Are my eyes really blue?

* I can’t claim to have been a particular fan of Harry Kalas, but my heart goes out to two generations of fans who don’t know the Phillies any other way. In a world where, as Jerry Seinfeld memorably said, we wind up “rooting for laundry,” the voice of the play-by-play is often the heart and soul of a franchise. Ask the Dodger fans about Vin Scully, or Cal fans about Joe Starkey. For me, obviously, it’s Sonny Jurgensen and Sam Huff, two old guys from another NFL era whose style and sensibility is largely borrowed from those two old Muppets up in the balcony – imagining the Redskins without them is something I’d rather not consider without a stiff drink to hand.

* If a bank is so bothered by restrictions on CEO compensation that they’d rather just give their bailout money back, I question whether they ever needed the money in the first place.

* The old family team is safe in the Scottish First Division, two points behind Partick Thistle. The dream of the SPL will have to be deferred another year, but then, Celtic are only on a one-point lead over the Hun at the moment.

* Speaking of the Hun, I’ve been giving the Anglican Communion another look, albeit from a safe distance – having done the Catholic thing at Easter again, I’m starting to get the sense that I might just want to throw in my lot with a leaner, whippier version of the same. And, I’ll be brutally honest here, one that has a lot lower barrier to entry…although I think that my urgent need to have something, anything, to say I belong to – well, it’s less an issue than it was previously.

* Now that you’ve climbed up there, it’s a hell of a lot higher than it looks, ain’t it? If you seriously think the DHS report about right-wing terrorism* is directed at you, I would strongly suggest you’ve got a tin ear for all the people who spent the last few years saying “what are you gonna think of this kind of government power when Hillary’s President?” Or a guilty conscience. But hey – if you haven’t done anything wrong, what do you have to worry about? (disengage sarcasto-drive)

* Nothing more annoying than being in IT and having someone else’s major IT system go out. Nobody says “Wow, those dumbasses at Core don’t know how to keep an SMTP system running,” they say “Hey you, my email doesn’t work!” Then again, I do have a lot of people who can magically negotiate Yahoo Messenger, AOL Radio and some entertainment blog at once without a hitch – and then, when I ask them to go to a URL and change a setting, they turn into Sammy Sosa testifying before Congress. “Ahh…ummm…no habla Computer.” Say what you like about the youth of America, but I never have this conversation with anybody under 30.

* You know, I think all the coverage of Bo the First Dog is just fine, for two reasons: 1) The dog is named indirectly after Bo Diddley (pray for us) which is an unalloyed good. 2) Covering pictures of a cute puppy is just about the level of intellectual challenge that cable news is capable of handling without hurting themselves. I get the feeling that if I ever kicked down Wolf Blitzer’s door and demanded to know the three constituent parts of the Iron Trangle, he would burst into tears and piss himself.**

* It’s really not good for IT to be regarded as some kind of weird clan of magicians. Largely because people who believe in magic have a poor grasp on things like cause and effect, not to mention the limitations imposed by natural phenomena like time, space, and budgets. Yes, I am very very good at what I do. No, I cannot raise the dead. And even if I could, I wouldn’t start with your Dell POS.

* Dell is shit. That’s right, I said it. If I get my hands on our Dell rep, I’ma give him an Irish blanket party and a wood shampoo that even the immortal Marc Radi would bow before. Dell rep, DEAD. Dell tech, DEAD. Marmalard, DEAD – no sir, Dee Snider ain’t gonna take it anymore and neither are we, sir, brace yourself, for the storm is coming, and Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Chitwood and John Cougar are riding its cresting wave, and by the time you make it back to the surface we’re gonna wing it over to London and jam with Mick and the Stones.

I woke up in a great mood. I don’t know what the hell happened.***

* Bit of a sore point for me, as my hometown is singularly defined by right-wing terrorism to the point that it was nicknamed based on the number of acts that went on routinely.

** As defined in classic political science and public policy, an “Iron Triangle” is the interdependent contrivance of an issue lobby, a Congressional committee, and the executive-branch bureaucracy, the latter two specific to the issue at hand. Go re-read Wildavsky’s book on policy implementation, cleverly titled “Implementation.” See, pretty smart to come up with shit like that, right? Hold the applause…

*** Mike Damone gets a nickel. He probably needs it.

Biggest announcement in technology in some time: this week the iTunes Music Store, the nation’s largest retailer of music (bigger than Amazon, bigger than the Great Arkie Satan, bigger than Target or Tower or Virgin Megastore or Charlemagne Records down on the Southside), went to 100% DRM-free music (and at 256 kbps, no less). This is big for two reasons:

1) No longer can one plausibly claim that the iTMS locks you into Apple products – yes, you have to use iTunes to get at the stuff, but that is free software, and once you have the tracks, they will play just fine on any device capable of handling MPEG-4-standard multimedia. If your device cannot handle the MPEG-4 standard, then your device is a piece of shit and you should replace it.

2) No longer can any online music retailer insist on DRM’d music and expect to succeed. Apple no longer has it, and the one entity I think capable of surpassing Apple in the music sales sphere (that would be Amazon) has never had it as far as I know. It’s going to be damn near impossible for somebody to come in with some non-standard format and convince people to take a flyer. Sony tried it, with some variant of their horribly-named ATRAC format (say it three times real fast and watch the 70s well up around you!) and failed horribly. And Microsoft…

Let’s face it, it was risible when the likes of Steve Ballmer would go out there and say that Windows Media Audio was the format that gave you real choice in your digital music. The choice, of course was between the likes of the Zune format of WMA, the “Plays For Sure” variant of WMA (generally known in the industry as “Plays For Shit” and utterly thrown under the bus by Microsoft when the Zune hit), the prior Windows Music incarnations (some going back to before 2000)…well, the use of an unencrypted MPEG-standard format means that you can go out and get hardware from other providers and still use your iTunes content, so this might actually be good for the hardware business if somebody wants to try to tool up to do to Apple what Apple did to…hell, I don’t know, Creative? Rio?

I say that to reinforce what I said last week: if your next big thing runs on a PC, it’s not the next big thing. Personal computers are still out there and fine for the usual applications, but all the hype in high-tech is in the Web 2.0 – social networking – personal entertainment – smartphone sector. Personal computing is ubiquitous, but it’s also become a commodity experience (something Microsoft isn’t really helping by hammering the “PCs are cheap!” angle). People do the stuff they have to do on a PC, irrespective of OS, but increasingly, they do the stuff they want to do on a Wii, or an XBox, or an iPhone, or a Blackberry, or on whatever web browser is handy to get them to Facebook.

The reason you see Microsoft lunging to advertise now – the reason you see them falling about themselves to take shots at a competitor with one-eighth of the market share in personal computers that WIndows-based systems have* – is because it’s starting to become apparent that the world of high-tech in 2009 is not dependent on Microsoft products in any way. Don’t believe me? There’s a manager at my office who does everything he does on a MacBook Air – the machine I once derided as a mid-life crisis computer, a machine unfit for anyone to use as their sole system. If he doesn’t need Microsoft products as a working lead in Tier 1 IT support…how long before no one does? And if nobody depends on Windows, what exactly does Microsoft have left to sell?

Actually, what do they have to sell? The Zune is the butt of jokes from Washington (the Junks: “I wouldn’t have that piece of S if you paid me to use it”) to Hollywood (Craig Ferguson: “Of course you haven’t heard of the Zune…probably because it Zucks.”). Windows Media just got the nuts cut out from under it vis-a-vis digital music. Windows Mobile got its lunch eaten by RIM in the business market and by Apple in the consumer smartphone space. The XBox 360 is still doing well with hardcore gamers, but got lapped in the mainstream mind by the Wii. In short, once you take away the advantages of incumbency and OS tying…well, it’s not 1995 anymore.

And for that, we can all be grateful.

* Especially risible is the notion that instead of an overpriced pretty pretty Apple that’s only useful as a status symbol and a shiny thing, you should buy…a Sony VAIO. Ask anyone who actually does support for a living what they think of Sony’s laptops. Then plug your ears.

* Bought another Nerf gun, a little $10 thing from Target. Already cut the air restrictors out of it – it’s ridiculous loud but I can sit on the far end of the sofa and hit the front door knob every time without particularly aiming.

* I knew that everyone from Vandy was coming back for next year’s basketball season, but I didn’t realize that the one scholarship addition – John Jenkins of Gallatin – was averaging 42.3 points per game his senior year of high school – #1 in the nation. Assuming that AJ Ogilvy sticks around for his senior season, 2011 could be one hell of a year for the Commodores.

* When you’re being sensible and drinking non-alcoholic spacers between your pints, it’s advisable to use water rather than something with caffeine in it. Especially Red Bull Cola. That stuff hurts you worse than the booze.

* Three ways you know you’re not “technically savvy”:

1) You describe yourself as “technically savvy.”

2) You do comparative laptop shopping by going to Fry’s.

3) You decide that good battery life means buying an HP slab with about 2 hours of real-world battery usage.

* Seriously, there comes a point where if you keep saying things that are demonstrably stupid, you should not continue to have a public forum. I’m not looking at anyone in particular, but let me point out that the FEMA-concentration-camp shtick was tired when Jello Biafra was bloviating about it from the left when I was in HIGH SCHOOL.

* Microsoft can say what they like, but I’ll tell you this: I had a Dell go dead last Tuesday, one under a next-day warranty repair deal. The tech came out Thursday, replaced the power supply and motherboard, and said it needed a graphic card replacement. The tech came out Friday and replaced the graphics card. This morning, the computer failed to boot exactly as on Tuesday. Now I have a freaked out doctor who has a week to go in grant season – the best I can hope for is that she’ll believe me when I say that Dell’s tech needs a wood shampoo and not think “oh, my new IT guy is butt-worthless.”

* Watching footage of Magic Johnson from 1979…and thinking about the matchup with that big kid from Oklahoma who will probably be the number one pick. Is he as good as Magic? Well, he could probably take Magic…but then, you have to remember that Magic is fifty years old and has almost two decades worth of retroviral drugs in him. God knows I got no love for the Lakers, but if I could take any player in his prime to start a team with, the 6-9 “point guard” from Michigan State is my go-to.

* A different doctor said something to me about “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” I finished the entire Macbeth soliloquy for her. I don’t think it’s going to be long before these people are prepared to believe absolutely anything about me.

* Seriously, this isn’t a basketball game, it’s an autopsy. Unless things change drastically, the second half will be rated TV-MA for violence.

* Burger King is still F’ed up beyond recognition vis-a-vis their advertising, but I could have done the rest of my life without seeing a bunch of old college coaches in their shorts. Who the hell’s approving the advertising on CBS?

So the Nerf Maverick is basically the gold standard of office warfare. Sure, you have your little hold-out guns, and you have your big belt-fed tripod-mounted joint, but the Maverick is really the best possible blend of capacity (6 shots before reloading), portability (fits easily under a coat or in a backpack), and rate of fire (single-action, slide-cocked reviolver; can empty the cylinder in ~3 sec). If somebody comes charging into your cubicle, you don’t want to be shooting back with some muzzle-fed trick, especially if it has to be air-pumped.

The Maverick is the standard loadout for the Alabama nephews, so naturally I have one and am well familiar with it. What I didn’t realize is that it is also the standard sidearm of my new work group. Turns out the other half of the team actually *has* the battery-powered belt-fed super-donkey-collider trick. Which means that if the balloon goes up, your boy needs an edge.

Thing is, though, the Maverick uses Nerf mini-darts with suction-cup tips. If you throw down $4 plus tax at Target, though, you can get a 10-pack of “Sonic Micro Darts,” a.k.a. whistletips. And unlike Bubb Rubb’s famous automotive modification, these are definitely not for decoration. Instead of a concave suction cup maximizing your air resistance, these are rounded at the front and have much more of their weight at the front, presumably to maximize the whistling.

Well, I loaded alternating standards and whistletips and did some test shooting* and made some interesting discoveries:

* The whistles go “WOOOOOO” but only about 15 feet from the muzzle.

* From a distance of approximately 6 feet, the Maverick shoots a standard dart about six inches below point of aim. Every slide-step backwards is good for another 4 inches drift and drop, which means that from more than 10 feet away you’re going to have to fire your darts in an arc like some sort of Elvish archer holding off the Orcs at Helm’s Deep* if you want any chance of hitting center of mass on a Tier I-technician-sized target.

* From about 20 feet, the whistletips can be shot more or less to point of aim with negligible drift or drop. I am willing to bet that if you were to tip the muzzle, you could probably put a dart on a technician across the full length of my office, which is 50 feet if it’s an inch.

The standard suction-cup darts are going in the bottom drawer for last-resort backup. From now on, I’m loading out with the whistletips, and anybody who snipes at me from a distance is in for a shock. So really, the question you have to ask yourself is…do you feel lucky, punk? Well do ya?

*Yes, I am a huge, huge, huge geek. I know it, I admit it, and I might as well be good at it.

** Meticulously observing the Four Rules: all guns are always loaded and are treated as such***, never point the muzzle at anything you don’t want to put a bullet through, never put your finger on the trigger unless you are firing, and always know what’s behind your target. Nobody on television – with the conspicuous exceptions of Battlestar Galactica and Torchwood – appears to have any clue about this.

*** If you say “treat it as if it were loaded,” you will invariably get lazy and assume that something isn’t loaded. Assume that every gun, everywhere, all the time, is ready to fire and you’ll be a lot safer, as will everyone around you. It’s amazing how much of this you are made to internalize before your dad will let you handle the BB gun.

So Alabama hired Anthony Grant as the new men’s basketball coach. Everybody seems to be over the moon that they sailed in and got him before Georgia or Virginia could. Apparently he’s one of the names to mention in hot up-and-coming coaches in college basketball.

It was three days into the reporting before I realized that Anthony Grant is most assuredly not white.

The Crimson Tide hired a black coach for arguably their second-highest-profile sport (Sarah Patterson’s gymnastics team and their multiple national championships might have something to say) and nobody thinks to mention it in the reporting?

This is how you make progress…one piece at a time.

…a couple of different people have made a point and I have finally determined what’s wrong with that ad:
It’s not selling anything Microsoft.
It’s selling an HP (and a pretty crap-ass HP at that apparently). No mention of Vista, or WIndows 7, or even XP. Sure, it runs Windows, but it could just as easily run Linux, and with a little scuffling, maybe even Mac OS X (though I doubt anyone involved with the purchase could hack that).
Thing is, though, so will a Mac run Windows, right on the metal – and I believe a boxed copy of Windows makes more money for Microsoft than the licensing fee for a single OEM copy on a new machine.
I think the point from the last post is the same. Microsoft doesn’t have anything that goes along with the current hotness in personal computing – more to the point, nothing in the current hotness depends on Microsoft. And while their market share still dwarfs that of other OS makers (Apple or otherwise), their mindshare is shot to hell.
And oh yes, I am well aware that the redhead is actually an actress. So what? Did you actually think John Hodgman was a personal computer? Grow up.

Seriously, whoever makes Microsoft’s ads these days really needs to be dumped in the desert…or off the Bay Bridge in a sack. The take-home message of their latest ad campaign is that people look for Macs first, but wind up getting a PC because it’s cheap.

Personally, I would say that the additional software and the promise of an OS that doesn’t pick up viruses like a Tennessee co-ed at a family reunion would be a non-trivial consideration, but the take-home point ought to be this (and it’s something that a lot of people don’t seem to grasp): when times are tight – hell, even when they’re not – price is a lesser consideration than value for money. Sure, you can get last year’s Chevy compact for less money than a Honda Civic, but which one’s going to leave you on the side of the road first?

Coupled with Ballmer’s recent remarks about people not wanting to pay $500 for a label, you rapidly start to get a sense of the take-home message for Microsoft in the Great Recession: Apple is a frivolous branding exercise that people won’t spring for in difficult times.

Well yeah – I’m not going to deny that your typical Mac is way way way cooler than some brick-assed PC laptop that’s tarted up with more stickers than a nine-year-old girl’s Trapper Keeper. But bear in mind that you’re talking about an HP Pavilion laptop that PCMag.com described as “last year’s model” – one that can’t address all the memory installed (for some reason, 32-bit Vista can’t cope with 4 GB of RAM) and which shows 1440×900 on a 17-inch display – which isn’t all that hot a pixel density when you can get 9″ laptops that go 1024×600 and 10″ models that do true 720p HD.

Look, can you get a PC cheaper than a Mac? Hells yeah. You can get a PC laptop for $300 if you like, and it’s an incredibly fast-growing segment. Now you also get a Munchkin-scale keyboard, a processor that would have been a rocket in 2003, and no optical media drive at all, but it can be done. That’s because Apple’s not competing on price, they’re competing on value for money. At the high end of the range, too, the so-called “Apple Tax” has largely ceased to exist; the only place the wild disparity continues to exist is at the low end of the market – and that’s a pool that the Monster of Cupertino simply doesn’t fish in. In the end, the sense you get coming away from the ad is that the Windows machine isn’t the first choice, but it’ll have to do because it’s cheap. Which has more or less been the case for years and years – I just didn’t expect Microsoft to advertise with it.

But here’s the dagger of the whole thing: it doesn’t matter any more. What are the hottest things in high-tech right now? Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. Hulu. What’s the common thread? It doesn’t matter what platform they run on. In fact, the hottest thing in high tech right now is mobility computing, being driven by RIM and Palm and Google – and the iPhone. A common refrain in the Valley is “if your next big thing only runs on a PC, it’s not the next big thing.”

In 1950, NBC launched The Big Show, hosted by Tallulah Bankhead (I would say “pray for us” but Alabama’s greatest daughter is about as far from a saint as you can get without committing actual murder). It was blockbuster programming in every way: top-notch writers, A-list celebrity guests, outstanding music. And it died in two years, having lost a million dollars, because it was a radio show – and a different form of media was taking over. Microsoft is making quite a stand, but when it comes to truly personal computing, I tend to winder whether the sub-$1000 laptop will last against the sub-$200 smartphone.

I couldn’t have been in the gym more than 15 minutes but I can barely move my arms. I think it’s the connect points for the triceps at the elbow – whatever it is, they’re sore as hell and I have overexerted myself. SHOCKER. Naturally I have eaten a bunch of Advil and such, but it guarantees that I will not be able to to go work on anybody with a pipe wrench for their projector-based malfeasance. Instead, I will go over and run some calls on my primary group, who love me. I think. Strong like, anyway.

Speaking of malfeasance, I saw nothing in yesterday’s morning highlight reel to disabuse me of this notion: the principal problem of “Washington Insiders” has nothing to do with elected officials or career bureaucrats, but with 20 years of the same donks covering the same things and forming a self-reinforcing echo chamber so inbred that I’m surprised they don’t burn couches for Big East wins. (Cheap shot at the Baboon there.) Seriously, inbreeding reduces IQ, and if you listen closely to the questions last night, you can see that we’ve sunk a long, long way from the kind of people who used to holler on the POTUS.

You know how I can tell? Because the intelligent questions are coming from web guys and Ebony and outlets that have traditionally not had that kind of access. So they actually take it seriously and do their work and try to ask smart shit. Meanwhile, that clown from Fox, who is soiling the perfectly good first name of St. Ogilvie (pray for us), is too bloody stupid to understand what a reserve currency is. Here’s a hint: you don’t get it out of the ATM or change it for dollars when you fly in from abroad. The new guy from NBC is way way WAY over his head – Chucky is like one of those NFL coordinators who gets hailed as a genius, gets hired away for a head coaching gig with another team, and gets that Lauer-in-the-headlights look (ZOMG SEE WHAT I DID THERE HA HA) when it comes time to actually run a whole team. (Actually, like most newly promoted and unready head coaches, he grasps for what would have worked out great four or five seasons ago, which explains a lot about how the Redskins donked off 7 of their last 9 this year.) And as for CNN – nobody I know watches CNN or takes it seriously, not for any partisan reasons, but because the channel that used to be first in and last out in places like Baghdad or Tienanmen Square is now the Octomom Channel, at least when Larry King’s not pooping on himself again.

You know how I know these people are idiots? How about Obama just rolled out the much-remarked-upon “Geithner plan,” the thing that basically turns the US into the world’s largest hedge fund manager, the presumed last best hope short of nationalization, something that’s oddly pacified Wall Street while causing most liberal economists to flip out? I mean, this is a seriously big deal with major implications for where we go from here.

No questions about the Geithner plan. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Don’t believe me? Read the transcript.

This is not even taking into account the fact that a certain morning program thought the best solo commentator they could ask about said presser was an opposition leader who actually spent the evening at a Britney Spears concert.

Seriously, people: the enemy isn’t conservatism, or liberalism, or Democrats or Republicans. The enemy is bullshit. And it’s got the best-organized permanent lobby in Washington.

ETA: But then again, sometimes you can drown in your own bullshit, i.e. today’s “budget” rollout. If I made a living as an elected Republican, I would probably have gone home tonight and stuck a gun in my mouth.

If you have an 11 AM presentation, and call at 10:20 to ask your offsite support to bring a laptop you can use for it, and they can’t get there until 11:05, and they’re coolly yet inwardly frantically trying to get your trilobite-encrusted projector to work with the one spare Acer POS that was available after a half hour search through all of IT…do NOT ask the room if they have any issues for the IT guy while he’s here.

Well, I mean, strictly speaking you COULD do that. But you should probably have somebody else start your car for you. For a while. I’m just sayin’.

http://blog.al.com/bn/madness

The Birmingham News is shaking down a field of 64 to determine Alabama’s top musical icon. Check out the field and be amazed. Say what you like about my old state – God knows I do – but you have to concede that the Heart of Dixie punches well above its weight when it comes to American music in the 20th century, from W.C. Handy to American Idol.