Are my eyes really blue?

RIP John Hughes, even if I never saw most of his pics until I was out of the demographic. The only one I saw somewhat contemporaneously was Pretty In Pink which I saw in March of ’87. Later, I managed to see The Breakfast Club (night before undergrad graduation) Sixteen Candles (grad school?) and of course Ferris, but the thing I always take away from his movies is that they somehow wound up with a happy ending. The only true-life finish that ever happened in a John Hughes movie was that Duckie answered the bell at prom time and got ditched for the preppy kid. And then of course they had to screw it up by throwing him a pneumatic blonde as a lovely parting gift.

Honestly, the only remotely accurate locker movie EVER is the best one ever made…Heathers.

* The great struggle of our time is Pre- versus Post-Enlightenment. The problem is that you cannot get the pre-Enlightenment true-believer to reply to post-Enlightenment stimuli (more crudely put, you can’t reason with the Taliban) which creates…issues, whether in Afghanistan or Alabama.

* Google’s Chrome OS (which I take to basically be Chrome browser + Google Gears + a Linux kernel and drivers enough to run netbook-grade hardware) is interesting to me because it threatens to make the netbook a net-book again. The One Laptop Per Child project produced the XO-1, which was sort of a proof of concept but never got to be as cheap as they hoped. However, it led to the likes of the Asus EEE and the current crop of netbooks, which are laptops. Small, cheap, weak laptops, but laptops nonetheless, with Windows (or similar), local storage with locally-installed binary applications, etc etc. Chrome threatens to get even leaner and lighter than that: imagine a machine which you turn on and get A Browser And That’s All. How long can you go in Just A Browser? Actually, pretty far, if you’re willing to do it all in the cloud – recall all the stuff on my previous List Of Google S, and consider that if you throw in Gears for offline mail handling and document composition, etc, you could actually get a hell of a lot done. And if all you need to handle is a browser, a TCP/IP stack, and drive a screen, keyboard and trackpad plus either Wi-Fi or WWAN or both, you eliminate the need for very much RAM or storage or most everything else.

* Which means that if you have an XO-1, you basically can have the Google netbook already – just open the browser and go to it. (God knows the Sugar interface is worthless for almost anything else.) This doctrine of just-enough-hardware-to-run-a-browser is pretty much the Palm Pre in a nutshell, too, and the iPhone and G1 aren’t far off. You could make it big enough to see, light enough to travel, sell out on battery life since you don’t need room for too many other components – hell, scale the iPod Touch up to 6×9 or so and you’d damn near have it. The implications for the local rumors du jour are left as an exercise for the reader.

* My friend is getting her sister back. This makes me happy.

* All you Freudians looking side-eye at my research on airsoft and Nerf guns: feck off.

* After twenty years with a bad knee and two years of post-surgery, I’m FINALLY getting around to rehabbing it. I also have a pass for the gym at my office, at long last. The goal, such as it is, is to try to get myself semi-healthy in short order. To be honest, I’d settle for being able to hike up the hill to the stadium without getting winded and to slim back down to a 36 waist for the first time in a decade or so. God knows I need a new pair of jeans anyway…

* I’m still getting by fine on my iPhone 3G, but I’m having the same trouble most smartphone owners have: if you *use* it as a smartphone, checking mail and reading RSS and surfing the web and listening to some music, it will not last a full day roaming around the city unless you turn off Wi-Fi, turn off 3G, turn off push notifications after dinnertime and use an iPod Shuffle to catch up on your three hours worth of podcasts. And even then, you’re coming back running awful light. Of course, your mileage may vary. You may travel with friends and be too polite to constantly check your phone during otherwise civilized conversation. =)

* From the Bureau of Ouch: this week’s featured Coca-Cola Championship match on Setanta is West Brom vs.Newcastle. That’ll leave a mark…

* I have two conflicting and irreconcilable impulses that run my life. One is a deep and compelling need to keep other people out of my S, and to stay out of their S. The other, apparently, is a deep and compelling need to be a stupendous badass and save the day. So the question is: how does a guy whose biggest need is not to be responsible for other people’s S wind up as an emergency responder – not only for his neighborhood but for his place of work? For that matter, how does such a person wind up making a decade’s career in TECH SUPPORT?

Now things are getting interesting, with the news that Eric Schmidt is off the board at AAPL. Officially, it’s because things like Chrome and Android and the forthcoming netbook OS are moving Google into competition with Apple, and Schmidt has to recuse himself from so much as a result that he can no longer be an effective board member. Unofficially, the FCC probe into what’s happening with Google Voice on the iPhone is probably accelerating what was inevitable anyway.
First things first: nobody wants to separate carrier and service more than I do. We have a third-world mobile infrastructure in this country, and that’s an insult to the third world, which usually has a much more robust system than the US has. Part of the reason is because we have no interoperability between carriers – for the average non-techie consumer, the only way you can change carriers and keep your existing phone is to go from T-Mobile to AT&T after spending enough time/money with T-Mob that they will unlock your phone. If you get an unlocked phone or are willing to unlock it, you can go the other direction as well. You could kind of sort of go between Sprint and Verizon, maybe, but you need their help and consent since they register phones by ESN rather than SIM card. And you can’t go from AT&T or T-Mobile to Verizon or Sprint, because we have two technologically incompatible wireless systems in this country.
In developing the iPhone, Apple didn’t have a choice – as stated before, if you want a GSM phone that works in both frequency bands, your choice is AT&T, period. They did try some other things – home activation, for one – that gave some indication that it might be possible to change the way things are done. That went right away with the iPhone 3G, though, as did the pricing – the iPhone 3G had the same carrier subsidy as every other phone, because selling the phone at retail is financially uncompetitive when every other phone is $200 off with a 2-year contract.
For all intents and purposes, the iPhone is no different from any other smartphone on AT&T’s network, with one exception: Apple has control of the App Store. Which means that unlike the Blackberry, for instance, all apps come from one place and can be throttled as needed. Example: last year, a Slingbox client for the iPhone was produced. AT&T balked, changed their terms of service, and now the client only works on Wi-Fi. Not only was the Google Voice app rejected, but all third-party GV apps were yanked from the store at the same time. Apple doesn’t really have a motive for doing this, but AT&T has every incentive to shut off GV access, as it has the potential not only to turn AT&T into a dumb pipe carrier but to cut in on possibly the most lucrative thing AT&T has: text messaging.
See, SMS is part of the GSM standard. SMS messages are not data as such – they are piggybacked on the control channels for the GSM network. They’re freebies on signals that have to carry through anyway – which is why text messaging holds up in times and places where you can’t hold a phone call long enough to let it ring – but in the last couple of years, the cost has doubled to 20 cents a pop, sending OR receiving. Most carriers have covered it by saying “ALL messages are now the same, 20 cents” but the fact of the matter is that this is nearly the only place on Earth that charges on the send AND the receive, and raised the price of text messaging despite the complete absence of any technical requirement that would cost them more.
Google Voice has its own SMS.
Google Voice, in short, has the potential to reduce any cell carrier to a dumb pipe provider. Think AT&T wants that? Given that their network can’t handle the data traffic they have now?
God rest Deep Throat’s soul, he was right: follow the money.

No, seriously.

Let’s start with a fact that is indisputable: AT&T sucks. This is not up for debate. The sky is blue, the grass is green, Tennessee football players have carnal knowledge of cattle, and AT&T sucks.

Stipulate further that Apple really didn’t have a choice. There are four national mobile phone carriers. T-Mobile only has 1900 Mhz coverage without roaming. Verizon uses CDMA technology and wanted to second-guess Steve Jobs and Jonny Ive on interface design. Sprint? Don’t make me laugh. If you want to build a phone for the whole world, and start in the US, your only call is AT&T Wireless (or Cingular, as it was at the time). In retrospect, the fact that Apple got as many concessions as they did is proof of the Reality Distortion Field.

Now, however, AT&T has a problem – the iPhone is so successful that its user base is growing faster than AT&T can build out infrastructure to support it. iPhone users consume orders of magnitude more data that other smartphone users, which means that 3G capacity will get maxed out. In places like San Francisco or New York, it will get pummeled. There are countless stories of people who had iPhones and gave up, simply because it was impossible to get any kind of reliable service from AT&T. It has reached the point where I am, for the first time, actively considering whether to a) jailbreak my iPhone or b) consider a different smartphone altogether.

See, I wasn’t kidding when I said Google’s G1 was the first iPhone challenger worth taking seriously. I look at the things I use the iPhone for – podcast download and playback, social network stuff (FB, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc), RSS feed reading, tracking public transit in the Bay Area, making dinner reservations on OpenTable, Wikipedia lookups, programming the DirecTV DVR, directions on Google Maps…let’s face it, 90% of this stuff can be done on the G1 right now, and unlimited messaging and data on the G1 is a third the price of the iPhone. And while 3G is limited to T-Mobile’s exclusive 1700Mhz band, and it’s not built all the way out, it could hardly be more overtaxed than AT&T’s ever-tardy 3G.

Sure, I’d be giving up MobileMe, but there’s Google Mail, Google Calendar, a contact system that links with Google Voice, it all links with iCal and Mail on the Mac through the same iSync, I could replicate my own setup without a hitch and save several bucks a month…

…hold up.

Mobile Me = Google Mail + Google Calendar + Google Photos

iWork or Office = Google Docs.

Loopt/Foursquare/Dodgeball = Latitude.

All your calling, SMS, visual voicemail, Skype and IM = Google Voice and Gtalk

WordPress and half a dozen others = Blogger

RSS = Google Reader

Navigation = Google Maps

And that’s without taking into account 1-800-GOOG-411, Google SMS, the iGoogle portal, or – be honest – probably 99.999% of all your web searches since about 2001. And if you live in Mountain View, California, Google may even be your ISP.

Microsoft was the great devil of Web 1.0, but let’s face it – all they had was an OS, a browser and an office suite. The hottest things going now are smartphones (Microsoft’s smartphone OS has never stopped sucking), social networking (Microsoft hasn’t got one), location-based services…the thing is, Microsoft’s entire world has always been about owning the OS space with Windows and making sure everything needed Windows to work. And right now, of all the new hotness, none of it – not one single solitary bit – depends on Windows.

But Google…

When’s the last time you used Bing, or Cuil, Teoma, or WolframAlpha, or anything else for more than a couple of test searches the day of launch? Who are you using for webmail? How about IM? When you need directions, where do you go? Mapquest? LiveEarth? Just today, NewsGator – maker of the most popular RSS reader for iPhone or Macintosh, NewNewsWire – announced that Google Reader is replacing their own web service on the back end of those apps. Think about this: if you had to give up every single Google service, how well would you day-to-day computing life go?

Microsoft had your desktop. Google has your data. And the only thing standing between your data and a reign of terror that would make Bill Gates look like Winnie the Pooh is the vague promise “Don’t be evil.” Is Google evil? No more than any other company. Certainly not more evil than Apple, for instance. Far less evil than your typical cable company or baby Bell. But knowing what the world is like, and knowing where virtue ranks among American business metrics, are you prepared to hang your online livelihood on “don’t be evil”?

Once again, as ever, we return to President Reagan’s old Russian maxim: “trust, but verify.”

2004.

On July 14, I arrived in Silicon Valley. On August 5, I accepted a job offer. In between was a strange, strange time.

It was kind of disorienting, to go from another sweltering DC summer to a place where you had no air conditioning and had to heap blankets on the bed at night against the icy cool of the attic fan. It was more disorienting to suddenly have no pager, no ticket queue, and no idea where to find anything. I mean, I had spent plenty of time in the Valley over the previous three years, make no mistake, but I had never had to drive anywhere and I was literally lost anytime I ventured onto the roads.

Ideally, arriving would have meant being ushered into a big room where Ah-nuld, Gavin, Himself, and a couple other political and industry big wheels would have been filling me in on points of geography, culture, and general California aptitude, in one of those big empty rooms where the entire floor is the viewscreen and you get Star Wars-style holography. Didn’t happen.* Instead, I took it upon myself and my Saturn, with its 195K miles on the odometer and bad radiator fan and thermostat, to drive around and try to get some sense of up and down.

I don’t remember much from those first few days. I remember it was always cold at night, though not always foggy, and it seems like we were always in the other car and the moonroof was always open. I also remember that the total uptime on my laptop was 56 days before I rebooted it. I got sick, with no insurance to speak of, and shelled out a bunch of cash to the family doctor who gave me a HUGE sack of sample-size drugs in return. I had godawful reception on my T-Mobile phone(s), although that could have been a neighborhood thing – but within three months, I had crawled back to AT&T, which was a mistake in retrospect. I ended up selling the SonyEricsson for a fraction of what I’d paid for it. I also wound up in a marching band for a couple of months – how I happened to have my trombone here and not in a closet back in the Old Country, I’ll never know. I also picked up a ham radio license, which I wouldn’t actually make use of for almost five years.

All this is by way of saying that it’s been a while. What reminded me of all this? Probably the time spent in the city lately, which has been protracted and in the company of out-of-towners. Especially the other half of Team Black Swan – having them here was not only like vacation for us, it also gave me a chance to see everything anew five years on. Plus it has been COLD at night lately.

I guess all this is by way of saying that this regeneration may have finally been into an honest-to-God Californian. Although we’ll have to wait for the DNA tests to come back and see if they’re positive for tobacco aversion.

* Although I hear Google has this.

from the Compost:

In other pockets of the state, the reaction to Democratic proposals has been strong, too. At a recent town-hall meeting in suburban Simpsonville, a man stood up and told Rep. Robert Inglis (R-S.C.) to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.”

“I had to politely explain that, ‘Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,’ ” Inglis recalled. “But he wasn’t having any of it.”

A few thoughts, after the link/jump (for strategic spoiler purposes)…

Continue reading “Torchwood: Children of Earth”

People who don’t think the President of the United States is an American citizen don’t get to say shit about grown-up politics. So from now on, anybody who wants to participate in the process has to answer “Do you think the President is a citizen of the United States?” Any answer other than an immediate “Duh, of course, what the fuck else would he be?” means you go sit in the corner and shut the fuck up until the paint thinner and meth wear off, you fucking hillbilly retard.

I’m sick of this shit. Birthers, truthers, people who think Hillary shot Vince Foster and the Jews caused 9/11 and the Bush family is buying up South American water rights – you don’t get to play. Times are tough and this shit is hard, and it’s tough enough to sort it out without having to indulge a bunch of mental defectives.

(What really blows my mind is the percentage of a percentage who think Barack Obama is a secret Muslim AND approve of the job he’s doing. Ummm…o-kayyyyyy, but can you actually die of cognitive dissonance?)

Any member of the United States Senate who voted to continue the F-22 fighter jet – a program the SecDef doesn’t want to continue, a program the Air Force doesn’t want to continue – should be barred from ever complaining about the deficit again, on pain of being clubbed to death with a crowbar on the National Mall.
Money spent on shiny explodey things counts just the same as any other money. Anybody who thinks different is too fucking stupid for anything more intellectually challenging than sports talk radio.

…is the name for the Harry Potter Educational Foundation’s 2009 conference in San Francisco. Thirteen years ago, I made the online acquaintance of somebody who turned out to be sort of a big deal in the world of Potter fandom – and tonight, the wife and I met her in person for the first time. And when she got pulled away from dinner by another crisis – apparently, running a convention like this is rather like herding cats made out of gasoline and flint – she said “you have to come to the ball.” So we did, for a bit anyway, and were treated to quite the spectacle, mostly of a lot of costumed people going nuts for music that I am pretty sure wasn’t even out when they were born. (I’m thinking specifically of Journey here…but it is San Francisco, you’ve got to play it).

And it occurred to me: this is all down to the Internet. Sure, there would be fans of stuff, and some of them might get in touch, but in my youth, the most you could probably hope for would be a book club down at the public library. (I’m thinking specifically here of the Doctor Who fan club that occasionally showed episodes brought over from the UK in a room at the East Lake public library, which I popped in on maybe three times in high school.) But plug in a router, fire up a laptop, and holy shit, you can bring in people from all over.

I also want to know what it is about me that makes me conversational catnip for lesbians named Michelle. It’s starting to get ridiculous.

Most of all, though, it’s gratifying to have finally made it to the Tonga Room, even if I had to walk up Nob Hill in a pair of Docs to get there. I will be going back, you can bet on that – but you can bet even more that it won’t be on foot. It’s also true what they say about Zombies – take two at most. Take three and you’re under the weather, take four and you’re under the host.*

* Redd Foxx gets a nickel. Which he probably had to turn around and hand to Dorothy Parker.