deal breaker – in my experience, I can’t beat that on Verizon’s LTE without having at least 4 bars of LTE signal (only once this week have I cracked 8 Mbps with less than 4 bars) and given T-Mob’s buildout of HSPA+ I might be able to trump that speed without even having to rely on LTE. My test-dummy for T-Mob prepaid service has heretofore been an unlocked iPhone 4, so I’ve been stuck with traditional 3G speeds (not to deny them credit for having 1900 Mhz 3G service most places around here).  I’m very curious to see what a Faux-G connection is like.

* Looking at the Moto X, I’m wondering whether Apple might not try to bump the iPhone 6 a little bit.  A move from 1138×640 to 1280×720 would preserve the same screen ratio (16:9) while increasing the screen size to 4.5 inches at the same DPI, and if you somehow cut the side bezel out altogether the increased width of the phone would be negligible. The old Android trick of increasing the screen size to make the phone bigger to get a bigger battery might seem like a concession of defeat for iOS purists, but it might get a real-true all-day phone while simultaneously shutting up the “Apple needs to make a GREAT BIG PHONE OR THEY ARE DOOOOOOOMED” crowd in the tech press.

* I’m out of town next week, which is no time to be doing anything drastic or rash with one’s phone.  I’m seriously considering a hard wipe/restore to iOS 6 for the duration.

In retrospect, it’s almost as if Apple was specifically offering a middle finger to everyone who was deriding iOS as old and stale.  Here is a new version of the OS, with a completely new look…and almost totally identical functionality.  My June assessment stands:

“This isn’t an overhaul of the design, this is a re-skinning for the sake of appeasing people who were bored of the old UI. The underlying functionality is the same – everything is where it was, this is literally just new chrome – and I don’t know if it’s just the newness, but it feels challenging in a way that recalls the move from Mac OS 9 to OS X.  And given what a radical change that was, it’s a bigger conceptual leap than should be necessary from iOS 6 to 7.”

If you’re looking for some sort of radical departure, forget about it.  There are plenty of tiny tweaks that are nice – the hours-ahead-or-behind in the clock, the scale-bar and compass on Maps – but only the Android-inspired Control Center (long overdue) and the WebOS-inspired app switcher with easy-swipe quit (badly needed and useful) are really significant.  Everything else is a wash at best, and some things – like the removal of the actual weather widget and quick-Tweet button in the Notification center – are actually a step backward.

The real innovation relies on hardware, at this point.  The A7/M7 combination will actually make the location-based apps (and the Google Now-Lite functions in the Today pane) useful without destroying battery life, while the fingerprint authentication opens up new possibilities…but those are things that require a 5S.  When they trickle down to the notional revised-5C next year, and presumably remain in the notional iPhone 6, there’ll be enough of a critical mass of devices with those features for software to really start exploiting them.  At that point, you can imagine a greater paradigm shift in UI and functionality.

For the most part, though, the fact is that iOS is good enough already, and has been pretty much since iOS 5.  It’s hard as hell to sell “it’s already plenty good”, though, especially in Silicon Valley, so here we are, with a fistful of tweaks and a shiny new look.  At this point, the number one thing I would kill for is more battery life, which is why I’m most intrigued by the prospect of an AIO Wireless SIM and a GSM-based iPhone 5C…or a developer-edition Moto X.  And it’s been a long, long time since any Android device could claim equal curb appeal with the new iPhone.  It’s not at all lost on me that the unlocked dev Moto X is the same cost as a contract-free 32 GB iPhone 5C.