Are my eyes really blue?

Thirty years ago, I was going around with a ragged copy of the March 1981 issue of National Geographic, with a cover article entitled “When The Shuttle Finally Flies” – a comprehensive look at the next stage of American spaceflight. I had the Columbia’s first four mission patches, of course, stitched to my jacket along with two dozen other assorted patches. Little did I know that over two decades later, I would be a guest at the wedding of one of those astronaut’s sons – or that I would spend a year working as a contractor for NASA myself.

The thing is, even though that was thirty years ago, the launch itself was only twenty years from the day that comrade Yuri Gagarin demonstrated quite possibly the most elephantine balls of any human being in history to that date, as he climbed on an enormous pile of explosive fuel and Soviet-grade engineering and became the first person ever launched into orbit around Earth.

Twenty years from a glorified Roman candle to the space shuttle. Hell, less than nine years from that candle to human footprints on the moon. And thirty years from that shuttle to…no shuttle. Well, maybe one more.

I know every generation thinks the next one is the dumbest yet, but I think we’ve reached a point where it’s not the kids going backwards, it’s everyone else rushing to keep up with them. It’s not just reality TV, or the end of American manufacturing, or the fact that DONALD FUCKING TRUMP is leading polls for the GOP in 2012, or the fact that we don’t have a news media that could carry the ashtray of John Cameron Swayze or Ed Murrow, or the fact that public debate is carried on at the level of sports talk radio and 14-year-old gamer chat. It’s all of the above and more. It’s the size of the Farmville economy. It’s the fact that our best and brightest got routed into doing math tricks on paper to create shitstorms of fake money that got bailed out with real money. It’s the fact that nobody seems to care about it anymore. It’s the attention span that lasts thirty seconds for anything more complicated than celebrity news. It’s the fact that people have long since forgotten we have two land wars in Asia, a potential revolution on the boil in the Middle East, a Chernobyl-grade nuclear disaster in Japan, and a planet that’s slowly warming up with real and demonstrable consequences.

We’re not arguing what to do about things, we’re not even arguing about the priority of things, we’re arguing about what reality is.

And because we chose to embrace and stupidity as a valid way of life, we’re stuck in the mud, instead of grasping at stars.

Alarm goes off, earlier than normal. Make sure everything is stuffed in the bag – it’s sure not packed as well as when you arrived three nights ago – get all the key stuff in your pockets. Hastily finish off the donuts and instant coffee you bought to keep from going out – and only get halfway through. Out the door and into the gray light of morning, whirring of the street sweeper, businesses closed and dark except for the drugstore across the corner (and, you’re sure, the Starbucks at the other side of the block). Hurry into the train station, that inexplicable smell of bread baking. Which train? Oh God not the one calling “All aboard” – phew, it’s the next one. Plunk down in your seats, look at each other, you made it.

Only this time, instead of London or Paris, it’s just San Francisco, and the Caltrain is taking you back to real life, Monday morning, team meeting at 8:30.

Still, a nice break, as such things go – and proof that all you need for travel is an iPhone and a signal.

Well, the iPhone client resists allowing it, but there should be a pic here of the championship ring for the 2010 World Champion San Francisco Giants. Designed and produced by Tiffany and Co. and based on the 1933 championship ring, it’s white gold with 77 diamonds weighing approx. 1 carat and yellow gold accents including a Golden Gate icon on one shank.

Championship rings are something that almost every guy will look on with a certain amount of reverence. Even something as simple as my brother’s state championship ring from high school basketball is impressive in its way. Makes me wish we’d had rings for our state championship in 1989 for scholars bowl…

But when you get right down to it, I have two championship rings. One went along with a masters degree and a University Graduate Fellowship from a nationally prestigious institution, which is meant to serve as some sort of validation that I was really smart once upon a time. The other championship ring can be found on my left hand. 🙂

The Masters is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with this country: a contrived event, inaccessible to most except on television, operated by a tight clique that wants to stop time about 1959, and yet hyped to the stars as the be-all and end-all of sports. Oooh how pretty, ooooh look azaleas, ooooh the beers are only $3, oooooh a tradition unlike any other. Please. If Grantland Rice hadn’t had to fill column inches on the way back from Spring Training, nobody would know where the hell Augusta is. The rest is just the 84 Lumber Classic with better landscaping and the soporific kiss-ass stylings of Jim Nantz.

Anything that you can do while smoking and while somebody else carries your S isn’t a sport. If golf is a sport, so is waiting in line at the airport.

If you think Donald Trump should be President of the United States of America, kill yourself. You are too fucking stupid to live and you deserve to die for the good of the human race.

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it three or four times: when in Vanderbilt’s situation, every non-conference football game should either be a guaranteed win or an opportunity to elevate the program. Non-conference games against the likes of UAB or MTSU or even Duke offer very little reward and a lot to lose, while the national picture has proven that as long as you go 13-0 or 14-0, nobody cares who the 13 or 14 actually were. Cupcakes, layups, whatever you want to call them; that’s our slate.

Except.

If you have a chance to go to Columbus and play Ohio State, one of the Mount Rushmore-type programs and most storied traditions in college football, you have to take it. It elevates the program. It puts us on the stage against a power team. If we get blown away – same old Vandy, whatever, but better to take such a blow from a national title contender than from UConn.

But…

App State beat Michigan. JMU beat Virginia Tech. Any given Saturday and all that – there’s no reason to think Ohio State is any less vulnerable, and they’ve struggled in early-season OOC games before. I don’t think CJF would put this game on the board if he thought we were going to Columbus to get the beatdown and slink back with a 56-0 loss on the board.

Here’s the thing: we’re not going up there with 2010 Vanderbilt to play 2010 Ohio State. We’re going to face a team that could well be reeling from NCAA penalties, that might well have somebody other than Jim Tressel at the controls – and we’ll be going after two years of James Franklin’s coaching, recruiting, and promotion, and hopefully improved administration support to boot. This game is a bet: that within two years, Coach Franklin will have pulled us up off the mat, cinched up our gloves, mopped off the blood and given us a puncher’s chance. And besides, isn’t it time we joined the long SEC tradition of pummeling that other conference?

This is what the new era of Vanderbilt football is about. We don’t shirk from the challenge. We don’t shy away from taking on the big boys. We don’t make excuses about how hard our conference schedule is, we don’t cringe at anything that might take that sixth win away, we don’t tuck tail and run. We stand, we fight. Anywhere, anytime, anybody. If you want to put a motto on the crest of the CJF era, make it this: NON TIMEBO MALA.

I. Will. Fear. No. Evil.

All in?

ALL. IN.

It was my second chance, which was my first mistake.

I first started looking at grad school in the spring of my junior year of college, just around the same time I accepted that I was not going to be able to save my undergraduate experience from crash-roll-and-burning. My first official visit was Emory, in Atlanta, and I had the unusual experience of being put up in their guest lodging and being reimbursed for the mileage of driving over. I bought a T-shirt, I took the flyers for the PowerBook offerings in their computer store, I met with two faculty (including Alan Abramowitz – how different would my life have been if I’d wound up apprenticed there?), and – oh irony – I watched the Giants beat the Braves that night in my guest room, kicking off a chase for the ages in the NL West, the last real pennant race.

And thus began the grad school hunt. I invoked the help of faculty. I did research. I actually took the practice GRE before taking it once for real (as opposed to just rolling out of bed and taking the SAT and ACT the way I had in high school, with no more prep than making sure to eat bacon and eggs instead of cereal). I even found myself counseled by the director of graduate studies at one of the top five programs for political science in the country – albeit one that didn’t offer funding for first-year grad students. I made sure all my applications were in by Thanksgiving break, including a mad run back to campus to print out personal statements and another mad run to the airport to make sure everything went in FedEx on time.

In short, I did everything I should have done but didn’t when applying to college. And that was the mistake – I was looking to hit the reset button on my college experience, rather than pick out the most suitable graduate school. Which is how I wound up going to a school that offered me the best funding package – but which was in retrospect the lowest-ranked program of the five I got into. (For the record, the other four were Wisconsin, Emory, Washington-St Louis, and Florida State, and how different would my life have been at any of those?)

I think about this now because it has lately occurred to me that college was when spring stopped being good and turned into a misery of exploding allergies and creeping doom. Weather getting hotter, the bleak prospects of needing to find a job for the summer, the misery of moving back home and going back to being miles from anything. Not good. For a decade after starting undergrad, 1994 was the only positive flicker, because I was leaving undergrad and heading north. Even that was bittersweet, because I was still stuck with a psychotic girlfriend and I could already feel the regret at having wasted four years.

Since then? Mixed bag. 2001 came closest to the good ol’ days, with the promise of a new beginning involving a girl from California and the not-inconsequential advent of Mac OS X. But spring thereafter always seemed to mean swamped with work , swamped with work and planning for a job change, or swamped with work and getting married, and the pollen. Always the pollen. At one point, it led to a prescription of three different drugs and a steroid injection for my nose, just do I could inhale enough to get back to the office.

Spring is supposed to be the promise of a new beginning. When the early morning sun sends filtered light down through a canopy of pale green new leaves, and it’s still just shirtsleeve-cool at 8 AM, you can almost believe it. But my new beginnings are always in fall, when the heat breaks and Saturdays bring football. Spring usually just means trouble on the way…

It’s opening day for your WORLD CHAMPION SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS, who I will hopefully be around next week when the home opener happens. But in the meantime, it’s a bright gorgeous sunny day and the urge to have work outside today is overwhelming. Unfortunately, a bog-standard two year old MacBook Pro 15″ is not the ideal contraption for this, given its battery life (or lack thereof relative to more modern hardware; this was the last model before Apple went to non-removable long-lived batteries).

Along those lines, I’ve almost come to my conclusion on portable devices, which is this: as long as I have a work-provided laptop and a home desktop, the iPad is the only plausible option unless it becomes imperative that I have no personal material AT ALL on my work machine. As it is, my personal content resides in a separate account from my work account, and that account is FileVault locked such that all anyone could get at is a single monolithic file of gibberish. Of greater concern is making sure that’s not my primary repository for my stuff, since the Time Machine backup is a bit squirrely with FileVault-ed home directories, but between that and Mozy I could probably reconstruct myself on a new machine sooner than later.

Which means that my first job should be trying to persuade the powers that be at the office to put me on a leaner, lighter machine. I don’t think a MacBook Air is realistic for my work system, but a 13″ MacBook Pro should be eminently doable next time, especially given the firepower even the lowliest pro laptop from Apple is packing these days, and something like that would be a killer for ARD and the like. As for personal use, well, if you take iTunes contents out of the equation (and the 150 GB of space taken up by same) the rest of my stuff would also fit in a nice lean setup – in fact, 90% of what I would like to do at work would be handled by a carefully-chosen browser (the combination of Firefox and Tor would let me browse my RSS and blogs, post to WordPress via the web interface, write in Evernote where applicable, etc etc) without the hassle and inconvenience of even setting up a separate account. Let the iPhone itself handle podcast downloads (via Downcast) or the acquisition of new apps and music on the road (through the iTunes App/Music Stores) – I can always do the OS update when I get home, and since home is on 12Mbps, it’s no longer a question of “do it at work or else do it overnight”.

Which brings us back to the iPad. I demonstrated a couple of years ago that you really need a proper laptop if you’re going to do NaNoWriMo or even NaBloPoMo (although slightly less so for the latter if you don’t hew to a high wordcount requirement). But the Bluetooth keyboard alleviates a lot of that, and if you have to have a bag for the iPad (which you do) the keyboard isn’t a particularly trying addition.

“But you struggled with the netbook! How is a 1024×768 iPad going to be appreciably better than a 1024×600 netbook?” For one thing, the iPad isn’t having to prop up a laptop OS – even Ubuntu Netbook Remix is heavier than iOS, and with the iPad you’re not wasting precious space with things like a menu bar or dock or the other accoutrements of a desktop OS interface. For another, running a phone OS on an A5 processor is easier than running Linux on an Atom – despite everyone’s best efforts, the Atom is still struggalicious and can’t deliver a fraction of the video that an iPad can stream over a similar connection (although in fairness, much of that is down to the iPad eschewing Flash and forcing everything to be in HTML5 for video). Scaled-up iOS on a larger screen can’t help but be quicker than a system that doesn’t have the overhead of a full OS and a spinning hard drive.

So if I were to make a move at this point, it’d be iPad – just because if I can’t get in there and expand the RAM and storage, I’d rather spend $630 than $1100. I HAZ A LOGIC, ALSO A CHEEP.

Of course, now I will continue to get along with the iPhone and Kindle for as long as I can get away with it…but I do hear a hibiscus iced tea calling my name. BRB.

So AT&T intends to buy T-Mobile USA off of Deutsche Telekom. This is the final straw in the complete Third World-ification of American cellular. Getting rid of T-Mobile eliminates the lowest-cost carrier, the most unlock-friendly carrier, the only carrier that actually charges you less if you’re not taking a subsidized phone, and replaces it with a single GSM carrier for the entire country and all the monopoly effect that goes with it.

The reason Europe is so far ahead of the US is that they settled on GSM early and enforced it. As a result, there’s separation between carrier and equipment, prepaid is a very reasonable option, you don’t pay to RECEIVE calls and texts, and you can pick up the iPhone on five different carriers in the UK alone. Hell, you HAVE five carriers, and a sheep in the middle of the Cotswolds has five bars. There’s none of this nonsense about charging $20 extra a month for the privilege of turning on tethering, nor a six-month wait for MMS to work, because there’s an actual COMPETITIVE MARKETPLACE.

Which the US doesn’t have. And hasn’t since Cingular ate the original AT&T Wireless. When there are only two national carriers with multiband coverage (850 Mhz and 1900 Mhz) and they use incompatible standards (GSM and CDMA), you have all the negative effect of monopoly while perpetuating the illusion of consumer choice. Sure, there’s Sprint still sticking it out with their one 1900 Mhz coverage band and CDMA hardware, but for all intents and purposes, national cellular service has been reduced to the two worst carriers in America. (And don’t start on Verizon’s network; their coverage was predicated on keeping analog up for YEARS and is technologically inferior in terms of data speed and voice/data use, at least until LTE is deployed widely.)

In fact, once LTE is more widely deployed, you might – MIGHT – have a competitive environment. But not for the foreseeable future. You can buy your nice new iPad 2, but if you get one for AT&T, you’ll have to sell it to buy the Verizon one if you decide you want the other carrier. In fact, with Verizon and Sprint both on CDMA, you can pretty much count on always having to buy a new phone when you change carriers from now on. Which is just the way they like it. Enhanced lock-in, more than ever, and you can expect ever-increasing carrier control on things like Android add-ons (hint: there’s a reason the Google prototype phones were only available on T-Mobile, and you can forget about OS upgrades if the carrier doesn’t want you to have them and you don’t want to hack your own handset).

I deeply resent the way modern America makes me sound like a fucking bong-watered granola shaver hippie, but it’s long past time for somebody to hit Corporate America in the ballsack with a two-by-four. We don’t have a free market, we don’t even have a regulated market, we have a series of monopoly and monopsony effects. AT&T or Verizon. Comcast or AT&T. DirecTV or Dish. XM or Siri–never mind. Third. World. Country. Remember when you could get DSL from somebody other than the phone company and had three different GSM carriers to pick from nationally? And when was the last time one of these awesome mergers and great business deals actually resulted in more capacity or a lower bill? Anyone? I’ll wait…

I believe the term of art with the kids these days is “FML.”

I know people HAVE to be getting tired of this, but I need to put it down just to be aware for future reference: the AT&T iPad 2 is not carrier-locked. Meaning you can take it to the UK, get a micro-SIM card from any phone company, pop it in and get yourself some data service.

I’m just sayin’…