Are my eyes really blue?

The LibDems didn’t finish down 3 seats, all right, they finished down FIVE.  What a kick in the bollocks.

I do stand by the second guess, though – I don’t think there’s a sustainable government to be formed.  Labour won’t get to keep playing until Brown is out of the picture, and a Blue/Yellow team, while attractive visually to Da Wife, will not be able to hold together once things like Europe and electoral reform are on the cards.

New election by Christmas.  I’m nailing my colors to the mast on this one.

 

ETA: This is the UK’s version of 2000 – in the absence of an outright majority, both sides are going to try to win this thing on television.  The Constitutional process, such as it is, gives the Prime Minister the right to attempt to form a government – but the Tories did finish with more votes and more seats than Labour, and might well be able to scrape together a minority government without allying with the Lib Dems (and these two parties will NOT be able to stay together long as mentioned above).  I have a tough time disagreeing with the Conservative assertion, backed by Nick Clegg in theory during the campaign, that the party with the most seats should be given an opportunity to do a deal – and while negotiations appear to be underway, I don’t doubt that the Lib Dems will at least give Labour an opportunity to make their own pitch before they make any firm commitments.

 

Two predictions:

1) The LibDems won’t actually finish down 3 seats.

2) There’ll be another election by the end of the year.

 

Personally, I think the best outcome would be a hung Parliament and an awkward Tory-Lib Dem alliance until things settle down some.  Although it’s truly ironic that after making his name as a financial wizard, Gordon Brown will be turfed out for a financial meltdown that’s mostly come and gone – and then be gone when things turn bad again.  It’s almost Shakespearean.

I don’t talk too much about my job here. I mean, I do discuss my previous ones from time to time, mostly in the context of people I knew and experiences I had, but I find it’s not too healthy to blog about your current line of work. Which is something I learned at one of those previous jobs, albeit indirectly.
My current job is actually going well. From a stress standpoint, it’s lower than I’ve experienced in a long time. I get to do more or less what I’ve done for thirteen years, albeit with the advantage of those thirteen years of experience. Less Nuke LaLoosh, more Crash Davis, if you know what I mean. Every man reaches a point where he has to stop being Nuke and try to be Crash.
In years past, I would have gotten the big head when the subject of my performance came up. Hell, I did get the big head, literally; I went up a quarter-inch of hat size between arriving in DC and leaving seven years later. I awarded myself multiple championship belts (won the tag team titles with three different partners, retired the Hardcore Title and spent 2003 as MVP and Intercontinental Champion), and I grumbled about how Superman must fly off after saving Lois Lane for the hundredth time and say “This is bullshit, why can’t that bitch stay out of burning buildings?”
Lately, though, it’s different. In a year and a half I’m at more or less the same confidence level it took me five years to achieve in my first job – not challenging for the top spot yet, but give it time – but I’m a lot more circumspect about it. I wince at things like “Mac guru” and “computer genius,” and when I was introduced to the boss’s boss’s boss’s boss yesterday as “our Apple wizard,” I pointed out “you know, most wizards wind up burned at the stake or slaughtered by Voldemort.”
The thing is, I don’t think it’s healthy for people to think of their IT staff as some kind of mystical beings. Smart? Sure. Sharp operators? Probably. Peer staff whose business recommendations should be heeded rather than blithely ignored until something goes on fire? Absolutely. But here’s the thing: if people think you are magicians, eventually, they will expect you to do magic.
It’s not a good thing when employees are ignorant of basic computing functions and the help desk indulges them for the sake of looking like gods. When you find yourself flung back in time, the medieval peasants will worship you like a god right up to the point where you fail to resurrect the little girl who broke her neck falling down the well. Then the torches come out. There will inevitably come a day when somebody does something that makes their computer take a dirt nap, and their vital data goes with it, and they never backed up. At that point, I can take their confession, but I probably can’t raise the dead, and it’s better that they know that now so that the beheadings don’t start when that day comes.
Call it the sudden onset of senile sanity, but I don’t really want to come charging out of a burning building with the vital grant CD in one hand while the grateful masses fling money and flimsy underthings at me. I’m at a point where I’d just as soon make sure everything passes fire code inspection, then sit back at the firehouse and pet the Dalmatian while the young guys wash the truck again – because nothing’s burning down right now. Maybe the way to reconcile the need to be a stupendous badass with the need for people to keep out of your shit is to just give up on both.

So what would it look like to leave Facebook?  Let’s caveat this with one thing: there is not another service that enables friend-of-a-friend discovery as effectively as Facebook, such that finding one classmate or childhood friend opens the way to a panoply of others.  So concede that Facebook may still be necessary as a sort of white pages.

After that, the question becomes this: what do most people use Facebook for, and what substitutes for that?  Simple:

STATUS UPDATES: Twitter.  DUH.

SHORT-FORM POST: Tumblr is the current favorite (NB: I did change my Tumblr URL to match this blog, so you may need to change how you get at it) but there are others out there. Posterous is one I keep getting references to – maybe I need to check that out?

NOTES: Anything like WordPress or TypePad or hell, even LiveJournal would work for this.

PHOTOS:  Well, this is pretty much Flickr.  I suppose if you’re willing to take a flyer on Google, you could use Picasa and Google Buzz to handle all of the above. MobileMe’s Gallery feature is not a bad notion for this either.

VIDEO:  Let’s face it, this is probably always going to be YouTube, although something like Vimeo might work too.

The problem there becomes “how do you handle granular access?”  Because a lot of these services do not have a lot of flexibility – Twitter lets you block EVERYTHING and then approve followers, but individual posts are tougher to handle.  I haven’t explored the short-blogging services much, but it looks as if that sort of granularity is tough to do.  Perhaps you wind up with one service as your public face, another as your general friend service, and maybe something separate for just your closest friends and family.

And then the problem is “how to aggregate it?”  The obvious solution is “RSS” but as mentioned previously, a lot of people (like ‘er indoors for instance) aren’t wild about it.  If you can have all your friends feeding into one Twitter or the other and follow all of them, or have everybody pouring into Tumblr, or using something like Threadsy – well, maybe, maybe not.

And that, ultimately, is how Facebook hangs on: central point of contact and an easy way to cover everybody at once.  And for the time being, there’s still some granularity to who can access what.  Until that becomes an impediment to advertisers, at which point you can expect to get Zuckerpunched again.

 

 

This is MarsEdit 3, which is finally supposed to bring WYSIWYG editing.  I am composing in rich text in hopes that this will show up properly when I finally post.

I note also that it posts to almost every media source I mentioned in last night’s post – things like Tumblr and Typepad and WordPress and etc.  This leads me to think that it might just be possible to build a system with MarsEdit and NetNewsWire (backed by the ubiquitous Google Reader of course) that would allow for spraying social media all over the place and then collecting it for reading elsewhere.

Da Wife (as she says) is not crazy about this.  It is the opinion of ‘er indoors that she does not like RSS-based reading, by and large, and she makes a good case.  For one thing, RSS is a thoroughly inelegant way of following Twitter.  So use it for everything else?  Well, too many sites do not offer a full feed – you get the first few lines only, or a prepared summary, or maybe text but no media, and you have to click on through anyway.

So why not Twitter?  Everything feeds back to it just fine, it seems, and if you have to click through anyway, no big deal – perhaps Brizzly, which auto-expands links and images and the like, would make for a decent all-in-one reader.  Plus, while Twitter is certainly as eager to monetize your data as Facebook, Twitter requires a much lower threshold of personal disclosure. (If you use a bogus name, and are lucky enough to have kept an email address for ten years or so that doesn’t tie back to you personally, you can use Twitter with a reasonable degree of anonymity short of somebody tracing IP and extrapolating from the people who tag you and etc.)

The problem with this is that inevitably you wind up needing multiple Twitter accounts, rather than breaking it out to have one service for some people, another for others, and so forth.  All this could be fixed if Facebook still offered trustworthy granularity – but with no idea what they might decide is public record tomorrow, it would be the height of foolishness to entrust them with anything now. (I can already hear people crowing “well you shouldn’t put anything on the Internet!”  Horseshit – the whole point of Facebook was that it WAS a walled and gated community, that WOULD allow you to control the precise distribution of your personal information.  That they have blown this up is a fault of theirs, not of those who took them at their word.)

Anyway, it’s time to get out the clipboard and see how we’re going to make this work…

(OK, I don’t know how, but the contents of this post have vanished.  I will try to recreate it later.)

…everybody from the EFF to Jon Stewart is howling about mean ol’ Apple sic’ing the San Mateo DA on the poor Gizmodo blogger who is a shining martyr to freedom of the press WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAHHHHHHMBULANCE. I will now puncture this self-righteous circle jerk with one word:

Engadget.

Go back and look at that again. More specifically, look at their archives. Two days before Gizmodo’s big breaking story, they published more or less the same thing – with specs and pictures, no less. And what have we heard from Apple? Not a mumbling word. Not so much as a takedown notice for the pictures.

So quit with your crocodile tears, people. If Jason Chen and Gawker Media don’t want to be treated like criminal suspects, maybe they shouldn’t have committed a fucking crime. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Pity level = NEGATIVE INFINITY.

So ever since Himself posted his small note on Flash, the chorus has come up loud and long from the paste-eaters. “How can he criticize Flash for not being open when Apple controls the whole iPhone ecosystem WAH WAH WAH FREE FREE FREE FREE SOFTWARE FREE MUMIA WAH” et cetera. As usual, they are missing the point.

Obviously, Apple controls the iPhone ecosystem – it’s their product. You can disagree with this if you like, and you can build a good case that they shouldn’t keep such a tight grip on it. But when Himself is beating the drum for open standards like H.264 and HTML5, it’s because nobody else controls those. As long as Steve Jobs runs Apple, you will never – EVER – see support on the iPhone OS for any sort of closed system run by somebody other than Apple.

The tedious workup again: Adobe makes tool. Apple allows tool. Tool becomes necessary to a non-trivial percentage of iPhone/iPad applications. Suddenly, Apple’s production is dependent on making sure they don’t break support for Adobe’s tool – and more importantly, Apple is at the mercy of Adobe for upgrades and fixes to said tool. Do you think Himself will ever yield that kind of control to any company, let alone one as Mac-negligent as Adobe (who have JUST NOW, nine years on, released a fully-native version of Photoshop for OS X)?

As an aside, I’ll point out that I think the assertion that cross-platform makes for shit is pretty apt. Remember the early days of Java, with “write once crash anywhere”? How about now? Java apps are insanely slow and look like shit – unless you employ native API calls. At which point you’re not cross-platform anymore, and you may as well skip the Java.

Now, all of this sets aside stuff that should be obvious to anybody who supports computers for a living: Flash is a buggy, CPU-hogging, security-breaching sack of shit whose main application in 2010 seems to be stupid Facebook games and insanely annoying ads. I have yet to see a use case for Flash on a phone – which is handy, because I have yet to see Flash on a phone (other than lecture demos and Flash Lite, neither of which gives me any reason to think the whole thing would run great on a mobile handset).

The ongoing wailing about Flash on the iPhone boils down to one thing: people are still trying to create the desktop computer on a handheld device. It’s not going to happen on Himself’s watch at Apple. It’s just not. Whether it happens in Mountain View, or Redmond, or with HP’s acquisition of Palm, is up for grabs. But “Windows Everywhere” was an actual Microsoft slogan for a while, and the need to tie everything to Windows is what killed their mindshare and made them an also-ran everywhere off the desktop. Apple is taking it one step further and asserting that the future of mobility computing bears no resemblance to what you’d do on a desktop – and that it is THE future of computing to go in that direction. If you don’t buy it, just count the number of OS X sessions at this year’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. I’ll wait. Oh, back already? You see my point.

My first review at NewestJob went pretty well, all things considered. I did ask outright “what does ‘exceeds expectations’ work out to in percent salary?” but nothing came of it. After, as I sat out at the cafe under the overhang and watched the rain drift in, I thought about what an easier environment I’m in relative to 1997-98.

Think about it – we have Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 instead of System 7.5.3. More to the point, we have Windows XP SP3 instead of Windows NT 4. Our operating systems are a hell of a lot more robust than in years past. And they run simpler computers, too. No more mucking about connecting a Jaz drive via SCSI, not when thumb drives with more storage than a Jaz are handed out as promotional items and tossed as too small to be useful. No Zip disks. No floppy drives. Precious few CDs and DVDs, and those burned internally from within the OS rather than on an external burner with Toast or some other third-party contrivance. And of all my currently supported users put together, I can’t think of more than two with personal printers – neither of which I can recall ever supporting.

The network is so much easier to deal with, too – all TCP/IP all the time. No AppleTalk. No Netware. No NetBEUI. No more mucking about with print queues and waiting for Novell to turn out a Mac client. Getting on the Internet is no longer a function of what floor you’re on, and having a Mac no longer means pulling cable three floors through the closet to find the one Ethernet switch set up to pass AppleTalk. No Token Ring cable, no LocalTalk cable, hell, no cable at all half the time thanks to pervasive 802.11 coverage. No screwing around with modem pools. Or modems. No “dialing up” into anything. VPN connects in about 5 seconds. Email is based on IMAP, instead of some hodgepodge of gateways and proprietary LAN mail systems – or worse yet, Lotus Notes.

And most of all, Apple Remote Desktop. Any of my Mac users are just a couple clicks away, whether I’m at my desk or off in a shared cube – or at home on a couch, or on a couch at the cigar store, or in a Starbucks in Birmingham. Only the need for a physical presence when network connectivity is inoperative keeps me from running my operations full time from the third-floor balcony by Peet’s – or from the third base line at Pac Bell Park.

The point is this: after some time and distraction, I am back doing the same sort of thing I was doing six years ago, and in the intervening years, the job itself has become simpler than ever. And six years ago was miles easier than six years before that, when I first came to the business. Maybe by 2016, I really will be able to do the whole thing off an iPad while lounging on the patio at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans….

So now one of Gizmodo’s editors has gotten a search warrant executed and his house raided. It appears as well that Gawker Media is going to push back claiming immunity under California’s shield law that protects sources for reporters.

I have a sneaking suspicion that dog ain’t gonna hunt. Mainly because the law says “no warrant shall issue for…the source of any information.” A full description of the notional iPhone 4, with specs and stats, would certainly constitute information. Even pictures could be so construed. But that ain’t what’s doin’. What’s doin’ is that Gawker Media, through its employee, took possession of actual property in a manner that, under California law, probably rises to the level of stolen goods.

Now I’m sure there will come the usual parade of First Amendment absolutists who think all reporters should be protected from everything for all time, to which my usual response is: you obviously have never seen NBC. But Jason Chen’s little exercise in balls-to-the-wall journalism is not going to get the same protection as, say, Daniel Ellsburg and the Pentagon Papers, and rightly so – because while details of the iPhone are certainly newsworthy, they do not rise to the level of a compelling public interest. Even so, with California’s shield law, he would probably be in a position to skate if they hadn’t paid $5000 – a felony-theft level of cash – for property that was not the seller’s to sell.

As it is, if I’m Gawker Media’s lawyer, I’m skipping over the righteous pontification and heading to the part where I hope the DA might be open to pleading down to something that doesn’t involve jail time.