Are my eyes really blue?

The SEC was a dumpster fire in men’s basketball this year. Just godawful in almost every respect. Florida’s 18-0 conference run was considered suspect (but not enough to deny them the #1 overall seed). It just wasn’t pretty, and a whopping 3 SEC teams got into the big dance. Only thing is, all three of them made it to the Sweet Sixteen, including the Gators, 8-seeded Kentucky, and the 11th-seeded Tennessee Volunteers, who were stuck in a First Four play-in game on Wednesday and were by definition one of the last teams added to the tournament.

And in the past five days, Cuonzo Martin has led the Vols to as many wins in the NCAA tournament as Kevin Stallings has coached for Vandy in the last decade combined.

In 2007, Vanderbilt got to the Sweet Sixteen as a 6 seed behind Derrick Byers and Shan Foster, among others. Since then…

2008: 4 seed, lost in the first round to Siena.
2010: 4 seed, lost in the first round to Murray State.
2011: 5 seed, lost in the first round to Richmond.
2012: 5 seed, beat Harvard in the first round but lost to Wisconsin after.

10 years. 5 tournament appearances. Three total victories, and three consecutive first-round eliminations by a double-digit seed.

This is why Kevin Stallings should only find his seat slightly cooler next year. The circumstances of this year, leading to a conference schedule played out by seven scholarship players, two walk-ons and a student manager with a uniform, were ridiculous – any success of any kind meant extra credit. We still finished 11th, right where we were picked when we looked like having nine scholarship players instead. So I guess we overcame the adversity of losing McClellan and Hendo, for what that’s worth.

Next year? Dai-Jon Parker and Shelby Moats are our seniors. We have no juniors, because they all flew the coop after their freshman season, but Siakam is a redshirt junior and Kedren Johnson (assuming he comes back) would be a junior for eligibility purposes. I don’t know where Hendo fits in, depending on whether he gets some kind of NCAA waiver for medical hardship, but given the track record I’m not banking on getting a whole season out of him. Luke Kornet and Damian Jones, our twin towers of terror, are true sophs, and we supposedly have three freshman guards on the way. So for the next two seasons, we never lose more than two seniors per season and we should be well-tuned to the point that the 2015-2016 season should absolutely feature an NCAA tournament run. A run, mind you, not another one-out.

Because at that point, assuming we don’t sneak into the dance next year, we’ll be looking at one tournament win in the last nine trips. The SEC tournament title in 2012 was an unmitigated triumph, make no mistake, but it also camouflaged a squad that absolutely underachieved in the postseason. Stallings can recruit talent, and he can make the best of a bad situation, but unless he learns how to make the best out of a good one, it’s going to be time to look elsewhere.

First, read this.

No, all of it.

Done?  Good.

It’s real, and it’s discouraging.  I noted online today that when you factor in the bus that picks you up in the morning, the free snacks, the open-plan space with everyone around their shared table – the major Millenial contribution to Silicon Valley is turning it into kindergarten. But it’s not like it was in the late 1990s – when Po Bronson could strike up a conversation on the sideline of a rec-league soccer game and almost instantly be asked “do you want a job?” Employers are still being picky about who they hire, and employees are being picky about where they want to go, and in the meantime, Zuckface takes time out from bitching about the NSA usurping his exclusive right to violate privacy and lobbies both sides for more H1-B visas so cheaper foreign talent can alleviate runaway salaries…

There is a holiday on December 25 called “Christmas” that is the observation in Western Christianity of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.  There is also a holiday on December 25 called “Christmas” which is a heavily-Americanized secular celebration of the end of the year and the coming of winter, heavily leavened with consumerism and a general sense that we should take a couple of minutes to pay lip-service to the idea of being nice to people.  A lot of confusion and conflict comes from people who conflate these two holidays and think they are the same thing.

By the same token, there is a Silicon Valley tech sector that dates back to the aerospace/microprocessor days of the Wagon Wheel era and has gone from military-industrial electronics to personal computing to the Internet to a revolution in digital media and communication.  There is also a “Silicon Valley tech sector” whereby the dream is to drop out of Stanford at 20, Tinkertoy together some APIs with a kicky interface and a whimsical name, host the whole thing on a cheap AWS instance, collect $20 million in VC funding and ultimately sell out to Google or Facebook within a year.  And too many people have come to conflate the latest get-rich-quick scheme for arrested adolescents with an industry that still has a lot of problems to solve more complex than a better way to get that co-ed to send you topless pics.

And most of all, the tide isn’t rising. The money isn’t getting spread around.  Unless you do a huge deal while you’re still small, the big acqui-hire dollars are going to the engineers and the CxO-level staff and the VCs who funded you.  If you’re a secretary or a QA guy or the IT support, don’t count on the massive upfront equity position – in fact, the only time you’re going to get equity up front is if they don’t have cash on the barrelhead to pay you.  And there are people out there complaining about it, but in classic Valley fashion, they’re doing it in the most tone-deaf ignorant-ass way possible.  Sigh.

Basically, the “Silicon Valley tech sector” is the latest version of the Wall Street of the 80s.  It’s a double-bubble economy; the economic bubble grows on the back of lucky guesses, personal connections and VCs and investment banks with more money than sense hoping one of the darts strikes gold, while the participants exist in their own bubble away from, you know, reality.  Live in the Mission or Marina, take the sealed bus to work without ever dropping off the Wi-Fi, get your dry cleaning done on campus, borrow an electric car to drive home if you like, enjoy the free food everywhere, never grow up, never grow old, and don’t think about how the ride can’t last because obviously Candy Crush will be popular forever and a $7 billion IPO is only sensible.

Meanwhile, the startup mentality goes haywire everywhere in the Valley.  So now we all get to sit in the big open-plan offices, we all get to answer our work email 24/7, and we all get our projects managed in the style of ready-fire-aim, and never mind that an organization of thousands of employees doesn’t work like your eight-man social-app company upstairs at Red Rock.  Everyone is chasing the “tech sector.” In the meantime, the actual tech sector suffers by it.

Android Wear has landed.  One of the worst-kept secrets in the Valley is now out there – Google Now is coming to your wrist, this summer, voice-driven and paired to your phone.  Pretty much what I and a million other people predicted.

This is actually potentially interesting.  For one, it lets Google leverage a lot of what they’ve learned from Google Glass in a less obnoxious package.  For another, it gets you away from the biggest cause of battery drain: the screen.  The modern smartphone uses more power on its display than anything else, which is why the constant make-the-phone-bigger race is a false economy in Android and why phones like the Moto X, with its emphasis on dialing down the specs race in the name of battery preservation, are pointing the way forward.

I’m still holding out until the notional iOS device, but wearables are going to happen – at this point, it’s just a question of who gets it right first.  On the face of it, Google appears to be closer than Samsung…

Actually never mind, this guy nails it.

Not final, certainly, but for the time being, the Moto X is not going to be the everyday phone. Partly because I’m still having my iPhone wholly paid for by work, obviously, but also because I think we’ve finally got the battery issues under control – and because if I’m packing a second device it’s going to be the iPad mini.

Android 4.4.2 is fine. It’s not tangibly worse than iOS and there are some things about that Moto X that I really like. But the email client is awful, and since I don’t use Gmail or Google Calendar, the utility of Google Now is diminished quite a bit.

I think if I had to use the Moto as the daily driver, the rough edges could be filed off with a quickness. Or at least with some alacrity. Press and doubleTwist are solid and the Twitter client doesn’t suck nearly as much as it used to, and things like Instagram or Evernote work a treat. So it’s there if ever I need it, which is awesome.

But for now, I think I’m gonna dance with the one what brung me.

“We’ve had tremendous intelligence failures,” Snowden said, “because we’re monitoring the Internet, everybody’s communications, instead of suspects‘ communications, and that’s caused us to miss leads that could have helped us.”

 

 

Well, my days of not taking Fast Eddie Snowden seriously are certainly coming to a middle.  In today’s SXSWI knob-slobber, a bunch of paste-eaters went crazy for a line that basically conveys the same sensibility as the middle-aged white women who were flabbergasted at being asked to take their Manolos off going through the security line at BWI in October 2001.  Why are you searching us?  Search the brown people!  Search the foreigners!  Search the terrorists!

But setting aside the propensity of well-to-do white nerds for profiling-based solutions to crime, Snowden’s other argument falls flat too – which is that there is a technological solution to technological surveillance.  That’s where he’s flat wrong.  There’s not.  Oh, sure, you can run GPG on all your mail and never connect except through Tor and eschew iOS and Android for some sort of hand-crafted phone you build yourself from an Arduino-clone, but it’s the same thing that keeps glibertarians with nine assault rifles thinking they can somehow stand up to the federal government.  The asymmetry is just too great.  What’s going to save you from the evil eye of Big Brother is not shooting back or building a better cloaking device.  You’ll be saved when Big Brother is no longer socially acceptable.

And that’s the thing: we as a society privileged catching the horrible evil superhuman Magneto terrorists above little things like privacy, and we did it for years.  There was one vote – one – against the PATRIOT Act when it passed, and that Senator has long since been turfed out of office in favor of another paint-by-numbers Teatard.  People don’t care about privacy.  If they did, Facebook wouldn’t still have a half-billion users despite whoring your data out as if it were Miley Cyrus.  Doctors who constantly hear about the legal peril of HIPAA data loss wouldn’t still be forwarding their mail into Gmail for convenience. AT&T would have paid some sort of price for the revelation eight years ago that they were routinely sending everything to the NSA.

I know that everyone at Nerding Man is convinced that they are the next wave of human evolution, and God knows I think I’m superior to 99% of the human race, but guess what?  The rest of the human race still exists and votes.  It’s not enough if everybody on your app.net client is in favor of strong encryption and robust privacy protection if Ed Earl Brown doesn’t give a shit.  And right now, he doesn’t, because he doesn’t think he has anything to hide and he wants terrorists to be killed, and the fact that he doesn’t see it working isn’t going to make him think we have to pull the plug.

It should be obvious, but apparently it’s not: you can’t fix cultural issues with technical solutions.

 

Now comes one of the weekends where it’s a great time to be in San Francisco.  Burning Man is one.  The other is South by Southwest Interactive, a.k.a. Nerding Man, the tech-annex of the hallowed South by Southwest music industry festival.  SxSWi has somehow become the tail wagging the dog, the opportunity for all the hipsters in SoMa to hop a plane to Austin, that sainted paradise on Earth…

…hold. Up.

Texas.  TEXAS.  George W. Bush and Mack Brown and Ted Cruz and Rick Perry and Aggies and the Dallas Cowboys and the entire spectrum of Southern pathology.  Just as Atlanta got to be “the city too busy to hate” (not too decent, not too Christian, they just couldn’t find the time?) and wound up with every Southern branch office and pro sports team, Austin somehow gets to be the get-out-of-jail-free card because they have bands and beer and basically nothing you wouldn’t find in Boulder or Tuscaloosa or Nashville…except bats.

And of course there’s the great Texas economic miracle, by which regulations and taxes race to the bottom while the roads turn into moonscapes and kids graduate high school thinking Jesus rode dinosaurs.  Kind of a shitshow, actually, but then that’s at the heart of the great Southern economic experiment: make yourself a third-world equivalent and you can get all the business to move South.  Right before it decamps to Shenzen.  It’s how southern Alabama became a textile capital in the mid-20th century and a ghost land at the end of it.

And then I look at the article in the Verge last week, about the Googleburg-ing of Mountain View, and it occurs to me that we’re missing a hell of an opportunity here.  Google has about 11,000 employees in Mountain View.  Half of them drive alone to work, which explains some of the traffic (more is explained by the horrific geographical coincidence of where Google is located; the placement of the ‘Plex puts it on the wrong side of 101 from every other freeway in the area and too far to walk from any train system).  The buses are controversial and don’t carry as many people as Google asserts; even if they did, discontinuing them doesn’t necessarily mean single riders (it’s equally likely that half the bus riders would move somewhere closer to work). Google itself doesn’t generate nearly as much tax revenue as one would expect; with most of its employees eating on campus (tax-free) and living somewhere else and not really selling much product, very little flows into the local coffers – in fact, there’s a good case to be made that Mountain View would be just as well off if Google decamped somewhere else.

So why not Birmingham?

Seriously.  Birmingham is fifty years removed from police dogs and fire hoses.  The state is still suffused with racism and pig-ignorance, as should be obvious to anyone who was watching the opening session of the state Legislature, but the city of Birmingham has artisanal coffee and amazing Beard-award-winning restaurants and a spectacular new downtown ballpark – and a rent and tax climate that would allow Google to do its business almost without paying a nickel.  If the state was willing to grant ridiculous tax incentives to Mercedes to build a plant in 1993, how much more would they go nuts to attract the biggest Internet company of them all?

And Google’s business is on the Internet.  They don’t have manufacturing plants to work with.  They don’t have factories to operate.  The whole promise of the Internet is that you can do stuff from anywhere.  Lay down the fiber, clear some open-plan loft space, and boom, you’re off to the races.  Why not?  If Google feels insufficient love from the people of Northern California, why not head for the Heart of Dixie and start a new revolution outside Silicon Valley?

Let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you know damn well why not.  But why not put their money where their mouth is and see what happens?

“…when you get right down to it, our lives aren’t measured out in easily-demarcated years. They’re measured in random eras – places lived, loves lost, championship seasons, cars driven, a million overlapping criteria that let us look back and try to gauge the distance we’ve come…

There’s not really anything I want for my birthday this year. Nothing I can buy with money, anyway. I have had everything I wanted in my life, even if I don’t have all of it anymore, or want all of it anymore, and even if I would like some more of what I already had… For today and tonight, though, I’m content with another cup of coffee, dinner with friends, and turning in early to snuggle with my sweetie. Tomorrow will take care of itself. You play the days like you play the games: one at a time.”

-Feb 28, 2011

“The only problem is with trying to find the solution is that this time there isn’t one. At some point, you have to find a way to acknowledge that shit happens, that life is full of randomness and it doesn’t always work out or even mean anything, that we live in a world of chaos and entropy – and you have to find your own light.  And for someone whose worldview has always depended on consistent rules and logical solutions, the real world is ever more difficult to cope with… The goal is to live in the now, in the moment – free of both the tyranny of memory and the trap of expectations.
That’s not a problem with a solution either.  You just do it, and hope nobody looks too closely at how…”  

-Feb. 28, 2012

“Aging sucks.  And yet I suppose it beats the alternative.  Yes, the sleep is more fitful and the pain lasts longer and the drinks hit harder and the stairs knock the breath out quicker, but fuck it, you’ve been dying from the instant you slid out of the birth canal. You just never paid attention to the fact.  Dwelling on it now isn’t going to slow the process down – just do what you can to stay healthy and get on with your life. But every February it’s the same story, and I’m starting to worry that I keep looking back because I don’t know what I’m looking forward to.  If it’s not going to be a long slow grind of the same thing every day until the grave, I need to find something to shoot for…”

-Feb. 28,2013

 

Huh. Well.  If that ain’t a show I’ll kiss your ass.  

Here we sit, 365 days on, and everything is just as it was the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that.  The goal is the same, but I seem to be falling shorter of it with every passing orbit round the sun.  Ever more cognizant that the world, or God, or Loki, or whoever – nobody owes you a happily ever after.  Stephen Schwarz’s Godspell notwithstanding, it’s not always all for the best. And the days may be long and drag on, but the years go flying by, each one faster than the last.

I felt it more this year than ever before.  Friends and family leave town – over the hill or up the coast or across the country.  Others fight through health issues, of increasing seriousness. Work becomes ever more intolerable, to the point where I not only despair of it ever getting better, but despair of it being any better anywhere else.  I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels for too long, marking time, treading water, abiding by what’s safe and secure even as the safe ground slowly crumbles beneath us.

Right now, if the Old Scratch himself appeared before me, offering to jump me ahead to age 60, but I’d be retired, with my wife and a healthy pension, and a cottage in a cold seaside town where the cops still carry revolvers and the coffee shop is still where you go for bacon and eggs and gossip, and where the one dive bar in town has a fireplace and doesn’t sell anything more exotic or complicated than Guinness, and where the sputtering air-cooled VW can get us around without the hassle and strain of walking on a bad back…I’d have to think long and hard before turning it down.  Assuming I would.

So that’s the challenge: what can I do to make the next twenty years something that I’m not better off just fast-forwarding through to get to my dotage?  And if I had to guess right now, I’d say: do the things that make me happy.  Go ahead and make the coffee in the morning, go to the public house on the nights they have trivia or live Irish songs, find someplace to sit by the fire and read, sleep in and cuddle with my sweetie, take a walk in the fog, just spend the $20 on the damned Nerf gun, turn off all the devices and watch the Prozac channel on UVerse with the lights out, take the time to meditate with nothing but the rain app or the shipping forecast in the background, buy the books and read them, use the vacation time, go away to Tahoe or Portland or Boston or Ireland or Japan. Cherish the things I enjoy, because – like Dan Brown’s Lounge, or the Antarctica video that the DVR ate, or the Franklin era of Vanderbilt football, or pie beer at Tied House – you’ll always lose them in the end, and be sorry you hadn’t taken the full enjoyment of them when you had the opportunity.

And for the love of everything, if there’s something in your life that sucks, that makes things worse, stop doing it.

I guess we’ll see how well that works out…

I mentioned it before, but one of the things that made the bowl trip to Birmingham so satisfying was that it was in a town where I had a past, where I had memories, where I had a life that could easily be related and relevant to the here-and-now.  And that’s not a small consideration.

I’ve mentioned the black hole before, I know, and how at diverse times it’s felt as if my past is falling into it, with me one step ahead like Indiana Jones jumping crocodiles or crumbling cliffs.  I guess 2007 was the worst example – leaving Apple, being gone from DC, my surrogate big sister’s moved out and the car I’ve driven since Clinton was sworn in is no more and I don’t have any friends from college or grad school and I’ve barely heard from anyone at my high school in a decade or more, and there’s the void yawning behind you.  And it’s a lot harder to keep your balance with a void front and back.

Part of it, I think, is just about having a past.  Remember when that bar was something else, remember before Pancake Pantry had the apartments built next to it, remember when that was Alpine Bagel, remember when that restaurant was a dodgy clothing-and-Chinese-cellphone shop.  I was here before, I’ve seen the change, I have institutional memory, I knew my way around and who knows, maybe I still do.  (hint: not as well as I thought I did.)

But part of it is about having that shared local culture. Mayfield Mall and the Old Mill.  Don and Mike and Low Budget Jeopardy and Vegas-style shows. KDF and HFS and 95 Rock.  People’s Drugstore and Big B and Long’s.  William Faulkner’s famous like about the South was that “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”  Which is true…if you’re there.  If you aren’t, then your past is definitely in the past, because I have at best tangential contact with anyone who shares common memory of the life and times of my first 25 years.

That’s what made it odd both times I made a big move – when I arrived in DC, it was almost fully-formed from scratch in 1997.  No past, no history, nobody around who could vouch for my prior existence – a big part of the reason why I was essentially rebuilt from scratch in the DMV.  And then, when I moved out here, nobody but my fiancee had any more than the faintest sense of my past existence, so I was dropped anew into a new world.

If I’m honest, I really haven’t done enough to build it.  Sure, I’ve had Cal football tickets for a decade (even if we don’t get very much use out of them lately), and I tried diversions as random as java programming lessons, Catholic RCIA and an a cappella men’s chorus – none of which really worked.  Work really hasn’t been as conducive to things social as it was back East, for better or worse – there’s no one tying me down to a crappy job, but there’s nobody there making it better, either.

But the other part of it is just time.  Putting in the hours, and the days, and the years.  Doing enough things that you can point back later and say “remember when”.  And in about five months, I’ll have a lot more to say about that.

Honestly, I gravitate toward the Moto X more than the iPhone now. I don’t know how much of that is novelty, and how much of it is exasperation with the Verizon-based iPhone 5 (and the battery-gimped iPhone 4S). But on so many criteria, the X is the equal or better of the iPhone 5 – I loaded up most of the critical apps last night and so far, so good.

The battery advantage is real. I have a plain black background and most of the text apps (Press RSS, Kindle) are white text on black background, to save power on the AMOLED screen. Android 4.4.2 has fixed the battery issue, for the most part, and in roughly equivalent use it burned only about 30% of its battery in town yesterday, whereas the iPhone 5 burned over 60%. And that’s without any audio playback, either.

Right now, the biggest weakness of the X is the mail client – which is just dreadful, to be quite frank. It won’t check multiple accounts at once, there’s a separate app just for the Gmail account (which goes unused), and it doesn’t delete mail from the server in a timely fashion (if at all). I don’t really do much in the way of personal mail, so it’s not a dealbreaker.

The bigger dealbreaker is iMessage. Apple’s bespoke solution to cross-device text messaging.. Literally every single personal message I have in my text messaging since I last restarted the phone is a blue bubble, even the folks in Nashville like the tailgate crew or the basketball manager who got promoted to player this year. Even at work, I only have a couple of green messages. Were I moving to a new iPhone, this would be a piece of cake, because the number would be abstracted away automatically, but now I have to tell everyone the new number. Which has the potential to be a gargantuan pain in the ass.

The iMessage issue really pointed up how stuck into Apple services I am. Having my personal calendar in iCloud is something I’m willing to do – and unwilling to move to Google’s service. Music, of course, is all from the iTunes Music Store – I might buy some MP3 from Amazon but I’m not about to commit to the Google Play Store for that stuff. And having iPhoto Stream automatically taking care of pictures as I shoot them is more convenient than I realized.

The polish just isn’t there, either. Little things as simple as having a quick lock to keep the screen in vertical orientation, or self-labeled folder creation, have been annoyances. I wish I could get the battery percentage beside the indicator instead of having to pull down a windowshade and then hit a button. And while Google Voice Search is great for entering terms, it doesn’t seem to work as well for some random inquiries, although I need to look more at what it’s supposed to do well. I wouldn’t mind having the headphone jack in the bottom of the phone instead of the top, though that’s probably personal preference as much as anything.

On the other hand, there are some things Apple definitely needs to go to school on with the Moto X. First among them, the camera-twist. Being able to twist the phone twice as it comes out of the pocket and have it ready to shoot? Absolutely priceless, especially when you’re out at the Chinese New Year parade. The display itself is perfectly nice – the 720p decision was the right one, and the iPhone 5 is legitimately starting to feel a little narrow in the display. I read a lot more Kindle books on the Moto X than I ever do on the iPhone.

Too, the battery management is beyond crucial – it’s 50% larger and things like the AMOLED screen help, but more importantly, there’s a table showing what percentage of battery use can be attributed to what function, whether it’s an app or the screen or the GPS or the Wi-Fi. It’s absolutely necessary and it’s inexcusable that Apple hasn’t put that into iOS yet. Similarly, it’s great to be able to see which apps took up how much cellular data. Since February 10, I’ve used about 300 MB – so 2 GB a month ought to be plenty, which means either T-Mob or AIO will do at $60 or $55 respectively (assuming I could live with AIO capping LTE at 8 Mbps, and I’m not sure I could when T-Mob was outstreaking Verizon at close to 20 Mbps in San Francisco last night).

But in any event, I can live with this phone. If I were going abroad, I wouldn’t hesitate to grab it first, and I wouldn’t be bitter if it was all I had until the notional iPhone 6 ships – and that notional iPhone 6 would have to impress me enough to pay full freight for, because I think I’m going to like no contractual obligation.