Are my eyes really blue?

The first viable smartwatch is no more. Pebble, which became the one proof that maybe you could buy hardware through Kickstarter, has been officially eaten by Fitbit, the leader (and in many ways last brand standing) in the fitness-wearable market.

This is a software deal, mostly, and in its way it makes sense: Pebble has the only platform-agnostic smartwatch worth mentioning. Fitbit is the only largely-successful maker of wearable fitness devices, to the point of becoming almost Kleenex-esque; makers like Withings and Jawbone and even Nike have found their space diminished (in Nike’s case, to the point of giving up and throwing in their lot with Apple). Only Fitbit seems to be having any success, much like only Apple seems to have any traction left in the “smartwatch” space now that even Motorola has chosen not to ship a new device to go with Android Watch 2.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s probably a good match. Fitbit’s hardware is generally well-regarded, while the Pebble was at least an existence proof that a smartwatch could be a viable product. Combine the two and you can come up with a fitness tracker that’s at least capable of more than just ringing and showing you have an incoming text, potentially. Even if Fitbit isn’t interested in going much beyond the notifications, they could at least use Pebble for a richer slice of “next event and who’s calling”.  Given that the smartwatch market isn’t going much of anywhere, a Pebbit (Fibble?) might have a longer runway than either would have separately.

But ultimately, the market isn’t at a point where Ed Earl Brown needs something on his wrist to tell him his phone beeped. I get good use out of my Apple Watch to prompt me to fill those three rings every day – and to use the Breathe app to try to get my heart rate down without eating more Xanax, and for the glance-ability of time and temperature and next appointment – but I’ve repeatedly demonstrated that if I don’t actually have it, I get by just fine with the watch I bought myself for my 40th birthday that I anticipate lasting the rest of my life. Smartwatches may just turn out to be another shibboleth for people with more money than sense.

Of which.

* It’s always strange going back through December posts. It’s clear that I started to really sour on the direction this country was taking in 2010, and reading on into 2011 it seems like we’ve been on track to get where we are now for quite some time – but I’m trying not to think about that. Instead, I look at things like how I finally splashed out on the Navy surplus peacoat in December 2010. I love it, it’s a big wearable horse blanket of a thing – but I don’t get a lot of chances to wear it. If I’m lucky, November through mid-February, and maybe two weeks in January if I’m not lucky. But it looks right on me somehow. It feels right on me somehow. It’s exactly the coat I needed back in the era of “wear big heavy coat to work, take it off because the heat is turned up to 76 in the office”.

* In 2008, Vanderbilt limped to the finish line of a 6-6 season by losing to UT and Wake. In 2011, they won their sixth game on the road against Wake to make a bowl happen. In 2012 and 2013, a bowl was locked up before time to slice the turkey. And way back in 2005, they beat UT on the road – but only to get to 5 wins.  Something has shifted in the last decade or so with Vanderbilt; the baseline expectation has grown to 5 or 6 rather than 3 or 4. And it’s achievable; we’ve beaten UT 3 of the last 5 and gone to five bowls (counting this season) in the last decade after going to three in history before that. The bar has moved ever so slightly, and even if it’s only enough to get us to the Iowa State level, it’s a positive sign for the future of the program. Now’s the time to raise money and invest even more in it, because we have the existence proof that 6 wins is reproducible in a non-Brigadoon setting. Sustainable? Maybe, maybe not. More sustainable with stadium renovations and facility upgrades? Maybe.

* I’d like to welcome the rest of the country to the search for American manufacturing. It’s over here behind my new shipments of Flint & Tinder boxers and American Giants slubby black T-shirts and LC King Pointer Brand jeans. With the acquisition of the workout shorts and finding the two old short-sleeve button-ups to go with the polos and hula shirts, I daresay I’m just about set to possibly wear an all-American wardrobe at any time (so long as I stay in California with its standards of dress). I even have that Moto X, for as long as it lasts (not long, the way it performs, but still). I’ve had my money where my mouth is for longer than Google kept it there.

* I got the Kindle in 2010, I think, and the iPad mini was bought on Boxing Day 2013. The Kindle gave up the ghost a couple of months ago, but that iPad keeps chugging along just fine, able to run iOS 10 and perfectly suitable as a replacement for a personal laptop in every way that matters to me. Given that our corporate turnaround on hardware is three years, the notion that a tablet will do for three-plus is very reassuring – and because it’s a tablet, the battery is big enough that three years worth of wear and tear isn’t as crippling as it is on a smartphone (as that Moto hits three years old and groans under the load of a two year old Android version that doesn’t even get updates anymore).

*Every year at the holidays, I swear that this is the year I cut down on the soda, do more to exercise, try to unplug from the wider world and engage with my local reality rather than disappearing into social media or the like. I think in 2017, I’m going to have to do it for real. I’ve already killed my primary Twitter (and not really missed it at all), I’ve firewalled all the political stuff into a separate account that only gets looked at once every couple of days at most, I’ve trimmed the political RSS feeds down to almost nothing, I’ve started stockpiling lists of things to read and watch for distraction. More on this later. But there are other things I want to do in 2017. I’m going to actually try to develop a new hobby: saltwater fishing. (Stop laughing. I caught a lingcod off Davenport last weekend.) I’m thinking of forcing the issue on exercise by increasing my Vasper visits. I may even try to go back to taking the train (though I doubt that will last, just because driving to work when I can pull between 40 and 50 mpg is relaxing and convenient).

* If I could somehow bottle the feeling of beating Tennessee in football and putting on WIzzard’s “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” I would basically never need another pharmaceutical for the rest of my life.

…the traditional reflection on what if there’s no playoff and bowl tie-ups are as they were when I was in high school at the end of the college football season.  Without further ado:

SUGAR BOWL: ALABAMA vs OHIO STATE. This basically becomes the de facto national title game, and it’s tough to quibble with it.

ROSE BOWL: PENN STATE vs WASHINGTON. This is the game to see who gets a bite if Alabama loses but Ohio State is unconvincing. If one of these teams blows the other out, 

ORANGE BOWL: CLEMSON vs OKLAHOMA. None of the Florida teams are strong enough to displace Clemson by a long shot, and Oklahoma is the best of the old Big 8 teams (which are carrying the “Big” “12” at this point).

COTTON BOWL: OKLAHOMA STATE vs MICHIGAN. A hell of a matchup occasioned by the fact that the B1G is as topheavy as the SEC isn’t (Seriously, Auburn backs into the Sugar Bowl in our world? Tennessee had a shot at doing so? Are you kidding me with this shit?)

FIESTA BOWL: WISCONSIN vs USC. The leftover bowl gets the Best Of The Rest and this should be entertaining, if nothing else. (Seriously, the B1G is out of control.)

PEACH BOWL, SINCE APPARENTLY THE BOWL WHERE VANDY PLAYED TEXAS TECH IN 1974 IS A BIG DEAL NOW: COLORADO vs FLORIDA STATE, because who gives a shit.

Now, here’s the twist: if you go back to the actual conference alignments, that means Penn State is out of the Rose Bowl.  In that case, you get Bama vs Penn State and Ohio State vs Washington, and a situation where if Penn State wins, the Rose Bowl winner has a case to make for a national title. Plus, Ohio State is your B1G champ. It’s also possible that since the Orange Bowl tie-up was the Big 8 and not the ACC, you might just get Bama-Clemson in a straight fight. Point being: there is one undefeated Power 4+1 team, and none of the other contenders have a clear-cut case why they deserve the spot more than the other two. So, how is this situation any better than it was in 1990? Now we get two games to a finish, and if you’re a power conference team with one loss you’re free-rolled in – although actually winning that conference, or your head-to-head record, no longer matter.

Other thoughts:

1) The case for SEC supremacy is kind of feeble given that the second-best team ranked out at 14. Meanwhile, the B1G has 4 teams in the top 8. The delta between the SEC’s top and second teams in the playoff rankings is the largest of any conference. Alabama may be the Death Star, but the rest of the league is thirteen stormtroopers.

2) The Ol’ Bald Poach got Penn State to the Rose Bowl. There is no god but Loki in college football.

3) In the playoff top 25: Western Michigan, Pitt, Temple, Navy. Not in the top 25: any team from the entire old Southwest Conference. No Texas, no Aggie, no Houston or Texas Tech. Not for nothing did I use “Power 4+1” – take West Virginia out, which makes NO sense, and the “Big” “12” has all of two teams in the top 25. 

 

Compared to years past, the B1G is the new SEC, the SEC is the new Big XII, and the “Big” “12” is the new Big East. We’re starting to see the outline materializing for four sixteen-team superconferences and a possible path forward. And if your conference title and head to head record is less important than your overall standings…you’re in the NFL. Might not be the worst outcome.

2000 was my third Christmas without my father. It was the second one spent in Alabama. I was single, and the Christmas season had just begun to make that feel like it might not be a good thing. And it wasn’t like past holidays, because my two closest high school friends had decamped to farther climes – so the old days of coming back and hanging out were done. 

It was a tough time to be back home, fraught with memory and the realization that nothing would be the same. My brother was newly divorced and his one kid was less than two years old – not much to relate to. The whole house was awash in a dark cloud, and that was before taking into account the effects of the election. It was a cold, sad, grim week of sitting around waiting and wondering what the new world looked like. And Christmas Day was the worst – you unwrap presents, such as they are, you eat your biscuits and strawberries and watch the Blue-Gray Game, and then it’s 3 PM and there’s precious little to do but sit and be miserable and hope that someone – in a world where cellphones mostly don’t do SMS, wifi is almost nonexistent and social media as we know it IS nonexistent, where you need a laptop and a cable to plug it into when at home – will be online to chat. 

But I gutted it out, got on the plane  the next day and flew home to Northern Virginia. And remarkably, when I got there, I had communication from my two best friends in DC: we’re going down the pub. And so that night, I was with my friends in the Irish public house of our frequency, knocking down pints and singing along, and we had a grand old time. 

It’s a useful reminder: you never know where life is going to go in the month after Christmas, and sometimes you just need to get by with a little help from your friends. 

 “Something was different last year, and if I had to put a finger on it, I’d say it’s when we all collectively realized that there may not be a happy ending.  Stupid keeps winning, ignorance keeps winning, racism and bigotry keep bubbling up even as we get traction on gay marriage, the climate keeps changing, the drought goes on, Congress gets more worthless and the media that covers it gets even more so, sports becomes ever more rigged and gimmicked and sports media gets ever more shrill and predictable, and the tech boom shoots money out of a firehose at complete assholes while everyone else tries to scrape by in a world where a suburban 3-bedroom townhouse can cost a million dollars.”

-27 Jan 2015
 
Well, almost two years on, there you have it. Pretty much exactly the no-happy-ending I predicted. We lost containment – stupid has always been mass-produce-able with unskilled labor and we’ve let it out of the box. Couple it with Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and boom, an unlimited supply of useful idiots. 
 
Please spare me the shock at the “fake news.” Shirley Sherrod. The birth certificate. The Clinton Chronicles. Vince Foster. Yellowcake and tubes. We don’t need Russia to feed us fake news and haven’t for decades when we have Fox and the New York Times and forwardable email. It takes a lot of damn gall for the newspaper of Howell Raines and Judith Miller to lecture about fake news. Politics went post-factual twenty years ago and nobody cared because “opinions differ” and “the truth is somewhere in the middle” rather than where the damned facts are. It’s how Hillary Clinton, whose issue positions were largely indistinguishable from those of a sitting president with 58% approval, could lose: not because of ten months of fake news but because of the twenty five years of it previously.

As much as Mark Zuckerberg wants to throw his hands in the air and say “not it,” that excuse doesn’t hold water. Facebook – and the Internet more generally – has a way of giving equal footing to every opinion, and if the Internet is how you get your news, then you’re getting all the filtering mechanisms stripped out. Time was, a major print newspaper or network news broadcast carried a certain weight of credibility, but if a spam site in Macedonia has equal firepower, it’s time to consider than maybe the Internet isn’t a force for good in democracy and informing the public. Which means that I was wrong, Dr. Pride, and maybe nobody owes me a PhD after all. Sorry about that.
 
Look at the world the last 10 years: Prop 8 in California, Brexit in the UK, and now we have this. If there’s one lesson to take away, let it be this: Nothing is unthinkable anymore. We can no longer say “that could never happen” because it fucking well did. If the state that the rest of the country identified with uncontrolled radical liberalism can outlaw gay marriage by popular vote, if the UK can slit its own throat in world markets and set its economy on the precipice, if we can elect a tabloid figure and walking Reddit board President of the United Fucking States, anything is possible. Delete the words “it couldn’t happen here” from your vocabulary. It could. It can. It has already. Stop pretending there are guardrails, that there are cultural barriers and historical precedents that keep everything from going off the rails, because there fucking aren’t. Don’t rely on anyone else to make the case, to do the job, to hold the line. This is not self-correcting. This will not all come out in the wash. This has to be actively reversed, and that takes work. Demographics won’t handle it in 10 years if nobody votes. Senators won’t balk at touching the third rail if it doesn’t shock them to touch it. The good guys can’t win with 48 percent.

So what happens now? Gonna have to fight. Gonna have to push back. To the last man, to the last trench, to the last vote, to the last ballot, to the last dollar, to the last day of the American experiment – we fight. Right now, Hillary Clinton has over two million more votes than the candidate who got elected. Never let that go. Never shut up about that. Never take the light off the fact that this person was elected with fewer votes than his opponent. There is no mandate. There is no moral authority. There is no blank check. For all his caterwauling and conspiracy-mongering, Donald Trump won an election as rigged as the American system can accommodate. Not a day should go by until 2021 that this doesn’t come up, loudly. And the correction of the American political system has to continue apace, such that we never again have a President who got fewer votes than another person running against them. When the popular vote is a loser twice in five elections, the system is broken.

This is disruption. This is what happens when someone ignores the regulations, the accepted standards of behavior, the very rules themselves. If nobody acts to sanction them, they win. As Uber, so Trump. Only difference is, instead of sclerotic taxi companies, this time the pillars of our democratic process got disrupted. Maybe we get them back. Maybe not. Definitely not, if we don’t act. Now, and every day for the foreseeable future.

What are you prepared to do?

IF I HAD THE WINGS OF AN EAGLE

IF I HAD THE TAIL OF A CROW

I’D FLY MY ASS STRAIGHT OVER KNOXVILLE

AND SHIT ON THOSE BASTARDS BELOW!!!

 

I didn’t watch the game as it happened. I haven’t watched much all year – largely because I didn’t need the kind of trauma this team has given me the last couple of seasons. I just hosted the holiday party and trusted the guys to handle their business. And amazingly, it all worked out, in a way that I couldn’t have expected when the year started.

3-9 the first year, a disaster. 4-8 the next – almost worse in a way, because there was obvious progress that didn’t translate into results on the field. And when this team limped through the first half of the season, getting blown away by Georgia Tech (thanks for nothing, cuz) and losing three SEC games by a touchdown or less, it began to look like the Dores just couldn’t get over the hump. And then…

Let’s be honest: we probably didn’t deserve to beat Western Kentucky or Georgia. But we certainly didn’t deserve to lose to Cocky AND to GATA AND to UK. So that’s sort of a wash, far as I’m concerned. We shouldn’t have lost to Mizzou but definitely deserved to, we went toe-to-toe with Auburn…and then in these last two games, against two rivals, everything clicked. We didn’t back into it, we didn’t fluke into it, we went out and beat Ole Miss and Tennessee convincingly. Hell, look at the way the UT game went: in the first half we traded punch for punch, went down 31-24 at the half, and then beat them handily in the second half, 21-3. The adjustments were made and they worked and we delivered the goods.

So there it is, in the cold light of morning: Big Six. Lost one of the non-conference games the formula requires, but made up for it with three SEC wins – Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee. The steady improvement continues, and now this team will wind up in a bowl berth on the merits instead of needing to leverage the APR loophole. Vanderbilt heads to its fifth bowl since 2008 under the third different coach to get them there.  In that time, of course, they’ve also won two games in the season (twice) and three and four…but since that 2008 season, we have more bowl years than sub-.500 years.

You look at that…and something has changed. After all, we didn’t break the .500 mark once from 1983 to 2007. Lot of 5 win seasons, the occasional fluke over UT or Bama or Georgia (OK, usually Georgia), but mostly a whole lot of blowout losses and “same old Vandy” head-shaking. Sometime in the last decade, the bar changed. Yes, the Brigadoon era was an anomaly at the time, but if you look at the team from roughly 2004 to that 2008 season, you could see the slow progress. And now, three years on, the movement may not be quick but it appears inexorable…hopefully.

After all, on this pace, we’re looking at the SEC title game in five years, right?

I’m putting the war on ice for now. I’m going to be aware, I’m going to make sure nothing slips by, but as of right this instant, I’m going to celebrate the holidays. I’m going to get the tree lit up and the music on full blast, I’m going to switch to my high school ring and celebrate with my actual loved ones, we’re going to milk the fact that it’s only the 23rd and we’re going to give Barack Obama the valedictory sendoff he deserves.  And then, when the Congress is in session and no one’s life, liberty or property are safe, we’re going to be tanned and rested and ready and we’re going to fight like hell for our people and give no quarter.

But as of this moment, the goal is simple and straightforward: have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

So in the last week and change, Apple has:

* Let go Sal Soghoian, the legendary Apple director for automation technologies – the drum major for AppleScript, Automator and support for scripting technology within Apple products. He is not being replaced.

* Reassigned the engineers working on Apple’s AirPort and Time Capsule routers and backup devices to…something else.

* Released a $300 coffee table book of Apple’s design in the last 20 years, dedicated to the late CEO who upon returning to Apple sent all of its historical memorabilia to Stanford rather than dwell on the past.

 

Something is going on in Cupertino and I don’t care for the direction it’s taking. The new MacBook Pro has come in for more of a lashing than any Apple product in recent memory, and most of the heat is coming from actual professional users frustrated not only by the too-little-too-late of just now shipping a Skylake-based laptop and prioritizing thin and gimmicky over high-end firepower. Made worse, no doubt, by the fact that the Mac Pro – “can’t innovate any more my ass” – literally hasn’t changed in any way since it was introduced three years ago.

It’s difficult to get the impression that Apple is more convinced than ever that it’s a phone-and-tablet company, and that the Mac is not only no longer the bread and butter, but not worth committing high-end resources to. The ancillary technologies that support the Mac, that allow you to easily have an integrated experience – the AirPort line, the Thunderbolt Display – are gone by the boards. The additional technology that helps with using Macs in an enterprise environment is going – there isn’t so much as a rumor around Apple Remote Desktop 4 and Apple has basically relinquished enterprise support and management to JAMF in every way that matters, never mind the absence of a rackable server product since the demise of the late lamented XServe. (Not that I lament picking up those RAIDs, though. Those bastards weighed 110 pounds each fully packed.)

When I left Apple in 2007, it was out of fear that the role I was in was insufficiently technical – my job was six hours a day of scheduling and checking inventory and tasks that could have been handled by a competently-designed database and a few well-crafted scripts, and two hours a day of dockwalloping and forklift-pulling. I wanted to be working on computers and with computers, not just moving them around. The problem is, since 1994, my life has largely been built on the use of and support of the Macintosh. And now, on the eve of my 20th year in the IT sector, it’s rapidly becoming apparently that the Macintosh isn’t that much of a priority for Apple anymore.

On the one hand, fine. I’m about to embark on a career as a JAMF administrator, in addition to my other duties, and JAMF is basically the whole of enterprise-grade Mac management at present. It’s also an iOS management solution, and the perfect bridge to a world where, to be honest, the Apple-made market share in business is greater (the instances of iPhones in enterprise FAR outstrip the presence of Macs). It’s also, insh’allah, a job that doesn’t require as much of a physical on-site presence once things are up and running – the sort of job that could be based in the Bay Area but actually carried out remotely from the Central Coast. Or the Oregon Coast. Or a village in Ireland an hour’s train from Dublin, perhaps. 

It’s also a job doing something that may not have the long-term demand to carry me the rest of the way home. Like it or not, I’m probably only about halfway through my working career. I don’t have a realistic path to retire before 65 – which gets even more unrealistic if they decide to kill off Medicare for anyone too young to be a Trumpshaker – so I’m going to have to be able to do something for twenty more years. And to be honest, modern workstation IT is less than thirty years old. During my ill-fated temp stint before I started my first real job out of school, I was told “the computer has an internet explorer” as if it were an unusual feature. LAN-type setups for anything but printing and maybe some basic file storage were new (hell, when I started at National Geographic, internet access was a function of what floor you were on and whether the switch passed TCP/IP). So to assume that the world of “workstation support” will look anything like 2017 in, say, 2027 – let alone 2037 – is an awfully big ask.

And we’ve already established that Silly Con Valley, as currently constituted, is a bad place to be in your 40s if you’re not already a millionaire VC. It’s definitely a bad place to be if you’ve been in the same job for seven years, which is apparently a red flag about your lack of ambition and never mind how much more you were doing in the same role with the same title by year six of the seven. It’s not the sort of neighborhood where I’d want to find myself looking for work at age 58, let alone 63.

So maybe I try to stick around where I’m at. If I could somehow carve out a niche where “platform engineering” becomes “platform support system administrator” for a little more money and a lot more remote-working, where we could easily go someplace else to hide out from the rest of the world when need be, where I could just punch the clock and let something else be how I measure my life…that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, right?

This is what “no future” means.  This is unsustainable. When people are endorsing a candidate on the basis that everything he’s said for the last year and a half is false, and what he said before that is true, and obviously he’ll go back to the way he was, and the people who pushed him to the right will go along with this – that is insane.  If logic doesn’t matter, if reason doesn’t matter, if the words coming out of the candidate’s mouth don’t matter, then there’s no point in even attempting to have a democracy or anything like it.  If truth means nothing, if reality means nothing…well, welcome to everything people bemoaned back when I was in college English. Welcome to the truly and completely postmodern world. If we as a nation actually decide that the truth is whatever you want it to be…well, maybe there’s enough medication and booze to help me see the world that way.

-5 Nov 2012

Forget everything you hear about the “moderate Republicans” or the “grownups” – there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the GOP and the Tea Party, there never was, and the successful laundering of the Republican label in the wake of 2008 while going even further to the right is one of the amazing mysteries of our time….And don’t underestimate the chance of Clinton Fatigue dragging Hillary down to the point where he – or another of his neo-confederate pals in Amen Corner – finds himself in the Oval Office on January 20, 2017…Better days are coming.  They can’t live forever.  The only catch is, can we last long enough to ride it out.

-20 Nov 2014

 

My mistake was in thinking that 2012 really was last call. I was right about Clinton Fatigue, except that Hillary actually finished with over a million more votes than Trump. What I wasn’t really prepared for was that the FBI would sandbag her, or that Russian misinformation would be gladly laundered through Wikileaks and Facebook, or that the press would run with it in a spirit of false equivalence and that we as a nation would just let that go, and that it could be enough to thread the needle in enough states to allow this to happen. 

But this should be the take-home: for the second time in the last five elections, the popular vote winner lost the election. That hadn’t happened for over a century. Now, two out of the last 5. 40% is a bad failure rate for a democracy in the 21st century, and that can’t be left to lie if we want to keep it.