Are my eyes really blue?

So Google is now Alphabet.  Don’t let the org chart games fool you; the bits of Google that are practical and presumably making money or heavily involved in same (search, advertising, YouTube, Android) are being staffed out to themselves but the founders are running Alphabet, which appears to be composed of moonshots and 100x and buzzwords and things that would make the writers of Silicon Valley on HBO blush to pin that level of preposterous on another person.

But they also used the words “Berkshire Hathaway.” And that’s a name to conjure with, because Warren Buffett’s holding company has become synonymous with long-term investment with big returns. After all, dude is as rich as Bill Gates, supposedly. If Alphabet is expecting to be attractive to investors, the promise of crazy cash in return for your upfront money is certainly what you want to sell.  But I’m looking at this and seeing something else altogether.

Look at television, for instance.  Right now, ESPN is the only thing going that really makes you have to invest in a cable bill.  Because otherwise, you could pay for subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO and Amazon Prime, and you’d have pretty much most of the things you’d have gotten from your cable subscription ten years ago aside from ESPN.  Things like House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black made Netflix the new HBO, and now the old HBO is not unlike Netflix with the advent of HBO Now.  Plus YouTube is the new hotness for the kids, and if you don’t believe me look at how Hannah Hart has gone in four years from making drunk cooking videos for her friend back East to hosting a Doctor Who marathon on BBC America and starring in a movie you can buy on iTunes and a revived TV series that will be…on the web.

Now.

Google owns YouTube.  What’s to prevent Alphabet from taking a stake, say 30% or so, in a publicly traded Netflix or Hulu? Or for that matter Amazon? Or buying big into Time-Warner, which impacts HBO, or into Disney which affects not only ESPN but the entire Star Wars and Marvel franchises? Or for that matter, into Apple? Or Microsoft? Or any other publicly held company whose interests might intersect or compete with Google?

Alphabet is the instrument by which Larry and Sergey can get a piece of everything and anything. You don’t have to sell out to Google anymore.  Alphabet can just buy a chunk of whoever you do sell out to.  And given the shoddy nature of securities regulation in this country and the limits of what can be done abroad, it’s not difficult to see them getting away with it.

Google might have been getting too big to innovate, but Alphabet might be too big to let live.

For the first time I can remember, Apple has overbuilt the hell out of a battery. This Apple Watch has never dropped below 29% before it gets to the charger, and that was a circumstance where I put it on my arm fully charged at 10 PM, slept in it, wore it all day, attached a Bluetooth headset to it around 7:30 PM the following day and played music, from the watch, for two hours.  My theory (and my brother-in-law’s) is that the battery was spec’d out at a time when there were going to be more powerful (and more busy) sensors in the watch, not to mention native apps running directly on the watch. So that battery may drop non-trivially when watchOS 2 hits in the autumn.

Having the fitness tracking on my arm has been extremely effective.  I look at the circles, I make sure they get filled, I stand up when I’m told, I take the stairs instead of the elevator, I walk out to a computer rather than relying on remote support. And in the course of doing this, I rely on coffee (largely unsweetened except for the occasional drip-drop of stevia) and sparking water from the office SodaStream (rarely adultered with so much as ice). I haven’t bought anything out of a vending machine in a week and a half. Lunch is almost always salad and unsweet tea and doesn’t come with a big Rice Krispie Treat tossed in the bag.  I can’t remember when I last bought a Coke Zero.  Sure, Sunday got a little wacky because I was at a soccer game and a pub after, but that was one day and it let off a lot of steam to let me be good on the other days.

It’s to the point that I’m wondering how I’ll wear this abroad if my iPhone is locked.  The Moto X is still the designated travel phone because it’s free to use any old nano-SIM, but there’s no using it with the Apple Watch (and I can’t go back to the Pebble, let’s be honest – nothing it can do is of any particular use to me when going abroad, which is why it stayed behind on the Japan trip). I’m not going to be amused if this all boils down to me having to splash out on an unlocked iPhone next time out, but then, it’s not like I wasn’t already indentured to the Apple ecosystem. Then again, the X may or may not be that viable by the time we next go abroad – it’s not like the camera’s worth a damn compared to an iPhone, and while the battery life seems much improved, it’s not going to play my iTunes collection…

There’s a little paradox-of-choice going on here, the same issue that leads to me having way too many Nerf guns that are 80% of what I’m looking for instead of the perfect one.  Through happenstance I wound up with an iPhone from work, a Moto X on my own, and an iPad mini on my own, and left to my own devices (see what I did there) I could probably lose the work iPhone and carry on just fine for the foreseeable future. But now I have the Apple Watch and that means iPhone. Which is fine, given that there hasn’t been an Android that compelled me since the coming of the original Moto X.  But if I did have to go out and buy a new phone on my own, it would be tough not to just take the iPhone 5C in white, cut my audio loadout by 75% and get by as long as I could, because after getting so much phone for $350, the thought of laying down double that is a bit tough to take. Then again, if I could get the T-Mobile $30 plan still…but that’s a problem for another time.

Other than that, the only real issue I have with the watch is that I haven’t yet sorted out that force-press is different from just long-press. I have screens dipping out under my finger ever so slightly as if they don’t know whether to go away or not, and I haven’t gotten use to just giving the on-screen button a thump – or force-pressing to see other controls and options (like, say, switching the watch from getting its music off the phone to its own local storage). But the much-debated “learning curve” isn’t that big a deal – this is for notification and quick action and not pulling the phone out of your pocket. And it’s a lifesaver in that regard – the two-factor authentication app for work runs on the watch and it’s so much more convenient to use 2FA now.

I’m glad I bought it.  It seems to have stifled the television glee and the car glee and several other glees, so I guess that alone is worthwhile.

When the Canadian team behind HitchBOT announced their robot was going to try to hitch its way across the USA, I had a sinking sensation almost immediately. I thought there was no way that robot would make it safely across the country, because people are assholes. And then I felt kind of bad for assuming people would be assholes, but I figured I’m not wrong. 

I’m not. 

It’s depressing as hell. This is why we can’t have nice things, because we’re one generation away from going full Idiocracy in this country. Would that I could live somewhere that has plenty of fog, plenty of low-key drinking establishments with fireplaces, no cops who need to load up like they’re trying to take Tora Bora, no NFL and no SEC, someplace where a robot in rubber rain boots can hitch unmolested from coast to coast. 

But this isn’t that place, and we’re worse off for it. 

Traditionally this is banged out on the device itself, but that just isn’t possible, because this time the device in question is in fact an Apple Watch Sport, 42mm, black on black. While the Pebble was fine for notifications, there were plenty of things it couldn’t do – Siri searches, reply to notifications, the expandability of things like Apple Pay or having two-factor authentication on the arm – and it had an annoying tendency to lose the connection to the iPhone at random. 

But the deciding factor for me was the health tracking. Because the cholesterol is bad again, and the heart rate is up, and I need to be pushed to get in some kind of condition. And all the Pebble can do for me is track steps – which the phone was already doing. Having regular heart rate being monitored from the arm will at least help me figure out whether I have an elevated pulse problem, and being constantly prompted to stand and move about will get me to do that much, at a minimum.

So far, the calendar is less workable than I’d like; seeing events in the next month doesn’t seem to work. While notifications all seem to come in, I don’t always notice them. There’s a bit of a lag using apps on the phone, though this is apparently changing in watchOS 2. Having things like the temperature, the next event and the health meter on the same watch face as time, day and date is helpful.  And I’m still working out Transit and Citymapper to see which, if not both, can be of use in transit planning ahead of iOS 9 updating.

So that’s it. I ate the paste. I couldn’t wear a FitBit and a Pebble on the same arm, but circumstances collaborate to make this practical, somehow. We’ll see what it amounts to in days to come.

People in the modern era don’t get how things didn’t used to be this conservative.  It occurred to me that in temperament, in judicious approach and in general policy, Barack Obama is not materially different to what we would have gotten from a Colin Powell presidency in 1996. After all, the Affordable Care Act – that bastion of socialist hellscape nightmare dystopia – is pretty much the Republican alternative to Hillarycare from 1994.

People forget how much the Democrats moved right. They went nuts chasing the white working class vote. They basically gave up on gun control, they sold out on “welfare reform” and Bill Clinton’s need to respond vocally to a throwaway line by one of Public Enemy’s backup rappers turned into one of those inane Washington proverbs – the “Sister Souljah moment” became the necessary gesture for Democrats to prove that The Blacks (or whatever other traditionally Democratic-leaning group) didn’t have them by the nuts.  Strange, how we never expect Republicans to do the same for the NRA or the holy rollers.

I say all that to say this: in 1963,  Martin Luther King Jr. accused America of writing the Negro a check which has been returned, stamped “Insufficient Funds.” Almost fifty years later, we elected a President of color, and the old Confederacy and its amen corner on Fox News and throughout the right-wing media machine lost their goddamn minds. Suddenly, any attempt to restrict weapons that didn’t need a trailer hitch was a sign of incipient fascism, and any attempt to do right in the law by someone darker than a manilla folder was a sign of playing the race card and imminent race war, and instead of fighting back, we just let them keep stacking the stupid higher. 

Now, in a story that sounds like it should have come out of Selma in the 60s, a black woman gets puled over in Texas, arrested under dubious circumstances, detained for three days, dies in custody, and the circumstances and evidence are immediately obscured by a county authority that closes ranks. This doesn’t pass the smell test for anyone who grew up in the South. The FBI should be on Waller County like flies on shit right now, and I don’t know why they aren’t. At a time when rednecks are out there marching in defense of the damned Confederate battle flag – arguing for history and heritage that consists mostly of lynchings, pellegra and illiteracy – the federal government should be going the full Mississippi Burning on these Texas necks.

The South lost the Civil War.  The South lost the battle against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The South lost the Presidential elections of 2008 and 2012.  So why the hell do I feel like I’m not on the winning side? It’s almost like a Bush Curse: victory goes to the side with fewer votes. But that’s not the point.  This is: every time we have the Confederate enemy on the ropes, we let them up. We let them up in Reconstruction, and got generations of Jim Crow for it.  We let them up after the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and got decades of right-leaning hegemony and the reconsolidation of a Solid South in GOP-Confederate hands. And now, every time there’s a shooting, we wave our hands in the air and say there’s nothing we can do, because we wouldn’t dare give offense to the people who want to need the guns.  One attempted shoe-bombing and we’re still putting our boots on the conveyer belt a decade later. One mass shooting a week and we’re doing nothing at all.

We’ve let the Confederacy go for too long.  We’ve let them ride along, sponging off the prospertity of the rest of the country.  We’ve bit our tongue as the racism persists, we’ve looked the other way as the Rebel flag flies in Michigan and California, we’ve apologized for suggesting that their ammosexual perversions and Talibaptist intolerance were somehow incompatible with American values, we’ve relented every time they felt oppressed by a waiting period or a rainbow flag.  Stop it.  We are talking about people who won’t be happy until we turn the clock back a hundred years on American values and culture, and that’s not going to happen.  If these people are going to insist they’re being oppressed no matter what, then let’s fucking well oppress them. And let’s stand up for the people whose lives have been ignored and devalued and disregarded for so long because we didn’t have the balls to do what needed to be done.

This is more philosophical than practical, but here goes anyway. I’ve been fiddling around with both phones lately. I took them both to Santa Cruz over the weekend, where the Moto X on T-Mob was far better at getting signal than the iPhone on AT&T. Then I took the iPhone alone to San Francisco, without even bringing headphones. I bled it down to 13% before getting home, but the picture-taking was far superior. (No surprises there.)

It’s funny that at some level, my brain is still thinking “I need just one device” when from 2007 to 2012, that’s exactly what I had, barring the occasional loan of an original iPad. Granted, it was kind of a PITA during the iPhone 3G era, but battery issues notwithstanding, I never felt the need for more than the iPhone 4 could offer me.  The one caveat is that reading Kindle content is much easier on a bigger display, but the 4.7” screen of the Moto X or iPhone seems to be a lot better than the 3.5” window the iPhone sported those five years.  Plus having the AMOLED screen on the X and using white text on a black background instinctively sounds like a battery fix.

I’m still thinking in terms of what happens if I take control of my own phone again rather than being provided one by work. The question I have at this point is how long I could get by on a Moto X before breaking down.  The Pebble works a lot better with the X, no question, and I could either go with the T-Mobile option for $30 a month or go with Cricket for $45 (T-Mob only offers 100 minutes, while Cricket caps data at 8 Mbps, but both offer 5 GB data and unlimited messaging.) In the back of my mind, the prospect of being able to hit up work for reimbursement and only pay $5 a month out of pocket might be worth the feeling of taking my phone back for myself. Which seems foolish on the face of it, but I don’t know what to tell you.  These things aren’t rational.

And to make matters worse, the Apple Watch is starting to look attractive for the first time. I’m increasingly fed up with the Pebble – on iOS, it has a tendency to lose the Bluetooth connection randomly, and the sleep monitoring functionality is erratic.  Meanwhile, the Apple Watch would add in the ability to reply to texts, to do voice-based messaging and search, provide much more granular control over the music (the Pebble gives you nothing you don’t get from the headphone controls; I want to switch playlists) and the ability to acknowledge and dismiss two-factor authentication notifications at work.  A little monitoring with an app shows that there are about 30 times a day where I pull the phone out of my pocket and use it for a minute or less; those are all incidents that could be as easily sorted off the watch once version 2 arrives.  Of course, this all assumes I commit to the Apple ecosystem for good…something about the watch seems like an extra level of commitment to the iPhone that I don’t really feel at the moment.

And then there’s the iPad…I have a sneaking suspicion that our inevitable future is the 6-inch phablet. When even Apple can’t produce a mainline phone with a display smaller than 4.7 inches, and when nobody but Apple can produce a viable tablet while instead throwing their resources into ever-larger phone screens, it looks like the inevitable future pocket computer terminal is something along the lines of the Nexus 6, one device to rule them all and you just have to carry a purse anyway.  Which is basically the use case for the smartwatch: critical stuff on the arm so you don’t have to pull out your Samesung [sic] Leviathan every time you get a text.  And it may sound risible that we’ve reached the point of needing a remote control for your phone, but let’s be honest: it stopped being a phone in anything but name about the time the iPhone 4 dropped.

So there’s that.  And yet, the whole idea of the ubiquity of the phone is definitely a 21st-century thing. As has been said elsewhere, half of Seinfeld episodes break down in a world with pervasive cellphones, so some sort of switch flipped around 1999.  Not very long after the switch flipped on pervasive internet access, which in my mind is still right around 1995-96.  There’s a nodal point there when the very nature of mass communication changes, and there’s something to think about there…but not today.

* I’ve been searching for TVs. Here’s the thing: TV makers are no longer making high-end 1080p sets, they’re only making 4K sets at the high end. And yet right now, there’s no 4K programming other than certain Netflix or Amazon outlets; everything has to up-convert. Lower-end 4K sets don’t up-convert well, so buying a (comparatively) inexpensive 4K set means getting shitty video for the next 3 years while buying the best-available 1080p set means five years instead of ten for viable lifespan.  The practical upshot of all this is: I should have bought a new TV as soon as the cousins took theirs with them, but instead I now need to wait at least a year, possibly more. We are in the sour spot of the U-curve.

* In the course of all this searching around, I went by Fry’s, and it’s staggering how different it is since I was first exposed to Fry’s 13 years ago. Time was, it was jam-packed with shelves higher than your head stacked with all manner of things that aren’t there any more. No PDAs. Precious few books.  Not a lot in the way of Mac accessories.  And no shelves higher than your chest, and very wide and expansive aisles. The Amazon bomb has gone off, and it shows in Silicon Valley retail.

* I put the work AT&T SIM in the Moto X with Lollipop yesterday and tried to use it normally, turning it on around 10. By bedtime, it had only bled down to 50% with normal use.  Now, the big caveat was that I was in no way using it for mail or audio like usual, but neither was I plugging it in at every opportunity. I actually turned on location and used it to navigate once, I was fairly constantly looking at Instagram or RSS or Wikipedia, and it seems to have done OK.  Maybe it’s settled in; the time to test will be tomorrow or maybe over the weekend of the 4th. But the Moto X, even now, is the insurance against a sudden change of circumstance, and could certainly be my everyday phone until something better comes down the pike if such were necessary.

* Nerf needs to deliver the Rivals series soon. A 70mph Nerf ball is the last argument of technicians.

I need to think about something else in my life so let me catch up on gadget issues.

 

• I went to see Eddie Izzard on Monday night, and for the first time had a concrete use case for the Apple Watch – I would have loved to be able to see when the last train was leaving without pulling the phone out during the show. It wound up with me being the last one out (the rest of the gang split at the interval, because it was a long day and a long night and we’re all pretty banged up) and catching a cab, but it would have been useful to at least know the light rail was done. Meanwhile, I read the Newt Gingrich review of the Apple Watch, and was intrigued – he came at it from the standpoint of the device as a travel aid, one with the boarding pass right on the arm (albeit needing to be rotated at a weird angle before it would scan) and not having to remove it through the metal detector and taxing the battery to its limits (probably because he forgot to put it in airplane mode on the flight).  All in all, it strikes me as being something more useful than my Pebble, which won’t stay connected to the iPhone reliably and as for the Android…

• Lollipop, so far, is a battery-killer.  It dropped 1% an hour just sitting on the bedside table overnight and took 16% battery to ride to work reading the RSS feeds and glancing at the weather a time or two. My understanding is that Android takes a few days to settle out, battery-wise, but at the same time it feels like the battery meter in L is all over the place – it looks like it’s trying to show what percentage of the total battery each app has used, rather than what percent of the used-battery-time each is.  Traditionally, the screen is 50% or more of a healthy Android battery life; now, Yahoo Sports or Microsoft Outlook are way way WAY ahead.  And while Outlook is the best available mail client I’ve found for the Moto X, it’s kind of a showkiller on battery life.  If this Moto X is ever going to be anything but a novelty piece in my rotation, it needs to get through a full day’s normal use (and it doesn’t even have to play music routinely). Then again, Android’s greatest improvement in battery usage has been “make the screen 6 inches and stick a 4000 mAh in it” so maybe it just can’t be done.

* I kind of like the MacBook. I know it splits the difference between the 11” and 13” MacBook Air on size, and the lack of ports makes it patently unsuitable for serious business work (there’s no viable way to make this a desktop workstation because to get a mouse, keyboard, network connection, display and power is too much to handle). But much like the 12” PowerBook G4 of a decade ago, this is the blogger’s delight. If you can get used to the keyboard (and I’ve more or less adapted; the size makes up for the lack of depth) then this two-pound laptop is perfect for banging out nonsense like this very post. Or the one which preceded it. I described it to my management as being “the iPad Pro” which I still think is a fair assessment and not a dig in any way. There are niches for which the iPad Pro is the dream of perfection. Only thing is, the battery tends to sink pretty fast, which I put down to including a retina display – table stakes, sure, but you’re making some compromises by throwing in a low-power processor and chipset and then turning around and asking it to drive 2304×1440.

* I bought a pair of Bluetooth headphones off of meh.com – big Panasonics that were supposed to be the equivalent of Beats at 20% of the cost. They’re not terrible – I like having something over my ears rather than in them for the first time in ages. But the Bluetooth connection to the iPhone is a little splotchy – the phone had better be in a clear line of sight for best results; front pocket is sketch and hip pocket is right out. And they don’t have a way to activate Siri, which is less of a concern as I’m not likely to be dictating into these. These are for clamping over my head and tuning out the world. Wish I’d had them handy when I was goofed on Valium, Norco and hydromorphone a couple weeks ago, but that’s a tale for another time, except to say that I had back pain treated with a drug that Ohio used for lethal injection until 2009. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.

* It’s time to start looking at cars again.  While I haven’t delved in depth, the wife is keying on either the Golf SportWagen TDI or the Prius V, neither of which I find problematic (leaning Prius to be perfectly honest).  Thing is, this is the long-range car.  The car we buy after this can probably be the electric option with a range under a hundred miles, and by that time, things should be very interesting.

Some people in this life need an elephant to take a shit on their head before they will acknowledge the possibility the circus might be in town. So now Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham and a bunch of other South Carolina Republicans, finding themselves backed into a corner by the Internet and the media and the blood of nine dead citizens, are saying the Confederate battle flag needs to come down from the South Carolina statehouse grounds. Yay and hooray.

Here’s the thing: those battle flags went up across the South – and onto state flags that had not heretofore incorporated them – not in the aftermath of the War of the Rebellion, not in the heady days after the Redeemers brought an end to the Federal occupation, but in the 1950s as a deliberate response to the emerging civil rights movement.  It was “Forget, hell!” writ large.  It was pledging the full faith and credit of Southern states to the cause of massive resistance to the notion that all men were created equal.  It had nothing to do with history, or heritage, or anything of the like; it was a deliberate gesture on behalf of white supremacy, and any argument to the contrary is facially invalid.

Yes, symbols matter. But this isn’t some kind of triumph. This isn’t even a win. This is table stakes, the barest small-blind ante necessary to participate in the 21st century. The idea that Nikki Haley deserves some kind of credit for “coming around” less than a year after saying it wasn’t important because she’d been elected and she hadn’t heard from any CEO about it is risible.  She’s not doing it because it’s the right thing to do, she’s doing it because the whole world is finally watching. You get zero credit for decisions you made because CNN had your nuts in a professional threat sandwich.

Start with this. Read it. The whole thing. Don’t skip bits. This might be the most important thing written about the topic of race in the United States in the last forty years.

I know you didn’t read it.  Go back. I’m deadly serious about this.

Okay. Now. 

Here is the thing: this country has never come to a reckoning with how we got to this point. We kind of sort of tried with the war, but there were slave states in the Union too, and their slaves were not covered by the Emancipation Proclamation (slavery in places like Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri only came to an end with the Thirteenth Amendment at the end of 1865). And Reconstruction – spun by the Confederates into a horror of foreign occupation and oppression rather than any kind of effort to maybe do right by freed slaves – lasted maybe a decade, until it was possible to throw it over the side for the sake of political advantage (and the election of Rutherford Hayes as President). The Civil Rights movement lasted long enough to get a Voting Rights Act that has since been disemboweled, and efforts to extend its reach beyond the South, or Jim Crow, or the ballot box, went by the boards as soon as one party decided to take advantage of the backlash for political purposes.  We as a nation are overly fond of making a grand gesture and then forgetting about it as soon as we can get something by forgetting it.

Reparations for black America aren’t about cutting everyone a check.  You can’t dump a sack of money in everyone’s yard and call it square, because it’s not just about poverty, it’s not just about water fountains or bus seats.  Hell, the effort to try to get black elected officials got utilized to gerrymander white supremacy into Southern Congressional delegations for the last twenty years. Affirmative action – that much-derided phrase – isn’t about diversity or a quota or ticking a box, it’s about exactly what it means. Affirmative action. Recognizing that people have been wronged and making a willful, deliberate, conscious effort to undo the effects of that wrong.

It also means something else.

It means not giving in to despair.  It means not deciding that the task is too enormous, too overwhelming, too difficult to explain. It means not choosing to punt because the last slaves died decades ago and nobody alive today ever owned one.  It means grappling with how to make our society and our country worthy of what we say about ourselves.  It means taking seriously things like “justice for all” and “all men are created equal” and “a more perfect Union.”

And for the first time in twenty years, it means struggling with whether that means not throwing your hands in the air and running away and hoping that death and demographics will bend the curve for you without having to put your own shoulder to the wheel and do your part to atone for the shortcomings of your forebears.  It means turning that question in upon myself.

It means I have to ask, in all seriousness and full well aware of what the answer may require, what am I prepared to do?

This post, gentle reader, is brought to you by Android 5.1 on a 2013 Moto X. Three months after the update and a year after the Lollipop launch, and two months after the Japan excursion on which I planned to use it. But hey, let’s overlook how long it took to show up and celebrate that we got an update at all. This phone shipped with Jellybean and now has Lollipop, and you don’t get two full updates for a non-Nexus phone very often.

The swipe function of the keyboard is pretty good given that the keys are just letters on a gray field, and the word correction looks to be pretty good. This is the speech recognition at work, and it seems to be pretty decent. Naturally there is a party piece with this version and it is Project Volta. Just as Jellybean was about getting smooth and responsive UI, and KitKat was about reducing the footprint of the OS, Lollipop is about battery life that doesn’t make you want to give your phone the Rhett Wiseman treatment with an aluminum bat. It won’t be easy to tell for a couple of days because of the way you can’t stop piddling around with a new phone, but my hope is to finally fulfill the Moto X’s original promise of a 24 hour phone that goes 24 real hours.

So off we go. More to follow.