Are my eyes really blue?

There was no reckoning.

Barack Obama is sworn in as President, with control of both houses of Congress, and almost immediately it starts: this is no time for looking back. There’s no point in rehashing the past. Any retrospective investigation would be a counterproductive witch-hunt. Best just to get on with it and go forward.  And thus did the people escape who lied us into a war in Iraq, the ones who sandbagged the regulatory regime and allowed the banks to fleece us blind, the ones who laid low for a matter of weeks before inventing the grass-roots GOP-laundering known as the “tea party” with which to perpetuate the idea that the world was just fine until January 20, 2009.

That comes to mind because of work.  I haven’t exactly had a grand time the last year and a half, and there’s very little secret of that. I now have a completely different management chain (well, at least a couple layers up) and there’s going to be a huge reorganization at some point.  I admit, I feel slightly better about it than I did when it looked as if the reorg was going to be brought to us by the people who drove things into the ground over the last year and a half.

And yet.

More and more, it looks as if there’s going to be no reckoning.  The people who made the mess will just move on.  There will be no accountability for those who clusterfucked the entire process, and those who sacrificed time and health and quality of life will just have to be happy with a small bonus and a small raise and a pizza party – and the fervent hope that they can’t be stupid enough to fuck it all up again.

Looking for justice in this world is a fool’s errand, which is why as a child you’re taught to be good in life so you can get a land of milk and honey and fried catfish when you die.  Oddly enough, the people laying up treasure on Earth never seem that worried about their eternal reward – not enough to make it worth delaying gratification, anyway. Fuck up all you like, but as long as you’re above the Whiffle Line, the consequences are inconsequential.

And ultimately, that’s why I wanted a new job.  It’s as close as I can get to a reset – the hope that it’ll be different, that at least if it’s no better it’s at least a change from the previous caliber of shit.  But it also means walking away, accepting that you took the loss, that you couldn’t get over on your foes, and there’s a very real chance you’re not going to be able to leave the baggage behind just because you hit the reset button.

Of which more later.

This was my first trip to Maker Faire in three years.  The last time I went, in 2011, it seemed almost completely like 2010 and the only thing I remember standing out was a small square tent in opaque black that was wound inside with firefly lights and fake vines.  I probably would have bought that and set it up somewhere if there were room for it. But other than that, it really felt like the event had hit the wall.

Flash forward three years.

It’s gotten bigger, make no mistake.  A lot of things that used to be indoors are now outside under tents, especially the craft and fabric-related stuff.  Not to mention a wide array of blacksmiths, fire-breathing octopi, mechanized snakes, and of course the ever-popular recreation of the Bellagio fountains with Coke Zero and Mentos.  (It used to be Diet Coke; I can only assume there’s a marketing angle here somewhere.)  Inside, there’s dedicated dark space for the glowing Tesla coils used to make music.  And there’s a lot more in the way of food-related stuff, and I don’t mean dining: there are vertical hydroponic racks suitable for growing tomatoes in the space of a phone pole.

The biggest things now are drones and 3D printing.  There were all sorts of 3D printing exhibits, applications, hardware specials, the works.  Basically the same old “the street finds its own uses for technology” – snap-together cosplay helmets printed one palm-sized piece at a time, custom-extruded Crocs made on a scan of your actual foot and fit perfectly to size, auto parts replaced by scanning and printing and lost-wax casting.  Plus assorted quadcopter-type things with HD cameras attached – some big enough to fly over streaming video of El Pulpo Mechanico live to the Internet, some about the size of your hand looking like an extra prop from Agents of SHIELD.  And there are corporate booths, of course, but they tend to be more like Radio Shack’s “Learn To Solder” booth.

Plus there’s the old standby, all of them – the naval battles between ball-bearing-firing warships on the water, the model trains propelled by live steam with tiny coal boilers, the marshmallow shooters of PVC pipe (customize your own!), an entire village of steampunk outfitters, wallets made out of seat belts and a human-sized version of the old Mouse Trap board game.  And a whole array of costumes, for every and any reason or no reason at all, whether Goth or steampunk or comic-book-ish or neo-Victorian-in-Wonderland or just made up out of your own head.  (And don’t think the opportunity to cyberpunk it up hasn’t drifted through my head once or twice, if only there were more fog and less sunlight out.)

Maker Faire, at heart, is what Burning Man used to be and tries to pretend it is.  It’s what SxSWi wants you to believe it represents (instead of spring break for startups).  Maker Faire, at its heart, is a celebration of creativity and imagination, not freighted with the baggage of ten thousand Williamsburg/Mission hipsters or techie douchenozzles (the whole day Saturday, I saw exactly three pair of Google Glass, not one of them on an exhibitor). And it’s all forms of creativity and imagination. Do you quilt? There’s something for you to see, irrespective of whether you’ve ever touched a smartphone in your life.  Do you just like to put Lego together? Go for it.  No pink feathered boas and/or skinny jeans required. Calligraphy? Iron cutlery? Fashion made out of Target bags and produce mesh? A working electric piano made out of cucumbers? It’s all there.

And there was one company offering an electrified folding scooter for $800. Cheap? Maybe – tops out at 20mph, costs only pennies to charge, folds up into a 34 lb package suitable for going on any transit, not just the bike car, and ideal for bridging the last mile (and possibly sidestepping some of the issues I have commuting to work) – I didn’t splash out for it, but it got me thinking about how to reinvent how I get to work and back or get around as a whole.  And that’s what something like this does: spurs the imagination.  And imagination is something we could generally use a lot more of.

As of today, in the UK, we now have the Moto E.  If the Moto G was the low-end version of the X, the E is definitely the low-end version of the G: 4.3” screen at 960×540 resolution (less than the iPhone 4), only 4 GB of onboard storage, rear-facing 5MP camera with no front camera…but the thing runs Android 4.4.2 with no extra overlaid skins and costs $129.  Let’s not mince words: this kicks the shit out of every other offering at this price point.  There is no other phone in the $100-149 range that’s running a current version of Android.  There is no other phone in that range that can run a current version of Android.

Motorola has it sorted. They have three phones: the G, the X and now the E, which is as many lines as Apple supports and in similar fashion (insert gag here about how the E comes pre-aged 2 years).  They run a clean OS without all the unnecessary crap that Samsung and others use to load down the phones  (and which Moto was equally guilty of in the MOTOBLUR days).  They’re using the E and the G to put viable smartphones in the hands of people who would otherwise be paying for last year’s crap.  And the Moto X…I keep being drawn to it.  Yes, the model is almost a year old (even if I’ve only had it since February or so) and yes, it’s resoundingly middlebrow on the spec sheet for all the stat-boys that populate Android’s fandom, and…I don’t care.  I reach for the thing instinctively, even (especially) over my work-provided Verizon iPhone 5.

Because Moto nailed it.  The UX is about as good as you can make it.  The phone is responsive and snappy, the hand feel is better than any phone I’ve had since the iPhone 4 (and before that, the original iPhone), it feels solid and reliable in a way that the plastic of the 3G never did, the screen size feels larger without making the phone feel bigger, and – now that I’ve had a chance to test with an AIO SIM on the AT&T network – it absolutely kicks the shit out of my Verizon iPhone on battery life.  Maybe it’s just because there’s more pervasive AT&T signal around where I am, but on the first full workday of testing, I used the iPhone for two phone calls, seeing some incoming text messages, and checking email twice.  I used the Moto X for everything else: podcast download/playback, additional music listening, Twitter, Instagram, opening web links in Dolphin Zero, RSS reading, incoming scores, the whole fidget-with-your-phone of modern life in Silly Con Valley.

At the end of the workday, both phones were at 59%.

If I could get iMessage, iTunes and a decent mail client on the Moto X, it would be my only phone.  Hell, if it weren’t for iMessage, I would give back my work phone outright and just ask if I could be reimbursed the $45 a month it’ll cost me to stick with AIO long-term (unlimited talk and text plus 2.5 GB of LTE/4G data capped at 8 Mbps – which costs literally half the retail cost of my old plan that had 450 minutes a month, 1000 texts and “unlimited”  3G data that rarely broke 1 Mbps).

The next iPhone had better be something pretty good.  But to be honest, give me iOS in the Moto X’s form factor, and I’ll be fine.

The mighty disruptive tidal wave of Uber has finally reached London.  The venerable black-cab drivers are prepared to strike over the ways that Uber is evading the normal requirements of taxi service in the British capital – that the smartphone app with its surge pricing essentially amounts to a taxi meter in a private car, which is not permitted. Setting aside altogether the fact that Uber drivers will presumably be spared the Knowledge, the exacting command of every street in the city that black-cab drivers are required to know from memory before they can drive.

The bloom is off the rose for me for Uber.  Every time I’ve tried to use it outside San Francisco, the results have been charitably described as dismal at best.  More and more, it seems like Uber’s success is down to a combination of massive subsidy from investment capital, sidestepping the existing regulations around cab service on one technicality or another, and relying heavily on “private contractors” for whom they disavow responsibility in a pinch.  In other words, the perfect 21st century American corporation.

It’s the cod-libertarian mentality of Silicon Valley in a nutshell – these rules are inconvenient, so they should be ignored.  And yet, people fail to understand why we have regulations.  You go up in a plane, you want to make sure it’s not going to collide with another one – we need the FAA.  You want to buy stock in a company, you need to know the company actually exists – we need the SEC. (The Securities and Exchange Commission, that is.  We could probably get by all right without the Southeastern Conference.) You want to build a house, you need to know the wiring’s not going to burn it to the ground and it’s not going to collapse the first time they blast for coal or the wind comes up – you need building codes and inspections.

Think about UberX, or Lyft, or Sidecar: their business proposition boils down to get in a car with a stranger because this app said it was OK.  And yet the more these companies disavow responsibility for the conduct of the drivers, or the operation of the vehicles, or compliance with existing law and regulation, the less plausible – or safe –  that proposition sounds.  There are other companies – Flywheel for one, though I’m sure there must be others – who are doing what Uber should have considered all along: take the technology, the payment system and the hailing mechanism and arrival tracking and such, and license it to existing taxi providers. The thing that people love about Uber isn’t anything qua Uber itself, it’s the ability to pull out the phone, summon a vehicle, get in, get out, and not have to fumble with the money.  Smoothing the rough edges off the taxi experience is a far easier operation than trying to replace it outright.

But that wouldn’t be “disruptive.”

It shouldn’t bother me this much, and I’m happy for him, but…it kind of sucks.  Herb Hand, perhaps the most social-media-savvy of all college football assistant coaches, apparently shot an episode of Chopped last summer and it will air in a month or two.  At the time, he was the offensive line coach of Vandy, and apparently was all in his star-V gear and everything.  But at this point, you know where that staff is now.  It’s that state school in Pennsylvania that plummeted to the abysmal depths of a 7-win season and took the entire Vanderbilt staff in an attempt to turn it around.  And for their trouble, right now they’re sitting on what is widely regarded as the #1 recruiting class for the 2015 signing year.

We can’t have nice things in Vandy athletics. Our hotshot basketball recruiter will get itchy feet after a year. Our talented class with three NBA draft picks will go 1-3 in three NCAA tournament appearances. Our #1-overall pitcher will lose the ability to find the plate in the first round of regionals against Michigan. We’ll have 48 hours to enjoy our first back-to-back bowl game victories, ever, before ESPN delivers our coach to State College because he didn’t go to Los Angeles or Austin first.  And then, when we land one of the most sought-after prospects in college football to replace him, we’ll get slotted 12th in the preseason out of 14 teams. A Kentucky team that we beat three years straight, an Ole Miss squad we beat four years out of six, a Vol squad that has to come to Nashville after losing twice and replacing their entire offensive line – they all have the Vandy game pencilled in as a win.

We get no respect for trying. We get no respect for “doing things the right way.” We tell ourselves we are to make us feel better, but supposedly Stanford was out there “doing things the right way” when they got hammered by Cal seven times in eight years, when they were winning one game a year, and do you know when people started giving them credit for it?  When they went to three straight BCS bowls.  Pity?  Sometimes.  Sympathy?  Rarely.  Respect? Never.

The fact is, we’re only going to get respect when we start beating people over and over and over and over again.  When it can’t be dismissed as a fluke play or a lucky bounce or a talented player or a coach who caught lightning in a beer bottle. And even then, as long as we have fewer seats in the stadium, fewer fans who only set foot on a college campus for games, less free-floating money wandering into the pockets of players and prospects, we’re not going to be considered a peer with the rest of our conference.  Because, to be blunt, they are not our peers.

Which begs the question…what are we still doing here?

* The AIO experiment is happening.  There’s going to be a month at $45 with unlimited talk and text and 2.5 GB of LTE data throttled at 8 Mbps, and we’re going to see if it makes a difference.  There’s also a 703 number associated with it…of which more later.

* Samsung got dinged for what is basically lagniappe, a hundred million dollars or so for violating some Apple patents.  Forgiveness is better than permission – Samsung, more than any other Android vendor, ripped off the Apple UX wholesale and for their trouble got a commanding share of the Android market.  Shameless.  Any idiot can look and see what happened – the packaging changed, the power adapter changed, the colors of icons were the same – but they’re pretty much going to skate with it.  Microsoft managed to make a touch UI that looks nothing like iOS.  That’s actual innovation.  Samsung just pauses every couple of years to try to wash the slime off.

* Once again, a quick review of my correspondents shows that basically everyone I text with is on an iPhone.  It’s going to be tricky to move off.  The things that the iPhone is indispensable on for me are text messages, email and media content – but maybe toting the iPad will help with that.

* I still haven’t seen an episode of Silicon Valley since the first one. I need to find the time and make the time, but for some reason my heart’s not in it.  I wonder if that’s a result of looking at the real thing all around me. Sometimes I wonder if the thing you have to come to grips with when you stop being Nuke and start being Crash is that you have to accept that 21 days in the majors was all that was going to happen, and that at the end of the day you’re a really good triple-A player.  But like I say…of which more later.

I don’t know when Nokia passed Motorola as the gold standard of mobile phones in my mind, but if I had to hazard a guess I’d say it was probably around 1997.  I replaced my Nashville phone with a Nokia 636 after leaving grad school – it was HEWWWWGE in today’s terms, but I went out and bought the NiMH battery to try to eke a little more time out of it (as you can see this has been an obsession for as long as I’ve had a phone) and when I left for DC, it became my dad’s phone until he died, and was my mother’s phone after that for at least five more years…after which she replaced it with another Nokia for five years.

Because that’s what Nokia was: solid, sturdy, easy to use and utterly robust.  I kept falling back on Nokia. I got my Moto Piper when I moved to DC, broke the contract, wound up with a little Ericsson, but sure enough, before long I was on a Nokia 5160 or so.  When I moved to GSM, I had a dual-band Siemens phone that did GSM and TDMA for about six months, but it kept shutting itself off in the subway – so I wound up with a Nokia 3590.  I tried to go smartphone and got that SonyEricsson P800…and moved West and wound up pushing a Nokia 6620.  I got a cheap Moto flip as a backup phone at work with an eye toward traveling – and wound up getting a Nokia 3120 to replace it.  Even when I started using that Moto F3, I picked up a Nokia 1112 as a backup to the backup just because it sipped battery and hung onto signal tenaciously.

My nephew has that Nokia 1112 now, and my wife’s Nokia 1600 (locked to Orange) sits in a drawer against the day we go back to London, and all those other phones have been donated or sold or just lost. But nonetheless, there was still a little pang today when Nokia’s smartphone business officially became a subsidiary of Microsoft.  Sony Ericsson had the flashy UI, and Motorola had the hot industrial design, but Nokia was old reliable.  And yet, they were late to the game on smartphones.  Had they not stuck with Symbian for so long, they could have ruled the Android world the way Samsung came to – their Windows phones are things of beauty and are to all accounts right there with the best in the world for performance.  But they spent too long sticking to the low end of the market, and they paid…and eventually the only option was to go all in with Microsoft.

Which is too bad.  I wish I still had that 3120.

…Fast Eddie Snowden does realize that he just took a giant 100% Grade-A restaurant-quality organic deuce on his credibility by doing this, right?

* I had dinner last week with one of my tech insiders, who hadn’t actually seen and handled the Moto X yet (he carries a Nexus 5).  He was impressed with the density of the phone, and didn’t realize the screen was only a 720p AMOLED, and it occurred to me that the thing that continues to draw me to the Moto X is that it’s got the best hand-feel of any phone since the original iPhone and for the same reasons.  Solid rounded comfortable feel in the hand. Not coincidentally, the Moto X also had one maximum priority: battery life.  The various technological tricks to squeeze out 24 hours off the charger in the Moto X are the natural progression from the original iPhone’s lack of GPS, 3G, video recording or third-party apps: if the battery doesn’t last all day, the phone will be DOA in the market.

* He also concurred with me that battery life is the future of everything.  If the battery can’t be made to last – and right now the only way to get more battery life is to either cram in a bigger battery or else do some heroic things in chipset engineering – the product will be DOA. And right now, I’m still struggling to parse out how much of my battery woes are the device, how much are the carrier, and how much is just me actually trying to use the damned thing as intended. The fact that I never get more than three bars signal at work has to be a thing, simply because even if I’m using Wi-Fi for data, the phone has to burn extra power to cling to that weak CDMA signal for voice.

* New York magazine nails the Ponzi scheme of the modern tech bubble – not that it’s new, of course.  Back in the dot-com boom, everything was going for free and making it up on volume, to the point where there were free cars wrapped in advertising and free DSL at a time when DSL was new and rare and pricey.  That ended about like you’d expect. But the lack of institutional memory around here, coupled with a flood of VC money looking for returns, has enabled a bunch of startups to go down the PimentoLoaf.Com route of providing goods (or more likely services) at a loss by just burning their capital and getting ever more funding – on the presumable promise that when the bubble bursts, they’ll be the viable service left standing like Amazon or what have you.  At some point, though, I doubt investors will be happy to feed the beast with no prospect of return, and it’ll only take one economic jolt to put us back in 2002.

* I’ve said it over and over again, but what the iPhone 6 needs: 2 GB RAM, AMOLED 4.7” display, 2200 mAh battery, dedicated coprocessors for speech and location beyond just the M7.  What the Moto X2 needs: better power management, a mail client and a ringtone store that both don’t suck, improved camera performance in low-light situations, and a headphone jack on the bottom (and I wouldn’t say no to a legit iMessage client, but that’s never happening).

* There’s a major IQ test tomorrow: public sale of Google Glass for $1500. Like cocaine, or the Fisker Karma, the current version of Google Glass is God’s way of telling you that you’ve got more money than sense.  Google has managed to combine the worst of Microsoft and Apple: ubiquity plus reality distortion field. If they had just one person who’d paid attention to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and the opprobrium heaped on “gargoyles” therein, maybe they would have tailored the thing any better.  As it is, Google Glass is to this boom what the Segway was to the last one: a potentially useful device with niche applications at present that over-wealthy techies are managing to turn into a symbol of arrogance, detachment and social ineptitude.  After all, walking around in the Mission with $1500 strapped to your face isn’t really a good idea at even the best of times.

* After three months and change, I can say in all honesty that I haven’t missed the larger iPad at all.  The iPad mini Retina is absolutely the perfect device of its type and it’s only warm weather that prevents me carrying it everywhere. (Although I still prefer the Kindle Keyboard for long-term reading, obviously – assuming the lights are on.)

* Let’s be honest, all I want out of my next phone is to feel like Tony Stark designed it for SHIELD.  That’s how you know you’re legit cutting edge these days. =)

“When the smoke cleared, I was in a one-bedroom apartment facing right out on a main thoroughfare in the mid-Orange Line sector. I had no furniture – the cable was working and the TV was on the floor, and the telephone was working…but the Power Mac 6100 was sitting on top of a pizza box with a hole cut in it over where the fan intake rested. I had an inflatable mattress to sleep on, with my boom box at the head, and every morning at 7:30, I awoke to Z104, playing Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You” regular as clockwork. We were still shirt-and-tie then four days a week, and I honestly don’t remember what I did with my shirts – hopefully I wasn’t coming to work too rumpled, because I sure don’t remember bringing an ironing board. I got up in the morning, walked down the main drag, turned to cut through the local mall, and down the road between towering condo and office buildings to the Ballston Metro station, catty-corner from The Nature Conservancy (a sharp reminder of the ex-girlfriend). And then on the weekends, an early Friday exit to allow me to beat the rush hour traffic on the Beltway as I headed back for the Pennsylvania Turnpike and back west, through rolling hills splashed with autumn color in a strange world of tollbooths and cornfields and bits and pieces of Colonial architecture…”

-August 23, 2009

Sprint Spectrum was the first PCS service in the country.  GSM-based, operating in Washington DC and Maryland (mostly) and the first step into the 1900Mhz band, all in November 1995. I’m sure that at the time, it seemed downright futuristic, and not just because of the built-in caller ID and voicemail and pager functionality. And I’d certainly never heard of them anywhere else in 1997 when it was time to start looking for cell phones – because of course I’d need to have a cell phone in DC.  Even if I couldn’t freakin’ afford it.

I’m reminded not only of that, but of walking by the Sprint Spectrum kiosk in Ballston Common Mall and seeing the new Washington Wizards gear in the sporting goods stores – that lower-case “dc” logo and all the blue and old-gold where once there had been the red-white-and-blue of the Bullets.  Because they were moving to the new MCI Center and changing their name, and because the owner had been a friend of Yitzhak Rabin and turned against the old name after the assassination.  But the thing that stuck out was – here is an NBA team. Call 301-NBA-DUNK for tickets. There’s an NBA franchise in my town now, something I’d never experienced – never mind the fact that I’d already been a Redskins fan for seven years or that there was pro hockey too. Local major league sports: completely new concept.

And transit, of course.  The Metro, the functional necessity of DC as much as air conditioning – no sane person would live there without it.  The story’s been told over and over by now of how I only realized the night before my first day of work that I didn’t have to change at Metro Center for Farragut North – I could get out at Farragut West and just walk the extra block. But then, I’d never lived anywhere with a viable public transit system before, and by that I mean one that could take me from the place I lived to places I actually wanted/needed to go.  Like work.  Like a four-level mall at Pentagon City.  Like the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institute.

While I was ditching work after jury duty, I took the opportunity to watch the new Captain America movie, which is basically 80% set right between where I lived and where I worked in those first days in what’s now known as the DMV.  I was watching a guy who had a life somewhere else – somewhen else – who’d had it turned upside down and found himself living in Washington, trying to make sense of how his life had changed and who and what he was now.

It hit way too close to home.