Are my eyes really blue?

To the Commodores who joined the ranks of the alumni this morning:

Thirteen years ago, I stood out on Alumni Lawn under a bright blue May sky in Nashville, wearing a robe and a mortar board for the last time. Graduating from high school was like ripping off a Band-Aid. Graduating from college felt like my life’s work was finally complete and I could move on with what I wanted for myself. Graduating with a master’s from Vanderbilt, especially under my unique circumstances…

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what to think. When I left Nashville a year before, it was with no idea where my life was headed and no clue what to do next. That was the first week of May, 1997. Four and a half months later, I was living five hundred miles away, with a job working for a place that needs neither introduction nor description, making better money out of the box than I ever could have expected from my first job in my original profession, in a field with no connection whatsoever to what I’d spent the past seven years studying and preparing for. As my wife would say, “then time happened.”

We are told that in days of antiquity, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi bore an aphorism over the forecourt that read “Know Thyself.” Ultimately, that’s what the college experience is meant to do. Sure, you major in something. Or you play ball well enough to do that for a living. Or you meet the friends who will ultimately hire you into something unlike what you trained to do. Or you punt, head for grad school, and kick the can down the road for a year or six.

In the end, though, you’re not here for vocational training. You came here to learn – to learn what you think, to learn how to think, to take another step into a wider world. I can’t say it enough – college IS the real world, it’s just not the WHOLE world. Things as simple as fending for yourself on laundry, or trying to make $23 in your checking account last the whole weekend – that’s not going to end just because you’re in an apartment somewhere cashing a bigger check than ever.

College gives you a chance to reinvent yourself. You’ve been able to try out all manner of things – interests, aspirations, intoxicants (let’s not kid ourselves) – and see what you like, what you want…but now you have a chance to do it again. Another fresh start. Another new group of people to meet, maybe another town, maybe a completely different realm than you thought you’d be going into when you first set foot in the West End four, or five, or however many years ago.

I can’t speak to what kind of college experience you may have had, or how much you loved being here, or didn’t love being here. Maybe these were the best years of your life. Maybe you just want to get out as quick as you can. But whatever you are now, you’re not the same person who walked through orientation at the Commons all those years ago. Maybe you don’t know what you want to do. But hopefully you know who you want to be. And if you don’t…well, you just have that many more options to choose from now.

But above all else, enjoy your day. Academia is the last medieval profession – you have to put in the years, you have to earn the credits, you apprentice yourself and carve out a future with your fingernails – and God help you if you go for something beyond a bachelor’s degree – and the fact that you’re standing here today means that you climbed this particular mountain. Whether you enjoyed it or not, whether it’s something you wanted your whole life or something you want shut of as soon as we walk off today – you can leave today in the knowledge that you can bear down and endure and achieve something that takes your time and your sweat and your tears to get. You’re going to have to do it again, you know – tomorrow, and the next day, and for the rest of your life – but remembering that you can will make all the difference.

I’m going to shut up now. It’s your day. Treasure it, cherish it, and if you have the ring, wear it where people can see it, because today is your championship parade. Enjoy it.

WHO YA WIT??

Well, the first two ChromeOS notebooks (netbooks? Chromebooks, apparently) are out of the gate, an 11″ from Acer for $349 and a 12″ from Samsung for $429 with Wi-Fi only and one with 3G for slightly more. Due next month sometime.

Hm.

Let’s remember that what you’re getting here is a browser with a screen, keyboard and touchpad attached. It’s not materially that much different than a tablet, although in the Acer’s case you are definitely undercutting the iPad on price. Still, it sort of makes you wonder what the point is in Chrome when you could instead get an Android tablet or iPad and get a browser PLUS native applications.

More to the point, though, I bought a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 netbook for $300 and ran Chrome browser on Ubuntu – this time last year. Hell, you can buy a Dell Inspiron Mini1018 and install Chrome browser on it for $279. Now in fairness, it looks like Acer isn’t skimping on the battery, RAM or storage – 2 GB RAM, 16GB of solid-state drive and a 6-cell battery are certainly nice, and more or less what you should expect for $350.

I really think Google is missing out on an opportunity to spend some of that cash in the service of gathering market share – if they could bring this thing in for $200, they’d have a genuinely kick-ass alternative to tablets and netbooks, something lean and light with all the benefits they’re pitching of a constantly-updated browser/OS with no “computer” overhead. But without a compelling price-point value proposition…I don’t know. I’d certainly take one for 30 days and test the hell out of it, but based on my extensively–rehashed netbook experience, I’m not convinced it’s a dealmaker for me.

Looking at the two big headlines of the day, it’s all I can do not to look for a chorus of All-4-One and Shania Twain. Two of the biggest names of the 90s making their big bid to remain relevant on the very same historic day…one at a time, please:

1) Newt Gingrich. Where to start? America really wants a guy who knows how to strike when the iron’s had sixteen years to cool? A guy who has experience dumping cancer patients AND MS patients to take up with younger wives? An old white guy with a Southern accent? Let’s be honest: if you split Bill Clinton down the middle into one part with everything people loved about Clinton and one with everything people hated, you’d basically wind up with Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich. But because Washington DC is a company town, and the Sabbath Gasbags are a branch of the company, there is an actual perception in some quarters that Newt Gingrich is a wise old seasoned veteran of Washington – or worse, that he can merely be sold as such. That the rest of the world won’t look at him and see “Sarah Palin without sex appeal” – which, let’s be honest, is what the mighty Newt brings to the table.

If you want a resume topline for Gingrich, make it this: he was midwife to modern conservative politics. He actually staked a bet that he could make American government into a parliamentary system with him as Prime Minister, and he nearly pulled it off for a year and a half. Sure, he couldn’t get the Senate to go along with him, and he eventually got outflanked by the President, but if you need a name to answer “who brought us the House Republicans as a supine body that would blindly do whatever they’re told, no matter how asinine or illogical,” Gingrich is that name. Government shutdown, Presidential impeachment, six years of roll-over-play-dead for Bush, and scorched-earth resistance to anything and everything Obama says up to and including “Good morning” – all can be laid at the door of the big thinker from Georgia. Including Republican defeat in 2006, when his own playbook was used to bum-rush the incumbent House majority.

It’s amusing and handy to have Newt in play. For one thing, it makes a mockery of every word spoken about “sanctity of marriage” by the GOP field. For another, it helps drive home the point that the GOP is still the party of the Confederacy. For a third, it helps drive home the point that the GOP hasn’t had a new idea for about two decades. And most of all, it gives us the very real possibility that the 2012 electoral map will look like the 1964 one.

2) EIGHT AND A HALF BILLION DOLLARS. For bloody SKYPE. Microsoft has the cash, somehow, but this is a hell of an outlay when they were essentially bidding against themselves. And for what? Video chat everywhere? The ability to talk from your Hotmail account to your Windows 7 phone? (uncontrolled snickering goes here)

Microsoft hasn’t had a good idea in…well hell, ever. They have built an empire on Windows and Office and created nothing of interest since; even their Internet Explorer monopoly was a product of building it into the operating system. Which in turn led to a decade of malware and security nightmares, while superior browsers emerged from the Mozilla project and from KHTML’s evolution into Webkit. All the big things of the last ten years – search, digital music, web-based collaboration, consumer smartphones, social networking, blogging – in every case, the Beast of Redmond has been a day late and a dollar short, and everyone in Silicon Valley knows that if your next big thing depends on a Windows PC, it’s not the next big thing.

So this is Microsoft making an all-in bid to buy themselves relevance in the field of video chat. Hopefully the carrier partners they need for their Windows phone platform won’t be too pissed at bundled VoIP video chat, because they definitely don’t have the stroke Apple does with AT&T (and presumably now Verizon). Hopefully the emerging data caps on home broadband won’t discourage people from trying to Skype up their own personal Telepresence room at home. Hopefully acquisition by Microsoft won’t do for Skype what it did for, say, Hotmail…

NB: As an aside, the most interesting thing to come out of Google I/O, for me, is the commitment on the part of carriers and manufacturers to support Android upgrades for 18 months. In a world where the Nexus One gets introduced in January and dumped in May, where phones are unable to update eight months later, where the only way to get a current version of Android is to root and hack your phone or buy the one unlocked Google model – this is the only thing that will keep pace with iOS in terms of knowing for sure that you can update your device for the life of your contract.

So now the New York Times is reporting that the force sent into Pakistan to take out Osama bin Laden was beefed up and overequipped “to fight its way out of Pakistan if confronted by hostile local police officers and troops.” This on the heels of word that Pakistan is deeply concerned (read: butt-hurt and pissy) about violations of its sovereignty. And to their credit, the Obama administration isn’t taking the bait.

It’s probably a good thing Rahm Emmanuel has rolled out already. Because really, what should be happening at this point is somebody getting the president of Pakistan on the phone, saying “Please hold for the President of the United States,” and then Obama opening his remarks with “You want to explain why Osama bin Laden was living a hundred yards from your military academy?”

To borrow a line from Pulp Fiction, Pakistan just lost its LA privileges. They have nukes? Fuck that shit, North Korea has nukes, and we don’t make nice with them. India has nukes, a democratic system of government, almost as many potential consumers as China, a critical high-tech sector and didn’t have the world’s most wanted man living in a GIANT FUCKING WALLED COMPOUND NEXT DOOR TO THEIR MILITARY ACADEMY without telling us.

I know whose side I’d rather take. Whoever’s in charge in Pakistan – and it sure as hell isn’t their President – needs to start talking fast. We violated your sovereignty? Fuck you, convince me you really didn’t know where the head of al-Qaeda was for six years, and this had better be fucking brilliant.

2001 was a bad year all around. The dot-com collapse, the beginning of the eight-year regression under Bush, and the chaos of September 11 all combined to create a general malaise that poisoned the entire decade. The most poignant tweet of the night Bin Laden was shot was something along the lines of “Can we start the 21st century now?”

It really doesn’t much feel like we won, looking back. We’re still getting the anal probe at the airport, as security measures are just barnacled on rather than evaluated and re-thought. Nobody seems to be moving on getting us out of our current armed engagements abroad – nor do I expect them to, given that anyone who talks about pulling out troops gets tarred as a Defeatocrat. And the “scared of everything” model of politics has extended from merely the threat of international terrorist blowing up the local Wal-Mart to a full-blown panic over everything from gay people to the secret Muslim in the White House to the government-indoctrination camps known as public schools*…seriously, it’s reached full-on whuckery** out there.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. The iPhone 4 still feels like a slice of the future, and it’s neat that I was able to stand up with my surrogate sister at her lesbian wedding and nobody blinked an eye (even if the state of California got whucked itself for the moment), and it’s cool having On Demand HD…but at the same time, it feels like the future is more unevenly distributed than ever, especially when I pass through the ancestral lands.

Plus, no long coats. Every single TV show I ever saw signifies “near future” with a plethora of long coats. Still waiting on mine.

* I am not shitting you. Rick Santorum said this. This is a former Senator who wants to be President.

** “whuck” – contraction coined by Tim Goodman for when you need something better than WTF but can’t spell it out.

Apple’s Massive New Data Center Set To Host Nuance Tech; Partnership Announcement Due At WWDC

Called it yesterday? Called it yesterday.

Yes, again. Because I really do think about this S all the time.

In 2007, the all-new iPhone was meant to be a phone in an iPod. Or vice-versa. Apple couldn’t very well shed the ability to play media content, could they? Consequently they had to use tethering to get media onto the device, and you’d much rather do that with USB2 than try to do something over Bluetooth. Because let’s be honest – the idea of a consumer smartphone was still new-ish, aside from the Sidekick, and the first iPhone had to be both overbuilt (thus the protected headphone jack and the solid metal back) and limited in its capabilities for simplicity (one screen, no apps, not a lot of enterprise features, and nothing borderline like then-poorly-deployed 3G or anything else that would suck down the battery). Factor in the desire to exploit the existing iPod infrastructure – the existing dock ports, sync cables, assorted accessories, and of course iTunes as the computer-side interface – and you can see why the iPhone has, from the beginning, been linked to a computer.

By contrast, Android phones have, from day one, been tied to Google services – which only exists on the web. No application on the desktop, no required OS or hardware, no legacy technology to support – purely a cloud proposition, especially when you consider staffing out some of the CPU work (a la the voice recognition and dictation in Nuance’s Dragon speech apps for smartphones). So from day one, the notion that you’d need to connect an Android phone with a cable to a PC for anything simply wasn’t there. (Especially given what an afterthought the Android media players were for the first couple of years.)

As a result, this has carried over to tablets. If you buy a Samsung Galaxy Tab, or a Motorola Xoom, you pull it out of the box and go. Android makes it possible to build a completely free-standing device, especially if one was to use Google ID to instantly configure & sync with the whole range of services. By contrast, even the iPad 2 still calls for an iTunes connection as soon as you fire it up.

This, to me, suggests where Apple needs to go next with iOS 5. Right now, the iPad 2 still runs rings around its competition, and I say that with confidence after dawdling around Best Buy checking out the aforementioned Tab and Xoom (and the Blackberry PlayBook, ha*) – but the fact is, you can’t just pull an iPad out of the box and go the same way you would an Android tablet (or, for that matter, a netbook). This needs to change – and one of my hopes is that this new notional MobileMe replacement will include some sort of cloud storage sync solution such that you can buy an iPad, open it up, attach to a network, and immediately restore your settings and some data (bookmarks, mail config, the like), even if 14 GB of apps and music and movies would be impractical.**

The other thing I’m hoping for is more voice control. Right now, the system itself is largely limited to voice-dialing and controlling the music playback functions. I’d like to see something more Android-ish with the ability to dictate into any text entry field, and the fact that Apple has long since purchased Siri gives me hope that they’re working on that – not just in terms of speech-to-text, but in terms of being able to parse your meaning and turn “need a table for two at seven” into a localized OpenTable search with reservation options. (If you have an iPhone 4 and don’t have Siri, well, run don’t walk. It’s remarkable.) If the thing could read back incoming tweets and let me respond…well, that way lies madness, obviously, but hey, why not give it a whirl?

The Kindle, by the way, is still the best thing for reading – although I don’t find myself using the browser as much as I had expected to. Despite the Webkit-based browser, it’s still too tricky to get anything more complex than Google Reader up and running. (Maybe I should just get rid of two-factor authentication, because it means I have to have the iPhone with me all the time, and at that point you may as well just use an RSS app there.) But it’s great for reading, especially when you’re in a mood that means you need the entire Bigend Trilogy by William Gibson available.

* The Playbook is a joke. Something smaller and more expensive than an iPad that requires a Blackberry tethered to get your damn email? To hell with that. RIM is in deep shit and has no idea how bad it is.

** Especially in a world where your home internet access is capped. It’s going to suck trying to restore your device when it’s going to take a double-digit percentage of your allowed bandwidth for the month. Hell, I’m already doing a large chunk of my downloads and such over the network at work rather than at home, especially Mozy backups, against the day that AT&T starts metering our UVerse service. Screw you, AT&T…

When I was in grad school, I had a pager. It was a cheap little Motorola thing, which if memory serves was free with something like ten Mountain Dew bottle labels (which I could easily produce in, like, an evening) and it was meant to be the key to some sort of promotional program. As it happens, it was also keyed to the local area (as most such devices were at the time) and was no good outside of Nashville. I didn’t give the number to my then-girlfriend, because the last thing I needed was for her to be able to ping me anywhere, but I didn’t really have anyone else to give the number, either.

I mention this because I’m still keeping Tuesday night as shutdown night – turn off the laptop, put away the iPhone, switch off the wireless on the Kindle, and limit myself to whatever’s on TV or what’s in a book or magazine or (gasp) actually go out and do something. And for those nights, I have my backup phone and my Google Voice number, which only a couple of people have so that I can be reached in an emergency. And the thought went through my mind last night that an actual pager would be a handy thing to have for such evenings – nothing even that complicated, just numeric paging and maybe voice mail. And then it occurred to me that while the old black plastic Dew Beep pager was nice, it might be even nicer to have one of the sleeker translucent-colored-plastic Motorola models from later in the 90s, or the elusive one-line-text Motorola Jazz…

And then I look at my Moto F3, or my Nokia 1112, and it occurs to me that there are things I used to covet which I still DO covet, despite the presence of technology that’s far in advance of them which I already possess. I mean, with an iPhone 4, there’s very little need for a Sony Ericsson K710. And the iPhone will run freakin’ rings around any old Blackberry-style keyboarded device like the $100-ish Nokia I was looking at for an emergency iPhone replacement when I thought my wife had lost hers. And hell, the iPhone pummels the old second-gen metal-case iPod Nano (or the original gold-metal iPod Mini). But I still would jump at the chance to grab either of them.

Actually, now that I think about it, there are bits of me that still perk up at the notion of the PowerBook 1400, the first “low-end” PowerPC-based portable Mac (which replaced the nightmare-inducing PowerBook 5300 series). Or the shiny silver Siemens S40 phone that I saw in a Cingular shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto, in June 2002, which really tripped my “I must get to GSM as quickly as possible” urge. Which in turn points my mind back to PowerTel, in the days when GSM was wildly new and unheard of – the notion that you could pop this credit-card out of your phone and put it in ANOTHER phone and carry right on? MADNESS.

Maybe this is what passes for a mid-life crisis for me. Other guys run out and get hair plugs, motorcycles and Hooters waitresses – yer boy slumps in his chair and covets a pager.

[T]rust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked…

The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday…

Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself…

Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s…

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young…

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth…

When Mary Schmich’s column in the Chicago Tribune was published in June of 1997, I didn’t see it. In fact, I first ran across it when Baz Luhrmann remixed the Romeo + Juliet version of “Everybody’s Free” with the whole column spoken over it, and Lou Brutus played it one morning on HFS in the spring of 1999.

It was too late, of course. Those were things I needed to hear then, and still need to remind myself now – but when I really needed to hear them was in 1990, and again in 1997. In one case I was headed into higher education, and in the other I was being cast out of it. When I first walked the aisle in a mortarboard and gown, it was secure in the knowledge that I was headed to bigger and better things; when I left my old apartment for the last time – fourteen years ago this week – it was staring into an abyss: 25 years old, academic career prematurely terminated, six thousand bucks in credit card debt and no prospects for employment beyond “office temp”.

It staggers me to think that I’ve now been out of higher ed twice as long as I was in it – hell, that I’ve been out of it longer than I was preparing for it. You’d think that pushing 40 (or reeeeeally dragging 30) would mean that your college years were no longer definitional, but in some ways I’m still living in the shadow of decisions that were made in 1989, for better or worse. In one way, fourteen years doesn’t seem like nearly enough for how long it’s been – but at the same time, when the light’s right and the wrong song comes on the iPhone, I tend to forget I’m not twenty-something years old.

The point of all this is that graduation is completely the 180-degree-opposite time to be offering advice for the future. College is the real world, even if it’s not the whole world – and it’s a warning you need well before you arrive, not an admonition once you’re departing.

Yes, I have the same shirt on I had that day. It’s a nice shirt. Durable. Also has the logo in the old font, which I like better. Classic.

The funniest thing ever would be if Seth Meyers opened Weekend Update with a graphic of Bin Laden and said “Well don’t I feel like a jackass now.” and waited for the 3-minute crowd pop to die down. Come on, it’s NYC. You had to know they would go batshit. DC too. Hell, I wish I could have been there.

My big hope out of all this is that maybe it’s going to be an end to the September 12 mentality. No more pants-shitting terror, no more blind panic, but a calm, reasoned evaluation of the threat and the response. Terrorists are not Magneto, they are not vampires or zombies, and they can be handled in a rational manner by government and public alike. I have to say that the most gratifying thing about this operation was that it was a long play with the CIA and military working hand-in-glove, something that hasn’t happened before – and instead of rushing in on the eve of the elections in November to score points, they took their time and waited until they could do it right.

That is how you get to say Mission Accomplished.

As I said on EDSBS last night, this isn’t the championship, this is just one win in a long and grueling season. But it’s a big win, and we’re going to take a day to smoke and lift a glass to absent friends. We can get back to grinding tomorrow when the moment’s over.