Are my eyes really blue?

The conference shuffle continues.  Texas A&M, for better or worse, is now part of the SEC.  Syracuse and Pitt have weighed anchor and jumped to the ACC.  Comes now the news that Texas Christian University (TCU), as successful a non-BCS football team as has played in recent years (if not nearly as hyped as Boise State or Utah), is flaking on its move to the Big East to join the Big XII instead.  This gets the Big XII back to 10 members and preserves a modicum of viability, assuming they hang onto Missouri.

However, the Big East as a football conference is in serious jeopardy.  The class of the remaining league in football is undoubtedly West Virginia, which has purportedly been rebuffed by SEC and ACC alike.  Then you have Louisville and UConn, both top-flight basketball schools with occasionally passable football.  Then Cincinnati, two years removed from a BCS berth but otherwise undistinguished in football and some distance from its Bob Huggins-led basketball success.  Then South Florida and Rutgers, with little hope of hanging on.

Because that’s only six teams.  By rule, a BCS conference must consist of no less than eight.

The Big XII may have saved itself for now with the TCU move, but the Big East is doomed, for BCS purposes.  The ACC would be happy to pick off Louisville and UConn and cement itself as the ultimate power in college basketball.  Maybe the SEC takes West Virginia after all, tired of the dithering from Mizzou and accepting that academic quality – indeed, quality in any aspect other than football – is no longer a critical criterion of SEC membership.  Cincy, Rutgers and South Florida are officially left grasping for something else – maybe the Sun Belt or Conference USA, maybe continuing in a non-football Big East and making their way in some sort of alliance of independents (this is where Notre Dame might be able to lend a hand by adding those three to their football rotation).

Ultimately, though, it’s going to be like this:  SEC/Pac-12/ACC/B1G (formerly Big Ten) are now the upper crust.  The Big XII (-2) will struggle to stay afloat, and the new-look Mountain West Conference (featuring Boise State, Nevada, Fresno, Colorado State, Air Force and others) will probably grab the former Big East auto-bid.  Expect the next round of the shakeout to involve the mid-major conferences – the WAC, the Sun Belt, the MAC and Conference USA – as they try to pick off Big East stragglers (and as some of their top-tier members try to battle their way up the ladder).

The key thing in all this, though, is that the current round of Russian Roulette all stems from Texas and their attempt to create their own network.  They wanted all the benefits of independence while still owning the Big XII as their personal fief, and enough schools have rejected it that the Pac-12 and B1G are now at 12 and the SEC at 13…which compelled Syracuse and Pitt to escape while they could, which crippled the Big East and made TCU flee, which sank the Big East and set everything on tilt-a-whirl again…

Texas Roulette is just like Russian Roulette, only with a semiautomatic.

Steve Jobs, in many ways, is the foundational myth of Silicon Valley.  Along with Woz, bashing together their homebrew computers in the garage, or Hewlett and Packard in that Palo Alto garage, or Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore leading the Traitorous Eight to found Fairchild Semiconductor – what they accomplished is part of our DNA as an industry, part of what we believe about ourselves.  This notion that two guys in a garage can take their dream and conquer the world with it.  That’s what Silicon Valley is.  That’s the dream.  And to lose Steve – and lose him early, despite accomplishment enough for two or three lifetimes – well, it feels like we lost a piece of that dream, part of the proof that what we believe about ourselves as an industry is real.  It pushed Larry and Sergey at Stanford, it pushed a kid in a Harvard dorm room, it was the 21st-century Thomas Edison-crossed-with-Henry Ford: you can dream the future, make it real, and sell it to the whole world.

And I think for as much as the effusive hyperbole around the iPad launch was mocked, Steve meant every word of it when he said it was “magical and revolutionary.”  It was the Dynabook, in every way that mattered.  Alan Kay’s original vision, made real after almost forty years.  Steve chased that Dynabook from the earliest incarnation of the Macintosh, and you can easily make a case that in 2010, he caught it.

The man dreamed big.  We got to dream his dream with him.  Lucky us.

Not much to say that I didn’t say the day of the resignation announcement.

I have a career because of Steve Jobs.

Between the Apple II and the Macintosh, he helped create the personal computer.  And between the iPhone and the iPad, he may have replaced it.  That’s a career, in any league.

Rest in peace, Steve.

Fred Shuttlesworth is dead at 89.

The obituary in the Birmingham News – a paper that fifty years ago had very little kind to say about him – doesn’t even begin to cover the enormity of what the man undertook.  What the Reverend did in 1956, in starting the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, was to stand up to an entire society with segregation at its very roots and hold them before the eye of God’s judgement.  And he did it in the face of bricks, bombs, and a government and police force that was rotten to the core, and he did it for seven years before Dr. King ever showed up in Birmingham.

If you don’t know about Brother Shuttlesworth, Google him.  And then thank God for his life.

Well, we’re back to the prevailing model from years gone by – namely, if you bought your iPhone last year, there is not that much to tempt you; if your iPhone is two years old, run don’t walk.

The changes are mostly incremental – once again, the iPad processor makes its way into the iPhone (and once again, it is suspected, with even more RAM).  Once again, the megapixel and HD capacity of the cameras gets a bump to the next general tier.  Once again, battery life is slightly improved, and once again, there’s a single new big-ticket feature that’s hardware-dependent (true A-GPS in the 3G, video capture in the 3GS, Retina Display/FaceTime in the 4, and now Siri in the 4S).

If you’re still packing a 3GS, you should put in your order now.  If you have an iPhone 4…well, there are two things to wait for.  One: how will iOS 5 perform on the iPhone 4?  Given that it’s all we’ve had to test on to this point, one has to assume it’s broadly feasible (you’d want to be mad to run it on a 3GS; I know Apple is trying to preserve long-term viability but I suspect you’ll be sorry if you try to bump a two year old iPhone to the new hotness) but it’d be nice to see for sure, especially if Siri is so processor-intensive that it needs a 4S.  And two: is the whole thing really capable of both CDMA and GSM? Could you finally get a Verizon iPhone and take it abroad without a fight?  How will this work?  Will this work?

So far, it looks like I’ll be sticking with what I’ve got.  I reserve the right to change my mind, though, if the Verizon performance is so good (and the prospect of going to the UK/Ireland so high) that I can justify making the switch…

Scott Beason (R-Jugtown) got called out by a farmer:

“After talking with famers at the tomato shed, Beason visited the Smith family’s farm. Leroy Smith, Chad Smith’s father, challenged the senator to pick a bucket full of tomatoes and experience the labor-intensive work.

Beason declined but promised to see what could be done to help farmers while still trying to keep illegal immigrants out of Alabama.

Smith threw down the bucket he offered Beason and said, “There, I figured it would be like that.”

 

Leroy, my man, your next beer is on me.

The whole world is going nuts about the Fire, which looks like it will be a huge success, and rightly so.  But notice the two things they had to do to make it happen:

1) Massively undercut the iPad on price.

2) Adopt an Apple-style infrastructure with its own media store and app store and fork the base OS away from Android.

Google did neither of these things themselves, though they certainly had the money to do the first (and probably to buy into the second).  But Amazon comes to the table with a compelling value proposition for “this is why you need a tablet” and a price point that will let people think “maybe I do…”

The Amazon Kindle Fire is even cheaper than we’d expected; $199 is the price point and it’s a damned attractive one, given what you get: 7-inch color display. An innovative browser that actually relies on cloud computing for, you know, computing and not just storage.  Access to the Amazon infrastructure and the only store for apps, books and media that rivals Apple’s own.  Weight under a pound and dimensions that would make it slip into the inside pocket of my peacoat without a fight.

The downside of bringing it in at two bills, though: 8 GB of memory with no expansion.  No camera or microphone. No unlimited 3G – no 3G, period, actually, let alone GPS.  This is, in fact, the very thing the iPad is oftimes accused of being: a device for pure consumption.  But to add video playback from Amazon Prime (and presumably music) on top of the world’s biggest bookstore may well make the Fire the gold standard of easy consumption.  Especially with Amazon leveraging their cloud infrastructure to handle computation and storage alike.

Won’t know for sure until I get a hand on it – which is the common problem with new gadgetry these days – but at first glance, you have to think they’re going to sell a million of these things.  I’m definitely more interested in this than any Android tablet so far – this looks like a dream of a travel device, map and 3G notwithstanding, and at only $199 it’s going to shift what’s an acceptable price point for an Android tablet.  Hell, any tablet.

Your move, Cupertino.

Facebook is doing it again.  It seems that they’re on a constant spiral in which your life becomes ever less private.  And they’re intent on becoming the manager of your identity – the news that Spotify will exclusively use Facebook ID for login in future is enough for me to be done with Spotify, which strikes me as incredibly overrated in what limited use I’ve made of it.

I think the whole point of social networking is getting missed.  It’s not about putting your identity out there for everyone, it’s not about having one universal login for everything – it’s about being able to keep contact with people you want to stay in touch with.  And I’m sure that Facebook is a wonderful solution for the kind of people who still use AOL to get to their Hotmail account in 2011, but if you’re not my mother, there’s a better way.  Right now, for me, it’s Twitter, to the exclusion of almost everything else.  Pseudomymous, simple, straightforward, and at its base level usable through SMS – never mind apps or websites, if you have a Nokia 1112 you can handle Twitter.

Ultimately, for as much as the techno-hip and the haters bash Apple, they’re the only company still trading in the notion of cash on the fuckin’ barrelhead.  Want email and calendaring and online storage?  Pay for MobileMe, and there it is.  No ads, no data mining, just the stuff you want.  Want music?  Buy a song on the iTunes Music Store – boom, 256kbps AAC, no DRM, plays on anything that handles MP4, it’s yours, no monthly subscription, no ads.  I’m willing to pay to be the customer and not the product.

Because what, ultimately, is social networking for?  I’m not interested in games, I’m not interested in meeting people, I’m too old to make use of a lot of the functions – I just want something that gives me a dashboard view and occasional pings about people in whom I’m interested.  I want to be able to see my old co-workers flip out when the Redskins shit the bed (AGAIN) against Dallas.  I want to know when high school friends will be in town.  I want to rave out and have people yell back at me when Vanderbilt goes big.

Ultimately, I’m willing to spread it around.  Pictures on Flickr and MobileMe (and presumably iCloud).  Short messaging on Twitter, longer stuff here, and maybe something in between on Tumblr. RSS feeds under one Google identity and email under another with the Google+ there (for now).  Personal mail still coming through another server not connected to any of those.  It’s not tough to set things up and be able to just work through your iPad, or iPhone, or laptop – and if you have enough intelligence to use a computer in the first place, it’s just as easy not to rely on Facebook Connect as your one login.

I am who I am.  I don’t need Facebook to co-sign it.

11″ MacBook Air vs iPad.  Given that a 2GB-RAM/64GB-HD 11″ MBA is $950 and, say, a 32GB iPad with AT&T 3G is $730, I think there’s a bit of an edge to the iPad – and not just for cost.  The 3G iPad means you can use GPS and Find My iPad (which has proven its merits already).  It’s half the weight, it’s easier to pull out of the bag and use, and I think in the grand scheme of things the difference in RAM and storage is made up by the difference in OS requirements.  Now that Prompt and Spaces will let me mess around with ARD-type functionality, all that’s really missing is ESPN3.  I could always pull on the work laptop and Chrome Canary for that.

Most of all, even with Lion, the iPad’s instant-on is faster, and the rated battery life is double.  Yup, 5 hours wireless web on an 11″ MBA and 10 hours wireless web on an iPad.

So I guess that’s it.  Unless something seriously changes, my target is a personal tablet and a work MacBook Air, supplemented by a Bluetooth keyboard and the home desktop and made better with iCloud for sync.

Mission – for now – accomplished.