Month: March 2010

You listen.

Much is being made of a Flurry Analytics report showing that while the iPhone sold a million units in the first 74 days – and the Droid OVER a million – the Nexus One sold a slick 135,000. Flurry puts this down to the fact that Apple had a game-changer, and Droid had Verizon plus a holiday season – and that launching an unsubsidized phone in January may not have been the best move.

I concur entirely with this, with the extra caveat that you need to see the phone. The only way you see a Nexus One is if you know somebody with one; otherwise you buy a pig in a poke and hope for the best. In addition, this is America – which means subsidized phones, through the carrier. Apple tried to break through and didn’t; the Nexus One is doing much the same (even with a partial T-Mobile subsidy for some units).

Furthermore, and importantly: iPhone and Droid were supported by major carriers at launch. Having a Nexus One on AT&T and Verizon will go a long way toward improving those numbers. I wonder if the deal with Verizon is being impeded, though, by both the Droid and by the relative difficulty of buying your own phone and putting it on CDMA (relative to the ease of buying an unlocked GSM phone and popping in the SIM).

Birthday money gone on a netbook, property tax due, unexpected purchase of NCAA tickets, and now…Google drops a Nexus One with AT&T frequencies.

That’s just cruel.

So here, in no particular order, is a rundown of my thoughts:

* It’s completely unlocked. And costs about what I paid for a similarly unlocked SonyEricsson P800 back in 2003 in a shady Chinese cellphone shop in the Bowery, which ought to be a cautionary tale as I sold that joint within a year for a quarter of what I paid for it.

* It’s got a lot of stuff I want. 5 MP camera with flash (!) and video capture, noise-cancellation built in, high-res display, and most of all that blinding-fast processor. Not to mention integration with Google Voice *and* the Navigator function of Google Maps, which would make an end to ever needing a GPS.

* It’s got some glitches. The video camera only gets 20fps, the OLED screen actually has a less rich color palette and is supposedly almost useless in bright sun, the virtual keyboard is awkwardly placed in horizontal orientation (leading to trouble with space bar vs silkscreened buttons), the camera doesn’t have touch-to-focus and doesn’t take the best shots for a 5MP job, and the text-to-speech options are supposedly limited to certain fields.

* The geekery factor is a lot higher with the Nexus One. Multitasking, widgets, the ability to do much more granular monitoring of resources (i.e. find out what’s killing my battery!) and to sideload apps at random in addition to the goods of an unlimited Marketplace…lots of lots of LOTS of potential there.

* But the fit and polish isn’t quite there relative to the iPhone – again, it’s like Ubuntu vs Mac OS X, and how much are you willing to trade away for interface consistency and fit-and-finish. Plus I would want the stuff I’m used to – Facebook app, Tweetie, DirecTV programming, March Madness On Demand, top-notch RSS reader, Kindle app, Caltrain schedule, the $ILLY sleep-cycle alarm clock…don’t know how much of that is there yet.

* And it’s tough to tell – everything with the Android devices, you do THROUGH THE PHONE. There’s no web version of the Android Marketplace, there’s no sync to the PC – you sync everything in the clouuuuuud. Which brings us back to the “GOOGLE PWNS JOO” problem – exactly how much of your life are you willing to hand over to these guys?

Long story short (TOO LATE), I think this is the deal: we now have the leader in the clubhouse. Apple has until September to produce a compelling fourth-wave iPhone that will keep me in the barn, with the additional caveat that an unlocked Nexus One would prevent my having to do anything contract-wise. In fact, the Nexus One would let me do away with the personal plan altogether and go over to a work account, with work-paid 4G, and switch between them at random if I liked…

Hmmmmmmmm….

Your move, Cupertino. Better make it good.

For the fourth straight year, the three major D-I men’s basketball programs in Alabama were shut out of the NCAA tournament.

It’s been four years since a certain trashbag institution on the west side of Birmingham sandbagged its fledgling D-I basketball program and ran off its greatest-ever coach.

Coincidence? God, I hope not.

* The consensus for Vanderbilt was “hope for 4, expect 5, be prepared for 6.” When the 4 came through again, it was cause for ecstasy – as they will be playing in San Jose. Tickets have been ordered. Did we deserve a 4? Probably not, and it’s making a lot of people remember 2008, when our 4 seed went up in flames in a first-round loss to 13th-seed Siena. But I can live with that, as long as we get past the first round. Since this team is MUCH deeper than two years ago, I’m counting on everyone to show up.

* Dick Vitale asserts that this is the weakest at-large field in years, and I don’t disagree. The only team he had a beef for was Virginia Tech – and while a Wake team they swept got in ahead of them, you have to dock points for an out-of-conference rating below 300. As it is, eight mid-major teams got at-large berths, double the number from last year – and a good thing too, as there are plenty of mid-majors whose number-2 team would pound, say, the SEC’s number-5…or the Pac-10’s number-3.

* Honestly, there are only three number-1 seeds, and only two of those are absolutely legit: Kansas and Kentucky, and probably Syracuse. Duke got the fourth thanks to the usual blowjob from the NCAA, who also gave them the play-in as their first opponent and gift-wrapped a glide path through the regional. I fully expect them to fall before the Final Four; they won’t make it past Villanova if the Wildcats are there.

* The Big East is the best basketball conference in America. As ghastly as they are in football, they are THE basketball league; eight of their sixteen teams made the Big Dance and I don’t quibble with any of them. Meanwhile, the Pac-10’s two teams are the fewest from a power conference since 1988, and I don’t expect either of them to survive the first round (sorry, sweetie) – in fact, if Cal had won the Pac-10 tournament I am convinced they would have been the lone rep from the conference. I don’t think that’s happened since the days when only conference champs made the tournament. The SEC got four in, which is one more than it deserved; Mississippi State may have a beef that Florida got in and they didn’t, but Florida doesn’t deserve to be there either. No SEC West team made it, and for good reason; they were DREADFUL. Not one team in the SEC West won a regular season matchup against any of the 4 East teams who made the dance.

* All this adds up to this: the NCAA is getting top-heavy in basketball. There’s about 20 contenders, there are a whole lot of mid-mediocre teams, and there’s a whole lot of dreck. All I can think about is how two years ago, all four #1 seeds made the Final Four, and a 4-seeded Vandy team ranked in the top 20 at the end of the regular season managed to lose an opening-round game by 21 points to a 13 seed. Memo to these ‘Dores: you can be forgiven for losing, but you will never be forgiven for quitting.

* Friends represented (partial list): Vanderbilt, California, Notre Dame, Syracuse, Ohio State, North Texas, UC-Santa Barbara, Minnesota, Washington, Georgia Tech, West Virginia, Villanova, St Mary’s, Michigan State, San Diego State, Kansas, and I *know* I’m forgetting somebody…but seriously, is there a better annual sporting event in the world? I don’t think so, y’all. You can keep your Super Bowls and your World Series and your Stanley Cups…nothing’s as great as three weeks in March.

Look, I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the world’s greatest Christian. You know how the Baptists talk about “backsliding”? I backslide like I was on the monster waterslide at King’s Dominion. He that is without sin, etc etc.

But Glenn Beck’s got a lot of damn gall to talk about “perversion of the gospel” when he threw in his lot with the Magic Underwear crowd. I mean, I liked the original Battlestar Galactica as much as the next guy, but I’m gonna put “social justice” in my Gospel, you put “Kolob” (sic) in yours, and let’s see who the Christians think is closer to the right track, dickbag.

Seriously, how long do we have to pretend wacky morning-show shit deserves to be treated as actual worthwhile political discourse?

EDITED TO ADD: Catechism of the Catholic Church, part three: Life in Christ. Section one, chapter two, Article Three: Social Justice. Right up top. One billion people, son. In fact, now that you mention it, yonder’s some Mormons. Your move, carnival freak.

In an effort to accommodate the millions (AND MILLLLLLIONS!) of Hick fans who read blogs as God intended, through an RSS reader, I went back and cleaned up the relevant posts. So don’t be alarmed if stuff changed. I am nothing if not customer-service oriented.

(Can you tell I’m working on my self-eval?)

In other news, seeing the iPad commercial – specifically the bit where somebody appears to be moving an inline graphic in a web layout – makes me wonder if I just screwed up going the netbook route. Still, for $200 instead of $650, I’ll be wrong. I’m more concerned with the fact that my phone is doing some donkish things and I’m way too close to being able to pop for the new one…assuming there IS a new one…

I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before, but Flock is basically your one-app get out of jail free card for Linux – it includes support for blogging, Twitter, Facebook and the like.  What I’m really curious to see is how it works with WYSIWYG stuff…

While I’m at it, I’m wondering too…where the hell did all this zombie media come from?  Actually, never mind, I think I know.

Sitting in Krispy Kreme across from the Costco where I’m having four new tires put on the car. The Continentals that came with it barely made 43K, so now we’re going to have some nice solid Michelins warrantied for 60K, which at current use rates means I shouldn’t need new tires again before the start of the 2014 college football season. If then. Getting rid of the stop-and-start driving from my last job (literally 19 stops in 3 miles) should do wonders for tires, brakes and gas mileage alike.

(New paragraph here. It looks fine on the website, but for some reason isn’t there in the RSS feed. I guess it’s time to start asking around and see a) who reads this drivel and b) who reads it on the site as opposed to a feed reader. I don’t know of any blog that I don’t read through RSS anymore.)

The Mini is a perfect travelling companion – when put by itself in the old blue Timbuk2 sleeve I used to use for 12-inch Apple laptops (or even a 13″ MacBook with some squishing), you can throw the bag over your shoulder and it feels like it’s still empty. Typing is fine, RSS reading through Google is fine, Facebook is usable…and since we’re in Googleburg this morning, Wi-Fi is free and plentiful. Assuming you can see the antenna. I really need to get to work on setting up the secure version of Google Wi-Fi again, but it’s slow going especially on an iPhone…

Speaking of, I have a weird problem with the iPhone where you can put the switch in the “mute” position and the phone will vibrate like crazy as it toggles between “mute” and “not mute” every time you barely touch it in the general vicinity of the switch. Screen, side, just setting it down on the table is a show. But so far, it behaves all right in the normal position, so I have put it back in the hard case and just left it on. I guess it’ll have to be turned off altogether if I’m in a critical situation. And as always, there’s the Worst Case Scenario fallback of letting work pay for my phone directly and accepting the new hotness…which won’t be the new hotness anymore by summer, so I am strongly incentivized to wait.

After some trepidation, and the realization that resizing partitions in Linux isn’t something I’m really competent to do, I have left the Strumpet with all four operating systems installed. I don’t know what XUbunutu is going to be for at this point, though, because I really have been successful in getting everything up to scratch in UNR. The Wi-Fi works (after some driver weirdness), the codecs are in place to stream Absolute Radio or watch ripped episodes of Father Ted, and the Drivel app actually posts to the blog without a fight. I have a feeling I’m going to come to regret not having system-wide spellcheck in text fields, but that’s for another day.

And last but not least, before I walk back over to be fleeced of $500, this advice: a glass of club soda on ice, with a squirt of lime juice and four firm dashes of Angostura bitters, makes for the single best non-alcoholic fireside refresher you can imagine.

We’re not talking about Vanderbilt basketball today…

to see whether this works…

This is the netbook using Drivel. if I knew this would work, I would be happy to let it ride just like this.
The real question is whether I still have to manually tag everything.