Are my eyes really blue?

The rule on our honeymoon was made by the second day in London: I had to stop and kiss my new bride before I was allowed to walk into a cellphone shop.  Because let’s face it, I was going into all of them.  Vodafone, O2, Orange, Three, Carphone Warehouse, I was even looking at a phone display in Harrod’s for crying out loud.  Partly it’s because I was in the market – my domestic phone of record at the time was the Bibendumesque Nokia 6620, with the Moto V180 as the hastily-acquired travel phone and a couple other random handsets floating around back in California.  I was looking for something that would combine Bluetooth, speakerphone, EDGE speed, a top-notch screen, two-day battery life and quality reception all in one while still fitting in the change pocket of my jeans.

I ended up holding off on a purchase – partly because the dollar was struggling against the pound and we’d just paid for a wedding, but also in anticipation of a forthcoming Apple phone.  Which turned out to be the ROKR, a rebranded Moto E398 with an iTunes-compliant player in the software.  I shook my head and ordered the Moto V635 on the spot, the phone that had drawn my attention everywhere from Kensington to Bath to Edinburgh.

When we went back in 2007, I did take a curious look at the MOTOFONE F3 (which ultimately came to me as a Christmas present) but I wasn’t looking at phones otherwise.  In fact, I donated that V635 a week before heading out of the country – because the iPhone had landed.  It had a real web browser, none of this WAP-stack nonsense, naturally it handled iTunes playback, its email was superior to anything on any other phone not made by Research In Motion – and it basically brought an end to phone glee.

Now that my iPhone 4S is unlocked, I’m dreaming of the Cotswolds again, so I looked at the SIM-only plans out there now.  Three – which started life as a 3G-only provider and was running in a weak fifth place in 2005 – offers a plan on a rolling one-month contract with 300 minutes (outgoing only, remember), 3000 texts, and unlimited data – for all of £15 a month.  Under the circumstances, I can’t fathom using anything else, although there are plans from Orange or O2 that offer unlimited texts, 1 GB of data, and some minutes above and beyond the usual top-up for £25-30, and I believe my current Virgin Mobile could be switched to a pay-as-you-go setup that includes 1 GB of data and unlimited texting with every £15 top-up.

I say all that to say this: there’s really not much out there in the way of alternatives for somebody with an unlocked iPhone in the United States.  You can roll the dice on T-Mobile and hope you spend your time in the parts of San Francisco where they lit up 1900Mhz HSPA+ coverage, but otherwise you’re back to the best speeds 2006 has to offer – and damnably, most of the GSM-based MVNOs in this country are backboned by T-Mob.  The one exception seems to be Straight Talk, a WalMart-based MVNO that offers unlimited everything for $45 and appears to have AT&T as its backing network in some areas.  But then you’re giving up visual voicemail, for one, and the configuration process for data and MMS appears to be less than smooth. Factor in the presumed move to a work-provided Verizon iPhone sixth-gen when it ships, and the juice ain’t worth the squeeze – looking at cost savings of less than $20 a month.

But there’s almost no 4G to speak of in Europe, so an iPhone 4S is ideal for an all-purpose travel phone.  Which is good, because my tiny Sony Ericsson Z520 is starting to flake.  More on it later…

The Nexus tablet is real. Made by Asus, 7 inches and $199 – which is interesting inasmuch as Google appears to be aping the most successful Android tablet of them all, the Kindle Fire.  They’re pushing this as a cheap-and-cheerful consumption device with a pure Android experience in 4.1, aka Jellybean.

This, with Google Play, is apparently meant to put Google on par with Apple and Amazon in terms of offering media and a means to use it – selling music, selling books, the like – and also to give them control over the widget. No more relying on Samsung – this is Google’s own gadget with, presumably, Google’s own schedule for updates.  One less party making decisions – well, two actually, because no cellular carrier to worry about.

This, to me, is the first sign that Google gets it.  Android tablets were a big bag of hurt, the Chromebook is an overpriced joke, and unlocked Nexus phones were far too expensive to be viable in the United States – but here’s a $200 device that lets you get in on Android and the entire Google ecosystem, presumably with more flexibility than the Fire (which is pretty much dedicated to consuming media and maybe gaming).  This is something that I’m looking at and wondering if it’s worth an investment, given that I still haven’t had a chance to work with Android in any meaningful way.  At the very least, I’m going to be banging the drum in the Friday meeting that we need to get a couple of those in the door ASAP.

Meanwhile, the changes to Android for Jellybean look interesting, if a little creepy in spots.  Improved voice dictation and search are always welcome, but “Google Now” trying to use your input and search history and whatnot to find stuff FOR you without asking?  Little too Minority Report for me at the moment.  Wonder how well it’ll work in practice.  Of course, the real question will be how quickly Jellybean gets out to a world where Ice Cream Sandwich still has single-digit adoption among Android devices – thanks to the carriers, the old saw about “Nexus shows you what you’ll have on next year’s high-end Android phone” will almost certainly continue to hold true.

As for the Nexus Q…you know, the new gadget that does for $299 what the Apple TV does for $99 and Roku does for $69…well, Google still hasn’t figured out television yet. Give them time.  Third one’s the charm…

The “Bowl” “Championship” “Series” is dead. It will be mourned by exactly nobody, save maybe Big East fans who miss having a free seat on the starship because Miami was good in the early 1990s. Everything worked out about as well as could be expected: 4 teams only, no automatic berth for conference champions, and absolutely no role for coaches or their assistants aside from what they can do on the field.

Four is the way to go. People will yell for eight so the poor Big East and Mountain West can have a free-roll, and then they’ll cry for sixteen because the Sun Belt and Conference USA champions somehow deserve the same crack at the title as the Big Ten or PAC-12 champions, and everyone will get orange slices and a participation ribbon. To hell with that. Schedule up, schedule hard, and see if you make the cut. In fact, having no automatic berth for winning the conference – and not enough seats to accommodate all the former BCS auto-qualifiers – will increase the pressure to separate from the rest of the pack. God willing, that means an end to I-AA opponents and extra credit for going out and facing significant foes from other leagues.

Four is also good because it means that two of the former BCS bowls will be free to make their own deals. Hopefully this means an end to 5th-ranked PAC-12 teams being sent to the Holiday Bowl so Pitt can get their ass pounded out. More top-10 matchups on January 1, fewer sad-sack mismatches because some barely-top-25 team won their nubbins league.

See, the BCS was a misnomer in every respect. “Bowl” because eventually it created its own floating title game separate from the bowls so more teams could get a bite of the pie. “Series” because nobody played more than one game. And “Championship” because it only made a matchup of a notional 1-2 and used its other four bowl berths to create matchups hobbled by the Rose Bowl’s devotion to the Big Ten and the insistence that winning an eight team basketball conference was as worthy as running the table in the SEC.

No more. When was the last time there was a legit #5 team contending for the national championship? Never. (You shut up, 1977 Notre Dame, you got a gift.) If you’re not in the top 4, you’re not really deserving of a title shot. Maybe now some of these big time bowls can mean something again.

Make no mistake: if you love college football, today is as big a win as could be had without blowing everything up and going to 1989 rules again. And 2014 will arrive just in time for Vanderbilt to meet Cal in the first round in Pasadena…

Money quote from John Moltz, the Jon Stewart of Mac pundits:

“[A]s someone who lived through the technology world of the 1990s I just think it’s kind of amazing that in 2012 you can write an erudite piece titled “Microsoft’s developer problem”.

I was there – hell, I still have a copy of Ken Auletta’s “World War 3.0” lying around somewhere. And looking back, now it can be said with confidence: winning the browser war was the worst thing that could have happened for Microsoft.  We’ve got IE, they said, we own the Internet.  We won.  

And while they sat back fat and sassy on their WinXP/IE6 desktop monopoly, Google ate their lunch on search. Then Apple ate their lunch on digital music. Then Friendster created social networking, MySpace drove it mainstream, and Facebook ate Microsoft’s lunch in the social space.  Then Google ate their lunch in webmail. Then Apple ate their lunch in consumer smartphones. Then Google ate everything in consumer smartphones that Apple didn’t eat. Then Amazon ate their lunch in digital publishing and bulk cloud computing. Then Apple ate everyone’s lunch in tablet computing.  Then Google sailed in with the world’s new favorite default browser.

And in 2011, Microsoft woke up, looked around, and realized that while they were enjoying their overwhelming ownership of the desktop space, the world had moved on from desktop computing.  And Microsoft was in exactly the position they’d reduced IBM to all those years ago: an aging public utility providing a commodity computing experience. 

Look at the list: Google search, the iPod, Facebook, Gmail, the iPhone, Android, Kindle, EC2 and AWS, the iPad, Chrome.  Microsoft’s last big leap was Windows XP, and it’s been a decade since they had even a partial share in the Next Big Thing.  That’s why the push for Windows 8 is so overwhelming, and why it’s meant to be more or less the same OS from your phone to your tablet to your “ultrabook” to your desktop – this is Microsoft’s last chance to make Windows a necessary part of the computing experience.  They need Win8 to be the bridge that carries the desktop monopoly back over to mobility computing.

Bing didn’t make a dent. Windows Phone 7 was Palm Pre-like in its impact. They ignored the iPad for two years.  And they let Google steal a march on IE and Office with their own lighter, leaner, free products.  Microsoft is swinging for the fences now because if they don’t, they may never take the lead in computing again.

And as a veteran of the 1990s, I’m just fine with that.

I could do it.

I sort of did do it, for seven years in Arlington, but despite being inside the Beltway, on the Orange Line, and situated such that I drove less than 2000 miles a year (and that mostly to ride around listening to Eddie Stubbs or Redskin games), I don’t know that I could really qualify my time in Northern Virginia as “urban living.”  And where I live now is resolutely suburban, despite the light rail and the highly walkable downtown and the fact that I’m on a 100% rail commute most of the time.

But the bug bit me in New York City (of course) and was aggravated by a weekend in San Francisco. We generally get to occupy the condo of some friends whenever they’re out of the country, a phenomenon I have come to think of as the “MUNI-break”, and there’s an above-average chance I will be living most of the week of the 4th of July in that 2 BR unit hard by AT&T Park.  Even just those two nights – we arrived lunchtime Saturday and I got on the train for work at 7:15 this morning – were enough to hit the nerve.  We walked at least five miles on Sunday, including things like taking in the Pride parade and the Aquarium of the Bay, not to mention hiking the long way up Telegraph Hill.  And then there was a quick cab ride to the Mission for dinner with friends at a very foodie-friendly establishment with excellent cocktails. Once I figured out which pillow was for my head and which one for my knees, I slept pretty good, and after all there’s a Safeway at the corner of the block open ’til midnight for strategic provisioning.

It doesn’t help that Team Black Swan East will become Team Black Swan North in a little over a month, having finally landed a place in Pacific Heights – probably about the size of my 1BR in Arlington, but ideally suited for their needs.  Which in turn makes me think about having stuff, and paring down stuff – and hell, if I’m honest, we could probably get by all right in that old Arlington place to this day.  So much depends on going out versus cocooning and what your preferred approach to the evenings and weekends is.*  The caveat being that as I stop being in denial about how old I am, I’m more instinctively inclined to cocoon.

Da Wife is fond of saying that she wants her cake and to eat it too – and our present living situation is certainly desirable and would probably be attractive if the shoe were on the other foot and we were sick of city real estate and city prices.  And the day may come when my willingness to walk anywhere and everywhere is diminished exponentially (and it may come sooner than later).  But I suspect that for the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be wrestling hard with the idea that maybe, just maybe, we could be cut out to live up in the city for good.  And I intend to milk it hard and get it out of my system as much as possible while it’s free.

 

 

* Honestly, at this point, I expect them to go to the city on Sunday and start house-hunting just on inertia and force of habit.  Guys, stay home, curl up on the couch with Osgood and get into my bottle of Booker’s if you like.  You’ve earned it. =)

This guy has it absolutely right. It also explains why the people in a perpetual uproar about how the Apple Store isn’t open are chasing a car.  The hobbyist market, the chip head market, the people who want to tear it down and tinker are a very small minority of the total market, no matter how much folks like Doctorow and the EFF wish otherwise.

And the thing is, you can still tinker.  You just have to be willing to live with the consequences.  Apple still hasn’t gone after jailbreakers – hell, they haven’t yet gone after people who are reselling developer access to beta versions of iOS! – so if you want to delve into your device at some level, hardware or software, the potential is there, with the eternal caveat: buy the ticket, take the ride.

But I suspect a lot of the stick Apple is getting over this has nothing to do with actual tinkering hobbyists and everything to do with driving page views.  You can bash the Beast of Cupertino and reliably draw hordes of angry MacMacs with their rainbow apple superimposed on the Apple Menu, convinced that it’s 1996 and Microsoft is still the greatest evil the world has ever known.  (Nothing makes being a Mac user harder than the Mac obsessives.)  And of course, there’s their opposite number, the rabid Apple haters who are convinced that this is what’s going to do Apple down for good – much like their failure to offer a 7″ tablet, or their failure to license the OS to third-party manufacturers (again), or the lack of a physical keyboard on the iPhone, or the lack of support for Windows Media formats on the iPod, or or or or.  These are the same people who are convinced that a stylus and a keyboard cover are going to let the Surface completely destroy the iPad as a viable tablet experience.

I’ll have that bet.

Think about it.  MacWorld 1997, Steve Jobs turns to the big screen, and there’s Bill Gates, to the shock (and hoots) of the crowd, investing $150 million in Apple to keep it alive as a hedge against anti-trust action by the DoJ.  Apple was, to all accounts, ninety days from bankruptcy.

Fast forward to this week in Los Angeles.

Microsoft was always content to make its money on Windows and Office.  That was the angle, the indispensable hammer they held over the PC industry.  Every desktop and laptop that went out the door everywhere but Cupertino was money in their pocket.  They didn’t have to do anything at all, and for the most part they didn’t.

Meanwhile, Apple dialed in on the post-PC world.  Sure, Mac OS X made the move to Intel and basically completely captured the market for consumer personal computers over $1000, but let’s face it – for all the glitz and glam of the MacBook Air and the new retina-equipped MacBook Pro, Apple’s making its bankroll these days off the iPhone and iPad.  They captured the market for the consumer smartphone, essentially stabbed Blackberry to death, and currently makes ridiculous sums of money relative to the half-dozen companies pushing Android-based phones.  They created the market for consumer tablet computing, scaling a phone OS up to a tablet instead of trying to cram a PC operating system into it, and nobody has even come close.

And now, Microsoft is chasing Apple.

Think about it: the entire Monday event was like a parody of an Apple rollout. The Microsoft stores opening in malls across America are essentially imitations of Apple’s brick-and-mortar retail establishments (which were roundly mocked as a failure in the making when they opened).  And now, Microsoft is attempting to do what Apple didn’t by cramming a PC operating system into a tablet – albeit by making it as much like a tablet OS as possible, and most of all, by making their own hardware.

Microsoft never made hardware.  Keyboards and mice, sure, but never computers.  But for some reason, they now feel like they have to make their own tablets to run their OS.  They’re joining Amazon, who decided to fork Android and make their own version of the OS to go with their own tablet.  And next week, at Google’s own developer conference, the Great Mentioner expects them to launch their own tablet hardware to run Android.

Today, in 2012, everyone – Microsoft included – is chasing Apple. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is smiling.

Well the event is still going on as I type this, but apparently Microsoft is going to make their own tablet to go with Windows 8.  They’ve borrowed the 5-year-old name of the Surface tabletop-touchscreen device, so get ready for all sorts of Surface puns.

Short version: there’s no reason you can’t take a touch-tablet experience and cram a regular PC into it.

No, seriously. There are two versions of this trick: one running Windows RT, which is the Metro-touch-only version of Win8, and a pro version with last year’s i5 processor in it and vents around the entire perimeter of the device.  Yes, folks, this is a tablet with ventilation. I see no way this ends badly.

The unique selling point so far appears to consist of a kickstand (only viable in landscape mode), a SmartCover knockoff that has a quasi-membrane keyboard on the underside (so you get a sort-of-desktop experience, because this sure as shit isn’t going to fly in your lap), and of course the opportunity to run Windows on a touchscreen interface (though presumably that’s what the SmartCover knockoff is meant to handle).  

USB3 and HDMI, so they’re basically attempting to pitch this as the transitional best-of-both-worlds device that beats out your notebook and your iPad with a single gadget.  But as much as Microsoft is now just basically trying to clone Apple – which is the story of Microsoft, when you get right down to it, whether Apple or WordPerfect or Netscape – they haven’t managed the presentation bit, because the first Surface crapped out on demo and they had to pull the backup.  Some things never change.

When you get right down to it, that seems to be how high tech works now.  Somebody invents something crazy, that’s stage one.  Then somebody – usually Apple these days – perfects it and makes it something anyone can use, whether it’s an MP3 player, a consumer smartphone or a legit tablet computer.  And then a couple years later, Microsoft lurches into view and barfs up a knockoff that has as its principle virtue cheapness and compatibility with the existing Windows/Office ecosystem.

The problem is, that hasn’t worked.  The Zune was a joke from stem to stern.  Windows Phone seems to be rounding into a contender for third place, even if it’s about to undergo a compatibility watershed.  But the attempt to extend the Windows empire into tablets – to literally put a classic Windows desktop on a touchscreen tablet – suggests that Microsoft still can’t let go of Windows as the key to everything. And yet, Windows hasn’t been a part of the next big thing for a decade now.  One has to wonder whether the beast of Redmond wouldn’t have been better served by making a clean break – but at this point, that may not even be conceivable.  Microsoft is going to live and die with Windows, in whatever form that takes.

 

ETA: you have to think that Microsoft’s OEM partners are frisbee pissed.  And yet, this is probably what they had to do, and looking at the Android tablet ecosystem, it’s basically their only chance: partners are not going to craft a premium experience.  If Microsoft is serious about the touch-tableting of Windows, their only real choice is to do it themselves and demonstrate their vision, and hope the OEMs will play along.

That’s the recurring theme of our politics, it seems like.  Florida starts purging the voter rolls until told to stop by the DOJ – will everyone be legit in time for the Florida primary?  Who knows?  Fox makes its own campaign ad to slam the President and runs it twice on Fox and Friends, then says they will deal with the producer privately.  It’s the same problem as when the papers blast something in the headlines and then run the corrections buried on A14 somewhere.  And today, this very day, a “reporter” for Tucker Carlson’s “newspaper” – which, inexplicably, has press pool access – actually has the gall to interrupt the President of the United States – twice – and then walk out of the presser, live on cable news.  Which, of course, he knew would be carrying the whole thing.  I expect some sort of pro forma statement of regret from the Daily Caller in a couple of days, by which point its reporter will be the toast of the conservative world as a bold unafraid truth-telling hero instead of the asshole douche he is.

I know exactly how this works.  Of course I do, hell, I had a little brother growing up. I have almost half a dozen nephews now.  I have plenty friends with kids.  And everyone’s seen it at some point – the age-old move where the kid takes a swing at somebody or shoves his sister or grabs the toy out of somebody’s hand and immediately reflexively blurts “SORRY” at the first sign of adult notice.  (Makes me wonder how I didn’t beat the hell out of my brother more than the one time I did, when he wrenched my knee and inadvertently caused me to have surgery 21 years later, but I digress…)

This is of a piece with my theory of modern electoral politics: the GOP has become the Bully Party.  You see it in the opposition to anti-bullying laws, you see it in the likes of SB1070 in Arizona or HB56 in Alabama, you see it in the shenanigans of the Foster Frieses of the world. The ethos is simple: be the bully or be the bullied.  And that’s why it’s so critical they win – because they assume the whole world shares this outlook, and if we don’t bully the Middle East and Russia and China and the homos and the wetbacks and the hairy-leg feminists, they’re going to bully us, in fact we’re already being bullied because we have to pay for birth control and it’s a crime to beat up gay kids now and why is everything different from how it was in 1954* WAAAAAAAAH!?!?

And it’s only getting worse.  Multiple states down South are losing their shit over the library possibly stocking “50 Shades of Gray” (how the worse load of shit fanfic imaginable becomes a bestseller itself says a lot about American intelligence in the 21st century), while the board of Alabama Public Television is firing executives who resisted running Christian Dominionist propaganda on taxpayer-funded channels (god, remember when APT was the first public television statewide network in the country? Too long ago). Now comes word that the same casino magnate who essentially bankrolled the Newt Gingrich campaign zeppelin is now prepared to kick in literally tens of millions of dollars to the primary Romney SuperPAC.  Now the rich kids can just beat you to death with a wallet.

But there’s a larger problem, one I’ve mentioned elsewhere: the power of gall.  Of blatantly lying – worse yet, lying in a way that everyone KNOWS you’re lying – and defying anyone to call you on it.  This isn’t just a GOP political thing – you see it from everybody from Oakland cops to the RIAA to Hollywood studios.  You’re entitled to your own opinion, but when you decide you’re entitled to your own facts and insist on them – then what?  As I may have blogged before, it’s the problem of the asshole who stands on the train platform under the NO SMOKING sign puffing away on a whole bloody pack of Marlboro Reds – breaking the rules, annoying everyone else, but as soon as you call him on it, you’re the asshole for getting in his business.  And then, invariably, people who weren’t really paying attention or are late to the party, who might otherwise decry the smoker, will wash their hands of it by deciding that you’re both assholes, and just walk away from the whole thing.  And now you know why the GOP is running and ruining politics.  Now you know why there was a Romney campaign bus driving around the site of today’s Obama speech honking the horn.  Politics of the douchebag, for the douchebag, and by the douchebag.

So yeah, it’s going to keep coming.  It’s going to lie and dare you to say something, it’s going to be “do you know how much money I have”, it’s going to be punch first and then maybe say sorry once you’re knocked down – especially since this is real life and there’s no Daddy to grab them by the arm and stand their ass in the corner until they learn to behave.  The problem is that between an indifferent public and an incompetent press, America has a deadbeat dad.

Because in any other era, Neil Munro’s “journalism” career would be done.  Instead…just wait. 

 

* Again, nobody ever seems to remember that the workforce was one-third unionized or that the top marginal tax rate was 91% in the 1950s. When you see nostalgia for the old days, it’s for WASP social hegemony, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Jack Gilbert ran the writer development workshop at Warner Brothers for a decade.  He taught screenwriting at Azusa Pacific and elsewhere.  He has kids writing on or running at least a hundred shows (hell, probably more like two hundred) since 1994.  Every night, you can turn on your television and watch something that one of Jack’s acolytes had a hand in.

He was there in the early days of our misbegotten mailing list, always around the edges, definitely two decades older than anyone else in the bunch but never coming across as old. We found out years later than his license plate was YODA1 – which made perfect sense.  He was quietly funny, understated yet evocative, and on the occasions when he said something, you paid attention because you knew it would be something worth listening to.

We had birthdays only a few days apart (well, and a couple decades) and a favorite movie in common, but I first came to his attention when there was some silly dispute on the mailing list that led to some misunderstanding and hurt feelings.  Jack took it upon himself to make nice on behalf of the list, and as I was in the same town as one of the aggrieved parties, he tapped me to act as his agent in the matter.  Which is how I found out that Emma’s Florist and Gifts was the go-to for Warner Music when congratulating new artists.  Later, he would come to DC every year to visit friends – and he was always good for a lunch full of catching up and an insider’s eye on the new television season.  Everyone in the DC crew made sure to post for that lunch whenever they were in town.

He died too young. 62, pneumonia that he waited on too long before going to the hospital.  His memorial service packed a church on Mulholland Drive, because even though I don’t know that I ever heard anything explicitly religious from him beyond the “God bless us every one” closing of his Christmas letter, he was a more effective advertisement for Christianity than any sermon or tract or lecture I ever saw in my life. And I can’t speak for everyone else, but I can say with some confidence that Jack Gilbert is what I want to be if I grow up.