Are my eyes really blue?

As I enjoy a pint at the Chieftain before the afternoon sessions, I’m thinking I may not be able to wrangle a return trip next year. This is just what it says on the tin – a developer conference. Without an IT track, I’m sort of at a loss. Nevertheless I have learned a lot, and without breaking NDA, let me just say that nobody is sleeping on the malware issue.

iOS 5 has nothing new in voice control, based on what I saw at the keynote. I fully expected the Nuance tieup and the Siri acquisition to be more important than they seem to be at present. Nevertheless, consider how long it took the PA Semi acquisition to pay out, or the mapping acquisitions…this could be a long game. Other than voice, though, I got everything else I wanted from iOS and Mac OS X alike: full volume encryption, geolocated reminders, notifications that don’t suck out loud, and iPhones and iPads that will never need to see a USB cable for anything but charging ever again. Can’t wait to get my hands on it. The emphasis on how many devices support it seems to bear out my contention that there may not be a new iPhone this year. The white one and the Verizon models were it.

The iPad is also problematic for text entry, but we knew that. Of course, the angle on the bar is tricky, and the space bar isn’t getting hit very often (when it’s not turning the into Tyne or Te, that is). I really wish iOS did at least as good a job of spam management as Mail on the desktop, obviously, but in most respects it’s worked out well. Not for work obviously, with no ARD and no ability to use Remedy (but that, in fairness, is down to the shitbag HTML code that Remedy’s web piece generates). But more than ever I think iCloud means that a MacBook Air would be viable with all the media content left at home on the house storage Mac.

As an aside…there’s no getting around it. He looks bad. Really bad. I think Apple will be fine without him, but I don’t think he’s capable of resigning. I hope he hangs on, though. He’s earned a long quiet retirement. To help create the personal computer as we know it, and then come back thirty-plus years later to be the one who helps destroy it? That’s a career. In any league.

I was in higher education for a hair under seven years. Then I was in NoVa for a hair under seven years. Now I’ve been here for a hair under seven years – and somewhere in the month of May, I crossed a substantial milestone. I have now officially resided longer in Silicon Valley than I did in Northern Virginia.

This is a lot to swallow.

It doesn’t seem like seven years. On the one hand it’s been kind of turbulent, with three different employers (and arguably four different jobs) in that stretch. On the other hand, I’ve only had two mailing addresses, and one of them for only a little over a year (I’m not counting the three week stretch staying in my in-laws’ front room when we first arrived). If you look at my relationship with ‘er indoors, the majority of our time as a couple has been “married, living in California, in this house.”

A lot has changed since that day in July ’04 when I first saw my Saturn parked on a side street in Silicon Valley. The hair, let’s face it, has largely gone. Dr Martens went away, came back in steel toe, and gradually made room for sneakers. The leather jackets went into the closet, mostly to stay. The Saturn eventually gave way to a Rabbit, which now sits in the garage so I can commute by public transit again. The cigars and pipe gave way to nothing at all, and despite my best efforts, no adequate replacement for Ireland’s Four Provinces was ever found. The boys of the old brigade are remembered fondly, but I might see them once a year if things go well, and there have been years where I don’t at all.

I haven’t really built that kind of crew since, although passing through three jobs might have more than a little to do with that. I think it was lightning in a beer bottle that the EUS came together in the first place – a bunch of guys (mostly) of similar age, thrown together by chance and forged by adversity into a band of brothers. Those circumstances have not obtained here, for better or worse – they might have at my first job if not for a certain amount of internal strife and one or two toxifying personalities. Subsequent jobs have lacked the requisite numbers, demographics, and conditions that would forge the same type of bond, which has been unhelpful when some of the old challenges the EUS faced reassert themselves in the new world. On the other hand, having friends and acquaintances outside work means that I can complain to people who aren’t living the exact problem I’m bitching about.

I left DC at the top of my game, after an MVP-type year and the final welling-up of my black cloud of rage and despair. I put it on the line – change, or I walk – and I walked as promised. Given the number of job changes in California, I have struggled to get back to that point. My job, when I left DC, was to be Winston Wolf – the guy my boss could call in just about any situation, send me to fix it, and the people at the other end would say “The HICK? Shit, that’s all you had to say!” And one of the reasons I reached a frustration point in my first job here was because that was plainly never going to happen – I was in a role where I was merely bundling up work for other people to do. All I could do myself was come up with numbers and beg other guys to fill the orders, and in the meantime try not to blow out my knee hoisting boxes and wrangling pallets. Obviously, in my second job, a pair of conjoined part-time support tasks wasn’t going to make a hero out of me – especially in an environment where the computing was three or four years behind state-of-the-art on the desktop. (Hell, by the end of 2008, the majority of computers I supported were still running OS X 10.4.)

When I took my current job, my plan was this: year one, rookie of the year. Year two, valued contributor. Year three, MVP. Year four, The Wolf. This plan, such as it is, is the main reason I haven’t completely lost my shit over the past couple of months, as climbing call totals and reduced manpower combine to make things more like DC than ever before. If I want to be MVP – and to really be The Wolf – I can’t just be working on Mac software fixes. I have to be swapping hard drives, killing off PC malware infestations, resurrecting group printer-copiers, doing remote fixes from memory without the luxury of a screen in front of me (let alone Remote Desktop), and generally taking the calls that nobody else wants to be on the hook for. In fact, my recent conversation with the boss played directly into that – I need management to stop using “number of calls closed” as a metric, or all those times I take on a tar-pit of a ticket and spend all day wrestling it into control will get the same amount of credit as doing one “have you tried turning it off and on again” and spending the remaining seven hours fifty-five minutes engrossed in Farmville.

The fact that I feel I need to be The Wolf again speaks volumes to the fact that work is still a defining part of who I am. I didn’t want it to be like that, but the other things I’ve done haven’t panned out the way I expected. Friends have gotten married, changed jobs, moved away, or simply not been made. Things like RCIA, or barbershop quartet singing, or watching English soccer, or adult Bible study/theology class have all gone by the boards for one reason or another. I know I need hobbies, or at least pastimes. I read more than I have in a while, thanks to the Kindle and the enforcement of Tuesday nights as “unplug the computer” night. I’m far more involved in Vanderbilt athletics than at any point since I left Nashville, thanks to Anchor of Gold and the National Commodore Club (as well as having access to ESPN3.com). We still have Cal tickets during football season, though for how much longer no one can say. And the commentary scene at Every Day Should Be Saturday has become its own little proto-social sphere, enough like the Friends Zone of old that I find myself muttering “all of this has happened before…” like some kind of Cylon hybrid.

I do travel more. When I lived in DC, most trips were to New York, Ohio or California, aside from the obligatory visits to the ancestral lands. Now I’ve been to Portland twice, Seattle once, Disneyland three times since October 2009, San Diego, Reno/Tahoe, Las Vegas, the Gold Country, New Orleans twice, and – most significantly – three trips to London with excursions to the Cotswolds, Bath (twice), York, Scotland, Switzerland, Paris (twice), Austria and Germany. And I’ve come to the realization that I really do want to travel more – which brings up the problem of having the money and the vacation to facilitate it, not to mention the trauma of long-haul air travel.

My fashion sense – such as it is – has changed. The days of leather jackets in winter, khakis in summer, and “black shirt, black shirt, black shirt, Hawaiian shirt, black shirt, Hawaiian shirt, black Hawaiian shirt” have given way – first to T-shirts and dirty jeans and steel-toes, then to a slightly cleaner version of same, to a (very) brief experiment in trying to look stylish (Lucky Brand jeans, untucked dress shirts, Saboteur jacket, oxblood cap-toed Docs), to a Gabriel Hounds-Cayce Pollard approach to fashion. At present, if I had to put a label on it, I would say my look is “what I wore in high school, updated to what I would have thought twenty-five years in the future looked like from 1988”. The old Reebok Phase I tennis shoes have given way to New Balance 992s or Palladium Pampas LITE boots, the Members Only jackets have been replaced by black rain shells, and the assorted pastel short-sleeve Madras button-ups of yore have yielded to solid-color sport shirts selected on the basis of whatever the Eddie Bauer outlet had in size XLT during a 30% off sale.

I also need to worry about my health. I’m paying more attention to my diet than ever before, I’m getting in more walking than I ever did at any job since I gave up the Metro commute, I smoke maybe four cigars a year tops, I’ve even given up regular soda altogether – and yet my cholesterol numbers stay just a little too high and my resting heart rate is still not what it was in DC. Aging sucks, and it’s hard to shake the sense that I’m now running to stand still. And believe me, “running” is literally necessary now, even if I don’t do it nearly enough.

So where are we?

When I left DC, it was because I needed another fresh start. I was thirty-two years old, and even if you accept the fairly risible premise that 30 is the new 20, it was still a situation where I wasn’t going to get a whole lot of opportunities for fresh starts. Now I’m pushing 40 – or at the very least, dragging 30 like a mug – and where am I?

Not in need of a fresh start, at least. After a couple of blown decisions, and the mental and spiritual consequences of same, I find myself back in a job with pay and benefits commensurate with what I had in DC, and stress levels that while currently pegging the whuck-o-meter are still way below the darkest days of 2003 – or of 2007. I don’t have the kind of tight-knit crew I had in DC, but I know a lot more people to speak to and socialize with in a slightly broader sphere than just work. Hell, I have a social sphere that extends beyond work, which I don’t think I ever really developed in DC beyond the seven members of Team Ploughboy and the Zoners that occasionally guest-starred – and the breadth and depth means there’s always something going on somewhere.

In the end, I guess that explains a lot. DC was seven years of stability that ultimately culminated in turbulence and strife. SIlicon Valley has been seven years of turbulence and strife culminating in stability (notwithstanding the 2006 “I finally got my dull moment” year). And I do feel that sense of routinization, as I walk around the bed to pull out my contacts and flip off the light – or wake up knowing that I need to brush my teeth, be dressed, down my morning smoothie and walk out the door by this exact time if I’m going to catch the light rail on time.

I have heard parents remark about the experience of child-rearing “the days are slow but the years are fast.” To be honest, right now, the days aren’t as slow as they may seem – and the years are faster than I can register. It doesn’t feel like two and a half years at my current job. It didn’t feel like three years at my first Valley job when I left. And it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it’s been seven years since we crossed the Bay Bridge for good.

Memorial Day meant a trip out to support the flagging economy. I.E. five hours at the Gilroy outlets. It passed a lot quicker than you would expect (thank God and Jobs for the iPhone) and I left with some surprisingly good value for money (huge sales at Eddie Bauer).

For one, I did pick up that canvas-looking jacket, in a light color. This is, for all intents and purposes, the first jacket I’ve worn as an adult that was not a fairly dark color, and the effect is somewhat jarring when I glance in the mirror. It wears very well, though – and thanks to the unseasonably cool first week of June in the Yay Area, I’m actually getting some use out of it right away.

I also picked up two or three button-up long-sleeve shirts, an item that pretty much disappeared from my wardrobe about the time my DC job went five-day casual in 1998 or so. I went through much of the 90s in the American civilian uniform of chambray shirt and khakis, but the endless run of black casual shirts started about the time of the dot-com bust and I never needed the long-sleeve button-up for anything but the occasional date night since. Sleeves rolled four times each, of course, and jammed to the elbow; some things never change.

But the real change is the footwear. I broke down and ordered a pair of Palladium’s Pampas LITE in “aluminum”, which is more of a khaki color. For those who haven’t seen them, Palladium is a classic old brand of the punk era, somewhere between a Chuck Taylor hightop and a Dr Marten 1460. These are canvas, with a moisture-wicking lining that’s perfect for summer, and they may be the lightest-weight pair of shoes I’ve ever owned up to and including my Teva sandals. Couldn’t ask for better for a summer commute, and they fit remarkably well.

Take the whole look, in full, and there’s your radical costume change. If I were a Timelord, you’d look and say “huh, regenerated.”

Of which more later.

Shaq retires after 19 seasons.

Dude is only, like, a week younger than me. I was there the day Dale Brown ran onto the court to try to protect him from Tennessee players at the SEC tournament. (Tragically, although I was there that day, I left before the incident itself. The lesson, as always: I’m an idiot.)

My original post on this topic was EATED because ecto has…issues. Grrr. Anyway.

I have an Eddie Bauer “Seattle Suede” jacket – like a typical denim jean jacket, but in a weird waterproof suede. I bought it in an outlet mall in a weak moment on the way down to the Holiday Bowl in 2004, although postgame trauma and retrojection mean that I tend to remember it being in use through Christmas that year (the bowl was on Dec. 30). And I’m sort of torn – from a distance it looks pretty good, and the wife likes it, but I think the sleeves are a bit baggy and the weight is a bit much. And up close, the color is sort of weird – dark chocolate but somehow a “warm” brown in a way that looks dated and 70s-ish (it calls to mind nothing so much as the pilot jackets in the original Battlestar Galactica series.

I mention this because I have spent a few weeks idly looking in on assorted work coats, mostly of the Carhartt canvas-duck type. And it just clicked for me today that what I’m looking for is something like the suede jacket, but slightly less ridiculous and more practical. Basically, it’s the Gabriel Hounds* again – something that would look sufficiently timeless and non-fashion to be wearable wherever and whenever. It also occurred to me that my oilcloth engineer’s coat is probably the sort of thing I’m thinking of – only problem is, it’s sort of olive green, and I’m trying to steer clear of the faux-military look that’s taking over everything these days. (In fact, that very feeling is probably what’s kept me from going the Cayce Pollard route and just buying a black MA-1 nylon bomber.**)

I think this all comes back to my need to have the 100% correct one of everything. I don’t know why, but I feel compelled to have absolutely the right pen, the right watch, the right phone, the right…you name it. Instead, as often as not, I wind up with a whole bunch of things that are 80% of the way there, and that’s what caused me to ultimately get to the point where I’ll worry for six months over a $10 Nerf gun (when TBSE doesn’t find one in a park, that is). In fact, the only things I’ve really hit 100% on (in retrospect) are a house, a car, a wife, and Levi’s 501 in original blue.

I don’t know if it’s years of comic books and cartoons, but I think at some level I want to piece together the costume. MY costume. The identifiable look – a hat, a jacket, a pair of kicks, whatever – not some scramble through the closet to see which piece of outwear is appropriate for this 5-degree gradation of weather or whatever. Dammit, I’m gonna make one size fit all.

So this, then, is the list of everything I can think of that I would buy to hit all the 80% marks for this, that and the other.

CLOTHING: A good solid Harris Tweed sportcoat straight off the Orkneys. A solid cotton-duck brown work coat, preferably union-made in the USA, for that Mike CASSSSSSSSidy look. Maybe, MAYBE, one of the lightweight collared nylon flight jackets if I could find a color that worked for me. A seersucker suit (STOP LAUGHING). A San Francisco GAA Irish Football jersey. A whole rack of plain black pique polo shirts with no logo of any kind, and a couple more of the old heavy white Britches of Georgetown button-up casual shirts.

SHOES: An 11-eyelet pair of oxblood Docs, ideally made in Northhampton somewhere. A pair of LL Bean duck boots. Something in between a Chuck Taylor and an Adidas Stan Smith, preferably almost indestructible. (I actually broke down on this front and bought a pair of Palladium Pampas LITE boots – think of them as weaponized Converse canvas hightops; cotton and ripstop nylon with moisture-wicking lining and EVA sole; they weigh practically nothing and should be a nice summer alternative to clunking around in my Docs.)

GADGETS: A Nexus S phone. An iPad (and a Rickshaw messenger to put it in). A Google Chromebook, and a MacBook Air 11″ for when the time comes to use something other than a browser. A proper pair of polarized black Wayfarers and some sort of gold-lensed wraparound thing for strategic football-supporting purposes. And oh what the hell, a Tesla Roadster. And a Smart Fortwo. And a Piaggio MP3.

So…anybody want to give me a Blue Ant corporate card and a special project budget?***

* William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy probably informs my current sense of style more than anything. This is a Zero History reference, and I would probably wear nothing but Gabriel Hounds if they existed and I could buy them.

** Another Bigend reference, this one to Pattern Recognition – Cayce’s black MA-1 was by Japanese retro-replica manufacturer Buzz Rickson’s, which didn’t even make a black MA-1 until after the book came out and demand exploded.

*** Pretty much all three books…

Well, at long last, here we are. There now exists a piece of malware for Mac OS X that is sufficiently distributed that Apple has issued a K-Base on it.

This is a tough one to deal with, because it takes the proof-of-concept malware from five or six years ago and adds social engineering. Basically, to catch this, you have to:

1) Get a popup on your browser saying “YOU HAVE A VIRUS, CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD MACDEFENDER” or similar.

2) Actually click on it.

3) Actually GIVE IT YOUR ADMINISTRATIVE PASSWORD.

4) Actually TYPE IN YOUR CREDIT CARD INFO.

This is barely malware, people. This is practically the goddamn Amish Computer Virus. It relies entirely on social engineering, and it puts Apple in a tough spot: if this goes big, it will encourage people to think they need virus protection on their Mac…which in turn makes them more likely to succumb to the malware if they do run into it.

Once again, the problem is that Apple has made a computer that anyone at all can use…and that’s the chance you take. Plenty of people out there bought a Mac because they thought “it doesn’t get viruses” – and yet the first time a popup tells them they have a virus, they will believe the popup to the exclusion of ten years of history. But this is more likely to get traction because rather than taking advantage of a zero-day exploit or the kind of unified vulnerability that the Outlook/Exchange/IE monoculture gave us, it relies on human stupidity – a bottomless natural resource that can be easily replenished with unskilled labor. And all you need to know to prove it is that the problem is almost unheard of in corporate or otherwise-organized environments…but crops up daily at the Genius Bar.

Ah well. Still sufficiently bulletproof that if I could only have one computer to use for everything, it’d still be an 13″ i7 MacBook Pro. If this is the state of the art for Mac malware? COME AT ME, SON.

The summer of 2003 was a ridiculous time. My girlfriend was moving in with me – not that it made a huge difference, because she was back to California for work for weeks at a time. Meanwhile, work was undergoing a seismic shift with the coming of Mac OS X. My six-month rollout project got crushed down to three days, and my imaging solution (using Carbon Copy Cloner and a firewire drive) saved my ass. Then Apple Network Assistant (and then Apple Remote Desktop) came along and saved my ass again. And then there was the PC meltdown.

See, we were supposed to spend the summer deploying Lotus Notes 6 to all the machines in the company by Labor Day. And since we were ass-backward, that meant about 2000 workstation visits. Only problem is, before we could get going, one of the incompetents in the infrastructure group killed the primary domain controller in mid-July. Since they didn’t have clue one how to restore it, we ended up doing about 1200 workstation visits to put PCs back on the domain. And management wouldn’t let us kill two birds and put Notes on at the same time.

And then, just under a month later, a massive virus outbreak forced us to go around and touch all those PCs again. And once again, virus first, no Notes rollouts.

So when the time came, we were on a short schedule – and thanks to the various tools afforded us by ANA/ARD, we were able to hit up the Macs quickly, while the PCs were done one at a time by hand. And of course, through all this, the usual array of help calls was coming in. No extra manpower, of course; we got “assistance” from help desk operators and infrastructure staff who could have been more help if they’d gone home sick and not tried to assist OR do their regular jobs.

It was my MVP year. In my memory, it’s down as one of the Heroic Age years, like 1989 or 1994. But I burned bright and fast. I think I quit twice, and by September I’d been pulled off the regular help-ticket rotation and moved to new-machine-rollout duty with occasional Winston Wolf action. Those were the days when I would flip out in IM to my girlfriend and storm out the door…and by the time I’d gotten to the cigar shop, she’d already called in an order for me so that I’d have a couple of sticks ready to light.

Because for whatever reason, I was out there saving the world and being proven right over and over again – but once you got above my immediate boss, the rest of management was taking anyone else’s advice over mine. That is, when they weren’t flagrantly undermining policies and procedures we’d already agreed on. And it was driving me insane. Actual quote, September 16 2003: “Here’s the way work should go: if I’m not doing my job, fire me. No prob. If I am doing my job, then quit trying to find reasons why other people should be allowed to do it.”

I think that’s a big part of the reason why I’m having the flashbacks this week. Once again, somebody has gone outside the rules and outside the process, things have gone badly, and now they are having the ass with us and insisting that we owe them immediate satisfaction. And it happened on a day where lying nauseous on a gurney with a nurse missing the vein in my arm for the fourth time was the high point of my workday, other than my wife’s safe-arrival call from her vacation flight. And once we agreed to help them – once we threw out the rules and the process and capitulated completely – the person has made herself unavailable for two days in a row, working from home on the very computer she insisted was so non-functional as to require immediate response.

I have gone to great lengths not to be like I used to be. The black-glass bottle with the rage genie trapped in it sits on the mantlepiece of my mind these days, usually, and I do sometimes look at it and take a long breath before turning away and going back to work. But last week, confronted with half a dozen foes at once, I didn’t hesitate and I smashed the son of a bitch right open. At least this time, I have reasonable confidence that I will put it back on the shelf.

When I’m through, that is.

Jeffery Goldberg is somewhat polite in his response to Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest hissy-fit. Well, at least he said “please”.

Personally, I feel that anything the President says to the current Israeli leadership should be proofread first by The Rock and Nature Boy Ric Flair to get the correct tone and content. To wit:

Dear Benny:

Know your role; shut your hole.

Suck it,

B.

It’s almost comical looking back at the coverage ten years ago as Apple geared up to launch their retail efforts. The thing people kept going back to was the flop that was Gateway Country – and a decade on, it’s absolutely comical that people would mention Apple and Gateway in the same breath. But less than five years removed from a stock price of $15, and mere months after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, people were convinced that Apple’s effort at a brick-and-mortar retail presence would be a colossal flop.

Oops.

Mickey Drexler was the ace in the hole – the Gap CEO sat on Apple’s board and was the helping hand behind the retail launch. But for all the other names at Apple who have been credited in their turnaround – Himself, Avie Tevenian, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller, Tim Cook – the guy who might just deserve the most credit is Ron Johnson. When he showed up in 2000 – with a Harvard MBA and a recent posting as VP of Merchandising for Target – it was with a mandate to deliver a one-of-a-kind retail experience for Apple. And what we got, instead of Gateway Country, was a line of temples for the Cult of Mac.

The Genius Bar might have been the best part. If you have a problem with your computer, why sit on the phone with somebody halfway around the world telling you to turn it off and on again? Bring it in. If there’s new stuff out there from Apple, why look at a catalog, or take a chance that Sears or Best Buy or CompUSA will actually have one out and working properly? Go by the Apple Store and see it, pick it up, play with it, use it. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world, but there it is, the kernel of the post-Jobs-II Apple philosophy: don’t put your success at the mercy of anyone else. You want people to buy your stuff? Don’t rely on a bunch of big-box retail drones. Go out and build the kind of experience you want people to have.

Ron Johnson probably has the biggest delta of anyone at Apple for ratio of profile-to-importance, but today’s his day. 300 instances of proof, and counting.

Shocker – Mike Huckabee isn’t running either. The fact of the matter is that there’s no way you’re going to put a white Southerner out there and win in 2012, because the GOP is still trying to get beyond “party of the Confederates” – and not really succeeding.

Besides, Huckabee is in the Palin spot – he has media, he has money, and he has no incentive to give that up in a losing cause when he’ll still be young enough to make a move in 2016. But he was as viable a candidate as the GOP could muster – and is the latest big name to look at the pot and fold before the flop…