Are my eyes really blue?

First things first: switching from the cheap case I bought in advance (which was apparently spec’d out from pre-production info and doesn’t actually fit the buttons right) to the Apple leather case made all the ergonomic difference in the world. Black leather wrapped tight to the phone lends it a premium feel and a lot more comfort in the hand, and it grips well without sticking in the pocket. Approved and worth the money.

Battery life seems to be settling too. It looks good for about 8 hours of real-world use consisting mostly of Twitter, taking and posting pictures, checking mail and reading RSS. No audio playback; this was all screen on and cellular data with no Wi-Fi to speak of, and in a crowded environment. (yes, back at Disneyland again. You got a better torture test for a phone?) And while using an iPad charger is still the fastest, I could throw it on a lipstick charger at dinner and go from under 30 to 94% battery between cocktails and taking the entree plates.

Performance in areas of 4G-non-LTE coverage has, of course, kicked the shit out of EV-DO. I was routinely pulling around 6 Mbps without LTE, which is well over double the theoretical max of Verizon’s non-LTE data speed, which I never reached on the iPhone 5. And good coverage means good battery. Even with the bigger screen, I still outperform the 5. I’m curious how it will go at work.

One other thing I’ve noticed is that I can run voice dictation and get results at least as accurate as something like SwiftKey or Swype. The one finger swishing around the keyboard may not be efficacious, but if you can just tell the phone what to type and get the same or better results, that’s huge. Especially since you now get typing as you talk rather than waiting for it to be piped back for processing. Careful word choice means I can text the wife almost without typographical error purely via Siri. And that ain’t hay. It is in fact a major computing breakthrough, one I started watching for two decades ago as I tried to persuade a Power Mac 6100 to accept the rudimentary voice commands built into System 7.1.2 (in a gravelly Southern accent, natch).

Things I still need to test: battery life on a normal workday. The viability of reading on this rather than a Kindle or AMOLED phone screen. The impact of streaming WatchESPN during basketball season and how badly it kills the power. And once the Moto X (2013) gets Android Lollipop, there’s going to be an all-day utility bake off.

But for now, it looks like this phone (with a small charger in reserve for known full days) might just be ready to go as the One Full Time Device. And not a moment too soon either.

Two months. That’s how long it took for the iPhone 6 I ordered through work to show up. Well, better late than never, and in keeping with tradition, this is banged out on the device itself.

It’s too damn big. In every particular, it conveys SIZE like a Texas pickup with horns in the hood. I know intellectually it’s thinner than the Moto X, but it’s definitely taller and I suspect wider, with a top bevel that really doesn’t need to be that size. 

The keyboard is larger, of course, which alleviates a few of the issues with the iPhone 5 running iOS 8. Haven’t had time to see if the autocorrect runs away with it. 

Battery life is impossible to judge on first run: it’s all syncs and downloads and various screwing around. In a couple of days we’ll know more once I’m back to a standard load out. But this bigger screen means more battery used and I’m not persuaded the bigger battery will make the tradeoff work. Definitely better signal at work, though, and better fallbacks when LTE isn’t offered. That might help. (thanks, AT&T.) And the screen isn’t on for podcast playback, which will hopefully be less of a percentage hit. 

But the size of the damn thing…I’m going to need the slimmest practical case and hope it can stand up to the front pocket, in which it already feels like a slab. This is a purse phone. That’s not a compliment. 

Tim Cook finally unveils the worst-kept secret in Silicon Valley, in the pages of Bloomberg Businessweek.  To be honest, it didn’t seem like it would be a big deal.  This has to be one of the most gay-friendly places on Earth, and the man whose intensity is the stuff of legend never gave the impression that his orientation was relevant – because who can picture him having time for any kind of relationship other than the Auburn Tigers?  But he said it, and sounded much like Anderson Cooper when he did: everyone knows, everyone’s known, it’s not a big deal, but I need to say it for the sake of other people who might need the help or the inspiration or the comfort of knowing it’s not just me.

And that’s not nothing.  In fact, that’s huge, in perspective.  Because the worst thing you can be growing up in exurban Alabama is different.  Gay, black, foreign, or just smart – if you have anything that keeps you from being just like everybody else, you’re going to be on the outside looking in.  The closest thing I ever had to being a minority was that four-year undergrad stint where I wasn’t in a fraternity, and it drove home the point that as a minority, it’s not the active prejudice that does for you as much as the ignorance of your existence. The assumption that difference doesn’t exist – it’s that third Goventa level of power, the dismissal of anything that the dominant power doesn’t wish to acknowledge.

Well, this is going to be hard to dodge.  Possibly the richest, most powerful living Alabamian – and Auburn alum – is gay, and doesn’t care if you know, and thinks his home state should work harder on not being assholes to gay people.  The cognitive dissonance alone might be enough to power the state for a year or two.  (Although it REALLY makes you wonder what would happen if Nick Saban delivered and supported an openly gay Heisman-caliber quarterback who came through with a national title.)

Good for Tim.  He didn’t have to, but he knows the meaning of non nobis solum. And if some kid in Alabama feels less alone and more empowered – or if somebody in the old country rethinks their beliefs as a result – he’s done more than any amount of boosting AAPL stock.

Comes now the news that the woman behind the popular and acclaimed “Tropes vs Women” video series has been forced to cancel an appearance at Utah State University. Anita Sarkeesian received rather extensive death threats, and police said they couldn’t screen for firearms at the event because of Utah open-carry laws.

Setting aside the extent to which the Beehive State chooses to coddle ammosexuals and gunsuckers at the expense of public safety, this is basically a capitulation to terrorism. Some limpdick in a basement made threats to shut down something he found objectionable. That’s terrorism. Full stop. And it all came about because apparently somebody is terrified that a model of masculinity built on homophobic insults in Call of Duty groupchat and 4chan boards might not stand up to modern standards of, you know, mature society.

And really, that’s what we’re dealing with here. Arrested adolescence in a bunch of boys who never evolved past the He Man Woman Haters Club in the basement. Guys who are actively resisting the need to grow up to get along in the modern world. In its way, it’s of a piece with the rest of the Peter Pan syndrome that afflicts way too much of modern society and which I’ve spent plenty of space here decrying. And this is why.

Because you have to grow up. You can’t live your entire life stuck at 14. That’s called Lord of the Flies and that tends to be the usual result when you leave a bunch of spotty student boys to their own devices. And for the pubescent-minded scum that are flogging this movement in the name of fighting off adulthood, I’m sure that’s the dream.

But it’s 2014. And society is for grown-ups, regardless of age. You can be a grownup at 12 or you can stave it off your entire life. But it’s long past time for our society to stop indulging people who won’t grow up.

One hears quite a bit from time to time about the eroding middle class.  It’s well-documented that the disparity in wealth in this country is growing, and that the top of the stack has a greater percentage of the money than ever before, but I’m looking at it in a different way.  It’s impossible not to, with the recent rash of cops killing minorities and stand-your-ground nutballs looking for a chance to shoot a brown person.

PJ O’Rourke spoke of the Whiffle Life, that idea that above a certain point a kid on drugs is going to get routed into a treatment path and sent to a clinic and maybe worst case reform school, rather than jail and a beatdown from the cops and juvie. And that makes plenty of sense when you look around you.  But then look at the kind of gentrification happening in San Francisco, where one formerly working-class area after another gets hipsterized and Googlefied and your nightclub has to close because the people in the new million-dollar condos don’t like the racket and never mind who was there first.

And the middle class…well, that’s not really a thing anymore, right?  Because everybody wants to claim they’re middle class, but you there working in an office at a computer – you’re on an hourly wage, right? And you get more or less whatever benefits they’re willing to cough up, probably a choice of two HMOs if you’re lucky, right? You fill out a time sheet just the same as if you were punching a clock? And you probably get two weeks vacation a year and can’t work from home, can you?  Guess what: from a legal standpoint, you’re indistinguishable from that union pipe fitter who probably has better benefits because of collective bargaining, but you don’t need a union because you work inside at a table, right?

I haven’t read Thomas Pikkety’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century yet.  The take-home message, as far as I’m hearing, is that he asserts that capitalism inevitably leads to a flow of resources to the top of the pyramid, that the rich will only get richer and the rest will be left behind, and that the only reason this was interrupted in the 20th century was due to the impact of the world wars and the confiscatory levels of taxation needed to finance them (and the Keynesian spending to get out of recession in between and thereafter).

This comes around every so often.  Back in the day when Old Navy first launched, no less than Time magazine was concerned that Gap Inc was splitting into its high end and low end brands (and that was before Banana Republic became what it is today).  John Edwards, before he knocked up his videographer, had gone to great lengths to push the theme of “Two Americas” as the basis for his campaign. Naturally, Occupy Wall Street drew a line between the 1% and the 99% and it didn’t get any less bright just because the movement collapsed into its own dysfunction.

But the split comes round in different ways out here.  Sure, there’s the private transit system every major company now employs to move its workers back and forth from the Mission to 650 and back (which keeps drivers on duty for fifteen hours while only paying them for eight). But there’s also the revelation that the split in iOS/Android ownership tracks with economic status pretty smoothly.  And that in turn leads me to look at things like Google or Facebook services where everything is free at the point of use, as long as you’re willing to be data-mined.  You’re paying, just not in cash on the barrelhead – and if you can pay the money up front, you don’t have to have a cellphone contract or an email provider harvesting your data.

Really, the only way to measure class in this country is by the spectrum of diminishing consequences.  I said years ago that the definition of a charmed life was freedom from the consequences of your actions, and in the grand scheme of things, that’s about it.  Debt? Ignorable, written off, repackaged. Crime?  Do a few months in tennis prison or else just catch probation, maybe wear an ankle bracelet. White male? You can do anything.  Black?  Better not get pulled over.  Woman?  Better not want to be a gamer or a sports fan.

And the most annoying thing of all, the very worst thing, is that now you don’t even have to grow up. If you want trampolines and treehouses at work, they’ll build that for you.  They’ll drive you to and from and bring your meals to you.  You can even keep saying girls are icky and passing notes and pulling hair if you like.  As long as you chose a sufficiently lucrative field, you can pretend like it’s still third grade and that fifty years of society never happened and get paid $200K a year for the privilege.  The American Dream is a luxury good but adulthood is a lifestyle option.

It’s worse than it used to be. There are plenty of reasons why. Social networking made it possible for sociopaths to link up and validate their opinions (e.g. Reddit and 4chan). Obama backlash gave voice to all manner of racists with the thinnest veneer of politics smeared over their demands for birth certificates. A whole generation grew up with endless positive affirmation and helicopter parenting and freedom from setback.  And strange and straitened economic circumstances created conditions where unemployment could sit at excessive levels for historic lengths of time while bailed-out investors shot money out of a firehose at any and every stupid idea imaginable.

Twenty-five years ago, in a college education class, the Japanese education model was decried as a system where all through high school, you work like mad, you take extra courses, you attend cram school in the evening, you barely leave your room, because you must get into one of the correct six universities no matter the cost…and once you get there, you switch to glide because you made it into The System and will be all right from now on.  A quarter-century later, it’s hard not to think of that as you walk around Stanford.  If you want a motto for the current tech boom, the current state of American society, the current level of cultural maturity, make it this: Stay seventeen forever.

Or you could declare that we live in a society, and you have to accept that there are other people, and live accordingly.  And if you don’t?  Nobody’s too old to be spanked.  And we as a society need to call out these adultolescents…and reach for the paddle.

Last night, going through a box of stuff from the crawlspace (as the wife dug out T-shirts to be made into a quilt), we unearthed a particularly unflattering sweater of mine, vintage September 1990.  I didn’t want to throw it away, but I couldn’t put into words why.  And then, this morning, came the most unexpected news ever: David Lynch confirming that twenty-five years after the end of Twin Peaks, there will be more.  Showtime, nine episodes, 2016, picking up right where we left off (when Laura Palmer, or her doppelgänger in the Black Lodge, said “I’ll see you in twenty-five years”).

And it all came rushing back, with Gene Loves Jezebel’s “Jealous” underneath.  Because I know what I’ve talked about before with the beginning of my college experience and how it all went wrong, but…

There is another edit.

In this edit, I don’t panic at the failure of my abortive Greek experience, and I don’t latch onto the first girl who shows an interest for fear no one else will.  In this edit, the show I fell in love with over the summer becomes the hook by which I meet some other people, and we watch the season premiere with coffee and cherry pie to see if Dale Cooper was really shot dead at the end. In this edit, I meet some fun and interesting people who aren’t tied to the Greeks or the theater department and who have an interest in politics and this new show called Seinfeld (since Jerry Seinfeld is honoring a prior commitment and doing a standup show on campus despite his new program taking off like a rocket since then). In this edit, I pile in a car with people, go buy ice cream, and have to eat it all because it doesn’t fit in the dorm fridge. In this edit, I don’t have all my chips on one immature and jealous girl and I actually make friends instead, because I make a smart decision instead of panicking.

And that’s where the film runs out, because I don’t have footage of that decision, because I didn’t make it.

I have a vivid emotional feeing around September 1990, because it was a liminal moment at its truest.  There was a brief window where maybe the college experience could have been salvaged, maybe things turn out differently, maybe I get to have an acceptable college experience rather than spending the next twenty years trying to retroactively piece one together out of a scattering of memories and a series of increasingly poorly chosen compensations.

Maybe I want that sweater to be its own sort of memento mori, but in the opposite direction – instead of remembering your own mortality and fragility and inevitable doom, remember that you can make the right call and make life a little better in doing so.

I think the thing that’s made this first month of Vanderbilt football so hard to take is simple: it wasn’t supposed to be like this anymore.  When the previous coach started in 2011, my ambition for year one was “more than 2 wins” and I was hoping for bowl eligibility by year 3.  Instead, we started out 3-0, could have finished 10-2 if half a dozen plays had broken the other way, and wound up in a bowl immediately.  Vanderbilt football was coming off back-to-back 8-4 seasons capped by bowl wins to get to 9 – literally as good as the football program had ever been.  And then Mason shows up, and we’re assuming yes, there’s going to be a lot of new talent, but the non-conference schedule is squishy-soft and the SEC East is the easier division by far, so we should still clock six wins, right?

Oops.

The absolute defenestration at the hands of Temple might have been the single worst loss in Vanderbilt football history: an orgy of complete bed-shitting that saw the starting QB pulled after going 4 for 6 and replaced with two ineffectual quarterbacks who failed to deliver a single offensive point through two games.  Blame it on the repeated lightning delays and the ridiculous 10 PM start if you must, blame it on a squad that to this point has played 30 true or redshirt freshmen, or blame it on a coaching staff that through three games looked absolutely lost and over their heads and got their one win by virtue of a UMass kicker who pulled a 22-yard field goal attempt wide.

But here we are, 1-3 and only now looking good, and that’s thanks to a pair of blazing kickoff returns for touchdowns that let us cover the spread on ranked South Carolina.  We had a win that felt like a loss and now a loss that feels like a win, and we’re back to the money line as defining a successful performance…

Same. Old. Vandy.  It wasn’t supposed to be like this any more, but it only took about thirty minutes of football to set back three years of work.  Right on cue, here was literally everyone in the college sports media jumping on the pile, dying of eagerness to proclaim that things were back to normal, that Vandy had returned to its accustomed place.  And you want to push back, you want to scream, you want to punch somebody in the dick, but what can you say or do?  Because we did exactly that.  We went backward to the level of the Robbie Caldwell year. We looked like a football team that never heard of football.  And the ridiculousness – the godawful uniform fracas complete with an email printout, for the love of God, we had a permission slip – or burning Wade Freebeck’s redshirt for the sake of one quarter against UMass (to be fair, he played well in relief in the Carolina game and may have to do so again), or the decision to put the game against Ole Miss in the Titans stadium for the sake of selling 3,000 extra tickets (all to Rebels fans) and then having people unable to get to their seats until the second quarter, and now the revelation that Brian Kimbrow (who has known knucklehead tendencies) has been indefinitely suspended and Jordan Cunningham has taken an indefinite leave of absence…

It’s a bad look.  It’s a horrible look.  It makes Vandy football look worse than bad – it looks incompetent. A team that can’t get out of its own way, a team committed to running a precision passing game with freshman receivers and inexperience quarterbacks when the running game is gashing defenses for regular reliable first downs, and a team – to put it bluntly – that looks like all its mojo was carried off to Happy Valley to be part of the Penn State Get Right Quick whitewash.  Back to the basement.  Normal service has been restored.

This, then, is the challenge for the Commodores.  Not only to get back to the heights of mediocre, in the most challenging conference in football, while still actually sending kids to class and enforcing the law (looking at you, Florida State), but to get people to take us seriously in a world where back-to-back nine-win seasons couldn’t do the job.  I don’t envy Derek Mason the uphill climb.  It’s going to be a steep one, and no matter what they tell you in movies and fairytales, you don’t every time get to the top just because you try hard and believe in yourself.  And it’s an awful long way to fall.

I hadn’t been to Portland for five years.  The last time I was there, life was very different: I had just started this job, I was carrying my laptop because of fantasy football draft requirements, and I had just started using the Kindle app on my phone to read books.  Now, the Kindle app (or device) is pretty much the only way I read books, and I was doing it on either my iPad or my Moto X.  I did end up spending most of the time carrying two phones, thanks to the requirements of the job (gah) and I learned I don’t want to do that anymore, so I got that going for me which is nice.

But Portland.  Five years ago I said it was like “what if my high school was its own town” and I see no reason to change that.  This year, it feels like San Francisco, only with nothing to prove and successful treatment for Asperger’s.  It’s like Silicon Valley if it could only realize there were other people.  Without fail, everyone was nice. Like seriously nice. The only real problem with the week is that it was hot as balls in a part of the world that I am assured is reliably cold, rainy and fogged in. Jacket and socks were a no-go.  Otherwise…

It points up the real problem: we could totally move to Portland.  I’d find another job, the wife could probably telecommute, we could totally afford a house – but as soon as you move out of the Bay Area, you’ve moved away for good unless you hit the lotto or somehow arrange to move back into a house trailer of some sort.  It’s the problem with having a house that’s suddenly worth a million dollars: sure, you could sell, but then you have to turn around and buy something else in a market so hyper-inflated it thought your house was worth a million dollars.

But there’s all the beer.  There’s all the coffee.  There’s Distillery Row and an allergy-sensitive bakery around every other corner and a light rail-streetcar system that goes places you want to be and a soccer stadium smack dab in the middle of town and a soccer team that’s THE big attraction and an NBA franchise if you need that, so you have a local sport year around.  There are trees everywhere, plenty of shade, the beginning of fall color already.

Now.

I know that a lot of this is down to the novelty of a different place, coupled with the joy of not being at this job.  And that’s as may be. And it’s entirely reasonable that people in Portland would drive me nuts after a while. And you know what?  That’s exactly what I said when I decamped from DC to the Bay Area. And it worked out just fine.  At least until this job turned shitty at the same time as the technodouche boom washed up the flotsam of a hundred thousand hipster CS50 washouts.

We’re not going anywhere.  Not for a good long while.  But wouldn’t it be something if we could?

The new iPhones are, sadly, predictable.  The iPhone 6 at 4.7”, the iPhone 6 Plus at 5.5”, and the iPhone 5S still sticking around as the $99-with-contract option.  Apple has caved and gone the way of all other phone manufacturers, and decided that the premium phone must of necessity be a big phone.  It’s the same problem with the new Moto X, which grew from an ergonomic and delightful 4.7” to a just-a-bit-too-big 5.2” – and every reviewer is saying how much worse the hand-feel is as a result.

It drives home the point that the “phone” bit is more of a misnomer than ever.  These are Internet communication and media devices; telephony is an afterthought.  Holding a 5.5” phone up to your head looks incredibly stupid, but you’re never going to do it any more than you’d hold your iPad up to your head.  The iPhone 6 Plus should more accurately be called the iPad Nano.  For anyone who’s ever done a real train commute, though, needing two hands for the phone is a pain in the ass.

And that, in many ways, is where the Apple Watch comes in.  After two-plus years, the mythical “iWatch” is finally real – and starting at a wig-splitting $350, more than even the Moto 360. Apple did well to remember that a typical mechanical watch has a crown, and that it makes an excellent input device, and maybe the integration will be enough to be worthwhile…but $350 is a lot of fuckin’ money for a tertiary device.  Then again, that’s what I said about the iPad, and three years later the iPad Mini has almost entirely replaced my laptop for everything outside work.

But back to the iPhone 6, which is almost certainly what I’ll be moving to.  The screen is larger than my Moto X (and so is the phone itself, by about a third of an inch vertically), the battery life is allegedly improved, and they’re finally caving on NFC payment – which is truly interesting.  Because so many other devices have NFC readers already at point of sale (gas stations, drugstore, Whole Foods, vending machine) it should only be a software update to make them work with ApplePay – but because the system relies on a thumbprint from TouchID, you can’t just take the phone and start scanning to pay anywhere, which makes it safer than an actual credit card.  (People who don’t understand computers are already conflating an iCloud brute force password hack with the payment system, and making themselves look stupid in the process.)

So now we wait.  Will an iPhone 6 on AT&T get through the day better than an iPhone 5 on Verizon?  Almost has to, right? It had damn well better, anyway, or I might need to replace my iPod shuffle for the third time…

Not much to say except this is completely predictable.  Small-time police department given the armaments of an invading army (literally) and firm in the belief that all crime is fungible and all criminals are supervillains. Throw in the racial element of a town in the South with a history of disproportionate police action against racial minorities and you have all the elements needed for Birmingham fifty years later…with the caveat that the cops in Birmingham had dogs, firehoses, and revolvers.  Not fully automatic assault rifles with six clips each, armored vehicles, countersnipers and tear gas.

Which is fucking absurd. Their “sniper” was sitting on top of the armored vehicle with his SR-25 on a bipod, exposed to everyone in a position that in a real war zone would get him greased in about ten seconds.  That was a guy who was absolutely positive he wasn’t going to be shot at…which means he had no business being up there to begin with. Countless Tweets from people who service in Iraq have pointed out that the Ferguson cops are carrying far more ammo – and actually pointing their guns FAR more – than they ever did in-country, and one in particular noted that American troops put down riots outside mosques with less loadout than the Ferguson PD feels obliged to carry.

It’s out of hand.  And really, there’s no way to easily sort it out.  Ideally, you’d put the entirety of local law-enforcement on the sidelines and bring in cops from somewhere else where the police aren’t merely the best-armed gang and the rednecks who want to need the guns don’t have badges. And then the community activists would do a bang-up job of isolating the guys who just want to throw Molotovs and stir the shit (I guarantee you there are some of the usual Free Mumia-International ANSWER-Black Bloc-type douchetards out there making things worse).  If you could remove the untrustworthy police from the situation and launch a loudly public external investigation, you might persuade people that this is not going to be swept under the rug and justice will be served.  But then, if ifs and buts were bros and sluts we’d all have been laid on prom night, and right now not a mumbling word is being said about ann investigation.  Hell, nobody knows where the shooter cop is, he’s not in custody, and there are rednecks marching for HIM in St Louis even after autopsy results suggest that he capped an unarmed man on his knees.

And that’s really the thing, isn’t it? The Ferguson police are out spreading the meme that the kid was a criminal, that he had just robbed a gas station or something, despite admitting that the cop would have no knowledge of that at the time of the incident.  And even if it’s completely true – we’re doing “shot six times without trial” as an appropriate response to an unarmed theft now?  It’s like I said earlier: in the minds of certain people, all crime is fungible and every criminal is a terrorist and all terrorists are Magneto.  And more than one person is pointing out how a bunch of old white people pointed military weapons at the ATF for two weeks at the Bundy Ranch without consequence, and the point should not be lost on anyone.  Those old crackers weren’t criminals, after all, they weren’t dark enough for that.

Ironically, we have just found the perfect use for Google Glass.  Real time video of everything a cop does from the moment they step out of the car, both policeman and subject, with real-time data updates in the corner of your eye too.  Horses for courses, and law enforcement is the ideal spot for it.  And we already have documented evidence that the camera makes a huge difference: cops play by the rules and citizens know that tape is running on them too.  Instant surveillance at the time it’s needed: maybe that’s the fix.  Because the cops are loaded for bear in Ferguson but they’re still trying to shut down the media – which is all the proof you need that in 2014, the iPhone is mightier than the sword.