Month: December 2010

In college and grad school, I was sports-obsessive. All four major pro sports, both major college sports, locked in all the time. I remember one semester at Vanderbilt, I arrived at my apartment, hooked up the TV, flipped it on to ESPN, flipped to ESPN2, hit the “PREV” button, and never touched anything but the “PREV” or volume buttons again until I left at Christmas. Including the power switch.

The ongoing fiasco in Washington, coupled with the meltdowns in Nashville and Berkeley and the subsequent coaching change out on Natchez Drive, have led me to re-evaluate what teams I genuinely follow and care about. Whose news do I keep up with, who do I track in the offseason, who do I make the most effort to watch, who makes me most miserable when they suck and happiest when they break through. Right now, I would have to say the order is roughly:

1) VANDERBILT COMMODORES MEN’S BASKETBALL. Watch every game I can. Saw them twice live in the last year. I have multiple players on Twitter and they have replied and retweeted me. I’ve liveblogged along with Anchor of Gold. I’ve gone to viewing events with the San Francisco Vanderbilt Club and will probably be doing so for my birthday next spring. I have fond memories of three seasons in Memorial, I wear the caps and the jackets and the polo shirts and the ring, and I can’t pass somebody else in Vandy attire in California without a spontanoue “GO DORES” or, if they’re young enough, “WHO YA WIT” (which is probably lost on anyone who graduated before 2005). It’s wall-to-wall, November to March, and they’re usually good enough to give me something to be proud of every year at one point or another.

2) WASHINGTON REDSKINS. Gets the nod for twenty years of fandom. Watched constantly in DC – when I wasn’t riding around to listen to the radio broadcast. When I moved out here, I first insisted on DirecTV and Sunday Ticket, then got Sirius so I could hear the radio team again, then found a Redskins bar and attended regularly until they closed. I was able to fully indulge the fandom in DC, I drank with Bobby Mitchell’s son in Palo Alto, and I have an old jacket celebrating the two Super Bowl wins – because when I bought it, they hadn’t won the third yet. (My father taped it for me, as I was in Austria at the time.) They have been an unending source of embarrassment and misery ever since moving away, and yet I cannot seem to stop despite my best efforts. Switching to another NFL team will be a tough nut to crack – even though I would have the same access to any other team thanks to Sirius, I wouldn’t have the constant raving of the Junks on podcast or my friends’ shared misery on Twitter and Facebook.

2A) CALIFORNIA GOLDEN BEARS FOOTBALL. I wonder sometimes if I’m getting ahead of my wife in Cal fandom – I’m the one who’s on California Golden Blogs all the time, who always hates to leave early (until this year), who wanted to sell the Big Game tickets because I couldn’t stand the thought of being there to lose the Axe in person. Then again, I only really paid attention in earnest once we moved out here – and the run from 2004-2006 was so good that it was easy to get used to the notion that Cal had broken through and wasn’t just going to suck out loud anymore. The back end of 2007 put paid to that notion, and 2010 made us wonder if all the gains under Tedford had been given back (5-7 record and no Axe and all that). This is the one that really made me think “you know, maybe God wants me to stop caring about football.”

2B) VANDERBILT COMMODORES FOOTBALL. This should have been 3, but it’s moved up to 2B after the hiring of James Franklin, who quite frankly needed to hit a grand slam in his hiring presser after the Malzahn debacle – and in fact hit about a 6-run homer. The fact that the chancellor of Vanderbilt University actually acknowledged that football has been given short shrift these last four decades – and pledged that it’s going to change – helps a lot. We need to change the coaching staff – done. We need to improve the facilities – that’s coming, apparently. We need to change the culture of Vanderbilt football – that’s the real trick, isn’t it?

5) ALABAMA CRIMSON TIDE FOOTBALL. Even though I was raised on the Tide, they slipped when I went off to Vanderbilt and stayed behind once I left the South altogether. I still care whether they beat Auburn and Tennessee, and I was thrilled beyond belief to see them beat Texas for a national title – in Pasadena of all places – but on a day-to-day basis, they’re far behind the others, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the other Alabama fans are what makes it so tough to BE an Alabama fan.

6) SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS. This obviously came to the fore this year – I made a conscious effort to pay more attention and was rewarded with a world championship – but since my attention waned from 2004-2009, it didn’t have the same significance as if I’d been all-in from the beginning.

7) CELTIC FC. This dropped right off when Setanta went under – in the absence of that TV outlet and the end of the brief radio deal with Sirius, I was left with no way to follow them, and I honestly have no clue how they’re doing this season. It kind of sucks, but I haven’t really maintained the same caliber of emotional attachment – especially once they lost Nakamura and Venegoor of Hesselink, the two players I enjoyed watching most.

There are other teams I’ve paid attention to from time to time, but I’ve shed entire sports – mostly hockey and NBA basketball – and tuned out teams I was once notionally pledged to (Nashville’s hockey team springs to mind) while failing to foster attachments to others (I tried to latch onto the Golden State Warriors, or Fulham FC, or Newcastle United) but in the absence of that emotional hook, I’ve had a tough time making that necessary connection. As it is, when you look at how sorry the teams at #2 were this year and couple it with the horrible finish for #1 last year, you can make a very good case that I need to get the hell away from following sports at all, for my own good. I’m not saying you’d be wrong, either.

Several people (I’ll link to the great Om Malik for example) have made a very good point: since Chrome is basically just a browser with enough Linux code under it to drive a screen, keyboard and mouse, and since Android includes a Webkit-based browser (and support for larger displays as of 3.0), what’s the percentage in running ChromeOS when you could just as easily run Android and do all the Chrome-ish stuff through the browser, while retaining an app architecture underneath?

Part of it, I think, is like this: you want to be able to do your own thing at work. You don’t want the Man snooping through your S. Especially where your personal email is concerned. Well, if you have Chrome – the browser – you can have an entire separate machine in your browser window, with your mail and your chat and your Google Buzz and your Google +1 and your Google Reader and your Google Wave and your…you get the idea. And it’s the same, whether you’re in through your browser at work or your browser at home or your browser at the kiosk in the library that SOMEBODY ELSE NEEDS or your forthcoming ad-subsidized Google Notebook, only $99 at all Best Buy locations.*

Google has the reach and the power to do what Marc Andressen threatened Microsoft with fifteen years ago: the browser is the OS, and the means by which you get to the Web is abstracted away. Operating system? Hell, Chrome isn’t locked into a device – if they can make a netbook that’s basically just a browser terminal, they can do the same with a tablet or a TV (and are on their way with both). Ultimately, I think this is where Google and Facebook have a different sort of dominance – Google wants to be the middleware, the mediator for your Internet experience. Facebook just wants you to get on and stay on, and make sure to connect to as many people and things as you can because the data mining isn’t as effective if you don’t.

I say all this because I see another possible trend coming along, propelled by smartphones but also by things like Kindles and iPads with 3G built in. And that is achieving ultimate protection from work by doing all your personal stuff during the workday on your phone. All you have to do is keep a charge cable plugged in at the desk, and there’s all manner of stuff you can do without ever touching the boss’s network or computer. And as the person whose job it is to say “look, this is [EMPLOYER]’s computer and network, and in fact they CAN tell you not to do X, Y or Z on it” and make it stand up, it would be irresponsible not to at least consider how I would circumvent my own fascist regime.**

Once again, blogging is the obstacle. I could get by on a smartphone if I didn’t have to entertain you people. Ever tried knocking out 600 words on a piece of flat glass with your thumbs? That’s some bullshit right there. You could DO it on the iPad, but that as always don’t mean it’s to be done, which is why I will reluctantly start 2011 still logging into the personal side of my laptop to get S done during the day. Besides, as long as I have to haul this thing around for work, it may as well do for personal stuff too; if I couldn’t carry two separate cell phones I’m damn sure not going to carry two computers, even if one of them is a pound and a half and the size of a magazine.

* RAMPANT IRRESPONSIBLE SPECULATION MODE ON.

** Actual quote from a meeting at FirstJob, circa 2002: “He actually called us a bunch of black-shirted fascists. Now that’s a goddamn lie. I wore a navy blue shirt once last week.”

By early Sunday evening, word was out that Gus Malzahn was on the verge of accepting an unprecedented $21 million 7-year package to become the head coach at Vanderbilt. Not bad for somebody who was coaching high school ball five years ago.

Except that 24 hours later, Auburn was announcing they were nearly tripling his salary to keep him down on the Plains, putting him on $1.3M a year as an assistant coach – itself almost an unprecedented sum.

The obvious question at this point – was he ever actually serious about the Vandy offer or were we just something for him to use to squeeze Auburn? And was our administration actually serious about pursuing him, or did the media just run with a name and he leveraged the opportunity? And above all, why didn’t Vanderbilt roll somebody out yesterday evening – I know it’s 5 PM on a Sunday, I don’t care, this is 2010 and news doesn’t wait for opening of business on Monday morning – to at least say “there is no deal, this is all hype, we have nothing to say one way or the other” and damp down the speculation?

It’s a bad situation for Vanderbilt now. They went all in and the other guys flopped the nuts. Now we have to go back with hat in hand to one of the guys who we were allegedly calling last night to thank for their interest before we went in another direction, which almost guarantees we’ll be overpaying for somebody else’s OC. And of course, the Mike Leach option is still on the table, but that’s the wildest of wild cards and something I’m still not sure I’m comfortable with.

For a few hours, though, it looked as if the push was actually on – that the administration was doubling down on a commitment to take Vanderbilt Commodore football to the same level as the baseball and basketball programs: perennial national ranking and regular postseason participant. It remains to be seen whether they can muster the enthusiasm for another push with whoever the second choice turns out to be…or if that person can really get us over the hump.

The release of the CR-48 by Google – even if it’s a year late and a dollar short – is making me take another look at my portable computing situation. Over the course of the year, I’ve moved from iPhone 3G to netbook to iPad to iPhone 4 and round and round, and it’s cleared up a few thoughts, which I cite below for the sake of the record and so I have something to compare to in, say, six months:

* Right now, the iPad is unsuitable for work, as is the netbook/ChromeOS device, for one simple reason: ARD. I cannot work without Apple Remote Desktop, which means that for professional purposes, the low end of my mobility prospects is the 11″ MacBook Air. However, it’s got a legit 720p-type display, which puts it on par with the machines I used for ARD for years. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but it would be doable.

* The biggest obstacle to using the netbook, for me, was having everything in a web interface. Setting work aside altogether, there were serious negative implications for blogging, media management, some of my email that doesn’t have a web interface, or just the practicality of a separate window for IM and Twitter (neither of which offered a particularly polished Linux client, even relative to the iPhone). Since 90% of what I did consisted of opening Chrome and running a bunch of tabs, I have no reason to suspect there would be a material difference for me in running the CR-48 (although the Gabriel Hounds approach to hardware design is attractive as all hell). Also, Flash video is basically unusable – Hulu was more a slideshow than a streaming video service. I suspect that HTML5 streaming might make a slight difference, but I haven’t had an opportunity to investigate.

* The iPad’s size is a feature, not a bug, relative to the iPhone. Reading alone makes a world of difference; the iPad destroys the iPhone as a media-consumption device. While it has *a* multitasking model, it’s not a PC multitasking model, you could use Notification Services to handle interrupts for something like IM or Twitter but it’s going to be a bit of a pain in the ass with the modal approach to apps that iOS enforces. (Again, I would LOVE to get hold of something like an Android iPod Touch for $200 and no contract, but the non-phone devices so far all tend to be 7″ and that’s kind of a sour spot for a portable.)

* Which brings us back to the MacBook Air 11″, which starts at $950 on an EDU discount and can go as high as $1330 if you go for 4 GB of RAM and the fastest processor. Let’s not mince words: this thing ain’t half shaggin’ FAST. Yes it’s only a Core2Duo processor, but coupling it with an SSD makes it perform at least as well as last year’s MacBook Pro with a regular spinner. And naturally, as a full-on Mac OS X device, it means I can do everything I would do on my current 15″ MBP work laptop: run Flock or Chrome or Firefox in addition to Safari, have a real keyboard to input for Ecto or Evernote, do actual video chat or secure work IM, run ARD and RDC, etc etc etc…

* …but in a laptop form factor. If I don’t use this notional thing for work at all, that eliminates the need for three or four key functions including VPN and ARD. So then what? A laptop, we have proven, is far less convenient than an iOS device for reading text on the run, or just pulling out to check mail or look at a link real quick-like. And if you really need long-form text, you can always pack a Bluetooth keyboard for traveling…

* Not knowing what the new iPad will be like (because come on, that’s how Apple rolls, there ought to be SOMETHING by April), I can only compare the current model to the iPhone 4 – and the latter gives you everything the former does plus phone calls, video calling, GPS, a 5MP camera with HD video at 30fps, and of course fits in your pocket. The iPad only gives you a bigger display – but reading and websurfing become FAR more practical – and enough room to plausibly type with other than your thumbs, possibly negating the need for said keyboard.

* But the 11″ MBA is only two inches longer than the iPad, and is almost identical in width and thickness – and weighs only a half-pound more. But at the high end, it’s almost double the price (although the cheapest MBA is only $300 more than the most expensive iPad). And do you need the most expensive iPad? If you want to carry a lot of media around, probably, but the OS itself only occupies less than 1 GB of storage – whereas a full install of OS X Snow Leopard, even pared of extraneous apps and cruft, will set you back 7 or 8 GB all by its lonesome. Given the different processors, different RAM, different operating systems and different relative loads, it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison.

* There is no substitute for the iPhone from a walking-around standpoint. As soon as you carry anything bigger, you’re looking at a bag. Question then is what goes in the bag. I would say that by and large, iPhone + MBA11 is a much more flexible and powerful combination than iPhone + iPad.

* Biggest problem is that my media content alone is pushing 200GB. It’s starting to get to the point where a portable device is not going to be able to carry everything – thus the Mac Mini at home acting as the central repository, against the day that I no longer keep all the goods on my laptop.

Seven states: 14 Senators.

NYC, with more people: shares 2.

It’s past time to pave the Senate.

It’s not enough that Alabama has to lose to Auburn – Auburn’s in the national title game, with a high school offense and a defense that Vanderbilt thinks is weak. It’s not enough that Cal has to lose to Stanford – Stanford, a school which should have all the same troubles as Vandy, is in the Orange Bowl, playing in a New Years’ Day game that a similarly-ranked Cal team was denied in 2004, behind the coach of the year. And Vandy has no coach – and right now all the oxygen is being consumed by the openings at Florida and Miami and the like, and one high-profile candidate (for us, anyway) after another is saying ‘not interested’ while we wind up looking at the same mishmash of other people’s coordinators and low-conference head coaches as ever.

I think God definitely wants me to stop caring about football. If He wanted me to care about football, He would have pointed me to the Saints before supporting them turned into flagrant bandwagon jumping.

As an aside, Vanderbilt would have gone on the road with an 8-man team, playing against a Mike Anderson press run by the #15 team in the country (or #11 depending on whose poll you buy), and absolutely curb-stomped them…if we could hit a free throw. Instead, our traditional strength at the line blows up in our face, and 50% FT shooting leads to a 3-point loss in overtime. This is more frustrating, as Redd Foxx said, than finding out for the first time that you can’t do it the second time. (He memorably defined panic as “finding out for the second time that you can’t do it the first time.”)

At some point, I need to do a rank-order of the teams in which I am genuinely emotionally invested. And then see about shutting them down to the point where I don’t need to worry about games as a triggering mechanism for protracted melancholy…or a straw on a camel’s back.

By the way, if your computer won’t start up, before you call your tech support, remember this: THERE’S AN ON-SWITCH ON THE POWER STRIP. Dumbass.

All the hemming and hawing going on up on the Hill is leading me back to something that’s been stirring at the back of my head for a while – this whole notion of splitting the difference, that the truth is somewhere in between, and that there’s some sort of “straight down the middle” position that is the ideal of everything.

Horseshit.

This is exactly the sort of lazy thinking that makes “moderate” the grand virtue of Imperial Washington. For people who don’t pay attention to actual politics, “moderate” is the supreme virtue – despite years of polling that shows almost all “moderates” or “independents” have a partisan preference and that those who don’t have a tangential level of political knowledge or awareness at best. And it’s a notion that has been exploited over and over with the phenomenon of the Overton Window – if you move the level of what is acceptable or conceivable far enough in one direction, you shift the midpoint in that direction as well, and drag the entire argument your way just by virtue of people’s willingness to split the difference.

A blogger from Kentucky nailed this years ago, with a hypothetical where he had a painful wart. Some pundit argued that the only solution was to cut the Wildcat’s arm off. The Wildcat responded that he wasn’t cutting his fucking arm off. Enter another (I think it was actually Joe Lieberman) who argued that in the interest of compromise, the Wildcat should cut off his arm at the elbow – and a chorus of pundits sang the virtue of sweet moderation and berated the Wildcat for not accepting such wisdom. In fact, after a little digging, here it is. Enjoy.

This idea of “split the difference” has been known to be idiotic ever since Solomon took a long look at the baby and went for the cleaver. Sometimes you just can’t split the difference. And even if you were to try it, it’s ridiculous to assume that the 50-yard-line is always the place to cut.

Formal logic has a name for this: the golden mean fallacy. Unfortunately, logic took a walk in our lives a long time ago.

* If you honestly think that the United States would just sit back and say “well, there’s all our secrets dumped on a website for the world to dig through, ah well, easy come easy go” and do nothing – if you really think any government, under any President, would just say “cat’s out of the bag, let it slide” – kill yourself. Because you are a mental defective and are too stupid to participate in society.

* Now, what should the government do? Hell, what can the government do? Here we get to the party piece of the Internet – it’s distributed and robust and redundant and literally impossible to shut down altogether. Going forward, there should be a lot more circumspection about what sort of data is appropriate to share internally and with who – we went from a system of mutually locked-out silos to one where apparently three million people have clearance rated Secret or up. Seriously, how many people in the Defense Department need access to diplomatic gossip from State?

* Everybody is up in arms about the Library of Congress blocking access to the site, or defense contractors shutting down access to the site – let me explain something from the position of somebody who’s done time in government IT. If information is restricted in any way, you have an affirmative obligation as a government IT employee to maintain that restriction. Even if classified material leaks – hell, even if “sensitive but unclassified” material leaks – you are still obligated to treat it as appropriately classified until the appropriate authorities make a change in that classification. So if you’re running the network, and there is an exposed site sharing that information, you are legally obligated to restrict access to that site. Sure, somebody else broke the rules, but as far as Uncle Sam is concerned, you are still on the hook to discharge your duty with regard to information security. It may seem ridiculous, but that’s how it works, so pull the stick out of your ass if some people are still trying to do their job in the middle of this shitshow.

* There seems to be an attitude in some quarters that having all this in the public eye is a good thing, because government should never have secrets from “the people.” Setting aside the fact that “the people” are generally assholes, that’s not what you’ve got here. What you’ve got here is government secrets exposed to everybody. Does anybody seriously think that the business of the government should be 100% transparent to everyone in the world at all times? Say hi to the other Smurfs when you go back to fantasy gingerbread land.

* Everyone keeps banging on about the Pentagon Papers, trying to draw some sort of parallel – the 1971 leak by Daniel Ellsberg was a good thing, so therefore this must also be a good thing. The difference there is that, to the best of my recollection, the Pentagon Papers were entirely germane to the Vietnam War. The current flood of information coming out of the Wikilinks leaks is not limited to the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, but instead touches on almost every aspect of US foreign relations, military or otherwise. In a way, this is less effective – instead of the story being the actual revelations of things going awry in Kabul or Baghdad, the story is just that there were revelations – details not important, maybe some of the more salacious stuff briefly – and then becomes the whole cat-and-mouse of “will they arrest the guy, will they shut down the server, blah blah blah.” This is the sort of place where leaking to the New York Times or the Washington Post in the 70s meant that the pertinent stuff would get edited into some sort of narrative. Just throwing it up into the wind in 2010 means that the media will run with the meta rather than the content. Typical.

* And finally, we come to the bit that most people outside the right wing are ignoring: PFC Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who is supposedly the source of the most massive leak. He’s going to catch a court-martial. As well he should. In any profession, there are things that are not compatible with the requirements of the profession. If you’re a therapist, you don’t sleep with your patients. If you’re a pro athlete, you don’t bet on your own team. And if you’re an Army intelligence analyst, you don’t ship hundreds of thousands of government secrets to a foreign website. Maybe he thought he had good reasons, maybe he was even right about those reasons, but you know what? That makes no difference at all. At the very least, he’s headed to an intimate familiarity with Leavenworth, at worse – well, I don’t know if the Army is prepared to give him the Danny Deever, but before you leak classified information, you should think long and hard about whether it’s worth the consequences. If he dies, he dies – buy the ticket, take the ride.

…and consider the situation the President is in, one step at a time:

1) From day one – literally, from the moment he was inaugurated – Obama has faced a unified front of opposition. Uniform and unbending, focused on one thing and one thing only: NO. For all the talk about “moderates” like the two idiots from Maine, or speculation around a Scott Brown, there has been no meaningful instance of any – ANY – Republican Senator breaking ranks to side with the Democrats. And make no mistake, the Senate is where the action is, because it’s the only place in the political system where a minority with 2/5 of the vote plus one has the power to dictate what can even come up for a vote.

2) In the face of this opposition, the only way to get anything at all done is to put together sixty votes in the Senate. And thanks to the huge wins in 2006 and 2008, the numbers were there once Arlen Specter defected – barely. With exactly sixty votes, the Senate Democrats were at the mercy of the most conservative of their members – so for all the talk about out-of-control liberals from the retarded media hyenas on the right, the Obama Administration has spent two years with the tune being called by the likes of Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman. Forget about the wild-eyed radicalism of a Ted Kennedy (RIP) or Barbara Boxer or Al Franken or, hell, pick any talk-radio-boogeyman you like – inasmuch as the Democrats were falling in line, the ones doing the falling were the ones on the left, giving in to the most conservative Democrats just for the sake of getting something, anything, through the process.

3) If the left wants to lash out at some Democrat, there’s one target and only one: Harry Reid. Harry Reid, who did nothing to squeeze a loyalty commitment on cloture votes out of his caucus. Harry Reid, who chose to leave the filibuster rules intact knowing full well that the GOP had shattered the filibuster record in the previous Congress – and watched as they went on to shatter that record. Harry Reid, who had to pull out a miracle finish to beat an opponent who was advocating armed revolt against the federal government. Harry Reid, the man who shit the bed.

4) The GOP’s plan worked brilliantly. It was predicated on the absolute loyalty of their base, the absolute incompetence of the press and the absolute ignorance of the public. They were able to sandbag the entire political process in the Senate, the press duly reported that the Democrats couldn’t get anything done in Congress, and the public promptly punished them for their shortcomings.

5) Obama is now faced with a House in the hands of the enemy and a Senate that no longer has the option of begging together sixty votes – in short, the Congress is closed for business vis-a-vis the Democratic agenda. Any grand vision for the progressive future is officially dead on arrival.

6) Obama has two choices now. He can hew to the good line, thump the bully pulpit, raise hell at every opportunity – and hope against hope that his battle cries will get a hearing in the press above and beyond “President rages impotently while nation’s economy burns to the ground.” Or he can try to hammer out the best deals he can get, while he still can, and try to do something to move the needle while hoping against hope that things rebound in time for 2012.

Now, the usual suspects on the bong-watered granola-shaver left are screaming about a primary challenge, maybe Kucinich or Feingold or something like that. No. Grow the fuck up, hippies. The alternative to Obama isn’t Rachel Maddow, the alternative to Obama is Mike Huckabee. If you’re very lucky. If you’re not, well, let’s hope your visa application comes through before Sarah Palin gets sworn in.

Unless.

If everybody to the left of, I don’t know, Richard Lugar can somehow get it together and figure out who the problem really is, we might get somewhere. Obama’s not the problem, hippies. And the dirty fucking hippies are not the real problem, Mr. President. You know who IS the problem? The army of bloated redneck zombies known as Republicans. Put one-fifth as much firepower into shooting the zombies as each other, and maybe, just maybe, you can attract enough attention to move the needle on public opinion.

But for now, Obama managed to get the middle-class tax cuts extended, plus a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits and some other stimulus, in exchange for $120 billion worth of tax cuts for people who don’t need them or deserve them after the last ten years. It sucks, but that’s the price of doing business right now. That price may change later. Until then, everybody needs to take a deep breath, grow up, and focus on who the actual party at fault is here. Hint: it’s largely white and old with an annoying Southern accent.