Month: June 2010

June 23, 2010, will go down in history as one of the craziest days in sports and news for a long, long time. The USA gets a miracle goal at the final gasp from Landon “Hollywood” Donovan to win their World Cup group for the first time in eighty years. A big lurch from Georgia and an irritable Frenchman play a ten-hour tennis match that ends up drawn 59-59 in the fifth set. The President of the United States deals with the highest-profile case in decades of senior military gone off the reservation by relieving the general of his duties in what may be the #1 trouble hotspot on Earth right now. How crazy was this day? A Hall-of-Fame former NFL linebacker was arrested and charged with sexual assault against an underage prostitute, and it slipped through the cracks.

All of that combined to make quite a distraction. Because I’m supposed to make pickup on an iPhone 4 tomorrow.

It wasn’t meant to be like this originally. I had planned to skip the iPhone 3G when it came out – for me, 3G was nothing but a waste of battery life and I wasn’t prepared to pay $300 up front and an extra $240 over two years just for GPS. And assisted GPS at that. Bad arithmetic. Then my dock connector got packed full of lint and shorted right out, and three months after it was released, I had to go to an AT&T store and pick up a 3G, because it cost the same as buying a refurb replacement unit for my existing iPhone.

My father-in-law still has that iPhone, and I mean to keep it, because it’s the one I was given while I was still taking Himself’s shilling along with every other employee of Cupertino Hexachrome Produce Holdings, Ltd. And I missed it. I missed the flatter back, I missed the heft and feel of the aluminum casing. And when the iPhone 3GS came out, I was sore that I couldn’t take advantage of a handset that finally included legit video capture, a faster processor, and double the RAM. My only consolation was that if I waited another year, somebody was bound to push things further.

Then Android came out. The G1 was the first iPhone challenger good enough to be worth criticizing, but it wasn’t enough to tempt me. Neither was the myTouch. Then Android 2 dropped, and the Droid, and then the Nexus One – and all of a sudden, there was an iPhone challenger not only good enough to criticize, but good enough to consider for myself – especially with AT&T’s network sagging under a load it was unable and unwilling to bear. And I looked at the $530 price tag on the Nexus One, and I did math on T-Mobile’s plans, and I ultimately decided to give Cupertino until the end of the summer to return serve. After all, I wasn’t out of contract until September 15, so I had to wait anyway. And if there was no new iPhone, or if it didn’t meet the challenge, well, I had an alternative.

And then, the announcement.

Everything I could have hoped for in moving up from the 3G – faster processor, more battery life, better camera (with LED flash and HD video capture!) and a more compact package with the heft and density I’d missed. Sure, some of the benefits of 4.0 will be nice (although I still think multitasking is more for the geeks than a practical benefit for me – an improved notification system would have been better), but what I needed was a change in hardware. And I’m going to make a much better jump than I would have last year.

Now I just have to battle through the paste-eaters. I’m not using one of the more prominent Bay Area Apple stores, and it’s close enough to walk from work, so I’m hoping to avoid a massive crowd of paste-eaters camping out. Because I’m not after some sort of status symbol or fetish icon – I’m after a better phone than what I’ve got. And I’m pretty sure this is it.

It was a no-win situation. You can either sack the man who’s at the core of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, or you can leave in place a person who loudly and publicly shat all over the civilian chain of command at a time when the rift between Washington and Arlington is as troubling as it’s been in decades. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. So how to resolve it?

My first job out of college, I was lucky to have a boss who turned out to be one of the best friends I’d ever had. And the relationship was simple: he would keep the shit-avalanche of upper management off me, so long as I didn’t do anything to make said shit-avalanche worse. Basically, we had to trust each other – me that he was fighting in my best interests, and him that I wouldn’t do anything to screw him.

That’s the tiebreaker. The general forced the President into having to choose between the options above – and the tiebreaker is that the President was forced to make a choice at all. I realize that the only parts of the Constitution that Republicans care about are the Second Amendment and Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1. And I realize that the national news media is pussywhipped into believing that the President is the Commander-in-Chief of everything in the country, except the military. But the only thing the President is actually commander-in-chief of is the military. Key phrased being “commander” and “in chief.”

You want to question the strategy? You want to throw stones? You want to be a big-baller in the fashion of LeMay and MacArthur and McClellan? Resign. Write a book. Get a regular gig as a Fox News blowjob recipient. But as long as you’re active-duty military, the only answer you have to the President of the United States, for anything at all, is “SIR YES SIR!” Because that’s how the system is set up, that’s how it’s been set up since 1787, and it’s worked out pretty well so far. People can piss and moan, but it kept nukes out of Vietnam, and it kept us out of a land war with China, so I’m inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Because when you make your manager’s life a greater misery, you’re a liability.

The line of the trip had to be in Bath. We’re on the open-top tour bus, where the tour guide was a sixty-ish woman with a dry wit and an impressive command of history. She described how people came to take the waters for all manner of infirmities – “infertility, gout, baldness, the lot.” Some time later, she asked if anyone had been to Bath before. My hand was up, and the following conversation ensues:

GUIDE: “And when were you in Bath, sir?”

YOURS TRULY: “Five years ago.”

G: “And did you take the waters?”

YT: “Of course.”

(pause)

G: “Well if you don’t mind my saying so, sir, you might try another glass…”

(entire top half of the bus explodes in laughter)

The thing about Bath, like London, is that you can walk around in things that were built six hundred, eight hundred, two thousand years ago. It really screws with your perspective to think that Columbus sailing the ocean blue was at the halfway point between the construction of Bath Abbey and the present day.

The other thing about Bath is that you get there on the train. Inter-city trains were the thing I really latched onto this trip – partly because we were going through five countries, I think. We certainly took a lot of trains last time – Eurostar to Paris and back, inter-city to Oxford and York – but it didn’t quite resonate with me as much as this time. I guess it’s because it seems like we were always on a train this trip – whether the Eurostar or the Deutsche Bahn inter-city sleeper from Paris to Munich or the Golden Pass narrow-gauge out toward Montreaux or the wee little one-car train from Mürren to the cable car station.

The trains are FAST, though. Never mind the Eurostar, we were routinely pushing 200kph on the way from Interlaken to Frankfurt. I would gladly kill several people to have that caliber of high-speed rail in the US – there’s no excuse for not being able to go 120 miles an hour flat-out from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Disneyland in three and a half hours.

I also signed up for a Clipper card when I got home. Clipper is the new name for Translink, the all-in-one card for the Bay Area’s alphabet soup of transit agencies. BART, MUNI, VTA, Caltrain – this is your one-stop shop for all of them. Mainly it’ll just be a way for me to avoid having to buy tickets on Cal gameday at Daly City or to make the train faster at Milbrae when going up to the city for dinner or whatnot. But the Oyster card in London only served to remind me of how much I missed having the SmarTrip card in DC – tag on, tag off.

I like European trains. There’s plenty enough legroom even in second class, most of them had a bar car readily available, they were all prompt and clean and navigable…I could use more of that.

Anyway, that was the UK experience, more or less. I did get my pub meal, thanks to the good offices of some of Da Wife’s clients in Marylebone (and they picked up the tab – cheers, lads) and I did get to hear some of Geoff Lloyd’s Hometime Show on Absolute live on FM (thanks to Da Wife’s new Euro-phone on Orange) and I got plenty of Pret and I got to ride around the scenic loop again on the Big Bus (which never, ever gets old for me). It’s just good to be there.

Paris I have less to say about. Wasn’t as good an experience as last time – the shellshock of dragging the old ones around a country they’re programmed not to like, when they don’t speak the language, is bad enough. Add in too much heat relative to the UK and an absolute shitshow trying to find the bus, not to mention constantly having to make saving throws versus aggressive vendors and gypsy beggars, and factor in the new revelation that I am more acrophobic than I thought (it’s not that I’m scared of heights, I’m scared of FALLING from heights. More to the point, I’m scared of LANDING when falling from heights)…well, the practical upshot is that the only good thing in Paris was laying in bed with the wicked-fast hotel WiFi letting me top up podcasts and RSS feeds for the next long train ride.

Ultimately that’s the big criticism of this trip: it’s not the trip we would have made if it were just us. Don’t get me wrong, I think everyone had a good time (well, everybody that could cope with towns bigger than 20K population) and I’m not sorry I went, but it’s a lock that things would have looked very different with just ‘er indoors and myself. I’m pretty sure Paris would have been a scratch and I honestly think we probably would have dropped the UK altogether unless we just had shopping needs that couldn’t be fulfilled outside Londinium…

If you have an iPhone 3G, do yourself a favor and go to school on my experience: iOS 4 is not worth trying to install unless you hate yourself and your time is worth nothing. So much of the new coolness depends on the hardware (video capture, front facing camera, autofocus, hardware graphics acceleration, Bluetooth keyboard support, enhanced voice control) and, more importantly, the thing is built with the newer phones in mind so you can expect to drag just as much as in version 3.1.3.

Basically all you’re getting is folders, a unified inbox for mail, and iBooks. If you need that, go right ahead. Otherwise, save yourself and pick up the $99 3GS.

* Well, looks like “IT” has hit the wall with Ivory Coast. I realize that rooting for Brazil is like going into a casino and cheering for the slot machine, but damn, they are amazing to watch. (If you don’t get the reference to “IT” you should be checking out Special1TV at the World Cup on BBC3.)
* The thing I was going to be dogging England with was to change their official 2010 song to “It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming, SOCCER’S coming home” but I think they have enough problems at present without the colonies mocking them. At least they haven’t gone on strike like the French. Or shat the bed a la Italy…and doesn’t that just warm the little cockles of my heart?
* The iPhone 4 (which I should have by close of business Thursday, cross fingers) apparently does support the use of a Bluetooth keyboard. That is HUGE, as it gets over the biggest obstacle to my travel use of the iPhone (i.e. long-form text entry). Apple’s own regular Bluetooth keyboard for computers is only $69 and apparently runs for 9 months on two AA batteries, and is pretty compact on its own…that really could make all the diff in the world for travel purposes. What remains to be seen is whether the 960×640 display will make that much of a difference in terms of usability – from a pixel standpoint, though, it’s damn close to the 1024×600 of my netbook. It’s only the learning of Ubuntu that keeps me from putting this netbook on Craigslist. Well, that and the fact that I stickered it up with stuff from Maker Faire…
* The other thing I need to find out about the iPhone 4 is whether it still has the voice control features of the 3 GS and if so, what Bluetooth headsets support those command features. Not that I drive alone enough to really warrant an iPhone, but it’s one of those things you kind of have to have.
* Most of all, the big comparison from Thursday will be what the performance is like between the iPhone 4 and the iPad. I intend to get the work iPad onto iOS 4 as soon as possible to see what’s doing (tomorrow? don’t know for sure if the 21st is for the iPad version too)…
* Bitter that my Vandy cap was in that Timbuk2 bag. Not that I needed another Vandy hat, but the only one I have that kinda sorts fits is the St Patricks Day version, and that still has the stink of losing to Murray State on it…
* Dogfishheadshoulderskneesandtoeskneesandtoes 90 Minute IPA ain’t nothin’ to F with. I’m just sayin’.

I’m still discovering things that I lost when I left my bag in the taxi. So far, we’re up to: five magazines, my iPod Shuffle, a couple of pens, the foam contour travel pillow, the bag itself, and today I realize my khaki Vandy cap was in there too. No wonder I had to buy a hat halfway through the trip – I brought one, lost it, and forgot I lost it. I should not be allowed out of the house.

The last time I left London, I said we needed to either quit going or just move there and be done with it. After this trip, I’m inclined to think the latter. London works on me like New York: big city, world capital, everything you need and tons of it, and old old old with history and presence to match. Plus I’m well acclimated to sandwiches from Pret, coffee from Costa, prepaid cell service, Oyster card travel and coins for half my transactions.

Similarly, last time I got home I said “I really think the next trip will be Dublin, Salzburg, the Black Forest, and whatever else of Ireland I can get in. But…I think it will be a long time before we can get out of the country again.” Turns out it only took two and a half years – albeit a fairly eventful two and a half years. No Ireland, though – that’s for a time when we’re not parading my less-presentable family members around. London, Bath, Paris, Munich, Salzburg, the Berner Oberland, and the Rhine country near Frankfurt am Main…that was the trip this time.

The thing I love about London – which was impossible to manage this time – is just being there to hang out and experience life happening around me. Like one day, we were there when Millwall won the League One playoff and promotion to the Coca-Cola Championship League. The town was crazy with Millwall supporters – for those of you who don’t follow English football, this is the fanbase whose anthem is “No One Likes Us – We Don’t Care” and whose “F-Troop” of hooligan fans were known to attack other fans when outnumbered by two orders of magnitude. Well, the blue and white strips were everywhere, and I was giving a wide berth to a Leicester Square pub where the fans were belting it out on the patio, glass smashing, “WE ARE MILLWALL, SUPER MILLWALL FROM THE DEN!” And it was a sight to see – right up to the point where a passing limo disgorged what I can only assume was a bachelorette party, dressed to show up on Texts From Last Night – and without missing a beat, the chanting turned on a dime to “GET YER TITS OUT, GET YER TITS OUT, GET YER TITS OUT FOR THE LADS!”

Not that they did. As far as I could tell. But it’s not the sort of thing one would get strolling through Union Square or along the Mall in DC. =)

More to follow obviously…

Well, the entire world knows what the beef is in this post, but the shocking upset of the night is that FIFA apparently plans to do something about it. Which is fine, as it goes, but it presents a problem: if Koman Coulibaly (a.k.a. Osama Bin Whistlin’) is defenestrated from the tournament, it will concede to all and sundry that the United States was jobbed out of three points – which would have essentially guaranteed their passage to the second round. If they can put the wood to Algeria, this will all be water under the bridge, but there’s still no way to figure how good the Desert Foxes are based on what we’ve seen in South Africa.

What this gets back to is the ongoing problem that soccer has in this country. Premier League games are now popping up in the early hours on ESPN, certainly, and Setanta (RIP) and Fox Soccer Channel show a lot of international games, but for Bubba P. American, the World Cup is probably the only sustained exposure he gets to international football at the highest level. And when he sees it, he sees a steady diet of flopping, whining, and officiating decisions that suggest the use of a dog and a white cane.

More than anything, this is the thing that FIFA needs to do if they really want to crack the American culture. In every other team sport in America, if a player commits an infraction, the ref names that player and that infraction right in front of everybody and usually over a microphone. There’s no debating what the ref claims to have happened – it may be a good call, it may not, but at least you have the ref asserting that #12 traveled or #56 false-started or that there was a two-line pass, and you can judge from there whether the call was justified. As far as I know, nobody has yet been able to ascertain what penalty Coulibaly was calling, and nobody has been able to get a public explanation out of him.

Sports depends on one thing and one thing alone: the integrity of the contest. WIthout it, you might as well watch wrestling. That’s why the Black Sox scandal devastated baseball and why Pete Rose is still suspended. That’s why the NFL was hounded endlessly about the Seahawks-Steelers Super Bowl and why Tim Donaghy was the NBA’s nightmare (and why many people still believe the 2002 Western Conference Finals or 2006 NBA Finals were worked). As long as Bubba P. American thinks that international soccer is a game officiated on the basis of bias, partisanship, nationalism or just whether the ref’s bowels were acting up that day, he will dismiss it. And he will be right to do so.

It’s 2010. We have replay. We can afford to pay more than one man to watch the 22 players. FIFA needs to straighten up and fly right well before 2014.

So I left my carry-on bag in the cab on the way to the hotel, the first day of the trip. I filed a report with the Lost Property Office at Transport for London (which handles everything – cabs, buses, the Tube, you name it) and have a case number, but they still haven’t heard anything. I had a couple of my business cards in there, but I’m not sanguine about the prospects for getting it back.

See, I don’t really care about the contents, because I didn’t have that much in it – a pillow, a dinged-up iPod Shuffle (I have now had three Shuffles and lost every single one of them), half a dozen magazines for strategic plane/Eurostar purposes. The real loss was the bag itself. It’s a Timbuk2 Messenger Custom, small size, army green – the sort of thing they would make if Timbuk2 had to convert to wartime production. And it was a gift from a grateful end-user in the old country – a fairly high-profile user at an extremely high-profile institution. That bag was the perfect size to use for anything – overnight/weekender, backup laptop bag, what have you. And I was on super monkey tilt for the first two days of the trip because I’d lost my bag.

I may have something already that will do for a replacement. For the time being. But it’s not going to be my old bag, and I’m a little bitter about that. (It doesn’t help that the rollaway carry-on that I took as my main suitcase lost a zipper and is about to fall apart itself. Last thing I need is to go buying luggage.)

I woke up at stupid o’clock in the morning on June 5, 2002. Portugal was the stylish pick to win the 2002 World Cup, and the Americans were just hoping to better the 32nd-place finish from France four years earlier. And the Metro didn’t start running early enough for me to go to a bar to watch it live. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t exactly sanguine about the prospects. And then John O’Brien slotted a goal for the US inside of five minutes, and then Portugal gave up an own goal at the half-hour mark, and the riot was on. There would be a goal from the mighty McBride, another own-goal from Jeff Agoos, and by the time the smoke cleared and the closing theme from Independence Day struck up, the USA had won 3-2…and the best World Cup ever was finally on.

I say best ever because I got to see a ton of games. I went straight to Lucky Bar at the conclusion of the first game so I could be there for the replay and drink heavily (and cast aspersion on the refs). It was the first of many trips. I saw games overnight flying to California on jetBlue. I saw the USA beat Mexico in the round of 16 in a conference room at work, on the clock, after we somehow luck-boxed our way into the second stage. I saw the Americans outplay Germany for 90 minutes and lose anyway, because the incredible Oliver Kahn stood on his head and just bricked off the goal.

But there was more going on than soccer. I had a vacation in California that month, a week spent stooging around and reading and relaxing. I had my old iBook, which had just been fitted with an AirPort card, and I got to walk down University Avenue in Palo Alto and see open wireless around literally every corner. I had an iPod for the first time, and was able to listen to all my girlfriend’s new wave tracks and a band called Air that I’d just discovered through a Nick Hornby book. I saw a Cingular store where all the phones were GSM-based and marveled at the newer better technology than what I was carrying – better battery life in a smaller phone that you could change out without any input from the phone company. And I was amazed over and over again by the fact that it got cold at night – and really didn’t get that hot during the day, thanks to the morning fog and the lack of humidity otherwise.

It was amazing. I knew that this was the girl for me and that our future was on the West Coast, but that June was the first time that I really began to absorb what it would genuinely be like to be in California. All the things I would come to rely on – pervasive wireless, fully digital mobile telephony, all my music available all the time, Mediterranean climate – can be traced back to that June. I mention it because here I sit, watching the World Cup streaming at work, waiting eight days for the delivery of my iPhone 4. The circle of life continues to turn…

* If you really want an iPhone 4 and you have an iPhone already, your best bet is to use the new Apple Store app and upgrade direct from the phone. That worked for me in under 5 minutes, including the time to download and install the app.

* The former Big-XII is rapidly turning into a joke conference. Basically, it’s Texas-Chokelahoma-A&M trying to get all the money they can (they are literally getting all of the severance money from the Colorado-Nebraska departures at the expense of the other 7 schools). Basically it’s going to be the new WAC – a vanity conference of negligible strength for its one capable member school (i.e. Texas).

* Boise State to the Mountain West is a step up for both, and something that should have happened years ago.

* California voters are just paste-eating stupid. Prop 14 will give the state the same jungle primary that Louisiana is abandoning – all candidates run in one big primary, and the top two go to the general election. Get ready for the 2003 recall gangbang EVERY YEAR – the system disembowels political parties in favor of giving all power to those with the most name recognition and the money to get it. Meg Whitman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Huffington – lather, rinse, repeat. Idiots.

* Nothing makes me laugh harder than people trying to take the partisanship out of politics. What next? Taking the alcohol out of whiskey? Partisanship is why we HAVE politics, you morons. It’s how we resolve large-scale disagreements in society without resorting to firearms. The alternative to politics is not some big hand-holding circle of consensus where we all sing Kumbaya and do the right thing for all and sundry. The alternative to politics is fucking Somalia.

* Speaking of paste-eating stupid, nobody with two brain cells to rub together should listen to a single word the Republicans have to say until they purge themselves of their Confederate sickness. I can get along just fine with actual conservatism. Populist redneckery is not worthy of serious consideration.

* The reason I really hate crackers isn’t because they’re terrified of anything different. It’s because they’re terrified of the very concept of difference. The Confederate sickness stems from fear and outrage that anybody or anything might be unlike them in any way, and I have eighteen days of dragging a real live fossilized Wallace-ite like a ball and chain through Europe to prove it. I am not kidding when I say we should get Sherman’s descendants on the phone and see about getting an estimate.

* I was up 24 hours yesterday. I have had a shit-ton of caffeine. I am about one more cup of coffee from turning directly into Captain Jack Sparrow.