Are my eyes really blue?

This month is my career anniversary. On September 15, 1997, I left behind the world of political science and embarked on a new job adventure in the lucrative and exciting field of high-tech.  That my salary has doubled in the ensuing sixteen years is more a tribute to inflation and how little I was raking in at the beginning.  And the enthusiasm of those early days (in which I commented to some unwitting Iowa undergrads in email that my job was “as simple, easy and rewarding as picking up free money in the street”) has long, long, long since gone by the boards.

Sixteen years, man and boy, as the Cockneys say.  In theory and on paper, I should be halfway to retirement.  But the notion that I’ll get to retire before 60 is risible in the extreme, things being how they are.  That’s another post. This is more about what happened in those sixteen years.  When I started, my company had Ethernet, Token Ring and LocalTalk all in use, and whether you could get onto the Internet or whether your Mac could print was a function of what floor of the building you were on.  There was actually a modem pool so you could connect over the network to a 56K modem and dial into Erols or Heller or whoever was your ISP.* (And I had to do this, because at the time, the firewall blocked IMAP.)  We had Windows for Workgroups, Windows NT 4, Novell-based file and print services (at a time when FAPS wasn’t as giggle-inducing as now), and the phone in my pocket was a Motorola Piper that I couldn’t afford to turn on.

Things have changed a lot.  Apple stopped dying and took over the world in some non-PC markets that didn’t exist back then. Nowadays it’s all Ethernet connection, except when it’s all Wi-Fi.  I literally cannot remember the last time I had to use a model to dial in, but it must’ve been a while, because I don’t remember when I last had a computer with a modem built in.  The vast array of Zip disks, Jaz disks, and even CD-RW went by the boards in favor of USB thumb drives – when physical media was used at all, that is. I can’t remember the last time I had to use a DVD to install software, but extrapolating back I can only assume it was to install OS X 10.6.  Setting up printers remains as annoying and ignominious as task as ever, but the vast majority of my support tasks can be handled remotely.  The landscape of IT support, in short, should be completely transformed.

And yet.

I was having a conversation with my boss, who independently gave voice to something I’d been thinking for quite some time.  Generation X has by and large spent its entire office career working on computers.  Millenials don’t know anything else.  The baby boomers – the last generation to know routine office life without a PC on every desk – are starting to retire.  In theory and on paper, then, IT support should be trending away from “how do I do that” and more exclusively focused on “this doesn’t work,” because the user base as a while should have become more computer-literate and adept at handling the machine.

And yet.  The boss concurred completely: this hasn’t happened.  The new crop of users produces no fewer ridiculous questions, no less fodder for the Twitters and blogs and websites detailing the follies of help desk callers.  So if it hasn’t gotten any better – why the hell not?

My theory was this: as with most things in the tech world, the blame belongs to Microsoft. Windows was a mess until the release of Windows 95 – and then it was a slightly fancier-looking mess.  But all the old DOS problems remained and new and exciting ones were developed; Win98 was a kludge and WinME a disaster area.  Not until Windows 7 were the more robust NT underpinnings available at the consumer level – and by that time, the forced integration of Internet Explorer (as part of Microsoft’s effort to fend off the Netscape challenge) had opened the way to a whole new world of viruses and malware, made worse by the proliferation of peer-to-peer file sharing and high-speed home networks.

In short, Windows kinda sucked.  And it continued to kinda suck. People rebooted every day whether they needed it or not, and some folks prescribed a full OS reinstall every six months just to try to speed things back up.  Entire businesses grew up around consumer IT support – the Dell technician on the other end of a phone line in Hyderabad, the stereotype-bedecked Geek Squad at Best Buy – and people just accepted that the computer did weird things, bad things, performed poorly or oddly, and it was beyond their control.

It’s pre-Enlightenment religion, is what it is. You don’t know why your child is coughing and can’t stand up, you don’t know why the crop is withering brown in the middle of the season, you don’t understand why the sun is suddenly being covered in the middle of the day – and so you run to the village shaman or medicine man or whatever, and he sacrifices a chicken or something, and suddenly the sun comes back out or the kid gets healthy or, more likely, it goes on being shitty…and that’s just the way of the world.

Windows gave the computing public learned helplessness. People just accepted that the computer was beyond their comprehension, and gave up trying to understand or solve it.  Better to let the computer wizard do it, or the computer guru, or the computer magician – even the terminology suggests a primitive tribe throwing itself on the mercy of the supernatural.  And IT departments gladly indulged the peasants.  Maybe out of a need to get more budget, maybe out of a need to feed their own egos, whatever.  Personally, I think they did it because they wanted to guarantee that when sacrifice time came around, the peasants would look upon them as the priests…and not the chickens.

 

 

* I had the good fortune to have used two small business for my Internet access for a continuous stretch of about 13 years: Heller for dialup and Speakeasy for DSL.  Both are outstanding, and dearly missed.

Samsung did what they wanted to do: they got a watch out the door faster than Apple or Google.  Unfortunately, it seems a very Samsung sort of watch: all kinds of features,  a slightly clumsy UI, and a battery that may not make it through the day – and right now, it only works with the two new Samsung devices just announced.  Ultimately I suspect this was launched more for the sake of “FIRSTIES” and not for the sake of an optimal product.  Say what you like, but when Apple ships, the thing will be ready…for what it does.

See, that’s the thing: a watch is going to have to start at the bottom and scale up.  The tablet market wasn’t cracked until Apple chose to scale up the phone OS rather than cram down the desktop OS.  Similarly, someone like Pebble has a much better grip on the smart watch: what do you NEED it to do?  Shoot pictures? Probably not. Hell, you probably don’t even need a color display at this point.  What you DO need is not to charge it every night.  We’re more or less accustomed to that with phones at this point – the days of plugging my SonyEricsson Z520 in twice a week are long past – but to have to do it with a watch, to take it off every night and plug it in?  Pebble sorted that by focusing on battery life – still the most important trick in mobility computing – and for their trouble got a watch that could go for a week, can be worn in the shower (assuming it’s not too hot) and can be charged with a MagSafe-type cable.

Then there’s the other thing: the fitness monitor. Many of my friends have latched onto these, and the wife has started using the FitBit One – pedometer, activity tracker, can even tell whether you were going up stairs.  Easy to quantify and easier to monitor from a phone app.  No reason it couldn’t all be rolled into a watch; after all, the Fitbit Flex or Jawbone Up or Nike FUELBand are all on the wrist.  So there’s that – take your time-and-date and pop your Fitbit on there as well, and there’s your smart watch.  What else do we need?

Well, notifications. Apparently notifications are a big deal, as evinced by the attention given to the power-sipping active notification mechanism of the Moto X.  Presumably any notification you can get on your wrist is one less time you have to pull out the phone, unlock it, open an app or pull down a windowshade panel, all while burning through battery with that big bright screen.  So notification triage, and maybe even the ability to read text messages in full, possibly with some canned replies.  Throw that in there.

Now…each of the Big Two mobile operating systems has its specific party piece.  For Apple, it’s Siri; for Android, it’s Google Now.  Each represents a potentially useful way of interacting with the phone via watch.  With Siri, you do it all via voice.  Talk to the watch, hear the phone speak back via the watch or show you what would be on the phone screen on the watch (which probably mandates a color display or else some rejiggering of the UI).  With Google Now, it’s the constant push of cards to the watch (ditto re: the UI) and the ability to flip through traffic conditions on the way home or weather or flight tracking or what have you.  Each is potentially useful but would require some extra work from the OS side to make it function easily.

That’s the trick: it’s going to be difficult to come up with more than a bare-bones device that isn’t inherently tied to iOS.  Or to Samsung. Or to Motorola, or HTC, or just Android.  Pebble is way ahead of the curve on a genericised interface, but to really get use out of it may entail a bigger commitment to one manufacturer or another.  Which brings us to the Google Now problem generally.

See, I’ve done everything I can to try to make Google Now useful for me, but it doesn’t do much.  Weather report (of varying quality), commute directions (kinda sorta), transit info (when close to a stop), and to be honest not very much more.  Why?  Because I don’t use Gmail for anything. If it doesn’t have your email to mine, Google Now can’t offer you very much in the way of scheduling or prediction or “hey, leave now if you want to make your flight.” And even the notional alternatives (thinking of the slightly-stale Osito here) need to have Gmail access to do much more.

The problem, then, is that if you want the benefits of something like Google Now, you have to commit to Google for your services.  Which is asking a lot (which I’m sure is what Google wants). The “Today” view in iOS 7 will give you a little of this, supposedly, and apps like Donna are already trying to replicate some of the functionality with your calendar by rolling travel and weather and even car service via Uber into the package.  But it’s not all the way there.

Ultimately, the thing is this: at some point the Google Now-like service has to be something that does all its data mining and processing locally on the phone itself. Independent or at least agnostic of service provider, able to get useful info out of your work email without compromising your security in doing so and able to leverage whatever personal email provider you use without relying on Google’s technology.  In a way, that’s already present in iOS – for instance, if you get email with a tracking number from UPS or FedEx and tap on that tracking number, you’ll see “Track Shipment” as an option, irrespective of whence came the email.  Apple Data Detectors – a technology that Apple first rolled out in 1997 then largely ignored until two or three years ago  – can do that right now, already parsing out addresses to be sent to the address book (or soon to Maps) or dates to be sent to the calendar.  So the technology is there and it doesn’t take much to suggest that it could be extended to include things like flight confirmation numbers or  the like.

All of this is a very roundabout way of saying that I fully expect an Apple watch before long, and I expect it to rely on the functionality of iOS 7 to deliver a thin but satisfying slice of data to a glorified wrist-bound FitBit.  And in doing so, obviate the need for the phone itself to do a lot of the heavy lifting that currently makes it difficult if not impossible to use the iPhone itself as your fitness/presence tracker (see: the battery-slaughter of Saga or Human or Moves).  Anything that can be staffed out to something with its own separate battery is good for your phone.

So now we wait.  Every man his own Big Data.  It’s coming.

Lunch was late today, and in close proximity to a couple of cellphone purveyors.  Having satisfied myself on tacos and Coke Zero (note to the young man at Chipotle: the taco does not traditionally contain beans nor rice of any variety), I decided to step into the AT&T store and see for myself what the Moto X is about.

First caveat: I know damn well that the phones will all have those bulky alarm tethers on the back, making it impossible to get a good sense of hand-feel.  Second caveat: I know that the primary party pieces of the Moto X are voice control and its battery life, neither of which will be possible to test in a retail environment.  So with that in mind, I activated my personal psychic cloaking shield, made a saving throw vs. retail solicitation, and marched in to see what’s doing.

From what I can tell, here’s the story on the X: the gesture-based camera activation works right up until it pulls the alarm tether out of the base.  So much for cloaking.  The screen looks just fine, certainly no worse than the plethora of other phones stacked up alongside.  It doesn’t feel unseemly big on the x-y axes either. The woven back is a visual texture but not tactile.  Taps and swipes seem quick and responsive and natural.

More troubling is that there were two (2) devices in the store.  One by itself amid a sea of HTC and Samsungs (including the risible Galaxy Mega – is anyone really going to buy a 6-inch phone?) and one on the side of a display that included samples of the customizable colors.  White and black fronts, all the color accents and all sixteen color options for the back.  Most of which look like they could be really dated really quick – the resale value of your Miami Dolphins-colored phone is not going to be great.  But then, this is a smartphone for people who may not necessarily be upgrading every two years, for better or worse.  The crimson option would be nice for Tide fans. I kind of wish the navy was darker, but pair it with a white front and the metallic yellow and any Cal fan would be satisfied.

But that’s the thing: this is Moto’s hero phone, its cross-carrier flagship device. And it has less presence in this AT&T company store than you would expect.  Were it not for the customization console (which is not active, apparently), there would be nothing to promote this phone any harder than the free-with-contract Pantechs on the next counter over.  Maybe the big marketing push will come when the phone becomes available on all four national carriers, who knows.  But Motorola was allegedly preparing to spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars on promoting the Moto X – and right now, the budget for in-store promotion looks like about $3.50.

So on the way back to the car, I stepped into T-Mobile to enquire about the prepaid options for a notional unlocked iPhone 4S.  Not the contract-free options, mind you – the legit prepaid stuff, the sort of thing you’d have in the UK.  Add dollars, etc.  And right now, from that standpoint, the only real plan is a pay-by-the-day offering.  It’ll cost you $3 a day, but that comes with unlimited calls and texts plus 200 MB of data at full speed (LTE where available, HSPA+ otherwise).  That works out to $90 a month for unlimited calling and messaging plus an aggregate 6 GB of data.

Which might sound outrageous, until you look at a 2-year contract with AT&T through my employer and see that unlimited calling and messaging plus 5 GB of data per month will cost you $110 a month after the discount.  Verizon’s “Share Everything” seems somewhat more reasonable – $80 will get you the same unlimited everything plus 6 GB data – until you factor in the $40 for “Monthly Line Access.”  So you end up with $120 a month, essentially the same as the un-discounted AT&T plan.  And then throw in all the usual taxes, fees, assessments, blah blah blah…

Basically, as long as the network is sufficient, you can undercut AT&T and Verizon by 25% without any commitment at all beyond paying every morning when you turn on the phone.  If you were some random European popping over for a week – let’s say one of those British cabbies who always told us they were going to Vegas or San Francisco soon – seven days of service will only set you back £14 or so, and you can use your own UK phone into the bargain.

Now, the wild card in all this: AT&T is about to go national with their captive-brand AIO Wireless (pronounced like “A-O River!!”, Portlandia fans) which is also geared toward bring-your-own.  It’s not got pay-by-the-day, but its contract-free offering – on AT&T’s network, apparently – will cost you $70 a month for unlimited talk, unlimited text, and 7 GB of high-speed data.  All in one, no fees – flat $70.  Which is the same $70 that T-Mobile will charge you for unlimited everything – including data, although you have to think they’re throttling past 5 GB – if you bring your own phone and have no annual contract.  

By contrast: that same $70 is what I used to pay AT&T on a deep corporate discount inherited from Cupertino Hexachrome Produce, Ltd.  For that $70 I got 450 minutes, 1000 texts and 2 GB of data.  And if I still wanted that, I could get the unlimited text and talk and the same 2 GB of data for a slick $55 a month.  No hidden fees, no contract, and savings of $180 a year – on the exact same network.

I mean, what’s the catch? There’s got to be a catch. And in a way, there is: this is what happens when you take the phone subsidy out of the equation.  The European approach – and if you’re willing to stick with your own device, that’s $50 in your pocket every month.  The savings on service are enough that you can buy a new phone every year contract-free if you feel like it.  You’re buying a phone when you want or need a new phone, not when the window opens every other year and you have your one chance to take advantage of having been roundly rogered the past 24 months.

This is what I wanted when I switched to GSM a decade ago.  The promise of being able to move at will between carriers (well, between two carriers) without having to indenture yourself for years, of divorcing service from device and gaining the natural benefits of a real marketplace.

It’s coming.  And as soon as work stops providing me with a phone, I’m going straight there. Believe that.

So a couple weeks or so ago, I decided that since I didn’t have kids, I might as well take the case off my iPhone 5.  Nobody else handles it, I’m reasonably sure-handed, why not?  Sure enough, I’ve only dropped it once and not in a particularly harmful way, so now I have the benefit of it being light and slim and such.  And then, a couple days after, I did what my wife had done to her iPhone 4S with no regrets: pulled the screen protector off and left it off.

This was a huge leap of faith. After all, I scratched the screen of my iPhone 4 within a week of receiving it, and I’ve been paranoid about it ever since.  To take this fragile aluminum-glass iPhone 5 with no case, no screen protector, nothing at all – it feels akin to whipping off my trousers and Porky Pig-ing my way around Plato’s Retreat in 1978 or so. I mean, it may feel great and look very sexy, but before long, I’m going to wish I’d never done it.

But so far, it hasn’t been much of an issue.  And the thing is – it’s like getting a brand new phone. I don’t think I appreciated just how amazing the screen is, after months of having it covered by a scratched layer of polymer. I certainly didn’t appreciate just HOW thin and light it is on a day-to-day basis, or how the chamfer between glass and aluminum looks if anything even more high-tech than its Dieter Rams-influenced predecessors.  And given that right now it will support every known feature of iOS 7, it’s going to feel like a whole different phone again soon – probably by mid-September, given the Great Mentioner’s announce date of September 10 and the likelihood of sales on the 20th.  It’ll almost certainly feel like the biggest shift in the iPhone since it first shipped.

And that’s important. Apple is getting clubbed pretty good in the blogopshere by people who look at the evolving state of Android, or the new design of the Moto X, or the prospect of Google Glass, or just the fact that most Android phones have upward of 5-inch displays, and want to know why Apple isn’t doing anything wildly different.  And this betrays a couple of fundamental misconceptions about how Apple works and how things are in the world.

For starters, Apple tends not to test things out in public. The first iPhone and the first iPad had months to build buzz, but since then, new versions tend to be on the shelves within a couple of weeks of announcement.  The rumor mill goes berserk, always, but Apple themselves never let the cat out of the bag early. The notion of a Google Glass-like approach where an unfinished product is released to a handful of randoms is unthinkable in Apple World.  Sure, Siri has been “beta” since it launched, but how much of an outlier is that? By contrast, how long did it take for Gmail – for GMail – to drop the beta tag?  Siri’s ongoing beta status jumps out because it’s unusual that Apple would go to market with an officially unfinished product.

The other consideration is that of the delta. The first iPhone lacked a few things, but within three years, the iPhone 4 was essentially what we have now.  By contrast, the first Android phone worth criticizing – the Nexus One – only shipped in 2010…a few months before the iPhone 4.  Apple hasn’t had nearly as far to come over the last three years as the Android ecosystem, which itself made a virtue of necessity by producing ever-larger phones to accommodate the ever-larger batteries required to carry them through a full day.  The result, with half a dozen manufacturers, was a plethora of choice and the appearance that the Android world was somehow advancing further and faster than the Apple one.

In the end, a lot of what people wanted from iOS 7 was change for the sake of change.  Something new, something fresh, something different and exciting. That’s only been made worse by the features Motorola has rolled into the Moto X’s hardware, features that are almost certainly going to require new hardware to emulate and which Apple may not be able to match in 2013.  The iPhone 5S, so-called, will almost certainly be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and will as such feed the inclinations of a tech press that at some level has never really been able to shake the “beleaguered Apple” meme.  “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”  “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. None.” “iPad – failure, joke or fiasco?”

At some point – probably in 2014 – Apple has to do something to increase the delta.  Slow and steady may win the race and fatten the wallet, but it’s just not sexy enough for Them Asses.

The final score doesn’t matter.  It was a triple-stomach-punch of a game, literally – Jordan Matthews threw up his hydration all over the field and still came back to clock 178 total yards – and it was as close and compelling as you could have asked for.  If you weren’t on the losing end, it was an amazing game.  Plenty of Ole Miss fans turned up on Anchor of Gold to rave about how incredibly lucky they were and what an amazing game Vandy played and how they got away with one and otherwise be reasonably gracious in victory, which is why the rivalry doesn’t have the same sort of venom as some others.

No, the problem isn’t the Rebels, it’s the rest of the world.  You know, the ones who are circulating pictures of the stadium a half hour before the game and mocking the “sea of red” and empty seats, despite a completely packed student section – and, you know, the inability to see any of the other side of the stadium where the season ticket holders are.  The ones who, five minutes after an amazing Vandy comeback, three minutes after a shattering reversal of fortune and one minute after a heartbreaking tip-pick, dismiss the whole thing with “that’s why your [sic] Vandy”.  The SEC officials who threw a flag on “pass interference” that nobody could find in an amazing coverage job by Vandy’s all-SEC corner, and the ones who didn’t throw a flag on similarly tight coverage when it went the other way.  Naturally, the PI penalty kept a touchdown drive alive for Ole Miss.  But nope, “same old Vandy.”

Which is true from one standpoint: no matter how hard our team works, no matter how many changes our coaches make, no matter how much we pack the stadium, no matter how many new facilities we build, no matter how many four-star recruits take up the black and gold, no matter how many potential NFL stars come back for a senior year – no matter what actually happens, the same narrative will always be applied.  Perpetual cellar dweller, bunch of nerds who can’t get out of their own way, not really an SEC team, a guaranteed win every time out even if they’ve beaten you three in a row and five of the last six.

If you want credit, you should have gone to SunTrust.

The thing is – we’re actually a damn good school with a damn good athletic program.  The baseball team is a legit national power.  The basketball team, when we can enough players to scrimmage five-on-five, has done some great things.  Hell, women’s cross-country won an SEC title a few years back and women’s bowling (no, really) is a national power with a national championship in 2007 to their credit.  Our alumni clocked back-to-back Nobel Peace Prizes a few years back.

But we’re in the SEC. None of that matters.  Not to a conference full of borderline-illiterate Finebaum callers who never set foot on a college campus in their lives without a ticket in hand.  The SEC is about one thing and one thing only, and never mind that Florida was a dumpster fire of football before Spurrier and so was South Carolina, and that Ole Miss hasn’t done too much since integration, and that even mighty Alabama racked exactly one national title between 1980 and 2008 – no, Vandy hasn’t been good for years, so therefore Vandy can never be any good and will never change and cannot possibly improve in any way.

What we do doesn’t really belong in the SEC.  The things that are supposed to make you a great school don’t fit with this conference. Logically, the only thing to do is leave and try to get situated somewhere that actually credits the things you hold important, someplace where you actually fit in with the values and aspirations of those around you, someplace where you don’t spend your entire life as a freak just because that’s all you can be in that place.

Boy, that escalated fast, didn’t it?

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

For the Class of 2017:

Twenty-three years ago, I was where you are: getting ready for my first home game. I was a first-year grad student, coming from an undergrad institution with no football team, and nursing quite the hangover from a party the night before as I trudged into a battleship-gray monster to take on Wake Forest. Back then, the student section was at the far end of the horseshoe on the Memorial Gym side, and it got to about half-full by halftime with guys in coats and ties and girl still hanging onto Laura Ashley dresses (that long ago, kids). I thought we had a pretty good turnout. Then I realized that Wake also wore black and gold.

We won that game, 35-14. It was the last time we’d beat Wake Forest at home for a while. Hell, it was the last time we’d win at home that year bar one. We finished 5-6 for the second time in four years, and that was enough for LSU to swoop in and hire away our coach. That’s right: two 5-6 finishes in four years at Vanderbilt made you a hot enough commodity for another SEC school to poach. Of course, from 1983 to 2007, 5 wins was as good as it gets. This year’s seniors started their Vanderbilt careers with a former turkey inseminator as the acting head coach and experienced a second consecutive 2-10 season.

Things are different now. Vice Chancellor David Williams went out and got us a coach, as promised. James Franklin built a staff, took essentially the same players, and went 6-7 (and could have won even more with reliable place-kicking and officials who could recognize pass interference if it grabbed them by both arms). Then the next year we finished 9-4 with a resounding beatdown of Tennessee at home (the first home victory over the Orange since 1982) and a bowl victory to deliver the most SEC wins ever and most total wins since 1915. (We were really something before, you know, radio.)

Here’s the point: for years, we were all pretty lackadaisical about football. We showed up halfway through the second quarter, if at all, and were long gone before the final gun. We filled our stadium with season tickets bought by Gators and Vols and Bama fans, and shrugged. There was no three-finger VU sign, there was no “Who Ya Wit” or “Anchor Down.” Even the very lyrics of our fight song were “you know, we’ll be fine whether we win or not.” We had precious little to care about, and there were precious few who cared. Forget hope; all we had was a pipe dream.

Then James Franklin happened, and then Commodore football happened, and here we are. And now here you are. It’s your time, and your team needs you. They need you running out of the tunnel Thursday night like all the hounds of hell were at your heels. They need you on your feet for sixty minutes, loud and proud and to hell with being able to speak coherently in the morning. Your professors will understand if you croak like Toad of Toad Hall on Friday if we deliver the goods Thursday night.

So do it. Do it for your classmates. Do it for Austyn Carta-Samuels, who had an odyssey worthy of Homer to get to that first snap. Do it for Jordan Matthews, who could be a Heisman contender before the year’s over. Do it for Brian Kimbrow, who could have gone across the state but declared for all to hear that the orange hat didn’t fit. Do it for Andrew Jelks, whose family held Vol season tickets his entire life until now. Do it for Josh Grady, who did more to bring Vanderbilt football Twitter to life than anyone.

Do it for James Franklin, who any school not called Alabama would love to be able to hire. Do it for Coach Hand, the king of assistant coach Twitter, and Coach Chaos, who I want to record my morning alarm clock tone, and a whole staff that stayed together from last year, which never happens in college football. Do it for VCDW, who placed a bet on a Maryland offensive coordinator that’s paid out every day since. Do it for a national ESPN audience who needs to know who we are and what we’re about.

But do it for us, too. Everyone who sat and watched Notre Dame placidly drive down the field in the last 7 minutes to get their win after we took a miracle lead on a 3rd-and-37 pass. Everyone who plunked in a seat every even-numbered year for three decades only to see us fall to the Vols at the last minute (or, as in 1994, get our brains dashed out 65-0). Everyone who didn’t see as many wins in their whole four years combined as the Dores charted these last two seasons. Everyone who wanted to see one good run for the black and gold before they died, a sign that they hadn’t pledged themselves in vain, that we could someday be more than a punchline or a joke or a sure homecoming win.

You have the great fortune to be here at the beginning of the new age. You have the team for which we could only wish. Be the fans they deserve. Take up our quarrel with the foe; to you from failing hands we throw the torch – be yours to hold it high.

Anchor. DOWN.

I had just turned eighteen when Twin Peaks hit American televisions. It was the perfect combination of place and time: for me, something new and slightly weird just as I was getting ready to leave high school and achieve the big dream: college! independence! A new life for myself!  And a weird, quirky, dreamlike thriller was just the thing to pull me in, especially when the first few episodes ran again all summer and I could get caught up and stuck in.

Over twenty years later, I found it on Netflix, and resolved to plow through all twenty-nine episodes again, this time with the benefit of years and sense and a slightly better grip on things like Tibetan wisdom and terminal ballistics.  Last night I finished the last-but-one episode. There’s only the finale left.  And I’m reluctant to run it…because I don’t want it to end.

It’s definitely dated, I admit.  The pacing isn’t quite as bad as you’d expect of an 80s prime-time soap opera – and make no mistake, that’s what this is – but then, some of the slowness could be camouflaged by the abiding weirdness David Lynch brings to the table every time out.  It’s also tough to wrap your head around not only a world without cell phones and the Internet (not to deny them credit for Macintosh product placement before it was fashionable), but a world where the cops still carry revolvers and people routinely smoke indoors.  Twenty years ago is a foreign country.

The look is equally dated, although once again that could be partly Lynch and possibly just an affinity for the era. Let’s be honest; I was 18 and pretty much every one of the women on the show still holds up (we tend to forget that Audrey Horne was America’s designated sex-incarnate for most of 1990).  Norma in particular is still lovely, although she (and presumably Big Ed) are younger then than I am now, which is kind of disturbing to think about.  I’m still rooting for those two, of course – it’s tough to be with the one you love when one has a spouse in prison and the other has a superhumanly strong one with an eye patch and a drape-runner fixation.

So many plots and story lines that went nowhere, seemingly. Anything with the Packard Mill got boring in a hurry – Piper Laurie’s scenery-chewing bitchery seems much more suited to something like Dynasty.  The switch from the plot being driven by the expanding Renault crime organization to being propelled by Windom Earle seems fairly abrupt.  And James off with his mysterious woman served no purpose whatsoever.  No wonder it went off the rails – there was just too damn much to keep track of.  Lesson learned: you can be complex without being complicated.

But so much of it still works. Special Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry Truman remain the most underrated bromance of our time, and the evolution of Coop from mysterious eccentric sharpshooting investigative genius to humanized flannel-clad troubled soul in love with the new girl at the diner (and yes, that was Heather Graham, folks) is rather a nice character arc. I would have loved to see more of the Bookhouse Boys and seen more of their battles against “the evil in the woods” – and maybe the origins of the Faustian circumstances by which Twin Peaks became this idyllic small town taken out of time and framed by evil on all sides.

The thing is, Twin Peaks in its time tended to parallel my life. It started with a bang in the spring of 1990, when I was through with high school and anxious to get on with my future.  I even bought the cassette single of the theme, deliberately thinking to myself “you know, this would make a fine song with the new girlfriend which I will undoubtedly meet once college gets going.”  And then, when the show came back in the fall, it slowly deteriorated until petering out in April…which is just about how my freshman year went.  One long slow deterioration until by April, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to save this bird from a hard landing.  And just like my college career, the series didn’t have a happy ending either – just a cliffhanger with no obvious hope for how things could be saved.

Now? Now it’s a waking dream, a little slice of the past brought back out of the black hole, a piece of that sort of “creeping strangeness that we can’t quite bring ourselves to call magic” somewhere between urban fantasy and magical realism I mentioned a few weeks back. It’s a much better selection of jazzy ambient work music (hell, it’s a whole new soundtrack album that didn’t even exist twenty years ago).  It’s an explanation for my affinity for coffee and cherry pie (which never waned).  It’s the existence proof for shows like Lost or The X-Files, which never could have happened were it not for one random murder in the small-town woods south of the Canadian border.

RIP, Laura Palmer. =)

Much has been made in the last few days of one particular San Francisco techno-douche who famously raved out about what he hated about the city – and who was promptly savaged by pretty much the entire Internet.  As much fun as it was to see the entire 415 going in on some assbag who thirty years ago doubtless would have been coke-snorting his way around Wall Street, it drives home something I’ve been feeling lately – that this time, the up-and-coming generation of rich young dot-communists is materially more unpleasant than before.

I think this is true, I think it goes beyond just the typical generational disdain for those following behind, and I think it can be explained by a couple different phenomena.  The first, and most obvious, is that this particular technology bubble (and it is a bubble, don’t kid yourself) is not happening in parallel with a booming economy in general.  Famously, in 1999, we hired a waitress from Hooters to sit the help desk at $50K a year, because everyone more technically qualified was working elsewhere for more money. I myself got dragged in off the street in 1997 for $40K with not a day’s experience in IT, and saw my salary jump by almost 40% in the ensuing three years.  The dot-com boom went hand-in-glove with the longest sustained economic expansion in the history of this country, and it’s hard to disdain the twenty-something youngsters minting cash out of straw when everybody’s getting paid.

Fast forward to 2013, where the economy has never really recovered from the credit crunch of 2008.  A parsimonious Congress, in the grip of a political cabal that’s more than willing to sink the country in order to slag that colored boy in the White House, has given us an austerity binge that slowed recovery to a trickle.  Interest rates stay low, quantitative easing continues, but the market gets hinky every time it thinks the Fed might turn off the taps – the economy is on permanent life-support, and people stay in jobs they don’t want or can’t stand for the sake of security, or insurance, or because they have to get the kids through school.

Meanwhile, the nature of the technology itself is more solipsistic than ever before. The dot-com boom was about monetizing the web – search engines, advertising, retail that could offer results superior to brick-and-mortar shopping. And, of course, the technology blue chips that were getting you there: Netscape, Cisco, Microsoft, AOL.  Today, that’s all in place; Amazon is everyone’s default shopping choice and everybody’s got an on-ramp to the information superhighway (sneezes cobwebs off cliche).  The driving forces behind the modern tech economy are largely centered around social networking and mobile computing.  Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Foursquare. Google and Apple, of course.  It’s all about personal gratification, in a way that can be much more personal, pervasive and persistent than when our internet experience revolved around desktop computers plugged into DSL (if you were really lucky).

The combination of the two is what really drives people up the wall.  Things like Uber and Lyft and Sidecar are tremendously useful in a city woefully underserved by cabs, but the cabs are (quite rightly) irate at being subject to a slew of regulations that “disrupting” services are spared. The entire ecosystem of private shuttle buses running from San Francisco down the peninsula – taking ridership from a public transit system that needs it to survive, and frequently usurping public bus stops for their own – offends the sense that we’re somehow all in this together.  People looking to buy a house or a condo in the city are finding themselves shut out by people who can swarm in with a cash offer and then just keep the property as an investment.  And Sean Parker’s infamous “fantasy wedding” has become the gold standard of cautionary tales about the solipsistic oblivion of modern Silicon Valley wealth.

So what’s the solution?  There’s not one, really. Eventually this bubble will bust and all the douchebags will go back to Goldman Sachs or whatever, maybe. Or the economy will take off and enough money will shake loose that everybody’s happy – thought probably not, or it would have happened by now. Or this will just roll itself into the ongoing trend of social bifurcation where certain people wind up with Platinum Plus Preferred Citizenship and everyone else scuffles out a living as best they can.

So apparently Fast Eddie Snowden had access to classified material even as a Dell contractor, before joining Booz Allen. This is, politely put, an utter shitshow. It also points up a lot about how modern trends in business and governance have combined to make things worse.

See, there are some things that rightfully ought not be staffed out, and you would think national security would be at the top of the list.  But it has been an article of faith among the chattering classes of the Village that the private sector can always do everything better than the government. Consequently, as the government moved into things that didn’t exist in the 1970s, the odds are ever greater that those functions will be handled by contracts with private-sector employers.  Result?  Contractors and sub-contractors in positions of rather vital importance. And since government can’t pay like the private sector – because that would be a wasteful use of taxpayer dollars!!* – the sorts of people who can do these things are going to be in the private sector anyway, so you’re more or less obligated to contract out to get this done anyway.

And here’s the problem: I’ve been on the contract game. Hell, I was a government subcontractor. And the organization did not exactly inspire in me tons of loyalty – certainly not to the contracting or subcontracting companies. This is the price of treating labor as a fungible and disposable commodity – the workers will in turn treat the jobs as fungible and disposable.   That’s half the appeal of contracting, after all – you’ve got no ties to the company, you’ve got nothing invested with them, and the more you bounce around, the less incentive you have to take care of any particular job – because the next one’s around the corner.

Snowden, then, is the inevitable result of the modern mania for outsourcing.  Somewhere along the way, the powers that be decided that workers just weren’t that critical to the system.  Better to always be able to cut and run, to bring in somebody cheaper, to hit the eject button without even needing a reason.  Staff jobs disappear, population increases, more and more employers decide to go that route, and pretty soon we’re all out there making a virtue of necessity and talking about freedom and personal agency and taking control of Brand You, because that’s all that’s out there.  Add “recruiter” to “financial planner” on the platter of things you do in addition to your black-letter job responsibilities.

So there you go.  Throw our brave new world of work onto the pile with our terrorism-panic and insistence that the government spare no effort to protect us**, and you have an utterly inevitable and predictable situation – the entire Snowden affair, stem to stern, was practically predestined thirty years ago.

 

 

* Here’s the question: no matter how gold-plated the benefits, is it really cheaper to pay a staff employee than to pay a contracting company to pimp a contractor to you? I don’t use the word pimp idly – because face it, in contracting, you’re paying to dispose of the staff once the job’s done.

** The real danger for Snowden is that all this NSA stuff turns out to be completely legal, which given the exhaustive reach of the USA-PATRIOT act of 2001, its various re-authorizations, the laws enabling the FISA courts and the like – well, it’s not unthinkable.  Short of going all the way to the Supreme Court, which is mostly filled out with people appointed in the War On Terror era or those highly sympathetic to it anyway, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that for all the whistleblowing, no actual laws were broken.  If so, that puts our little Ed in a much more precarious spot legally.  Then again, being a guest of Putinist Russia might be its own punishment at this point.  It might not hurt for him to leak those girlfriend pics again.

So a week or so ago, I decided that since I didn’t have kids, I might as well take the case off my iPhone 5.  Nobody else handles it, I’m reasonably sure-handed, why not?  Sure enough, I’ve only dropped it once and not in a particularly harmful way, so now I have the benefit of it being light and slim and such.  And then, a couple days after, I did what my wife had done to her iPhone 4S with no regrets: pulled the screen protector off and left it off.

This was a huge leap of faith. After all, I scratched the screen of my iPhone 4 within a week of receiving it, and I’ve been paranoid about it ever since.  To take this fragile aluminum-glass iPhone 5 with no case, no screen protector, nothing at all – it feels akin to whipping off my trousers and Porky Pig-ing my way around Plato’s Retreat in 1978 or so. I mean, it may feel great and look very sexy, but before long, I’m going to wish I’d never done it.

But so far, it hasn’t been much of an issue.  And the thing is – it’s like getting a brand new phone. I don’t think I appreciated just how amazing the screen is, after months of having it covered by a scratched layer of polymer. I certainly didn’t appreciate just HOW thin and light it is on a day-to-day basis, or how the chamfer between glass and aluminum looks if anything even more high-tech than its Dieter Rams-influenced predecessors.  And given that right now it will support every known feature of iOS 7, it’s going to feel like a whole different phone again soon – probably by mid-September, given the Great Mentioner’s announce date of September 10 and the likelihood of sales on the 20th.  It’ll almost certainly feel like the biggest shift in the iPhone since it first shipped.

And that’s important. Apple is getting clubbed pretty good in the blogopshere by people who look at the evolving state of Android, or the new design of the Moto X, or the prospect of Google Glass, or just the fact that most Android phones have upward of 5-inch displays, and want to know why Apple isn’t doing anything wildly different.  And this betrays a couple of fundamental misconceptions about how Apple works and how things are in the world.

For starters, Apple tends not to test things out in public. The first iPhone and the first iPad had months to build buzz, but since then, new versions tend to be on the shelves within a couple of weeks of announcement.  The rumor mill goes berserk, always, but Apple themselves never let the cat out of the bag early. The notion of a Google Glass-like approach where an unfinished product is released to a handful of randoms is unthinkable in Apple World.  Sure, Siri has been “beta” since it launched, but how much of an outlier is that? By contrast, how long did it take for Gmail – for GMail – to drop the beta tag?  Siri’s ongoing beta status jumps out because it’s unusual that Apple would go to market with an officially unfinished product.

The other consideration is that of the delta.  Apple hasn’t had nearly as far to come. The first iPhone lacked a few things, but within three years, the iPhone 4 was essentially what we have now.  By contrast, the first Android phone worth criticizing only shipped in 2010…a few months before the iPhone 4.  Apple hasn’t had nearly as far to come over the last three years as the Android ecosystem, which itself made a virtue of necessity by producing ever-larger phones to accommodate the ever-larger batteries required to carry them through a full day.  The result, with half a dozen manufacturers, was a plethora of choice and the appearance that the Android world was somehow advancing further and faster than the Apple one.

In the end, a lot of what people wanted from iOS 7 was change for the sake of change.  Something new, something fresh, something different and exciting. That’s only been made worse by the features Motorola has rolled into the Moto X’s hardware, features that are almost certainly going to require new hardware to emulate and which Apple may not be able to match until 2014.  Unless Apple has something they’ve been playing very close to the vest – a la Siri in 2011 – it’s almost a guarantee that the iPhone 5S* will be heralded as a great disappointment. Because the delta won’t be big enough.

 

 

 

* The Great Mentioner has concluded that we’re looking at a 5S, which given the track record since 2008-09 makes perfect sense.  I also buy into the assertion that the 5 will remain as the $99 option and that there will be a new 5C as the free-with-contract phone, basically made of the guts of the 4S with the screen and Lightning connector of the 5 in a plastic case.  Mainly because Apple wants to standardize on one phone/iPod display and one connector, and the 4S will be the last thing standing not using the stretch screen or the Lightning connector. Plus a brand-new product in the low-cost area might be a big enough delta for some.