Are my eyes really blue?

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.

(cross-posted from comments at Anchor of Gold)

“From Nashville With Love”

a DUET in TWO HALVES, with MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT by the Pride of the Southland Ole Miss Marching Band, available here:

(Slow somber march; music swells)

REBEL:

O I wish we didn’t have to play at Vandy

Black and gold is hard like candy

Rebel yell!

Tripped and fell!

Run like Hell

From the Dores!

We thought Houston Nutt would put our team in action

Vandy put us all in traction

Out of luck!

How we suck!

What the F!@%?

Lost again!

GIG A GIGGITY BO-TARRRRR-KUS

COMMODORES HAVE GONE AND WRECKED US

MIGHT AS WELL WARM UP THE TEAM BUS

THE DORES HAVE KICKED OURRRRRRRR ASS

(Tempo picks up with cheerful tuba oom-pah)

COMMODORE:

Our defense is stout and our offense is tricksy

Plus we’re not still playing “Dixie”

Threw it soft!

Lots of loft!

Picked it off!

Went for six!

MISSISSIPPI’S CAUGHT THE BLACK RAIN

DEFENSE COMING LIKE A FREIGHT TRAIN

ANCHOR DOWN AND HEAR OUR REFRAIN

VANDY WHUPPED THAT ASSSSSSS!!!!!!

(Exeunt, pursuing a bear and a Mon Calamari)

All right. Back to 0-0. Gamecocks on Saturday.

So CBS Sunday Morning ran a blowjob of an interview with Mitch Daniels, the former Bush-era OMB director-turned-governor of Indiana, who famously flaked on running for President in 2012.  And predictably, he goes on and on about how much the federal government needs to balance its budget and how tough choices need to be made.

Now, I could point at the explosion of debt from the Bush tax cuts – as laid out by the OMB under Mitch Daniels – and post the graphic about those cuts account for almost all of the budget imbalance not related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Or I could point out that Indiana receives more federal benefits than it pays in federal taxes.  But the only thing that needs to be said is that if Mitch Daniels is so concerned, he had a choice.  He could have run for President, and he chose not to.

There’s no reason to heed the opinions of a bitch-ass.

They were on sale at the Vanderbilt Bookstore – hell, it seemed like you could buy one of anything at the Vanderbilt bookstore – and I didn’t think twice about throwing a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers on the pile of stuff I was buying on my Commodore Card.  After all, they were the platonic ideal of sunglasses.  Roy Orbison, the Blues Brothers, Don Henley’ chorus on “The Boys of Summer”, every movie in the 1980s – why wouldn’t you?

The error came when I left them strapped under the sunshade in my car at City Stages one year.  Needless to say, the kind of heat that builds up in a parked car in Birmingham is enough to soften any old plastic, and the earpieces were always too wide after that.  I did get some rubber separator rings put over the hinges that helped matters somewhat.

And then, after sitting on my sunglasses five years ago, I bought another pair, this time the New Wayfarers in tortoise with brown polarized lenses, and hung onto them ever since (save for the two-month interregnum when they got lost in my sister-in-law’s purse).  They’re a little scratched (might be able to buff it out, I don’t know) and a little warped, but still serviceable as daily wear.

So now, with my work bonus, I finally invested in the 52mm New Wayfarer in classic black, with the classic gray-green crystal polarized lenses.  They are simple, they are elegant, and they are absolutely timeless.  And I intend on getting many more years out of them, because my Wayfarers resist loss and damage better than any other shades I ever owned.