Are my eyes really blue?

The one bad thing about Michael Sam outing himself to the world as a gay man is that the footage of his gameplay that ESPN insists on airing in a constant loop consists mostly of him tossing Vanderbilt players around like rag dolls.  As Austyn Carta-Samuels tweeted earlier, “If anyone misses watching me play turn on ESPN. I think I’ve been sacked by Michael Sam over 150 times in the last few hours…”

But setting aside the abuse suffered by our offensive line and quarterback, this is absolutely the biggest sports story of the year.  This is not Dave Kopay coming out years later, this is not Jason Collins coming out at the end of his career – this is the SEC’s co-defensive player of the year, the linchpin of the defense of the #5 team in the country, a team one loss against Auburn removed from probably playing for a national championship, a unanimous first-team All-American and therefore, logically speaking, an almost sure thing to be picked on the first day of the draft (yes, I know the first round is broken out all on its own now, but you know how conservative I am).

And he’s gay.

First off, let’s not mince words: Michael Sam has balls the size of church bells to do what he’s done.  He could have kept his mouth shut, or even just stifled it until the draft was done and his contract was assured.  Instead, he put it out there for the world to see, for 32 teams to weight and consider – and guaranteed that he would go to a team willing to be the home of the first openly gay NFL player.  He also put a lot of pressure on himself to perform – if he can’t play, if he struggles, you can expect Tebow volumes of coverage about whether he’s a distraction, whether the pressure is too much, and from every side – this won’t be a beat writer and a division guy on ESPN, this will be a hundred media outlets at Tuesday practices.  He squared up to the challenge, and I can’t imagine that it’s not a huge load off his mind just to have it out there and play it as it comes.

The other heroes in this, of course, are his teammates and coaches. Supposedly, he outed himself to the team at the beginning of last season, when the coaches were doing the old “tell us something about yourself” to get the team talking with each other, and he dropped that bombshell.  And his team considered it and rolled right on as if nothing had changed.  That ain’t hay, folks.  That’s college football.  That’s the SEC.  That’s a team with national aspirations.  If they were distracted or sidelined or negatively impacted, they sure didn’t look like in Nashville, or anywhere else in their twelve wins.  And let’s face it, they could have won at South Carolina (double-OT slugfest that might have been the best game of the year) and probably could have beaten Auburn if Gus Malzahn’s mad-scientist act hadn’t gone batshit loonball.

But they rolled with it, and they won with him, and they had his back the whole way.  That ain’t hay, folks.  That’s the generation after mine, and it’s the generation that will ultimately redeem the South.  They probably heard all the stuff you hear growing up about race and homosexuality and foreigners and everything else, but they also know kids of other colors and preferences, and they listen to Frank Ocean and they watch Glee and they wonder what some Southern kids always have: if they’re lying about this, what else are they lying about?

They will save us.  You can hang that on Michael Sam, too: not for ourselves alone.

Well done, young man.  You didn’t have to do our O-line like that, though.

“This isn’t sports. This is sports thrown in a blender, drowned under entire tankers of schmaltz and nonsense, dumbed down to appeal to the kind of people who think the Today Show is a newscast, and then they shower themselves in celebrating their own cleverness. And the worst part is that we don’t have a choice. We have to dig like hell if we want to somehow steal an illegal stream of the BBC’s coverage, because the “live streaming” NBC claims to offer has yet to function all day for me (thanks largely to basing their tablet app around the binary abortion that is Adobe AIR)…”

That was my complaint about the London games.  It’s still just as valid, maybe more so – yes, there’s a problem with being eleven time zones away or something like that, but I’m still waiting to see whether events that happen while I’m asleep are available for playback when I wake up.  If the choice is between “stream this live on your iPad at 2 AM” and “wait for our chop suey coverage in prime time, three hours behind the rest of the country” with nothing in between, NBC has learned nothing.  At least now I have the shady UK VPN option…because I’m going to watch.  It’s the only game in town, and it’s worth it.  Why?  Look at what I said about London again…

 

“Every four years, like bloody Brigadoon, this little magic village appears. And we see some of the people we saw there four years ago, and meet some new ones, and remember some we don’t see anymore. And normal service is suspended and we watch something special, and hell, some of our basketball players even colonize it briefly. And then Monday arrives and it’s gone as if it were never there.

“It’s like Disneyland. We can’t stay. We wish we could.”

Ultimately, that’s why we’ll bear through the horrific NBC schmaltz, set up the shady streams, DVR overnight action, and even just suck it up and actually watch what we’re handed.  Because once you dig down and drill through the weepy interviews and the Ryan Secrest horseshit and the pious blatherings of Pinkeye Costas, and get through the politics and the geopolitical nightmares and the unsettling corruption and legal horror, it’s still that magical winter village that only appears every four years.  Dreams of racing down a bobsled run at breakneck speed, or cresting a rail on a snowboard and being seventy feet off the ground, flying, or just the whole spectacle of speed and snow…more even than the summer games, the Winter Olympics have that magical dreamlike quality that no amount of autocratic dictatorship or network malfeasance can bury.

And once again, it’s a marker for where my life has gone.  Of which, as always…

I first found the pub in January 2007.  Honestly, it came onto the radar simply because it was walking distance from a likely Irish pub that claimed to have live music on Sunday nights, and because it was close to the light rail home.  It dovetailed with an interesting time in my life, when I was starting to explore who I might be in the process of becoming (now that I was plainly no longer who I’d been). The memory is thick with 2-Tone songs plucked from the wife’s collection or from Virgin Party Classics of a Friday morning, songs that featured more than a little in the pub.

It was dark in there, most of the light coming from a couple of bright red neon signs, with a gas potbelly stove in the front and a gas fireplace in the back room. 20 ounce pints, real cask ales on tap and no televisions anywhere in sight. No wi-fi, either, or at least none publicly accessible. Lots of soccer scarves – mostly Quakes, obviously, but others as well, along with assorted paraphernalia from sports and music alike. The general atmosphere was like the place had been taken ever so slightly out of time, a feeling enhanced by the confluence of “Ghost Town” and “Set the Fire to the Third Bar” and the occasional Irish song flickering back up through my iPod.

And I sort of forgot to go back for a while, until January 2008, when I resolved to start checking out the Irish place again, and the pub into the bargain.  A couple or three Sunday nights, and then that was an end of it.  And then 2009 rolled around, and as I adjusted to the changes of a new job, I took on the notion of trying my hand at the pub quiz, at which I won about $75 over the course of a month.  All in pub credit of course, and when I left with the monthly prize single-handedly, that $40 of credit sat untouched for some time.  I know I must have gone back in at some point in the ensuing three years, but I’m not sure when it was exactly – friends came to town and social life became, well, social, and sitting alone down the pub wasn’t really a thing anymore.

I don’t know when I flipped it back on again – January 2012 maybe? – but by January 2013, I had locked in on it again, and rediscovered that sense of being taken out of time.  And last January and February, it was what I needed more than anything, because the world was getting to be too much.  Of which more later.  But with a Kindle and the Sunday burger (bacon gouda BBQ last night) and a cold pint of cask-conditioned porter, with the Selecter playing overhead as you recline in the leather chair, it’s just about dead solid perfect.  Even if it’s going to take almost an hour to get home.

Well, in accordance with traditional practice, this comes to you, gentle reader, from the Moto X itself. The keyboard is different but I’m learning my way around it. The 4.7″ screen is worth the upgrade in a subtle manner, much like how the iPhone 5 screen didn’t seem like a big deal until you went back to the 4. The swiping motion is difficult to get used to and the text recognition doesn’t seem as sharp, but I suppose that could just be comfort level.

A real battery test will come during the week, obviously. Tough to tell until you’ve had a full discharge and recharge cycle. So far so good, but not ridiculously different.

The speech recognition is something I’m starting to get used to. The Sun twist dictated with the speech recognition just so we can see what’s doing. (Okay, aside from mangling ‘this sentence was’ that’s right. I blame the Bowie playing overhead here in the pub.) It seems to pick up on the voice cue easily enough. Wondering whether somebody else could trigger it easily.

Camera seems good enough. Works great for Instagram. The wrist twist to start is very handy. I keep inadvertently touching the lens thinking it’s the dimple in back, though. We’ll see soon how the pictures look at full size.

The look is very nice. All black with the woven back. Very suggestive of classic cyberpunk at least in my own mind.

Anyway that’s the first cut. After a bit over 24 hours, I’m not dying to run back to an iPhone. That alone is a good sign for Android.

Well, the $100 discount code offer on an unlocked device was too good to pass up.  A week from Friday, maybe sooner, I’ll take possession of an unlocked Moto X.

Black on black on black, 16 GB, $300 plus tax for an unlocked American-assembled smartphone. I have yet to see a negative review of this thing, a device that is probably the most intriguing Android gadget I’ve ever encountered – this is the one, unlike the Nexus One or Nexus 7, finally induced me to put down cash.

So why this and not the Moto G?  Why spend the extra $100, and conversely, why not splash out to go up to 32 GB?  Well, to answer the second bit first – because I’m not going to be using it as my primary music device and carrying 12 GB of iTunes content on it.  If I could get by with 16 GB on the Moto G, I can get by with 16 on the Moto X.  And in return for the extra $100, I get an AMOLED screen and larger battery (so better usable life on a charge) and a slightly larger display in a slightly smaller package (which is nice), plus LTE (which is frankly non-negotiable when it supports both AT&T and T-Mobile bands).  Were I to get the Moto G, I’d have to choose between either international “4G” non-LTE coverage or having full use of both AT&T and T-Mobile “4G” in this country.  The Moto X handles both – so LTE everywhere in the US and “4G” abroad.

More to the point, though, the Moto X includes the stuff beyond stock Android that intrigued me – like the co-processor based listening feature for voice commands, or the ability to detect driving and automatically flip to a voice-controlled mode (reading out your texts and the like).  And unlike almost any Android phone I’d ever heard of that wasn’t a Nexus, the Moto X got an update to Android 4.4 shortly after it shipped, so there is the prospect of actual future-proofing.

But why Android? Why now?  Why throw in with the Beast of Mountain View?

Two reasons.  One: I need to be able to work the other side of the street.  Despite being hired on as a Mac tech, I went most of 1998 and well into 1999 without a Mac on my desk at work, because it was the only way to learn and get comfortable with Windows NT.  I know iOS inside and out, but unless I force the issue, I’m never going to get familiar with Android.  Certainly not by playing with phones at Best Buy or the like.

And two: this is an experiment to see how far you actually CAN go with Android without giving in to Google.  I’m going to try to get my apps via Amazon instead, where possible, and I don’t intend to use my Gmail account for anything.  In fact, I don’t rely on a single Google service for anything right now, so the only Google functionality I’m going to be employing on the phone is what it forces me to use, and that alone should be useful and informative.

And to be perfectly honest: this may be my last chance to ever buy a phone from an American company that was assembled in the USA.  I remember the days when Motorola had 50% of the worldwide market for cellphones and churned them out domestically – in the early 90s they were cited by Time magazine as proof that the US could still innovate and manufacture the best things in the world.  I don’t exactly trust Lenovo not to pack the whole thing off to Shenzen or something.

Plus, let’s face it: I have an iPad mini with 200MB free LTE data per month which substitutes for keeping personal data on my work laptop. It’s not like I have to abandon the iOS world altogether if this doesn’t quite work out.

So that’s it.  We’re going to spike the Android glee once and for all, and I’m going to put my own money on a phone for the first time in three and a half years.  And to be honest, if it works out, Apple’s going to have to really pull a rabbit out of the hat with iOS 8 and any notional iPhone 6, because what’s winging its way to my hand is legitimately the most innovative new smartphone since the original iPhone.  And innovation ought to be rewarded.

…during their two-season “punishment”, Penn State football went 8-4 the first year and 7-5 the second.  And to remedy this horrifying state of affairs, they brought in a new staff, all but two of whom were coaching Vanderbilt three weeks ago to their best back-to-back regular season record in decades: 8-4 and 8-4.  

Put another way, the last time Vanderbilt did as well as Penn State’s “punishment” seasons? 1929-30, when Dan McGugin took the Commodores to 7-2 and 8-2 respectively.

So Penn State claimed basically our whole staff and a quarter of our verbally committed recruits so they wouldn’t have to be as bad as our best stretch in 80 years.

No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.  But I wish nothing but ill to that team on the field.

I did some measuring.  As best I can tell, the Magpul case on the iPhone 5 gives me a package that is almost identical to the Moto X or Moto G on every axis – height and weight are within a tenth of an inch, max thickness is within a couple hundredths of an inch (to the Moto X’s benefit!) and the weight of the cased iPhone is heavier than either Moto.

So in basically the same size package, the Moto X has upped the screen size from 4″ to 4.75” and added a battery with 50% greater capacity.  And the Moto G is sporting a 4.5” display with the same pixels per inch and a battery only somewhat less capacious than the X.

Much as the Nexus One threw down the gauntlet to the iPhone 3GS, the Moto X and G are doing the same to the iPhone 5.  Sure, the 5S has the TouchID and the first effort at a co-processor for battery purposes, but Motorola’s gone not that much larger and stuffed half again as much battery into the package for their trouble – and battery, as I frequently insist, is THE defining measurement of a modern phone.  And both the Moto phones are breakthroughs – the X for providing the best Android experience yet and the most innovation on UI, the G for delivering a modern unlocked phone for half the price normally expected of such a device.

And I’m not on contract right now.

Cupertino, make me smile by September, or it might be time to get rash.

The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to make it leak.  As with your bathroom, so with our technological life.

Consider the computer, to start with. 1993 was the last time I had a summer job in an office that didn’t come with a computer on the desk.  Ever since then, if I’m in an office, at a desk, in a cubicle, whatever – there was some sort of computer waiting for me.  Maybe not a great one – that briefly-held HR job in 1997 meant a 486 pushing Win95, and typing 6 characters for your Peoplesoft password instead of 5 would cause the entire computer to crash – but a computer. Suffice to say that for two decades or so, the use of the computer has been normalized.  That means networking.  That means email. A computer that isn’t on a network is a computer that isn’t worth very much to Ed Earl Brown beyond Word and Excel and one-person gaming (and when’s the last time a solo game on a PC was a big deal? Wolfenstein? Maybe?) – what do we do with a computer? Email. Twitter. Facebook. Web surfing. Blogging. World of Warcraft.  Minecraft. Pinterest. Buy stuff from Amazon. Watch things on YouTube or Netflix.

All things that generate data traveling over a network and stored somewhere else.

That the government has all this data isn’t amazing in the least.  The data monitoring and collection is already there, in house, as a function of the services themselves.  All Uncle Sam has to do is turn up with a warrant.  We’ve clicked through enough EULAs and stuck enough pictures in Instagram and plotted our every daily move in Foursquare and sprayed our political opinions all over our friends’ walls.  And the thing is – we have an entire generation that’s come up believing that it’s perfectly normal to put your entire life on exhibit, and CEOs at places like Google and Facebook who don’t understand why personal information ought to be private at all.

That split difference is becoming a serious issue.  On a more personal level, I used to see it every day from cyclists on Caltrain riding their bike up the “Dismount Zone” tunnel and directly past the “Walk Your Bike” signs before complaining about non-cyclists in the bike car.  Or Googlers arguing that their private shuttle buses are just fine using MUNI stops for pickup because the alternative is for them to all drive – not to move closer to work, or work closer to home, or actually use the public transit whose infrastructure they choose to appropriate.  When it’s done by The Government, it’s the oppressive heavy hand of the old-fashioned legacy powers.  But when it’s done by techies, it’s “disruptive” and “rethinking” and “advanced.  When really, it’s all the same thing and all of similar concern.  Pious techie glibertarians go on about how “Google doesn’t have drones,” but by the same token, Uncle Sam doesn’t depend on advertising against your NSA profile for his income.

In the real world, unencumbered by Randian fantasy, Ed Earl Brown is far more likely to see his personal data abused for profit by Facebook than the CIA.  Consider the Nest thermostat and the acquisition of Nest by Google – and the ensuing online panic about Google suddenly having access to regular data from inside the house.  Tony Fadell – the CEO of Nest and the mastermind behind the original iPod, the guy that Google is probably counting on to figure out consumer hardware for them – has come right out and said that he doesn’t plan for anything like that to happen with Nest’s data, but the problem is, it’s not his call anymore. Instead, his network of devices now belongs to a company that’s built its fortunes on data-mining for dollars.

Ultimately, of all the companies in the Valley that people know, there are only two I don’t hold in immediate suspicion: Apple and Amazon.  Because at the end of the day, both of them are in the same business: trading cash on the barrelhead for goods and/or services.  Maybe they’re doing a better job of it than anyone else, and that’s what makes them respectable.  The second director I ever had in this industry put it bluntly: “Shit costs money.”  And half the delusion and deception of Silly Con Valley consists of trying to persuade Ed Earl Brown otherwise.

The FCC’s bluff has been called and the courts have basically taken a giant shit on Net Neutrality. The way is paved, at least on paper, for ISPs to revert to a fully cable-TV model of tiered access, speeding up (and slowing down) all manner of services however it suits them.  The obvious one that everyone goes to: Comcast, but for the consent order forced on them by the NBCU merger, could start their own Netflix-like service and then exempt it from throttling or broadband caps, with the result that Xfinity customers could either struggle with Netflix at 128kbps and three movies’ worth of data per month, or else subscribe to Comflix.

This is bullshit.  It’s bullshit that stemmed from the original misdiagnosis that ISPs were “information services” rather than “communication services.”  That might have been true for the likes of AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy. but it was never true for broadband ISP services.  Comcast might try to spin their “triple play” offerings as “information services” based on the presence of TV, but as television converges with the Internet, it’s becoming more false with each passing season.

Right now, there is exactly one surefire way of bringing this back under control: Congress will have to declare broadband ISPs to be common carriers and communication services.  Good luck with that.  There’s no more reason for this to pass Congress than anything else, unless somebody comes up with a wiggle that allows the GOP’s mental-defective wing to be separated from its techno-libertarian pretenders so the latter can team up with Democrats on a quick fix.  And to be blunt, the same thing needs to happen to wireless, because AT&T has already announced a plan for “Sponsored Data” that will allow companies to pay for their content not to count against user quotas…which opens the door for wireless data to be used only to access those services willing to pay the freight themselves.

It’s really hard not to be pessimistic about the direction of the country.  But hell, we don’t have kids, so in fifty years or so it won’t really be our problem anyway. Right?  It’s a shitty attitude, but then, we have pretty shitty politics.

Of which etc.

I’ve got a case on my phone.

It’s a Magpul case endorsed by none other than William Gibson – it’s a little bit Mall Ninja but not obviously so. Good grip, good protection, only obstructs about half my charge cables. I don’t mind it, and it doesn’t make the phone too big. Which begs the question: if I’m going to carry something of that size, why not get a phone of that size that doesn’t require a case and is using the added volume for bigger battery and a screen to match? Sturdy polycarbonate, Gorilla Glass…you see where this is going.

Seven years after the introduction of the iPhone, I’ve finally started giving active consideration to what my life would look like without it. To be honest, a lot of this thinking has been enabled by the acquisition of the iPad mini – a guarantee of iOS functionality in a go-everywhere package. But a lot of it has been driven by the frustration of battery on my iPhone 5 in the past six months or so. The problem is, my daily work life is in places where signal is compromised at best, and Verizon phones never deal well with compromised signal. And the battery has already been replaced once, which isn’t encouraging.

The problem is, battery technology isn’t keeping up, so the only solution is to cram in a bigger battery. And since Android’s power management was unspeakably bad until very recently, Android phone makers made a virtue of necessity by using 5-inch screens on phones too big to use with one hand…but which could make it through the day with the correspondingly oversized power supply. Apple did a little of that, but not much, when the 5 arrived. But now…

Now we have the Moto X. In addition to the larger battery, it uses several other tricks. Slightly smaller screen. AMOLED. 720p instead of unnecessarily higher resolution that the human eye can’t distinguish. And most innovative of all, a series of coprocessors that make it possible to staff out certain key functions to their own ultra-low-power CPUs and save the phone from lighting up the main processor (itself dual-core rather than quad). The Moto X is all about user experience, and the first big step is the elimination of the battery anxiety that goes with any heavy use of a modern smartphone.

The other problem has been diagnostics. I’ve had the very devil of a time trying to see what exactly has been taking the piss out of my battery. The only thing I can do is delete one app at a time, or turn off one functional at a time, or not play audio back, and do each of these things for a full day while making meticulous notes on usage times and battery percentages. And that’s purely a function of iOS. At least with Android, the potential exists to monitor the functions of the phone at a more granular level and see what’s hitting the CPU so hard.

So then, let’s be practical: what are the implications of going to an Android phone, based on my frequent usage? Well, number one is podcasts: I have to be able to download my two or three podcasts on the fly and play them back on a weekdaily basis. Then there are the other things on the dock: music playback (possibly challenging given that a good chunk of my music is still FairPlay protected m4p), RSS, and text messaging – and that becomes a challenge simply because so many of my friends and colleagues are iPhone users. Killing iMessage means committing to burning through a lot of text messages relative to what I use at present.

After that, it’s a whole pile of free apps: Instagram, Evernote, things like weather and IMDB and mail. And mail is tricky, given that I do use iCloud for my primary personal email. Not insurmountable, obviously, but a quality IMAP client would be essential to getting by otherwise. And obviously I would need a calendaring solution for work. And I suppose you get maps for free, along with transit info via Google Now, and…

And there’s the rub: while you don’t necessarily have to treat with Apple for anything other than the App Store, it’s almost impossible to deal with Android without working with Google. And while Apple wants your money, Google wants your data – and wants to keep having it. It’s not a question of paying off the phone and being shut of them; in almost every way that matters, going with an Android device means learning to live with Google as your middleman.

So…is it worth taking a flyer on? It would be the biggest adjustment since acquiring the Dell netbook, and for similar reasons, and that flamed out after six months…but then, is is possible to really be a good IT professional without working both sides of the street? And heaven knows I need to be forced if I’m going to leave the warm embrace of AAPL…

Something to think about.