Month: October 2024

“Fear God and give glory to Him for the hour of His judgement is come.”

-Rev. 14:7

40-35.

Think about that. The last time Vanderbilt football had a sweat like this was probably…1996? Maybe? When a 3rd and 37 pass for a 4th quarter touchdown gave us a lead over Notre Dame 7-6 with minutes left? I am sure everyone in that stadium was just waiting for the hammer to fall on Saturday, and yet…it never did. 60 minutes of SEC football and Alabama, undefeated and ranked #1 in the country, never led once. Not once. If you told me a Vanderbilt football team at any point in human history would give the Crimson Tide a 40-piece in the snotbox, I would have burned you for witchcraft.

And yet…it was not a brick fight, it was not a fluke, it was not a dick-tripping, in Spencer Hall’s words – Vandy just came out and beat that ass at the point of attack for 60 minutes. They played toe to toe with the top ranked team in the country, with THE football power of the last 15 years, a Mount Rushmore program in the history of college football, and the night ended with Vanderbilt fans (including several of my friends) parading the goalposts three miles down Broadway to throw them into the Cumberland River. Where the next day, the Nashville fire department helpfully fished them out and returned them to campus so they could be cut up and sold for souvenirs to defray the conference’s $100,000 fine for rushing the field.

This doesn’t happen. Vanderbilt had never beaten a top-5 ranked opponent ever. The biggest win I can remember like that was when the Dores got over on then-#6 South Carolina in 2007, and didn’t even finish the season with a winning record. Yes, the 2013 team tore ass through Florida, Georgia and Tennessee in the same year, but it was the second of five wins in seven seasons over the Vols, and Florida after Meyer and Georgia before Kirby. And yes, this is Bama after Saban, but it’s a Saban roster and a team that beat #1 last week to be #1 this week.

More to the point, it was the Death Star. It was the game you could write down a L in ink every year. Bama was a permanent opponent in the division days for 20 years, and it was a guaranteed loss, with the only question being “blowout loss, or brick fight loss with a back door cover.” The last time Vanderbilt won, I was 12 years old and on the other side of it, sitting with my dad in his old silver truck in Gardendale in disbelief as Paul Kennedy and Doug Layton called a desultory and lifeless defeat in Ray Perkins’ losing 1984 season while Vandy was still riding the fumes of the McIntyre renaissance. And my dad said “well that doesn’t happen very often,” because I think the last Vandy win had been 1969.

This should not have happened. This should have been inconceivable. A Vanderbilt team that could get handled on the road at Georgia State should never have been in the same ballpark with Bama.

And yet.

Something feels materially different. It isn’t just taking then-#6 Missouri to double OT before losing in heartbreak, or beating Virginia Tech in OT to open the season, or handily defenestrating Alcorn State in a way that doesn’t usually happen (it took miracle stuff to get by Tennessee State a couple years ago, if you want a straight HBCU comp). Not only are the Dores mostly handling business, they aren’t getting blown out and blown away. Hell, you make one field goal in Columbia and pick up the first down one more time in the 4th quarter in Atlanta, and this Vandy team is 5-0 and probably in the conversation about making the 12-team playoff.

But the bigger difference is that it doesn’t feel real – but it does. Vandy had success during the Brigadoon era, but it always felt like smoke and mirrors – we weren’t dragging teams we should beat (well, other than 2012 Tennessee), we were taking advantage of mistakes and still getting destroyed by power foes. The wins were close and the losses were not. This feels like it’s legitimately happening, somehow – we’re not backing into it, we’re not fluking into it, we are somehow going toe-to-toe with top teams and trading blows at equal strength. Diego Pavia doesn’t know it’s a damn show, he thinks it’s a damn fight.

And that’s another thing. This was achieved by basically opening the checkbook and purchasing the entire New Mexico State offense, players and coaches and all, and it is working. It’s not sustainable, and the question will always be, what happens next year when hipster CFB’s favorite quarterback is not around. But that’s not a now problem. Instead, Vanderbilt is America’s darling, other SEC programs are openly cheering for us to beat their hated rival, people are happy for us in a way that I never felt from anywhere under Franklin. Hell, there will probably be 49 and a half states rooting for us to do the same thing to Auburn in a month.

But it also feels uncomfortable. Ominous. You stack it up against things like finding the perfect Nerf blasters after all these years, or USMobile finally announcing Apple Watch support, or American Giant finally bringing back the fleece in the size I need, or stumbling across three 12-packs of Baja Blast Zero Sugar at the grocery store, and it’s hard not to feel like God is trying to throw me a bone and give me some last fleeting moments of joy before the end of the world arrives. Like we’re settling all family business before the onset of the darkness. I do not like this feeling, I wish I didn’t have it, but the Cubs finally winning in 2016 is my precedent. Joy may cometh in the morning, but it gets to be night fast in the autumn.

So the lesson, such as it is, is this: embrace the now, live now, enjoy today, don’t defer happiness. And worrying means you suffer twice.

More details are creeping out about the notional SE4, and they are not encouraging. Looks like the iPhone 14 form factor and display with a single iPhone 15 camera module. Which is consistent with previous SE versions, honestly. But the thing is – they will all be too big for what I want. And if you have to take the size, you may as well take the best possible battery and display, and if you’re gonna pay for that you may as well get the best camera. So it’s going to be the iPhone 16 Pro when the time comes.

But when does the time come? Not for a while. I’ve been doing an absurd amount of travel in the last 13 months, but barring one drive to Yosemite, it’s over – the whole Seattle – Austin – Denver – NYC – Tahoe – Prague – Dublin – London – Amsterdam – Pensacola – Disneyland – Sonoma – Minneapolis whirl. I don’t know how we did it back in the old days, but for now, things have settled down. One trip on the list for next year, possibly two, but it’s all on the other side of the wall for now.

And with no serious travel plans, the iPhone 13 mini – especially with the fresh battery installed – is still perfect in every respect. Sure, a full day on the run will take 130% of the battery, but I’m not on the run that much and I have the booster pack ready to go if needed. And I have a one-handed phone that belongs to me, not my employer, and has my work and personal lines alike. I fully intend to ride this phone into the ground, and there’s no reason I can’t get another year out of it. And I can let somebody else go first with the nonsense of Apple’s 5G modem or Apple Intelligence or the like.

Honestly, the next phone will probably be a pivot point back to “one device for everything.” And that’s fine. But if I’m not trying to do serious work on it – and I’m not, especially now – there’s no reason to give up my favorite iPhone ever. In fact, I don’t even own another phone at the moment, which I think is a first in…20 years? More? Certainly in the GSM era. Now all I need is for USMobile to support the Apple Watch so I can leave the phone at home on pub night, and we’ll call it square.

It’s the age old search for just the right thing: I’ve begun paring down anything that’s not a keepsake in hopes of reducing the amount of stuff I’ve accumulated. We’ll see how it goes.

I guess it began with Ken Burns’ Country Music. Seeing that in autumn of 2019, visiting Asheville almost immediately after, and then being limited to home for a year gave me plenty of time to resonate with the old-timey music. Which in turn reminded me of cold nights driving around Nashville listening to WSM, the thing that led to me riding around the DMV listening to Eddie Stubbs on WAMU. And then I started listening to Bluegrass Country again, and watching Country Music again in the autumn in times of stress.

Well, here we are. I haven’t pulled on the show itself yet, but what started off as a subset of the soundtrack to help me doze off to sleep has become a three hour playlist. Because that static scratch like a 78 RPM record rebroadcast over AM hundreds of miles away sounds like a black and white prairie night that could be almost any night of the last century.

It’s another species of escape. It’s a ticket out of the world, out of time, permission to forget about a world falling apart and a job I’m trapped in and wondering if there’s any way to get out of half my remaining life expectancy being stuck in a bad situation. It’s a species of meditation, like the series that inspired it or the drives I took twenty and twenty-five and thirty years ago or the pub nights I play it on now – the mantra, the vision, the focal point that lets me shut out everything else.

So the Great Mentioner has ramped up talk of the iPhone SE4 again, with a predicted date of next spring. It would be three years since the SE3, which was only a couple of years after the SE2 but was necessary because of the coming of 5G. Similarly, the notional SE4 is necessary because of Apple Intelligence and the need for 8 GB of RAM and a chipset to match, and the repurposing of the iPhone 14 body style recapitulates the use of the 5 form factor for the original SE and the 8 for the SE 2 and 3.

The thing is, I have been thinking for a while that next year might have to be the year. Four years is a good run for a phone, and I don’t regret replacing the battery and pushing on through, but at some point you need to get new hardware just to stay ahead of the OS, and there’s only so much you can get out of a physically smaller battery without counting on a battery pack. In fact, that’s probably the main inducement of four in considering the 16 series at all:

1. Sufficient battery life to make a full day possible without ever resorting to low power mode, similar to the Apple Watch Ultra 2.
2. Larger size means a larger battery, but it also means a bigger display for aging eyes. And there are some advantages to the new always-on wide-brightness-range high-framerate displays, assuming the battery can keep pace. Of course, it also means it’s not really a one-handed device, but it also means it’s capable of the kind of gaming and reading and viewing I normally rely on the iPad for on the road.
3. The physical camera button is a nice thing to have, especially when traveling and looking at things that pop up quickly without warning. It’s a nice-to-have.
4. The satellite SOS and texting function – because after seeing the aftermath of Helene, it seems that it would be useful to be able to contact someone after the Big One so they can spread the word we’re all right.

So what of these are you likely to get from the iPhone 14?

1 is almost a given because of 2. The 6.1” size means bigger battery than before, and if it’s using the same 3nm processors as the iPhone 16 series for Apple Intelligence, the battery life should be similarly improved. But will it be a 120hz display, or an always-on, or have the ability to dim down to 1 nit at night? Unlikely, one would think. It won’t have the camera button, for sure, and may not even have multiple cameras. And while the satellite SOS was present on the 14, is it something that could get dumped to save cost?

The whole point of the SE is to use last generation’s body type and less impressive cameras to put current processing power in a phone that’s cheaper enough to bring down the threshold of iPhone ownership. It’s meant to be perfectly good, or good enough. And it was, originally, and might be again depending. But I don’t want to give up night mode on the camera. Absolute dealbreaker, especially to get less in a larger package.

But the 16, and the 16 Pro, mean no compromises that way, and a guaranteed 35% or 50% battery bump depending on which. Plus the likelihood of another four year device. The only question, at this point, is whether the prospect of Apple Intelligence is something worth buying into or something worth avoiding even if it means squeezing a fifth year out of a one-handed phone.

The other noteworthy thing is that when I was using the work-provided iPhone X from 2017-2020, my use of the iPad mini dropped to practically nothing. I suspect something similar would happen for travel, although the iPad at home would still be the ideal reading device on pub nights and shutdown times when I wanted to lose myself without the temptation of social media or input from the wider world. There’s a certain appeal to one device to rule them all, but there’s also a certain appeal to horses for courses.

The only loophole would be if the iPhone SE4, so-called, comes with the elimination of the older non-16 phones, in which case the SE4 is the cheapest thing going – and then might be possible to swindle out of an employer that hasn’t updated my work-provided phone in seven years and counting. You gotta make your own bonus in this life. Otherwise, I guess we’ll wait and see.

It’s been twenty years since Black October, when a power outage on the day we had to ship an entire trade show with handwritten airbills kicked off weeks and weeks of running to stand still. No good inventory, no idea what our stock was, just figure it out in order on a daily basis and ship as far as you can down the list. I’ve written before about how I was able to hide myself behind a wall of Pelican cases, put on Virgin Radio and just disappear out of time in a way that hearkened back to those early days hiding under the bleachers at day care. At some level, I think that’s why I still want to work remotely, or at the very least be in a place where I can hide myself from a big open crowd of nonsense (which is not possible in my current formal workspace at the office, where nothing actually requires my presence).

I don’t remember what I thought about the incoming election, although I’m pretty sure I had given it up for lost by the end of the month. But the damage was already done, and the sense was “well things won’t get any better” rather than “well things are about to get worse.” Which is why I feel like it’s going to be a difficult run in these last five weeks, with no more direct confrontations and another war breaking out in the Middle East and no reliable polling information and a national media salivating at the prospect of bringing back their drama queen meal ticket. Unlike twenty years ago, I don’t have the prospect of earning a permanent spot with a desirable employer if I keep making my best effort, and I don’t have the excitement of a new world and a new life propelling me.

I just want to be left alone. I’m willing to contribute to making the world a better place, I’m willing to give way to the younger generations and their aspirations, I just want to mind my business and see out my days without things getting any worse. But that’s what aging is: increasing the speed with which you have to run to stand still.

So much of this year has felt like a bucket list run. Do everything you wanted to do one last time. Disney. London. Dublin. Yosemite. Take in the most important things while you can, before the world ends. I’ve been a little too loose with the money, I’ve had the extra pint, I’ve used the PTO days. Maybe we make it, maybe things work out okay, but if they don’t, I don’t want to have wasted my wishes.

And then, if we make it through December, we have to change the rules. Things won’t go back to how they used to be. Like baseball. If you want to undo analytics optimization that works the system, you have to change the system. No more shift, bigger bases, add a pitch clock. Expand the Court, eliminate the filibuster, end venue shopping in federal cases. It will not be quick, and it will not be simple. The tasks are great, the work is hard, and we are going to labor all night knowing we won’t all see the sun rise.

But we thank God for the work. We’re lucky to have the work.