Friday wrap up

* Where can I cash in all this stock I bought in “Keith Olbermann will part acrimoniously from CurrentTV?” I mean, the guy has amazing talent on camera but is legendary for napalming his bridges behind him at every stop. Besides, he was too big a fish for the pond – Current’s mission for “viewer-generated content” arrives five years too late, given that YouTube launched one year before they did.

* Now what? Tim Goodman seems to think Olbermann could wind up reprising his greatest role – SportsCenter 11 PM anchor – at the notional Fox Sports Channel. Having lost a lot of their regional nets to Comcast, and with NBC determined to turn Versus – sorry, NBC Sports – into a national channel, Fox is apparently going to roll the dice with creating their own ESPN, probably anchored by their copious international soccer rights. Let’s face it, ESPN is a farce, as I have declaimed in detail here, and having KO back doing what he did better than anyone – possibly even alongside Dan Patrick, clutch the pearls! – that would be appointment television, even if it does have a whiff of the Space Cowboys/Joe Gibbs II about it. Hell, I’d watch.

* Today’s iPad experiment: turn on LTE and leave it on and try to use the thing normally. As of 5 PM, and using the iPad for almost everything I’d use the iPhone for other than audio, I’m down to 57% battery and counting, and have burned through a whopping 4 MB of data – which is largely down to the ubiquitous Wi-Fi everywhere except Caltrain and the shuttle bus. And that’s almost an order of magnitude less than the daily limit with a 1 GB/month allocation. And it would mean that Find My iPad would work from about anywhere…but the battery drain associated with constantly pinging for LTE is probably a deal breaker there. Will test a typical day Monday with WiFi only and see how far we get…

* I’m not going to waste a whole post on jacketology again, except to say that I realized last night that the peacoat is basically the only piece of outerwear I’ve purchased in 15 years that wasn’t an outright impulse buy. Even the Saboteur Invincible – stylish and techno-cool but way too much money – was less than a week from find to buy. Maybe that says something about why I like the peacoat so much and why I want to find something else that just works for every situation – dress it up a little, commute in it, deflects mild rain and not be too much for when the sun comes out. Because direct sunlight, not temperature, appears to be the number one determinant of how comfortable I am outside in a jacket.

* The jacket thing has been a bigger deal lately because we haven’t had very much rain this winter. And the delta between low temp and high – hell, the delta between the temperature on the train platform at 7:30 and the high – has been pushing thirty degrees as often as not. Which is doable for a month, in spring, but rapidly becomes a pain in the ass when you have to spend all afternoon carrying the coat you wore against the 45-and-cloudy on the way to work. Of course, it completely explains the REI/North Face style of outer layer that everyone has…but dammit, I don’t want the “I will never ever wear this camping” look. Why does oilcloth have to weigh one Imperial fuck-ton?

* Just pulled this out of my bag on the train platform to finish the post. Which would be undoable in any meaningful way with the laptop or phone. And at a pound and a half, it’s half the weight of my MacBook Air, which combined with the iPad still weighs less than the old MacBook Pro all by itself. Welcome to the future. Again.

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