Month: December 2012

Yes, it’s sad that somebody shot up an elementary school.  But we didn’t do anything after Columbine or Virginia Tech or the movie theater in Colorado.  Nothing about mental health issues, nothing about gun control.  Instead we got lockdown and shelter-in-place drills, which means we as a society have accepted this sort of thing as the price of doing business and carrying on without making changes.  So yeah, it sucks, but America has long since decided they can live with it.  If you want to be upset about something, start with that.

Anil Dash has a great piece cross-posted on Gizmodo today, talking about how we’ve lost something of the open web over the last ten years.  His thesis is that social networking has taken us backward toward a more walled-garden experience with limited interoperability or room to innovate, something I’ve touched on before with the notion that Facebook is the new AOL (something that will ring painfully true if you’re doing tech support for office workers).

This has gone through my mind recently, albeit in a slightly different form, thinking about the prime movers in our industry today.  When the iPhone launched, Steve Jobs had the ringleaders of Yahoo! AND Google on stage demonstrating how their mail and maps respectively were crucial to the function of the phone.  This week, we finally got a standalone Google Maps app for iOS 6, incorporating all the features they’d withheld from the Maps app in iOS over the last couple of years, bringing it to rough parity today with…Android.

Meanwhile, Amazon forks Android, creates its own 7-inch tablet, and then its own 10-inch tablet to compete with the iPad, while Microsoft belatedly wakes up and churns out a typically-Microsoftian product in the Surface, the all-in-one tablet-laptop-Windows-touchscreen device that is apparently selling with all the speed of a snail riding a tortoise through molasses in a Big 10 stadium.  And Google is ramping up its media content in Google Play, improving its media offerings and trying to constrain the malware problem from the old Android Marketplace.

More and more, we’re edging toward a world where all the major tech players are trying to craft a fully-functional ecosystem.  Facebook is trying to leverage its chat and messaging and its purchase of Instagram to become the full-service one-stop communications hub. Apple, Microsoft and Google will all sell you a handheld device with its own map system, its own email service, its own web browser, its own mobile operating system and its own place to purchase apps to run on it. Amazon has its own line of hardware now and its own streaming video service on top of its usual offerings.

The point, in each case, is to serve the company’s own primary need by reducing the number of things that company’s system cannot do for you.  Apple needs you all in so that it can sell more Apple devices.  Google needs you all in so that it can show you ads – and provide advertisers with a richer way to more precisely target those ads to you. Microsoft needs to keep Windows relevant to modern computing and find some way of dragging their waning monopoly into the 21st century. Amazon just wants you to buy more stuff.  And Facebook is still trying to become your one true Internet identity and most meaningful point of contact so that it can sell even more precise ad info than Google.  (The bait-and-switch by which Facebook insisted on authentic identity and then tore down the walls has never yet been recognized as one of the most dastardly moves in the history of the Internet.)

Thing is, we need that flexibility.  We need not to be tied down. Google Maps on the iPhone was shit on a shingle by 2012 standards until Apple kicked them off and went their own way, and in response we finally got a best-of-breed Google Maps implementation for iOS. Twitter and Instagram and now Flickr are dueling over picture sharing as if “filters” are the secret sauce, when in fact the seamlessness of the sharing process is what let Instagram kick the shit out of something like Hipstamatic.  Tumblr might be a centralizing feature, but just about anyone can do microblogging with this thing we call a web site.  TypePad Micro or WordPress or Blogger or hell, why not just throw up some simple HTML on a page, the way this blog ran for its first incarnation from 1999 to 2002?

I may be the last person still relying on RSS, but I am, because it works.  Email still works.  SMS still works.  They work because they’re not tied to any specific provider. They’re implementations of standards, of a process that consists of putting the intelligence at the ends instead of in the network or the system itself.  The public Internet was famously sold to us as an information superhighway, and the big players are busy trying to cram us into ever-shakier public transit.  Time for another Negroponte Switch, perhaps?

It was New York City. It was 2003. We were bustling around with friends, shopping, enjoying the Big Apple at Christmastime. The final stop of the day was Nat Sherman’s, the famous tobacconist, and it kept getting pushed back and back – possibly because of how much candy I’d stopped to gorge on at Dylan’s Candy Bar, I don’t know.  But there was precipitation, and I was carrying a bunch of stuff, and I remember starting to get frustrated that we weren’t at the damn cigar shop by now, and then across the street I heard something – bells, or chimes, or something electronic, or God only knows what – playing “Silent Night.”

Bear in mind that in 2003, I’d had an MVP year. I had single-handedly crammed a six-month Mac OS X trial and deployment into three days, come up with a security model and a policy to prevent toy-boys locking us out of our own machines, come up with a rapid-deployment scheme using Carbon Copy Cloner and a Firewire cable that made it possible for us to turn out new Macs in an hour or so from box to desktop.  I’d also fought in the trenches on three separate mass deployments – the rollout of Lotus Notes ND6, the restoration of domain services on all the Windows systems, and a major antivirus cleanup/deployment, and in two cases managed to use Apple Network Assistant and Apple Remote Desktop to race through the Mac-side fix in record time.  And I’d done the whole thing in a blur of rage and fury, fueled by overwhelming esprit de corps and firmly convinced for the first time in over a decade that I was really as good as I thought I was, and that I was right.

And right there in the middle of the street, I choked up, fell out of my own time, and for one moment I was ready to give it all back – the success, the degrees, the friends, the loved ones, the whole damned thing – if it just meant I could wake up on December 1, 1988, and start all over again.

It passed – within about an hour, I was upstairs at Nat Sherman with a Vanderbilt stogie clenched in my teeth, blowing smoke rings at Notre Dame-Syracuse on the big-screen TV in the lounge – but it was the first time I’d grasped that something about Christmas had fundamentally changed for good.  It wasn’t depression, not as such – I’d been depressed at Christmas before. 1986 and 1998 I can name right off the jump, and 1997 wasn’t much better after the chaos that year had been – but 2003 was the first time I really felt like I had lost some piece of the holiday that I’d never get back.

It wasn’t until 2010 – with chaos and drama and bad things happening back in the old country – that I finally pieced it together.  “Silent Night” is what the Christmas carousel music box on the end table in the den used to play.  That 7th-chord in D hits something in the back of my mind and there it all is – fireplace full of wood, ancient console TV on the floor, there’s that same old artificial tree in use since Star Wars was first in theaters, covered with all the old ornaments – the Lucy-from-Peanuts-as-Santa ones that came with a loaf of Millbrook bread back in the dark ages, the square “12 days of Christmas”-themed ones with the gold glitter around the edges, the bead-and-pipe-cleaner candy canes that had long since deformed out of the traditional shape, and of course enough colored lights and gold and silver garland that I’m sure the thing weighed about 400 pounds when it was fully loaded.  

There’d be the family gathering on Christmas Eve, with aunts and uncles and cousins and the perpetual tease of “will it flurry snow” and later the snickering drama of who’d brought a significant other this year, and constant smart remarks and laughter to match, and my grandfather’s matter-of-factness adding even more levity to the proceedings. And of course I’d long since outgrown toys, but there would be a few surprises under the tree that December morning, and my brother and I would make a big show of NOT getting up early, and there’d be the Walt Disney World Christmas Parade on TV as we ate strawberries and biscuits before the Blue-Gray Game came on. And by nightfall, we’d’ve stomped around outside all we needed to, and it would probably be time to drive across the city to meet up with my high school friends again – whether it was high school or grad school.

Something changes when you truly grasp that you’ll never have that old Christmas ever again.  You can still have plenty good ones – and I have had some awesome and some terrible ones since 1998, or even since 2003 – but as with so many things in my life, the Killers have this one nailed:

i can see my mother in the kitchen, my father on the floor, watching television it’s a wonderful life

family all together, presents piled high, frost on all the windows what a wonderful night

cinnamon candles burning, snowball fights outside, smile below each nose and above each chin

so happy they found me

love was all around me

stomp my boots before I go back in

Hail hail hail, after the long misery of almost THREE WHOLE MONTHS there is finally a native app for Google Maps available for iOS.  No longer the misery of Apple Maps!  No longer the sluggish indignity of the web-based Google Maps!  No more stooging around with Nokia’s half-assed Here or dallying with MapQuest as if it were 2003 again!

Get a grip.

First, yes, the iOS native Google Maps app is amazing.  It is, hands down, the best mapping solution ever for iOS, and by some reckonings the best smartphone mapping solution ever on any platform. Google has played entirely within the rules for third-party developers and still come up with something that quite frankly kicks the shit out of everything that came before.

But this app also demonstrates why Apple and Google had beef. The standalone app has everything that Google was pouring into the Android version of Maps: vector-based graphics, so faster and lighter on your data service. Turn-by-turn directions, further killing the standalone GPS as a viable product. Full integration with Zagat reviews.  All the stuff that wasn’t getting put into the native iOS Maps app for the last couple or three years, so Apple chose to do the whole thing itself and paid for it.

Thing is, the number-one advantage Google Maps has is the fact that Google Maps has been a thing for the better part of a decade.  Apple began its mapping effort seven years behind in terms of real-world data in the field, and suffered for it – and also got pilloried for the flaws in trying to combine 3D and satellite imagery. (Try the 3D flyover function in Google Earth for a sample of how Google’s solution to pasting 2D pictures over 3D models works. SPOILER ALERT: not impressive.)  As has been mentioned in this space before, Apple chose to take the hit and hope for the best, and ended up sacking some pretty high-level people as a result.

I suspect that within a couple of years, Apple Maps will be a fully viable solution (although I wish they’d acquire a couple of these transit apps and get that integrated with a quickness).  Until then, though, Google Maps gets pride of place on the first screen…at least until they start throwing ads in there.

Of which…you know.

So it sounds like the Catholic private schools which were at the core of the Big East from the beginning – Georgetown, Providence, St John’s, Villanova, Seton Hall and the like – have finally decided enough is enough.  After the bloodbath of conference realignment, they seem to be on the verge of withdrawing from the Big East and taking an automatic bid with them, with an eye toward setting up shop as a mostly Northern, mostly urban group of basketball-first athletic programs.  You know…like the Big East.

The Big East was a name-brand to reckon with.  Within a few years of its founding, the conference placed three teams in the 1985 Final Four.  But at some point, the league decided it needed a football presence, and tried to claim instant credibility by adding Miami – a year or so too late. Indeed, the Miami team that was ignominiously pantsed by Alabama in the Sugar Bowl was technically the Big East champion.  And from there, the Big East executed a bit of a shuffle with the Atlantic 10 and the dissolving Metro conference, trying to piece together enough teams to form a viable football league.  Sometimes they actually added schools that gave credibility to the core basketball mission – lumping in Louisville did them no harm at all – and they still managed to get good basketball expansion with the likes of Marquette and DePaul. Plus Notre Dame, for non-football only, proved a coup just as Mike Brey and his shmedium turtleneck were making the Irish a power again.

But.

For every Louisville, there was a South Florida.  Then the defections started, with Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College fleeing to the ACC.  Then Syracuse and Pittsburgh jumped ship, and all of a sudden, the BIg East was flinging itself at the likes of Boise State and San Diego State and trying to beg back Temple and giving long looks at East Carolina, all in a desperate attempt to keep the football numbers at a point where they could exist as a football league – let alone piece together 12 for a possible title game.  But even at its best, the Big East was barely a BCS-caliber conference, and spent most of its years taking a slot from more deserving teams.  At this stage, it is beyond risible to try to sell the 2014 Big East as any sort of major conference.

And now, the Catholic schools have said enough.  Or are about to, apparently.  Enough of trying to add teams in the Pacific time zone for the sake of football.  Enough of yanking around the membership for the sake of football.  Enough of realigning and diluting the original mission and chasing the almighty BCS dollar for the sake of football.  The Catholic schools want to go back to what they originally joined the Big East for: a solid basketball league with lots of academic respectability, without the sordid distractions caused by the pursuit of big-time college football.

At long last, somebody has said enough is enough.  Bless you boys.

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)


So I’m sitting on the worst conference call of all time, bored to tears (NO YOU DO NOT NEED TO MAKE SURE EUDORA WILL WORK IT IS ALMOST 2013) and I decided to start totaling up the bowls and teams.

The following 15 teams with only 7 wins are in bowls:

Nevada
Arizona
BYU
Washington
W. Kentucky
Baylor
Texas Tech
W Virginia
Syracuse
Navy
Arizona State
TCU
NC State
USC
Oklahoma State

 

The following 13 teams with only 6 wins are in bowls:

SMU
Central Michigan
Duke
Virginia Tech
Minnesota
Rice
Air Force
Michigan State
Georgia Tech
Iowa State
Purdue
Pitt
Ole Miss

 

The following 10 bowls are matchups of teams with a combined 14 wins or fewer:

New Mexico Bowl
Little Caesars Bowl
Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas
Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl
New Era Pinstripe Bowl
Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl
Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl
Hyundai Sun Bowl
Heart of Dallas Bowl (ON JANUARY 1!!!)
BBVA Compass Bowl

 

The following four bowls feature a matchup of teams with only 15 combined wins:

Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl 
Hawaii Bowl
Belk Bowl
Russell Athletic Bowl

Amazingly, the math works out perfectly: if you make the minimum standard 8 wins, and only retain bowls that currently offer a combined-16-wins-or-better matchup, there are precisely and exactly enough bowls to go around.  And face it: how many of the 14-or-less bowls would you miss?  Hell, how many of those bowls did you know existed?

If you set the minimum standard at 7 wins (and that’s where it ought to be in a world of 12-game regular seasons; if nothing else it would end the necessity of waivers to allow 6-7 teams that lost a conference title game to go to a bowl), you end up lopping off 6 or 7 bowls (assuming that some 7-win team goes begging a la Vandy in 1975).  To keep the ESPNU announcers happy, we could allow the 6-win team with the highest APR to get in and keep the numbers straight.  But seriously, you can’t find 7 bowls on that list to kill?  And that list still leave intact the matchups of high-win mid-major teams in the Idaho Famous Potatoes Bowl or the GoDaddy.com Bowl or the Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl (how’s this for a start: any bowl named for nothing BUT a corporate sponsor gets whacked first).

To be clear, I’m going to want all the football I can get my hands on now – with the regular season over, there isn’t much left and we should cherish every opportunity to watch.  But this is a modest proposal toward restoring some of the old-time magic to the bowl system – coupled with the end of automatic bowl bids down the line below the conference champion, this could and should get us some shiny matchups to carry us through the week between Christmas and New Years, not to mention the classic moveable feast of 14 hours of killer games all January 1 while we nurse our hangovers and swear we really will go to the gym this year…

I don’t know how long ago it began, but I’ve always had the instinct to hide out in times of stress. It might be hereditary – as a child, there was a storage room off the garage where my dad had his leatherwork tools and his fly-tying apparatus (complete with a little hot plate to melt lead over hooks) and shelves of all kinds of odds and ends. Very little has moved in that room since 1998, and it still smells of old leather and gun oil and stacks of old Field and Stream magazines.

I remember being a kid in day care and finding a spot under the bleachers to hide, or high up to one side of the stage in junior high, or in a back corner of the almost-totally-unused library in high school. In college, it seemed like half my time was spent finding some place not to be found – a forgotten third level storage alcove in the old gym, a corner of the old ruined boiler building, a practice room in the music building around a warren of corners.

And then there was the shower. My dorm in my sophomore year was the oldest standing, dating to about 1940, and it had shower stalls with foot-thick walls floor to ceiling and a spray that was less like hot water and more like a radiator breach. It was possible to pin the curtain in place with the various bottles from your little crate of shampoo and soaps and whatnot, upend the crate, fold a couple of washcloths on top, and just sit in the steam for a half hour or more. And as long as it wasn’t in the morning, there was almost never anyone around. I fell asleep sat there more than once.

I’m sure it must have happened at Vanderbilt, but I don’t remember exactly where the spots were, if any. I was more likely to be in the corner of the deck at SATCO or in a random library carrel or up in the Overcup Oak nursing a triple-espresso milkshake with the grounds in it. And the there was DC, and I didn’t have much time or opportunity to hide out at work other than the cigar shop or the remote deck where I would smoke and do remote control help tickets.

And then, in the heart of at first chaotic and trying autumn at my first California job, it started again. The warehouse was so crowded and cluttered that I could easily drag a pallet of shrink wrapped Power Mac G5s here, another pallet of Pelican cases there, pull a third in behind me to block the path, and just like that I had a six foot wall around my workbench in all directions. Nothing but the tinny sounds of a stream from Virgin Radio UK, and the solitude to work without distractions.

That’s part of the whole drive for 5-space. I think about throwing a dark towel over the shower door to soak up some of the morning light through the window and make the space feel cozier. I think about holing up in the garage to watch the laundry machines work and read quietly. I curl under the covers and wish we were in a sleeping bag in a pup tent in some distant part of the woods miles from anywhere or anyone. And I think that’s why I like the fog, like the overcast, even like the light blowing rain and low cloud we had earlier this week. Just give me a peacoat to armor myself, and I’ll be happy to disappear for a while. Sometimes, you’re just better off without too much light.

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

Bowls are funny things. In 2010, a record of 8-4 was enough to get Connecticut the Big East championship and a berth in a BCS bowl. In 2012, a record of 8-4 is good enough to get Vanderbilt into the SEC’s seventh tie-in bowl, what with 6 SEC teams having 10 wins and the Gator Bowl unwilling to risk a Vandy-Northwestern rematch on New Years Day. But this isn’t about bitching at the indignity and inconvenience of facing the rest of the SEC, this is about the bowl process itself, and how the last 25 years have more or less ruined it. 

Conference title games are a BIG part of that, of course. It did nobody any favors that the Big Ten’s probation and suspensions left a 7-5 Wisconsin team in a position to take a Rose Bowl berth with one neutral-site win, but it happened. It hardly seems fair that a Georgia team that beat Florida head-to-head would be passed over to put that same Florida team in the Sugar Bowl and send Georgia to the Citrus, but there you have it.  The combination of the BCS (and its annual automatic bids afforded to unranked conference champs) with the proliferation of automatic bowl tie-ins (with the resulting lack of matchup flexibility) has combined to routinely shaft deserving teams and deprive the college football world of exciting matchups. 

How different would things be in Bowl World if we were still playing by 1990 rules?  Let’s have a look:

ROSE BOWL: Stanford vs. either Nebraska or Wisconsin depending on whether the B1G has a conference title game or not. Either way, not a game with national title implications, but a more attractive matchup if it uses the Huskers, and a prima facie demonstration of how the conference title game can bite your best team in the ass.

SUGAR BOWL: Alabama vs Notre Dame. We’ve seen this before, in 1973, but the old ways are sometimes the best. Still the 1 vs 2 matchup we would have wanted all along and in the most fun bowl town of all.

ORANGE BOWL: Florida vs Kansas State. The Big 12 inherits the old Big 8 auto-bid, and the “best available Florida team” that sometimes seemed to be a rule actually yields one hell of a fun matchup.

FIESTA BOWL: Georgia vs Oregon. The most arriviste of BCS bowls gets the runners-up from arguably the two top conferences in America, and gives us the SEC-Pac12 pairing that has only happened once in a bowl in the BCS era. And depending on what happens in New Orleans, a team who wins this matchup decisively might have a case for the national title if the Tide and Irish are lackadaisical and low-scoring.

COTTON BOWL: Oklahoma vs LSU. Couple of leftovers, but preserves some of the spirit of the old Southwest Conference.  I would have said Texas A&M vs LSU, but thanks for nothing, SEC expansion.

There you have it – mostly top-10 matchups, except for the Rose Bowl and its insistence on locking in a champion from a conference whose best team is on probation instead of playing for a title. (Said champion now apparently being out of a coach.)  Trickling down from there, you still have a chance to see choice games like South Carolina vs Florida State in the Citrus (you think Steve Spurrier isn’t fired up for that?) maybe Texas A&M vs Clemson in the Holiday Bowl (if you think this is burdensome, you’ve obviously never been to San Diego).  Point is, there’s no reason the top six or seven bowls shouldn’t be chockablock with top-10 matchups

If it weren’t for the upcoming playoff, there would be no need to do anything but go back to the way things used to be.  The system of conferences locking in berths all the way down (the SEC has lock-ins for potentially ELEVEN TEAMS if two go to the BCS, which they nearly always do) has done more than anything to stick us with unwatchable games. In fact, guess what?  We HAVE a playoff, and have had since 1992, when the SEC brought in a conference championship game. If not for a clutch pick by Antonio Langham, the undefeated Tide of Gene Stallings would have given up their Sugar Bowl bid to 3-loss Florida and would probably have had to go to the Cotton Bowl to play Texas A&M for the winner to grasp at a title if Florida could knock off Miami.

Point being, as long as you force a one-off game at the end of the season, you create a point at which a top team could have a bad day and crap the bed and throw things into chaos (looking at you, K-State 1998 and Chokelahoma 2003 and in fact quite a few Big 12 title games). The minute you expand a playoff past 4 teams, you increase the odds that somebody slips in at 8 who may or may not deserve to be there – especially if you put a restriction on participants or insist on giving a bid to every BCS conference champ.  Who deserves a bite at the title more: Georgia, Florida, or Louisville?

So in the Brave New World Of Bowls, here’s how I would roll if made God-Emperor-BAWSE-in-Charge:

1) Auto-bids to bowls are for conference champions only, and are VOIDED if the conference champ is not ranked in the top 10 (so long, B1G – enjoy your Gators, Stanford!).  No bowl shall be automatically saddled with a dud.

2) Minimum standard for bowl participation is now 7 wins. No more fretting over 6-6 or 6-7 or (as ESPNU couldn’t shut up about at Wake) 5-7 teams. The 6-win baseline was from the age of 11-game seasons and no conference title games; in 2012, you ought to need 7 wins to rate any postseason play.

3) We inaugurate a 4-team playoff to start next year, and ONLY 4, with no automatic bids for anyone.  Winning your conference title is no guarantee of anything, because you might win your way in without even being a top-25 team.  Why should Wisconsin somehow get a seat on the starship because they luck-boxed their way into one win on the right day? If the goal is to get the true national champion, there’s no room for feel-good spots.  Let the committee pick or just use the top 4 of the BCS formula (and re-engineer the hell out of it to get the coaches poll far far away) – but in any event, it’s crucial to privilege strength-of-schedule and discourage the practice of never playing more than one major-conference OOC game or never playing a non-rival OOC game on the road.

4) At some point down the road, there’s going to be a reckoning that results in massive conference realignment with a hard cap of 10 members and mandatory round-robin scheduling. Once a team is the champion of the entire conference and everyone has played everyone else, we can go back to allowing automatic bids into a notional playoff for conference champs (and ONLY conference champs, this time) – 12 conferences, 4 byes, bibbity bobbity boo. We always used to get by just fine with 10 teams per league from 1966 to 1991…

I think this would be fair and fun.  Otherwise, I think the way things used to be was better than the dog’s breakfast we have now, which is just as arbitrary and crooked as anything else but adds a veneer of alleged respectability.

How ’bout it?

Just because: the very first public performance of “Man In Black,” 1971, after a visit to Vanderbilt University.