Are my eyes really blue?

Well, here we go.  In my absence, Google announced the launch of Project Fi, their experiment as a mobile virtual network operator.  It more or less dovetails with what the rumor mill predicted: only works on the Nexus 6 with a special SIM that allows multi-network operation and does everything (including phone and text) over Wi-Fi first but can then roam into T-Mobile or Sprint networks, whichever is stronger. Unlimited talk and text, service in 120 countries (with a slight fee for placing voice calls abroad), all for a flat $20 and then $10 per GB of data thereafter, prorated and refunded.  So if you pay $50 but then only use 2.7 GB of data, you’ll get $3 back.  Or if you pay $40 and use 4.2 GB of data, you’ll be charged $62. Simple.

It’s a gauntlet thrown at the feet of AT&T and Verizon, mainly. The old PCS-only carriers don’t generally have the rural buildout to compete outside the city, because they didn’t inherit any of the old 800 Mhz frequencies the original A- and B-band cellular operators had (all of whom effectively were either AT&T or Verizon by 2006).  But with both Sprint and T-Mob to draw on, and wi-fi to backfill, Google might just be able to compete effectively – or at least put severe pricing pressure on the Big Two, which have in the last decade managed to pivot from selling tons of minutes and throwing in data as lagniappe to selling nothing but data and throwing in unlimited calls and texts as the sweetener.

But…

Seriously. Depending on where you live, Google has gotten way beyond the service sector only.  Time was, Google could be your email, your search, your social networking, your navigation, your media provider, and the OS of your phone, laptop and streaming stick.  Now they can be your ISP, your TV provider and your cellular phone company as well.  If you like and if the geography supports it, you can basically exist in a 100% Google ecosystem.

And that’s problematic, as I’ve described here and elsewhere.  It’s the mirror image of Mountain View as Googleburg: when you’re a company town, it generally works out better for the company than the town, and when Google’s not Google anymore where will that leave you? And it’s not like you can avoid them; Android has a market share bumping around 80% worldwide for smartphones and the majority of my personal email correspondents are on Gmail even if I’m not so it’s not like you can swear off the Beast of Mountain View and avoid being under their sway. And having established that “don’t be evil” is a crock of shit, where does that leave you?

I spoke with someone writing an article about the transformation of some of these company towns in Silly Con Valley, and my line on Google was “right now, it’s kind of like Smaug, sitting there on a huge pile of gold, and here we are on the lake hoping against hope it just doesn’t decide to wake up.”  It staggers me that the same people who got sand in their bungholes at the horrifying revelations of Edward Snowden are still blithely indifferent to how much power they hand over to Google, completely voluntarily.  Of which more later.

 

First off: set aside the details of the travel qua traveling. Because you should never leave the country with a group of 20 people who are all a decade or more older than you. Old white folks are the worst to see another country with.  Your own culture should be a springboard, not a fortress, and the best part of the trip was when we were on our own (which in fairness did dovetail with the most luxurious accommodations as well).

Now.  Japan.

I suppose the most surprising thing to me was that it didn’t seem all that expensive.  Sure, it was pricey, but so is San Francisco. When you can get a half-liter Coke from a vending machine for the equivalent of $1.43 and a whiskey highball – at LUNCH – for $2.60, that’s downright reasonable.  I’m sure real estate and rent is appalling, but hell, there’s no way our house is worth a million dollars, and yet.

The next most surprising thing, I suppose, is that for all the talk of ubiquitous all-everything Japanese vending machines, I didn’t see anything on offer but cigarettes and non-alcoholic beverages. That said, there were a LOT of drink machines.  I mean, a lot a lot.  As in, you’re walking down a back-alley sort of street and there’s a Suntory vending machine just in the middle of the alley apropos of nothing.  I don’t want to know how much money I sank into vending machines buying Coke Zero, or Coke Life, or Bikkle, or CC Lemon, or any of half a dozen different bottled coffee options with varying sweeteners and temperatures.  That’s right, they’ll sell you a can of hot coffee out of the same machine that sells you a bottle of cold Coke.

And the temptation is there pretty much all the time. The smallest bill is 1000 yen, or ~$8.40 today.  The largest coin is 500 yen, or ~$4.20. Because one yen is less than one cent, you look at ¥130 for a short bottle of Fanta and think “that’s less than a buck thirty” and pour the money right in, and next thing you know you’re spending ten dollars a day just getting drinks at random.  Which is not a problem for me, but it’s the same issue I had in Europe (and especially Britain) – when the base unit of currency is a coin, whether a Euro or a pound or 100 yen, your American brain instinctively devalues it.  It makes me wonder whether you could stimulate the economy just by getting rid of the $1 bill and forcing everyone onto the golden dollar coin, thus getting the push that comes with buying a drink for just two coins. But I digress.

There was a certain frozen-in-time aspect, too. Salarymen are still all off to work in two piece dark suits.  Women are still wearing pantyhose with jeans, never mind dresses. The architecture mostly seems to be Mad Men-era (for reasons that are probably obvious, as is the reason it’s awkward to discuss, especially in/around Hiroshima, of which more later). There are still line items like “drinks for women” in the cocktail menu. It’s as if the Occupation departed and everything more or less froze in place about the time the economy started to skyrocket – and thought “we have a good thing going here, why change?”  And then stuck after the deflation hit and the bubble burst.  You get the sense that daytime TV might have more than a couple ads invoking “ring around the collar” and “occasional irregularity” if you could understand them.

Japan is another train country, like the UK, and it was pretty delightful.  After years and years of public transit, all I really need to know is “do you tag at both ends or just pay on entry and is it a flat rate or not.” Once that was clear, using JR Rail was easy as pie. Even the light rail system in Arashiyama, on the edge of Kyoto, was easy to deal with once you figured out it was “pay as you get off the train if you don’t have a payment card.”  (As an aside, you could easily wind up in a Charlie On The MTA situation if you don’t watch yourself. Through the open window she gives Charlie the finger as the train comes rumblin’ through…)  And the existence of viable bullet trains…honestly, it’s a disgrace we let the rest of the world steal a march on us there.  I don’t know how we wound up bifurcating into cars and planes and ignoring rail transit outside the Northeast when a bullet train from SF to LA should have been done by 1990 at the latest.

Japan is also a very lawful country, in the D&D sense.  You expect that, obviously, but it’s still impressive to see people getting off the train before anyone tries to get on, and people being ready to board quickly, and being able to run trains with one minute headway because you can swap out passengers in 20 seconds.  Nobody was talking on the phone except tourists. Nobody was crossing against the light. Too many people around NorCal act as if it’s a straight jump from enforcing “no skateboarding on the platform” to concentration camps.  Japanese commuters know damn well there are other people, and it shows.

But back to the frozen-in-time thing, which strikes me as important. Japan was still in the throes of a deflationary spiral at the turn of the century when China was granted MFN status.  It seems like that was a critical jump, because most of the stuff that was made in Japan now gets made in one Special Economic Zone or another in China. Televisions, computer components, everything that Americans freaked out about in the 1980s; I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Japanese people were similarly freaking these days.  I saw an awful lot of “Made In Japan” signs on goods for sale, and it says something about how much things have changed that they feel the need to make it a selling point.

In any event, I’m sure I will have much more to say later as I process the whole trip.  I would go again in a heartbeat.  Probably not on a tour, though.  We broke the seal, we know where to go and what to see, and I think we’d be just fine, especially if I learned more than three phrases in Japanese…

And just like that, after years of agonizing and seven months of not-really-planning and a couple weeks of dithering, it’s time to go to Japan. There will be updates and a travelogue eventually, but for the most part, it’s going to be us and a couple of iPhones and a country that for most of my life was shorthand for “the future”. Bullet trains and high tech and 24-hour Blade Runner neon.  And then they too got overtaken by events.

It’ll be worth it, if nothing else for two weeks away from work and time to enjoy some downtime and check another country and continent off the list.

It’s handy to have every notification coming right to your arm.  It’s less handy when you seem to be dropping the connection. I’ve been having weird Bluetooth problems with my headphones, my Pebble and my iPhone 6 for the better part of a week, and I’m wondering how well they will all play together.  I’m also having trouble getting the sleep data out of Morpheuz into the Health app, and it’s annoying me.

Basically I’m starting to see the appeal of the single-platform integration, which is of course what Apple does better than anyone else.  If you need to run a watch with your iPhone, use the Apple Watch and the results will be seamless assuming you are slightly brighter than a turnip.  This is not a sure thing.  The problem with making a computer anyone can use is that anyone will.

Nevertheless, I don’t mind it.  It’s handy enough when I can make it work, and I’m sure some of this is just the teething pains of a new device in my rotation. That said, it’s not coming to Japan. Mainly because I don’t want one more thing to charge, and also because it won’t really be necessary.  The watch hasn’t replaced the phone for alarm clock purposes, and I won’t need instant notifications for things while abroad (not least because I won’t actually be on a cellular network, just a handheld WiFi device feeding Internet access to my phone).  I’ll stick to my mechanical watch when I’m out of the country.  

As for the phone, I’m taking just the iPhone 6.  No iPad, no Moto X – I know the X was meant to be the travel phone, but given that it’s much simpler to have a WiFi device in Japan than to battle through the trouble of getting a SIM card and activating it and having data only and…the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze. And the only thing I need from the iPad is easier reading or movie watching (neither of which I should need while I’m in, you know, ANOTHER COUNTRY) or maybe better access to websites or blogging (which isn’t enough to make it worthwhile). And the iPhone 6 will go in my pocket and has better battery life than the Moto – because Lollipop still hasn’t shipped for the 2013 Moto X, which is further proof that you should never buy Android unless you know you can live with the version of the OS that ships on it.  I’ve gotten from 4.2.2 to 4.4.4, and despite Moto’s assurances, I’m not holding my breath for 5.

So that’s it.  Analog watch, corded headphones, and iPhone 6. Last time I went abroad was with an iPhone 3G. Times have changed.  Hopefully this will work out slightly better.

It kind of is though. This is me testing how tough it is to blog from just the iPhone with the damn battery case on it. More and more I think it’s going to require some other tool to successfully blog this trip to Japan. 

And I’m going to have to make written notes. Now is the time when the tactical analysis kicks in – what do we actually need day to day? Given my record, the vitamin C and zinc need to start today. And I should start setting stuff aside for the suitcase or the carry-on tonight. First time out of the country in five years. And I won’t have cellular or the ability to understand the language At All. This will be interesting. 

So there was a price cut on Amazon, and I realized I have the gadget glee again, and it was either drop $400 on the first generation of a new Apple device or spend $80 of birthday money on an original Pebble watch.  And I chose the latter, if nothing else because it’s been around a couple of years and much of the functionality is already polished.  Unpaid beta testing was fun and then I turned 40.

So here it is.  I got it Thursday evening, plugged it in for a couple of hours and it’s been running ever since.  Haven’t had to recharge, take it off, anything.  First test passed, something that I don’t think the Apple Watch will be able to match now or maybe ever barring a BIG change in how battery technology works. Doesn’t hurt that I can wear the thing in the shower either. Well done Pebble folks.

Next up: telling time. Well, it does that.  It also illuminates the screen when you pop your wrist, which is very handy in the middle of the night.  Coupled with being able to set a different “watch face” such that the time is spelled out in big letters, it should be easier for me to tell what time it is when I wake up at 5 AM and can’t fall back asleep, dammit. Core functionality as, you know, A Watch: sorted.

Now, the smart stuff. So far I’ve only tested with my work iPhone, not with the personal Moto X or with the iPad (which it will also work with, unlike the Apple Watch so far as I currently know – the Apple Watch app didn’t get put on the iPad by the iOS 8.2 update at least). Although the prospect of the Apple Watch on the iPad is intriguing…of which more later.  Anyway. The principal advantage of the Pebble on iOS is that it has a neat little API hook straight into the Notifications framework. So the app developer doesn’t have to do anything extra. Text message, AmEx card charge, score update from Yahoo Sports or the official Warriors app, Duo Mobile authentication request, doesn’t matter: if it shows up at the top of the phone, it vibrates on my arm and shows on the little e-paper screen. And if I hit the delete button on the watch, it deletes the notification off the phone.  This right here is damn near enough to justify the device; no more pulling out the phone to clear all that cruft out every time.

The vibrate on the arm is key as well, not least because of the number of times I’ve missed a call (or much more likely a text) that I was waiting for because I had the phone in my jacket in a reasonably loud setting. That won’t be happening now, to the point that I’ve turned off the vibrate function on the phone to save a little extra juice. Anything the phone would alert me for by buzz or ding has been staffed out to my wrist.  It can buzz and I can glance and read and dismiss in pretty much the time it would take me to pull out my phone, never mind unlock and swipe and delete. So that’s handy.

The jury is out on the fitness tracking – it seems to be tracking steps for the most part, thanks to the Misfit app, and is notionally doing sleep tracking (to the surprise of no one, less than half my sleep registers as “deep sleep” and I need to go back and look at the charts after a couple of days to see what’s doing). I’ll find out sooner than later whether I’m getting enough steps at work, although the Pebble and Misfit apps do seem to be feeding back into the Health app via the HealthKit API.  Unfortunately the watch will only allow one fitness-tracking piece to be run, so you have to decide if you want Up or Misfit or MorpheuZ or what have you, and I’m still not absolutely committed one way or the other.

As for the other apps: don’t know yet. I installed the ESPN app and just as quickly uninstalled it, because it’s just blunt-force scores for an entire sports league at once and granular notifications are much better. I have a Caltrain schedule app which could be of use on some days when I’m not on the usual commute or when I’m going from a different station, but that hasn’t come up yet and probably wouldn’t for a while. There’s an even more complex app for other transit sources but it’s apparently keyed to showing what’s doing at specific stops selected in advance, and at that point I’d be pulling out the phone anyway. The ability to glance, or make one click or so and be done, is the whole point; if you’re drilling down five layers deep and trying to punch stuff in, there’s no point having it on the watch.

So here we go. The first cut at “Wearables” and like my tablet life, it starts with a black and white e-ink screen and the most basic functions. Four-plus years later, the Kindle is still a regular viable part of my life. Time to see if the Pebble folks have crafted the same sort of staying power.

 

We didn’t celebrate St Patrick’s Day that much in the old country.  Oh sure, I got free-rolled into the 4P’s once on the big day, and I did it just to be able to say I had, but we were Irish enough in our regular weekends that we dismissed March 17 as amateur day, a ridiculous confluence of American marketing and the perpetual need of twenty-somethings to seek an opportunity to drink like mad. St Paddy’s was for people who thought green beer was cool, Killian’s Irish Red was authentic and 26, 6 and 32 were something from Lost.

And then I moved west, and suddenly, it felt important to have a Guinness on the train into work on the 17th and blast the Pogues “Streams of Whiskey” at full volume. Now it’s a day to holler back at the old gang, renew the old shtick. And it got me thinking about something else, too, as we bustle around trying to straighten up the house for company coming.

In the late 1990s, the National Geographic Society did a retention survey, attempting to ascertain why people dropped their memberships (i.e. stopped subscribing to the big magazine). And the number-one reason, the overwhelming leader in the clubhouse, was that they couldn’t find a place to store them. People just don’t throw away National Geographic. There was a story, possibly apocryphal, of a sheriff who saw that a well-loved neighborhood family was moving away and throwing out their National Geographics.  He found this odd, sniffed around a little, and discovered that the family were actually Soviet spies. Sounds way too good to be true, but it makes the point.

Sometime this autumn, around Christmas, I will have been at my current job longer than I was at NGS.

It stings for a couple of reasons. I’ve had four major employers in my adult life, none of whom I ever had to explain what they did. But none of them – not NASA, not Apple, and certainly not where I am now – triggered the instant “HOLY SHIT THAT IS SO COOL” that the big yellow rectangle did. And I miss that.  I miss it more than I’m willing to admit to myself, for a couple of reasons.  For one, Silicon Valley isn’t as cool as it used to be.  The influx of tech dickery, the invasion of San Francisco and the growing sense that this is still where your future comes from, only now it’s corporate-technocracy and dystopian – that’s unpleasant enough.

But for another thing, I haven’t grown since I took this job.  I’m not sorry I took it – I needed out of government subcontracting in the worst possible way – but I honestly didn’t think it would prove as stagnant as it did. In my seven years at NGS, I went from a kid off the street with a strong aficionado’s sense of the Mac to a fully certified technical consultant, ably handling Mac and PC issues alike, the guy they called on for times when you needed a satellite phone to call into an ISP to download mail but couldn’t test it until it reached Gabon or when you needed to shorten the pilot program for OS X deployment from 6 months to 3 days.  Eleven years on, it’s…the same thing, only slightly less so.  We don’t actually test or pilot things, we just do them and clean up the mess.  Other IT people break shit and I fix it…just like 2003.  I build out the Mac deployment solution using NetBoot…just like in 2004. I get called in for VIP Mac issues for people I don’t support…just like 1999. I got an Apple class and certification…just like 2002. And I got old.  I was 32 when I left DC, and if you don’t think there’s a huge difference in this valley between a 32 year old workstation tech and a 43 year old workstation tech, you’re not paying attention.

The toughest thing you will ever do in this life is to stop looking back in all the wrong ways. I know that.  I know that being here doesn’t diminish what I accomplished in my previous jobs. I know my life isn’t over. I know I probably have twenty years til retirement and a lot of things to do in the meantime. But I’d really love to feel like I’m not going backward, and that’s what this job makes me feel like. And if somebody dropped a quarter-million dollars cash on me to allow me time to start over doing something else, I’d take it in a second.

For quite some time, there’s been talk about Google wanting to build high-rise housing for employees on the back side of the Plex near 101 past San Antonio. Or maybe in proximity to Moffett Field. Or something else. And it goes back and forth, because while Google’s commute patterns have disrupted Mountain View’s transit and traffic, the notion of locally housing enough employees to give Google a decisive voting bloc in local elections unnerves people. And now comes word that Facebook is eager to do the same thing in Menlo Park, an even smaller-by-population town than Mountain View. 

This comes to mind for two reasons.  One is that I realized this weekend that I enjoy going to Sunnyvale or San Jose for  my pub nights rather than Mountain View; the one place I really like in MV is a dive that’s very suited for somebody knocking back straight Fernet while it’s still light out. The other is that I saw the new office building at the corner of Castro and Central…and it’s going to be occupied by 23 and Me, a company famously associated with Google. Here’s some of that new construction in town, a 2-story motel replaced with a 4- or 5-story office block…and it’s going to another arm, tenuously, of the Beast of Mountain View.

How do you go about getting development without becoming a company town? Mountain View has had famous tenants before, like Adobe or Silicon Graphics or Netscape, but they never accumulated the kind of scale Google has.  Other companies like IBM or Intel or Sun were strewn all over the Valley – you can’t throw a rock without hitting a former HP building, and Apple’s “Campus 2” is going on top of the former HP Cupertino campus – but none of them became the dominant power in their town. Now, Apple’s got Cupertino, Google has Mountain View, Stanford has basically always had Palo Alto, and Facebook is making their play for Menlo Park. And this article sort of nails it: how is it that tech companies, the ones who brought us telepresence and work from home, all have to have these self-contained hamster runs now?

As a native son of the South, I know plenty about company towns. They tend to be good for the company and less good for the town. Mountain View needs housing, all right, but it doesn’t need a Google dorm and it doesn’t need another stack of luxury condos.  What it needs is a safe replacement for all those pre-1989 apartments that sit over carports and will pancake down in the next big quake. But the only way you get a return on your investment is to posh it up, because there’s another name for large-scale dense affordable housing: the projects.  And it’s something no one is eager to bring to town, no matter how badly people who aren’t getting options and restricted stock units need a roof over their heads.  Mountain View has five dozen firefighters, and two (2) of them live in Mountain View.  You’re not surprised at this for some place like Hillsdale or Atherton, but when it trickles down the Peninsula to Menlo and Paly and Mountain View, it’s worth stopping and thinking about what kind of community we’re creating.

It’s a tough choice, really. You don’t have to put new housing in town when everyone wants to live in San Francisco, but then you’ve got problems associated with Google buses on suburban side streets and a train station overwhelmed by shuttles and the density of what used to be a reverse commute and the fact that instead of paying property taxes and sales taxes in town, Google’s drones are being ferried back up to San Francisco on nights and weekends and eating their free lunch on campus in the meanwhile.  When the choice is between occupation and colonization, it’s time to start thinking about how you diversify your town and make sure you’re not in thrall to that one big company who’s going to leave you sneezing if they get a sniffle.  And when your company has 20,000 people working in a town of 75,000, that’s bad arithmetic. UAB is the largest employer in Birmingham (and in Alabama) and still only represents 1 job in 10.  If even half of Google’s Mountain View employees live there, that’s a nontrivial impact on the town – in terms of voting, in terms of public resources, and in terms of what happens to Mountain View when Google decides to go Galt and move to Birmingham for the tax breaks.

And make no mistake, once that company is big enough and once that town is dependent enough, you’re going to be a wholly operated subsidiary.  Nice little city you got there.  Shame if anything happened to it.

It bears mentioning that the iPad debuted in spring 2010, and that Christmas, I got…a Kindle. It’s not lost on me that the cross-platform-compatible original Pebble watch is two years old and robust/mature in its own right. Or that its e-paper interface is the same as…the Kindle.

That two year old Pebble is still getting functionality upgrades. Makes you wonder how long the slightly newer and slightly colorful model might last.

“As you get wiser you learn to spend less money on materials and more on experiences”

-former Vanderbilt QB/WR Joshua Grady, 6 Mar 2015

 

About the time I turned 40, I was taken with the ephemeral nature of our industry, with the idea that you couldn’t reasonably expect your new iPhone to last much more than three years or your laptop more than five, and marveling that I could splash out the same money on a phone that would barely survive its contract or a mechanical watch that would last me the rest of my life without ever so much as looking at a battery.

This is particularly appropriate today.

First things first: the differentiation in Apple Watch lines is all about materials. Functionality is identical across all models.  So set aside the $10,000 model completely; this is about the baseline $349 watch. And nothing’s changed since last night: I still need to see this thing make contact with the real world for a year or two before I’m persuaded of the utility.  For instance: I know someone with an iPhone 6+ and an atrial fibrillation issue; the combination of real-time heart monitoring and not having to take that slab out of the jacket/cargo shorts/backpack is a very real and viable use case. They can actually use the thing in a way I don’t need. But for me, right now, it’s a gimmick…and a short-lived one.

See, the original iPhone was missing some crucial bits. Like video capture or MMS or GPS, stuff that couldn’t be replaced in software.  And the original iPad was missing some crucial bits – like a retina display. And the original Apple Watch is apparently missing some of the sensors they wanted to get into the first generation but couldn’t make practically functional.  And while there’s an expectation that you’d replace your phone every couple of years, that isn’t quite the case yet with the iPad, and nobody anticipates needing a new watch every two years. So if $400 means a watch and a pair of Ray-Bans that will each last me until I’m dead and buried in them, what’s the percentage in a watch that might not make it to the end of Sonny Gray’s rookie contract?

Until I know that the smart watch is a viable proposition for at least – four years? five? ten? – it hardly seems worth getting stuck into it, especially when the things I’d use it for exist on the phone.  That’s money better spent on something like going down the pub every Sunday night to hear live Irish music for two straight months and change. Or on a train ticket to Los Angeles. Or…

Here we stumble across something I think the millenials and their sympathizers have gotten right. So much of the nonsense I see on things like Texts From Last Night and Twitter seems to be checking a series of notional boxes where going for anything, no matter how crazy or absurd or stupid, is justifiable for the sake of being able to say you did it. Or tried it. Or just having the story. And that’s where spending the money on the experience is worthwhile: because while it may seem absurd to pay money to become a Baron of Sealand, you’ve got that story for the rest of your days.  Which makes it an even greater value than if you’d put the same money on a couple bottles of wine…unless those bottles of wine led to a House Hunters International viewing-and-drinking party that led to unbridled shtick you’ll be doing for ages.  Or…you get the idea.

I got a little money for my birthday.  Enough that it would make a sizable dent in acquiring a first-generation Apple Watch.  And yet…there’s much better things I could do with that money that would almost certainly last longer than two years, or three, or five.  I have stuff a-plenty, I have a watch and a phone (or two!) and a peacoat and a trucker jacket and a pair of resoleable boots and things that will last for ages.  What I need to spend money on now is in the service of making memories.  They’ll last as long as my watch or my peacoat…and if done right, they’ll be just as warm and timely for just as long.