Are my eyes really blue?

So I’ve started watching Carl Sagan’s landmark PBS miniseries again. Thirty years on, we tend to forget that until Ken Burns produced The Civil War for PBS, Cosmos was the highest-rated PBS program of all time. I don’t know how I came to it, but I distinctly remember being allowed, even encouraged, to watch it. Looking back now, I didn’t really grasp now much of an anti-nuclear-war jeremiad it was, but then a lot of stuff from the era looks dated as hell (The Day After, anybody? Amerika? Hell, Red Dawn? How exactly do they plan to remake that? Why exactly do they plan to remake that?) Also, it’s clear that I really did have that line of demarcation at a young age: God created the universe in six days on Sundays and in 4.5 trillion years the rest of the week. Anybody who’s ever done any quality time in Nashville is well aware of the duality of Saturday night and Sunday morning. What can I say, I am large, I contain multitudes. Even then.

It’s amazing how well the thing holds up, though. This was at the apex of space science in this country – Pioneer, Viking and Voyager had all gone off in the 70s, we had landed man on the moon as late as 1972, we had Skylab, we had the Shuttle coming any minute now and the promise of the Hubble…it’s not hard to see how somebody as distinctive as Sagan could turn into a celebrity. I honestly can’t think of a hard-science celebrity that would turn up routinely on The Tonight Show these days. Stephen Hawking maybe, but not really. Anyway, so far, most everything they talk about – historically as well as scientifically – is still germane to the present day, enough so that you could still use the whole trick in science class anywhere about third grade up.

It’s comfortable, like finding one of your favorite old jackets from decades ago and realizing it still fits. For some reason, though, the opening makes me feel the slightest twinge of sad – it’s been a long thirty years, and maybe I’m just regretting that I didn’t make it as a Jedi astronaut, but what can I say – it’s hard as hell to find a place that offers that as a major…

An aside: in my previous job, there was a wizened old scientist who I privately grumbled about as “America’s Silliest Scientist” (or worse) but who was foisted on me as the new guy – because he’d exhausted everyone else’s patience. And yet, there he is, looking very capable as he pipettes some mysterious substance into the cosmic brew. I think that’s because there wasn’t a computer involved…

This guy has it figured out. Honestly, nobody should attribute any sort of sainthood to the folks in Cupertino (and as somebody who was one of them for three years, I oughta know) but to pretend like Adobe is some innocent babe in the woods being done wrong by the Beast of Infinite Loop is the height of foolishness. I would think that the paste-eater cognoscenti would be thrilled to see somebody pushing back against proprietary technology in favor of reasonably open formats not under the control of any one company, but for some reason, pressing for HTML5 and H.264 to replace Flash has somehow become the Silicon Valley equivalent of the Hun butchering the Belgians.

Look, any idiot should have been able to figure this out by now: Apple, in the era of Jobs II, is not interested in being beholden to anyone else. I can only imagine how much it chafed Himself to have Bill Gates up there pledging to keep producing Office for the Mac, knowing what a delicate thread the company was hanging by and how the decision to cut off Office would have effectively killed the Mac by 1999 or so. Anybody who thinks that the guy in the turtleneck is ever going to make his products dependent on the fruits of another tech company is smoking crack – thus the Quattro acquisition, a firewall against Google’s control of AdMob, and the PA Semi acquisition, and the map company they bought a while back – hell, the Great Mentioner periodically mumbles something about Apple and search, for crying out loud. Why do you think Apple had a version of Mac OS X running on Intel hardware for six years before making it public? Because Jobs had all he wanted of being in hock to Motorola to make a faster processor, and he had a backup plan.

For better or worse, Apple now has a survivalist streak a mile wide. IL2 is full of whatever is the high-tech equivalent of 9mm ammo, dried food, flashlight batteries and water purification tablets. The Sons of the Hexachrome Fruit haven’t holed up in the compound, and probably don’t want to, but if it comes to that? They are prepared to go it alone with no Adobe, no Microsoft, no Google. And given how much time they’ve had to prepare and bank resources, I’m not sure they couldn’t pull it off. Don’t forget, the big new data center in North Carolina opens any day now…

ETA: This Android engineer breaks down how Apple’s “multitasking” will work. Long story short: it’s more or less the same technique used by Android, although Android doesn’t kill the original task after switching until real RAM is close to running out. I suspect this means faster return-from-switch on Android, at the risk of crashes if the OOM handler is overwhelmed by too many big-RAM apps and cannot free enough memory in time.

So I went to a couple different surplus stores today. Look, I’m as free trade and globalist as the next guy, but it kind of bothers me when every single military jacket in the Army-Navy store is labelled “Made in China.” Anyway, the MA-1 apparently doesn’t have the velcro patch on the chest and is huge and bulky besides (probably warm, and it weighs NOTHING, but it’s just too damn big around).

Honestly, what’s driving me here is the notion of Cayce Pollard Units. If you’ve read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, Cayce is the heroine of the tale. She has a unique “ability” if you want to call it that – she is allergic (to the point of psychosis) to branding, to the point where she can only wear clothing that would be generally regarded as fashionably indistinct anytime from the Second World War to the present. The one thing she has out of the ordinary is a Buzz Rickson’s replica MA-1 jacket, in black – and while Buzz Rickson’s is in fact a real Japanese company whose reproduction is almost artistic in its precision, they never made a black one until after the novel came out.

To be honest, this is as close as I come to a fashion statement. From the time I moved to California until about a month ago, the only jeans I’ve bought are the standard blue Levi’s 501. My daily footwear runs to Dr Martens in black or occasionally brown. My default work shirts are solid color collared sport shirts with no logo other than the WWDC logo on a couple of them. My off-hours shirts run largely to identical gray 2XL American Apparel t-shirts.

Only the jackets tend to run wild – and boy, do they. In the current rotation alone, you see the Vanderbilt softshell, the dark green oilcloth engineer’s coat, the canary-yellow Community Emergency Response Team coat, a plain black rain shell, a black National Geographic fleece that goes under that shell, a couple other Eddie Bauer cold-weather coats, a poorly-chosen jean jacket in brown suede, and (most distinctively) a brown leather Indiana Jones jacket from US Wings. That last was my signature jacket for most of the decade, but it’s proven largely impractical in a place where I have to wear a backpack to and from work every day – and it’s not the best thing for travel. Also, I’m not entirely sure I want to deface it with a couple of patches, even if they are germane to my history.

The big problem is that out here, it’s all layers all the time – it legitimately gets cold at night during the summer, and it’s legit too warm to wear the jacket during the day. It’s like those spring conditions where you always forgot and left your jacket at school. Which means that most of the time, I need something to wear in the morning that will ball up in the backpack in the afternoon. And the Stuff White People Like “performance outerwear” starts to make sense…which is why that Vandy softshell has become the go-to for most of the last year. I’m not sure I want to take it through Europe for two weeks, though – especially since it’s looking like “warm and rainy” is the default condition through much of where we’re going…

Well, my brother-in-law and I were looking at a WordPress migration. Then he was distracted from looking at the CSS issues in Movable Type 4 by the need to put the little one to bed, and while he was doing that, it occurred to me to archive and reload the templates – which got the MT4 CSS working properly, and in turn allowed me to switch to the nice gray layout you see here. Enjoy!
Now I just need to figure out how to get a blogroll going…

Well, back to ecto – now that I know what’s happening, it’s a lot easier to manage. For whatever reason, new posts show up in MT4 as “scheduled” but never actually post. But that’s an easy fix from the browser, so I’m better off with the WYSIWYG approach. MarsEdit means riding bareback on HTML, with tags and everything, and that’s just more trouble than it’s worth.

So anyway, I’ve been looking through my ridiculous collection of outerwear, and I have the oddest urge to fit something with some patches. Not like my patch jacket of yore, with everything from shuttle mission patches to a UPS logo – this would just be something simple, almost military-ish, something that would work out for cyberpunk dress at Maker Faire or some such. Blame William Gibson and Cayce Pollard, but I keep being drawn to the MA-1 nylon flight jacket despite the fact that it’s far too warm for most winter days (and too short to be an effective raincoat).

Actually, I should be working harder on a steampunk getup (despite my misgivings about how warm it’ll probably be) and some sort of attire plan for the Europe trip in June (cool to warm, rain likely). Most of all, I kind of need to go through my dresser and plow through whatever I can get rid of – there’s a lot of old sox and drawz that need to go away and make space for the new stuff…

Sad to see AJ leave Vandy – I doubt he’ll even be a first-round pick – but I almost wonder if we’re better off with the three-headed monster in the lane plus the new recruits (Kyle Fuller and Rod Odom are both top-100 prospects nationally) and just turning into a run-and-gun team. We’ll still have plenty of beef down low – I daresay that more slightly smaller guys who can get up for offensive boards would help things a LOT.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got at this point…no politics, precious little tech talk, ain’t that something?

It’s quite a gadget. It certainly seems to obviate the need for a dedicated e-book reader. It’s incredibly easy to pull out and use in a way you’d never use a notebook, just because of the whole folding action and the space it takes up. (I really wish I’d had this trick on the trip to DC.) And by using a phone OS, it’s incredibly fast to get going – button, swipe, 4 digits, Safari, and boom goes the dynamite. As opposed to: open, wait for login box, log in, wait for desktop, double-click icon, wait for app to load…it’s like an iPhone, just pull it out and go, except that the processor is so much faster and the screen so much bigger that you actually get to work and see things sooner and easier. The 4-way screen rotation is great – work from whatever angle you pulled the thing out.

It does seem excessive for things like Foursquare or Twitter, but those are so location-specific that they really do belong on the phone, not the iPad. You could take the iPad most anywhere, but you definitely will take an iPhone everywhere, so – horses for courses.

If I hadn’t bought the netbook, I would be sorely tempted. As it is, I find that I tend only to use Mail, Safari, Notepad, and the e-book readers. Other things are nice, but I don’t get the mileage out of them on a routine basis.

Long story short – does this sound familiar? Steve Jobs delivers new product. Not a completely original concept, but the first real consumer-friendly approach, easy to use and sexy as all hell. Looks like a premium product, and priced like one; right off the bat it’s too much money for not as much functionality as you might like, but from day one it becomes the new standard that everyone else is chasing.

iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad. Lather, rinse, repeat.

* It’s got sex appeal, make no mistake. You could go out to a public park with a baby, a beagle puppy and a big-eyed stuffed turtle and you wouldn’t draw the crowd an iPad does. It certainly hits all Apple’s usual markers for industrial design.

* If it’s a big iPod Touch, the key word is definitely BIG. Having 1024×768 scale changes everything, making for a better UI experience and a lot easier time with things like mail or reading complex websites (you don’t need a Facebook app for the iPad, you just go to Facebook).

* The killer app, for me, is the battery life. This is the thing Apple has done: they have used a phone OS to get light and lean, while still including a first-rate browser – the net result blows away any netbook you like for speed while offering ridiculous battery performance (after almost 7 hours of off-and-on browsing and mail and even some video, I’ve still only blown off 1/3 of the charge). Better than my MacBook Pro, better than my Dell Mini 1012 (in Ubuntu OR WinXP), better than my iPhone – hell, I could use all three of those one after the other until the batteries all died, and I think an iPad would outlast them all. Now in fairness I’ve been using it on a college campus with pervasive Wi-Fi, not taxing it with the need to hold a 3G signal, but even so – this is something you can take around for email and web surfing all day and not have to worry about when you’re going to plug it in. For that reason alone, I think it has a lot of potential not just as a netbook killer, but as a MacBook Air killer.

* I mean, seriously, think about it. What do you do on a netbook? What CAN you do on a netbook? The physical keyboard may give it a slight edge on the text-entry front, in theory, but (in horizontal mode at least) the iPad’s virtual keyboard is every bit as viable as my netbook’s physical one in practice. I can check my mail, I can surf the web – well, the iPad does those things as well if not better (I’m generally stuck on webmail with the netbook, because using Thunderbird or Evolution is painful on that screen and with that processing power.) I could input with Google Docs or Evernote if I wanted text, I’ve got the WordPress app right there for blogging things – hell, right now the only thing I absolutely need the netbook for over the iPad would be video chat. And that’s not exactly a huge part of my life.

* If you’re doing all this stuff in the cloud anyway, you can get by fine with 16 GB of storage. Hell, get all your movies from Netflix and you don’t need to use your local space. I guarantee you that the notional Google Chrome OS devices aren’t going to have 16 GB of local storage. All the “cloud” really consists of is a move back to the old client-server days, and the iPad is the thinnest of thin clients.

* Yes, you can RDP back to your Windows machine – just not very well. Similarly, I expect VNC would be kind of a show. I don’t think you’re going to get Apple Remote Desktop for iPad for some time, unfortunately.

* The iPad, at its root, is a consumption device. You read mail, read books, surf the web, watch video, listen to audio. It’s necessarily compromised for things like churning out flashing newsletters or hammering out the Great American Novel or administering a rack of servers. I certainly wouldn’t undertake NaNoWriMo on one. But the people breathlessly intoning “this is your new TV” – I think they’re onto something. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, this is going to be a big part of how you see your shows. (The notional Hulu app will go a long way there.)

* I think the biggest impact of the iPad is yet to come – I don’t think the apps that are going to make it indispensable exist yet. I think much will depend on what happens with the developers who just now have one in their hands. I also think much will depend on what gets discussed on Thursday, when the iPhone 4 talk takes place in Cupertino. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more consolidation in what is emerging as OS X Mobile, for lack of a better word – in stark contrast to the fragmentation currently happening with Android.

* All of this said, I’m probably going to pass it along to the next tech by the end of the week if not sooner. When you have a laptop and an iPhone, it’s definitely a device too far. It’s not a substitute for a laptop for people who legitimately have to work remotely or on-the-go (by contrast, it’s the IDEAL device to give your CxO so he can look slick in the first class lounge). And for my purposes, it’s neat…but it’s not really suitable for Twitter, or text messaging, or walking around with the headphones in on a constant stream of the Junks. I downloaded a ton of the free iPad apps, but most of them are things I don’t use or aren’t practical – Pandora, ABC Player, Y! Entertainment, two or three news apps, stuff like that. Until portable devices become the prime way of consuming media, the iPhone is still the best horse for the course for me.

This post is coming to you from an iPad. I have the Apple folio thingy, it is sitting on top of my net book on the coffee table, and I’m already seeing some of the compromises on the keyboard. It does a good job with some of the autocorrection, but also makes two words of netbook and doesn’t give me an apostrophe without using the shift. It also makes ozone curious decisions on what not to correct. That should be “some”, not “ozone”. You see the problem.
in the grand scheme of things, though, it isn’t bad. I daresay it’s as least as typable as the much maligned keyboard on the Dell Mini 9. Obviously I’m in landscape mode and counting on the spell check, but even so – it’s miles beyond trying to do the same on an iPhone. I wouldn’t dare try to write anything this long on there.
(An aside: Duke got freerolled into the Sweet Sixteen with a one seed they didn’t deserve, then managed to be two points better than a five seed in a game where the refs basically let them play Red Rover under the baskets. Least impressive champion of the modern era. And I’m all the more bitter that Vandy got skunked in the first round, because that Duke team is one we could easily have beaten. Douchebags.)
I’m not having quite the OMG IT IS THE FUTURE experience that I see in the reviews, but it is a nice piece of work. It’s not $500 nice, for sure, but this is going to kill a lot of what would have been Kindle and Nook sales. It will also light a fire under somebody to get an Android-based tablet experience out the door sooner than later. From a philosophical point of view, though, the thing I can’t stop thinking over and over is “it’s the Dynabook”. Alan Kay’s landmark vision of a super-thin 9×12 tablet weighing not more than two pounds was a theory that drove the development of portable computing for the better part of a half century. And now, this is pretty much it. If Apple gets an edu discount going on these things by August, they are going to sell a trillion of them. One device the size of a magazine, pound and a half – and it’s all your textbooks, all your notebooks, your mail, your TV, your damn near everything. If I were starting college this year, I would move heaven and earth to have one before I headed out the door.
Well, now to see if it can replace the DVR for strategic “V” purposes…

* Look, “can tell time” was not part of the job description when I applied for it. At least I’m going to my review meeting 2 hours early instead of posting for the interview 45 minutes late…

* It’s odd – I didn’t go through Arlington at all on this trip. That makes it a full three years since last I saw that part of the old country other than on Google Earth. I remember the last day, turning in the key in July 2004 and then walking back to where I was parked – it was like all the years rolled back at once and I was standing in 1997 seeing the apartments for the first time.

* There are so many things that are so many years ago now. California is six years this July. Next January, I’m ten years together with my girlfriend-turned-wife. This summer is my twentieth high school reunion. I don’t know why all of this amazes me so much. I probably said this already elsewhere, but 1997 is the midway point; on one side is everything from junior high to leaving grad school and on the other side is everything SINCE grad school. It doesn’t feel like a quarter-century since I was an impressionable young seventh-grader, consumed with comic books and RPGs and vaguely aware of things with two X chromosomes. There’s a big post about the non-linearity of time in there somewhere.

* Speaking of Google, above, DoubleTwist (an open-source iTunes workalike to let you use your music library with other phones) now has an interface to the Android Marketplace. It even has a web version – which means that for the first time, you can practically explore the world of Android apps without an Android device. And based on this, I was able to look and see that there are Android versions of probably 90% of my commonly used iPhone apps – there’s not a Twitter client as polished as Tweetie 2, I don’t think there’s a Tumblr app let alone one as good as the iPhone version, and I’d have to learn to live with the Texts From Last Night website – but almost everything else is there. Facebook, Foursquare, Amazon, DirecTV, MLB At Bat, Absolute Radio, Paypal, Open Table, Urbanspoon, the FCC broadband checker, WordPress, IMDB, Evernote, Midomi Soundhound – all official versions. There are also workalikes for things like Wikipedia readers, wi-fi scanners, movie ticketers, Caltrain and VTA schedulers, RSS readers, even a sleep cycle alarm clock and a lightsaber. The practical upshot is this: there is very little to keep me from replicating the functional equivalent of my iPhone environment on a Nexus One or similar Android device, especially if it includes a mechanism for direct download and playback of podcasts.

* The catch is, though, almost every single one of those apps I mentioned (except for Soundhound, the alarm clock and the lightsaber) is something that under normal circumstances can be used through a web browser, plain and simple. So why all the apps? Convenience? An attempt to refine the interface for a mobile device? (Probably.) And yet as I look through the apps, I notice a lot of apps for multiple services. Foursquare, Gowalla and Whrrl…Yelp, Urbanspoon, Opentable, Geodelic and AroundMe…and obviously Facebook and Twitter. And that’s where the thought clicked:

WE ARE BACK TO 1992. Instead of being segregated into AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, GEnie, and the like – not to mention a crap-ton of BBS outlets – we now have to have a Facebook account, a Twitter account, etc etc. These are not open systems, and are not generally fungible (except insomuch as Facebook has connectivity to them through RSS or whatever). Basically, we’ve come full circle and in the case of Facebook and Twitter are back to having a single entity providing us with a closed communication service. Or put it another way: if your email provider goes down, the rest of the world carries on using email. If Twitter goes down, that pretty much does for everybody. If Facebook goes down – well, not nice to think about, especially since the privacy model changes repeatedly and occasionally they publish everyone’s email without thinking about it. Social networking has created a situation where we are back to largely non-interoperable services and dependence on single providers, only this time there’s even more potential for mischief. Especially in light of the explosive growth of Foursquare and its competitors, who have somehow managed to wheedle us into reporting the details of our life in a manner that I can only assume they will attempt to monetize eventually…

* Actually, that’s the uneasy-making part. Social networking compels us to disclose all manner of things, because we’re only telling our friends. Well, that’s what we’re meant to think. But anything we tell our friends, we’re also telling Facebook, or Twitter, or Foursquare, or Google, and at some point the VCs and angel investors will demand some sort of return on their capital – at which point these entities will find it necessary to use your personal information to make money. Yes, I do continue to use these things – but when I only have maybe half a dozen friends on Foursquare, Buzz, Whrrl, and Gowalla combined, what’s the ratio of communicating with friends vs. preparing a detailed demographic survey to be sold for big bucks in a couple of years?

The problem with these services is that they promote lock-in. Everyone’s on Facebook, because everybody is on Facebook. It’s Metcalfe’s Law run riot – as long as these systems are closed, there can be only one – the more there are, the less likely you are to use them all. Friendster begat MySpace begat Facebook, with each one being effectively killed by its successor – because who wants to update three different social network sites? If there were some sort of interoperability system for social networking, you’d at least have the security that comes with distribution – imagine if email were simply one great big bulletin board with a few rudimentary privacy filters. As it is, I’m getting more and more uneasy every time I check in.

* I may or may not be using a company iPad this time next week. Hmmmmm…

But if you drink nine pints of stout, you won’t really notice.

We closed the 4P’s last night (it’s always and forever the 4Ps, no matter what the sign out front says) – half of a dozen of us, in the old style, knocking down pint after pint and fortifying ourselves on THE GREATEST POTATO SOUP ANYWHERE and roaring along in actually pretty good harmony. We sang the old rebel songs with our own modifications, and when the band didn’t play them, we put them on the jukebox and belted them out. I may or may not have stood on the table for “Sweet Home Alabama” despite the fact that it’s not particularly MY sweet home…all we lacked was the Chernobyl cloud of pipe smoke overhead, which you don’t get in any bar in DC anymore.

I haven’t been back to Arlington, and I may not get there, and that would be fine – so many times, trips like this take on the feel of visiting the place where they shot a movie you saw long ago. Even now, everything feels slightly unreal – even the old route home down Rock Creek Parkway and onto 66 felt familiar, but it’s not like I was never gone. Tyson’s Corner was almost unrecognizable, even inside the mall once I oriented myself. Names, places, things that I remember on the periphery of my consciousness – stuff that I’m sure was critical once, problem users and implacable foes and girls who walked out of the cafeteria line like it was a runway show – so much of it barely rings a bell anymore.

We’re old. We’re none of us getting younger, and the other five guys around the table last night represented twelve kids back home (ten of them girls – you don’t think God has a wicked sense of humor, think again). For many of them, it was the first trip to the 4Ps since the old days – or at least since we were last in town in 2007. We couldn’t do this on the regular anymore even if we wanted to – it’s damn near impossible to synchronize babysitting and then throw down the cash (and the bill last night wasn’t a patch on the old days, when we routinely pushed the upper edge of three figures because there were so many of us staying so late.) Even if I’d stayed around, this kind of thing wouldn’t have continued steadily on – maybe my birthday every year, with a little luck, but making it once a month? Not a chance. One person can’t make it, then another, then maybe you feel like you’re in a rut anyway. One guy moves, another gets married, there are kids now, you get out of the habit, and before you know it, it’s been years and years. In fact, when I first walked in and sat down, and looked around at the changes in the menu, and the decor, and the staff, and the jukebox, I had a creeping sense of dread and sadness – that it wouldn’t be the same, that it couldn’t be the same, and that it would only be depressing in the end.

But it wasn’t. It was glorious. It was enough to be able to reach back and touch that part of who I was again – and a great comfort and relief to know it’s still there. Here we go again, we’re on the road again, we’re on the road again, we’re on our way to paradise…