Are my eyes really blue?

OK, I admit up front this may be the most offensive thing I’ve written – well, maybe ever, but here goes anyway. I regret nothing.

If you’re not from Lower Manhattan, or Arlington, or didn’t have a friend or a relative on one of those four planes – if you’re just some random from some square state somewhere – and you feel the need to start lecturing people down around Park Place about “anguish” and “catastrophic pain” and “self-deception” and “surrender”…

You need to shut the fuck up. Right. Fucking. Now.

This is a thing that happened. “9/11” is not Rudy Giuliani’s political mascot. It is glib shorthand for an actual event, with actual consequences. And the last thing on Earth that is necessary, or appropriate, or even tolerable, is to have somebody else lecturing those of us WHO ACTUALLY HAD TERRORISTS CRASH PLANES IN OUR CITY LIMITS about how we ought to feel, or react, or respond, or view the world.

I mean it. Step off. Zip it. KNOW YOUR ROLE, SHUT YOUR HOLE.

Opinions are like assholes – and I couldn’t be less interested in yours.

Steve Wozniak is 60 years old today. That’s probably not as bone-chilling as it should be.

If all he’d ever done was create Breakout, or the floppy disk controller for the Apple ][ , Woz would be remembered as a genius. But he also had a dab hand in the creation of the Macintosh as we know it, and his is the DNA in Apple that keep the Jobsian drive leavened with perspective and a sense of humor. Infinite Loop – hell, the world – is a better place for the efforts of Employee #1, and if he wants to spend his years now as the court jester of Silicon Valley? Nobody is more deserving – or suited.

Cheers, Woz. Hope next time you go drinking with Gray Powell you get more than a lousy T-shirt. ;]

…I said at one point that I couldn’t think of ANY superhero team movie that hadn’t gone down the chute. Obviously I whiffed on X-Men and its sequels. The first two were pretty good, especially in making the whole thing accessible to non-comic folks, but the 3rd was just egregious. Bryan Singer left to do Superman, leaving X-Men for Brett Ratner, which killed both franchises dead.

I guess what I was thinking was that there’s never been a film that combined a bunch of established characters – thinking of something like Justice League of America, which would have Superman AND Wonder Woman AND Batman, all characters that would carry their own movie normally. The lineup for Avengers seems a little more daunting since everyone will have had at least one movie of their own – and Robert Downey Jr. has almost pulled Iron Man to the level of a Spiderman or Hulk, where the character is at least beyond the “huh?” level with normal civilian non-genre types.

Looking back, if you consider Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk in 2008 to be the start of the unified Marvel film universe, it’s remarkable that they did two Fantastic Four, three Spiderman, a Daredevil and (by some count) four X-Men without ever doing any sort of overlap between them. Of course, factor in two Iron Man and (sigh) two Hulk, and since 2000, we’ve had fourteen Marvel pictures, damn near two a year most years. DC’s had two Batman (which reinvigorated the franchise) and one Superman (which damn near killed it, if it wasn’t only the best known of all superheroes) and I suppose broadly speaking you can count Watchmen, although I suspect everyone involved is running like hell from that one. And V for Vendetta, while I liked it, isn’t any part of the normal DC universe.

I guess the point is, don’t look for a film adaptation of Challenge of the Superfriends anytime soon.

Papermaster’s out. This is quite a turn of events, barely a year after IBM actually sued to keep him from going to Apple. But as the top iPhone exec, if somebody had to pay the price he was the obvious choice.

According to the WSJ, he’d lost the confidence of Himself and had delegated a lot of things that, by Apple standards, he should have been on top of personally. Personally, I don’t think it’s the antenna as much as the white iPhone 4 that sealed his fate – the fact that there’s still no ship date for half the product line is too glaring to ignore.

Starting to wonder whether Apple will be able to effectively hire from without…the “cult of Apple” is a lazy shorthand for the paste-eaters, but it’s also something to consider inside Infinite Loop. There is definitely an Apple Way, and those who cannot adapt to it will probably not do well – makes you wonder how quickly they realized this guy was not a good fit.

It’s still too soon to panic. AAPL is a long term hold, and as for the haters – well, until I see somebody pitching a “Droid killer” phone, I’m not hearing it.

The RNC has approved a resolution making dramatic changes to the way the GOP picks a presidential nominee, moving primaries to later dates and requiring states to allocate their delegates on a proportional basis.

Who called it? Your boy. Flash back to February 20, 2008: “If you don’t think there are going to be MASSIVE changes to the GOP selection process for 2012…I’ll take that bet.”

I AM the straw that stirs the drink.* Don’t let anyone tell you different.

*It’s amazing what a genius you can be (and what an ego you can develop) just by “predicting” something as obvious as the nose on your face. This is also a tacit admission that John McCain was not the desired outcome in 2008 – although again, I maintain that anybody else would have done as bad or worse, running on the “double down Bushism” platform. The older I get, the better I was.

Today, the VP of my old group at FirstJob is retiring. At long last, the principal source of our torment for years on end is gone.

It’s a completely hollow victory, of course. The guys who gathered in the basement in January of 1998, with nothing on the org chart between us and the enemy, are for the most part scattered to the winds. Only a couple are even in the same job they had then.

Everyone who was on staff with years under their belt and talent had pretty much flown the coop before. All that was left were the people who had just started, the people who weren’t going to walk out on their generous defined-benefit pensions, and the people who didn’t actually have the skills to go elsewhere – and this was at a time when Hooters girls were being hired at $50K to sit the help desk because everybody more technical had a better job. So it was down to just us, organized two by two like Noah’s Ark: PC hardware, PC software, Mac hardware, Mac software, PC rollout, plus a guy to handle the avalanche of incoming equipment and our lead. The Dirty Dozen, in a place with PCs running 3 or 4 different operating systems and three different forms of networking in place (four if you count the modem pool that fully half the user base needed to get onto the Internet) and three completely separate email systems, all administered by former big-iron operators who got the job because a study said their salary was commensurate with that of an email administrator.

When I say we were in Tech Vietnam, I’m only serious. And the VP was head of the Viet Cong. Petty, arbitrary, oblivious to any concept of workstation support, and interested only in not having his phone ring – despite the fact that two PC software techs plus a dog’s breakfast of systems plus a thousand users meant a nine day wait for your Windows trouble ticket to be addressed, let alone resolved – which makes the phone ring.

We fought like hell. We had to be smarter, faster, better, and more conniving than the users OR the management. And when the VP finally relented after orders from the C-suite to bring in contractors and reduce the number of tickets, one middle manager after another was brought in as well, with orders to subjugate us. And invariably, they turned on him, because we were right and he was wrong.

In the workplace, I reserve my lowest contempt for a manager who has no discernable talent or skills or knowledge, but just stirs the shit constantly – either in hopes that some order will spontaneously form out of the chaos, or so that there’s a constant stream of things that aren’t his fault so that he can roll the aforementioned shit downhill. This guy got away with it for fourteen years – finally retiring with most of his power and responsibility gone, standing up for a retirement ceremony that he didn’t deserve, because any one of a half-dozen people he fired or quashed did more in a year to save the IT infrastructure than he did in his whole tenure.

I suppose I should thank him. The chaos and bullshit he engendered forged a team like none other. But we could have burned steady for twenty-five years instead of flaming out in six. So instead, I will send him on the way from afar with the worst curse you can lay on a human being – that he gets precisely what he deserves.

For some reason, it’s all memories of September lately. Start of a new year, start of a new football season, start of a new term. Cool at night, and a new jacket to wear with it – not to mention a replacement pair of jeans, at least one or two new shirts of some sort, and in all likelihood a new pair of kicks to help cope with the endless hills and stairs of high school and college and grad school. (Reebok Phase 1 throughout high school, a Nike deal thereafter until I left Vandy.) A fresh look, a fresh start. Nice thing to be able to count on every year.

It occurs to me that you don’t often get a reset point in adulthood. Change of jobs, maybe, or when you marry or have another kid, or if you move house or to a new town. But for the most part, there’s not a time when you get a regular chance to make a fresh start of things.

The other thing that strikes me lately is that I went from a high school where everything was a half-hour drive away (or worse) to a college where everything was inside a fenced perimeter – and then a grad school where everything you’d want or need was within walking distance. Those were the years that really transformed me into a person who didn’t want to need a car for anything. And now, as we shiver through another San Francisco summer, I feel the need for a sharp new set of clothes and a reliable pair of kicks to step out under the cloudy gray autumnal sky.

Now I just need to shop through my own closet and schedule a day trip on Saturday…

“A state’s interest in an enactment must of course be secular in nature. The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose. See Lawrence v Texas, 539 US 558, 571 (2003); see also Everson v Board of Education of Ewing Township, 330 US 1, 15 (1947)…”

and

“In the absence of a rational basis, what remains of proponents’ case is an inference, amply supported by evidence in the record, that Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples. FF 78-80. Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate…”

The long-awaited iPhone 4 jailbreak is finally here. In fact, it can be done by just visiting a website and clicking a link! HOORAY WE’RE ALL FREEEEEEEEEEE–

Step back from the Amazing Freedom Sauce and think about this:

This is your OS being rewritten with the click of a webpage link.

This is, hands down, the single biggest security hole in the history of Apple products. This is a blockbuster vulnerability, as bad or worse than anything in recent years for Windows – just click one link, and damn near any code can be executed on your phone, as root – you can, in every meaningful sense of the word, get pwned.

I have absolutely no doubt that iOS 4.1 will hold now until this gets repaired – 4.1 beta 3 just dropped and probably does something to fix this. One can only hope, anyway. The fact that this is being pitched as a heaven-sent means of liberating your phone, rather than the most embarrassing flaw in a shipping Apple product of the Steve II era, speaks volumes about how distorted are the sensibilities of the tech press. Gizmodo, for instance, was hailing the jailbreak two days before decrying the vulnerability, having apparently never considered that jailbreak-by-web-site might represent a serious breach of security.

The problem is, as soon as Apple fixes this bug, it’s probably going to break a lot of newly-jailbroken iPhones. And there will be people screaming about how Apple is out to screw jailbreakers and decrying the evils of the beast of Cupertino, who sincerely believe that trying to fix the OS equivalent of Pearl Harbor is less important than making sure that Billy L33t H4xx0r can still run Cydia on his iPhone, and that Apple is wrong to fix the former at the expense of the latter. These people should kill themselves at the first opportunity, for the sake of the human race. We have enough trouble with teatards without keeping script kiddies in the gene pool.

Can we stop being shocked that Target and Best Buy threw the interests of their LGBT customers under the bus? Yes, the candidate and PAC in question are terrible on matters of equality, but they are all for tax cuts for business. And it should come as no shock when a big corporation comes to the conclusion that making more money trumps their “values”. Target is going on about their previous endorsements from HRC and the like, and that’s real sweet, but the fact that they’re willing to compromise that because of “pro-business” positions – well, it’s maddening, but it shouldn’t come as a shock.

(Who the hell is still getting consumer electronics from Best Buy?)

In the bigger picture, this is why you have to be scared about all this Teabagger bullshit (yes, I’m going to use that epithet, because fuck those redneck mental defectives). There are far too many people out there who will at least be uncomfortable with (if not outright deplore) the excesses of the movement, but they’ll go along with it because it’s on their side. And there are people who may think that Sarah Palin is a clown, or that holding hearings on whether the 14th Amendment should actually apply is abysmally stupid, or get embarrassed that elected officials endorse questioning whether Barack Obama is in fact a secret Muslim and not an American citizen at all – but you know what? They’ll still pull the GOP lever, because that’s their side.

I’m not interested in the whole false-equivalence, either. People will scream “MoveOn!” and “Michael Moore” and “International ANSWER” – but you know what? None of those entities ever had a prominent role in the Democratic party, none of them were elected officials, and certainly no Democratic leaders felt compelled to genuflect before them and rush to embrace their flakiness. Meanwhile, the Senate’s top Republicans wants to address the notion that people born in the United States shouldn’t automatically be citizens – and hold Congressional hearings on the topic. The last time the Democrats went this far off the baseline was 1972 – and establishment Washington and its kept catamites in the Beltway media are still acting as if George McGovern and his boosters are running the day-to-day operations of every politician left of Joe Lieberman. All you have to know is that individual mandates for health insurance were part of the Republican health care position in 1994, and that cap-and-trade was a Republican answer to greenhouse gasses in 2008, to know that the Democrats are if anything running to the right to try to make something happen.

So yeah. At this point, we are at the mercy of whether non-insane Republicans are willing to stand up and say “this isn’t cool.” I’m not even talking about embracing the Obama agenda – I’m just talking about simple stuff, like making it abundantly clear that Obama is an American citizen and the legitimate President, that the first sentence in the 14th Amendment is clear and unambiguous and not up for debate, that there are no such things as “death panels,” that the election wasn’t stolen by ACORN, that there is no pending government plot to take everyone’s guns and open concentration camps. I would like to see prominent conservatives come out in public and loudly proclaim, in short, that they don’t want to base our political discourse on derangement and abject stupidity.

I’m not going to hold my breath.