Are my eyes really blue?

It was recently made clear to me that I spend rather too much time on Twitter. This point was driven particularly home when I dumped Twitter off my iPhone for two days. Not only did I not have to plug the phone in at work once, not only did I carry on using everything else like normal (including podcasts and playing music for most of the day), but when I left work I was still at 50% battery. Clearly, something is amiss with Twitter. It could be the app itself, but I think it’s the fact that checking Twitter like I tend to check Twitter means the screen is constantly on and the network is constantly refreshing.

Others (like Mat Honan and Ezra Klein) have written better about the firehose quality of Twitter and how it’s become progressively more difficult to drink from. I only routinely monitor about three accounts of my own. One is the (locked) original account, mostly just my actual friends. One is entirely for Vanderbilt purposes. The other, and effectively the primary one, is a catchall for everything – acquaintances from the days of all-day EDSBS comment sessions, assorted Redskins, critical bloggers and sites, parody accounts, authors, radio hosts…basically it’s a distilled stream of my Internet and broader interests, some 300 sources strong, spraying at full power pretty much all day every day. And like the early days of email, there’s the little endorphin hit that goes along with hitting “refresh” – less because maybe this time you’ll have something (oh, the agony of watching that Eudora progress bat at 14.4K waiting for the FROM header) and more wondering what you’ll have with this reload.

Ironically, the “Top News” feature I decried in Facebook is exactly what I need in Twitter. In Facebook, where the people I follow are actually my friends and number less than a hundred, I want to see everything they put up. On Twitter, where I’m following almost five hundred people between three different accounts, I would be fine with something that just hit the high points for the primary account and still let me look at the personal account Tweet by Tweet.

The problem now is that a technical fix may not be easy to come by. Twitter is slowly cutting off the oxygen to third-party clients, so coming up with a solution in software will largely depend on whether Twitter wants to offer one. It’s tough for me to imagine that something like that is too far off, though – the ability to charge people for pride of place on the pile is too good a revenue opportunity to relinquish, especially in a world where “promoted tweets” are already a (grudgingly) accepted part of the ecosystem.

(In non-tweet related technical news, today is a red-letter day: U-Verse access has just gone live on WatchESPN for iOS. For the first time, it’s possible to watch any games ESPN is offering online via my iPhone or iPad…and even stream them to the TV via the AppleTV unit. Given the nature of Vanderbilt athletics and SEC television contracts, I can now basically count on seeing any televised Commodores game on any device – no longer does it mean digging out the laptop and crouching around it. The last major obstacle to an iPad as my sole personal portable computing solution has been surmounted. This is what Vice President Biden would call “a big fucking deal.” Of which more later.)

It bears remembering that Britain in the late 1970s was on a malaise bender that made Carter’s America look like a frat party.  Three-day workweeks, Callaghan’s “Winter of Discontent,” strikes, and the detritus of nationalized industry caught in a stagflation spiral – Margaret Thatcher came to power in a country infinitely further down the road to socialism than the United States ever was, no matter what modern wingnut media blowhards will tell you about the collectivization evils of raising the top income tax rate to 39.6%.  Thatcherism was very much a philosophical and intellectual challenge to the political and economic ethos of postwar Britain, and represented meaningful change.

Consider also that this was largely a battle over economics.  Thatcher was no particular friend of social liberalism, not that the 80s were a boom time to be gay or black or a woman (one person famously remarked that because she had climbed the greasy pole herself, Maggie’s conclusion was that there was no such thing as grease) – but the sort of Christian Right-Moral Majority fire that fueled the Republican ascendancy wasn’t so much a thing.  Thatcher’s elections never turned on the likes of prayer in school, or the Pledge of Allegiance, or abortion: it was all about capitalism and the fight against Soviet Communism.

And the Tories held on seven years longer after she was pushed out, and when Labour finally came to power after eighteen years, it was “New Labour,” the Clinton-esque Third Way-styled party of the left that had foresworn government control of the means of production.  Nobody was rushing out to re-nationalize British Rail, and until 2008, nobody was attempting to slap the reins back on the City of London and wrangle with the bankers and financiers who made London the money capital of the world from the 1990s on.

It’s because of that transformation that she’s still such a polarizing figure. “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead,” from The Wizard of Oz, is literally climbing the charts in Britain right now and could possibly be the #1-selling track by the weekend. There were street parties at the news of her death, especially in Brixton (home of riots in 1981) and the northern coal-towns where the miners lost a year-long strike effort.  You could make a case that the Big Bang – the 1986 financial deregulation – was the pivotal blow in replacing the Little England of old with the modern whiz-bang high-roller economy, with foreign investors living two weeks a year in vacation homes in Mayfair while Dr Martens production gets shipped out to Vietnam.  Thatcherism turned the UK into a 21st century economy, for better and for worse.

One of the refreshing things about the UK is the agreeable lack of hagiography as soon as somebody dies.  When Reagan went in 2004, all of a sudden everything was Saint Ronaldus Magnus all the time, indulging the idolatry of every GOP fetishist in a tidal wave that continues to this very day. In Britain, among the hosannahs and glorious remembrance of the Tories, you’re also getting the Beat and Elvis Costello and the Specials and memories of the Young Ones. “Vyvyan’s baby will be born a pauper!  Back to Victorian values! Charles Dickens! Oliver Twist!  I HOPE YOU’RE SATISFIED THATCHER!!”  As Geoff Lloyd pointed out, irrespective of what you think about her, 80s music in Britain isn’t the same without the Iron Lady.  (And unlike in the United States, British political protest usually has a beat and you can dance to it.)

Margaret Thatcher transformed Great Britain.  That’s a fact, regardless of what you think of the transformation. And what she did doesn’t all become good just because she popped her clogs.  A fact that Americans would do well to think about and internalize for future reference.

House rules dictate that everyone gets safe passage across the Styx.  Plenty of time for brutally honest assessment tomorrow.  Still, it bears thinking about that Margaret Thatcher made sweeping changes to Britain, and two facts are true:

1) Nontrivial numbers of British people are still viciously pissed off about it.

2) None of the sweeping changes have been reversed in any meaningful way.

I also stand by my post of almost five years ago: irrespective of what you think of her, the prospect of having to tell your parent over and over that their spouse has died, and have them relive that over and over, is maybe the most profoundly sad thing I can imagine.

iPhone-iPad-iTunes-iBooks-iCloud.

Nexus-GooglePlay-GooglePlus-Gmail-ALLGOOGLEERRRRTHANG.

Kindle-AmazonPrime-AWS?

 

We have embarked on a world of post-PC mobility computing where we have silos.  There’s still some overlap – you can get a Kindle app for damn near everything and anything with a processor, for instance, and your current .m4a iTunes files will still run on other players, and Google Maps is out there for your iPhone – but by and large, we’re sort of where we were in the pre-PC era, when you bought your computer from Apple or Radio Shack or Texas Instruments or Commodore or what have you.  The difference being that now you buy not only hardware and software but a variety of online services and media content through the same silo.

I think to a certain extent, my desire to own a Nexus 7 tablet is pushed by the same impulse that led me to go out and buy that Dell netbook back in 2010.  Something that came with a viable OS of its own but which could have other ones slapped over top of that (or in place of it). Something that would run an open source OS and not be beholden to anyone’s App Store, something that could sideload its programs and media and what have you, something to sort of provide that survivalist “in case shit” approach.  Something, in other words, which would fulfill the promise of a European-style mobile phone environment where carrier and hardware are separate and combine it with a screwdriver-shop Linux world where you could bundle together your own hardware and have something run on it.

And I don’t see that happening.  Problem is, with mobility computing – and infinitely more so with tablets than laptops – it’s difficult to have the approach you had with PCs where you go out and buy a motherboard, some RAM, a hard drive, a video card and the like.  Things aren’t nearly so modular in the miniature world, and going in and upgrading the processor on your tablet would almost certainly kick off a compatibility nightmare.  Android, notionally open-source, is already fragmented to the point where Amazon chose to fork an older version rather than keep pace with the current version, and many Android users never get the opportunity to upgrade (and many of those who do don’t bother), so the prospects for slapping something together from spare parts and getting CyanogenMod to run on it seems like a fool’s errand.

At this point, the biggest thing is to not pledge yourself too much to one service.  If Apple went down tomorrow (or did something to run me off), I would be kind of stuck as far as video purchases and a non-trivial chunk of my iTunes content…but Twitter, Evernote, RSS, weather services, Instagram, Netflix, WordPress, Tumblr? Could all run on an Android device.  Hell, most of them would probably work on Nexus or Kindle alike.  But until then, there’s no reason to jump off the current ride.

(This is the sort of logical post occasionally required to stop the glee.  The shoe glee has also been arrested for the time being, which is nice, because that was about to get expensive.  You can spend hella money on hand-sewn American shoes with a Goodyear welt.)

The one thought I keep coming back to with Facebook Home – more so than having your personal life whored out to every ad buyer on earth, more than the prospect of seeing your friends’ most compromising pics as soon as you pull your phone out on the train – the thing I latch onto is this: unless you get the HTC First, which is apparently dumping Sense in favor of FBH, you’re most likely going to be running FBH over top of some other middleware layer (Sense, MOTOBLUR, TouchWiz) which itself is running over Android. And I think of one thing: battery.

This is the problem. I mean, the problem. Faster processors, more RAM, bigger and higher-res screens, more complex operating systems and apps, and ever-faster cellular data – battery technology hasn’t budged in about six years or so, when the lithium polymer in a SonyEricsson Z520 lasted me four days between charges. Then again, it was pushing a tiny screen and no data service to speak of. Hell, most of its power went toward changing themes and flipping between ringtones. No RSS, no Twitter (except via SMS), no web browsing or Instagram or podcasts or streaming March Madness action. And the only real advance in battery life…is to make it bigger. In fact, that’s half the reason Android phones all grew to 5 inch screens: more room for battery in an OS not known for power management.

I accept that I need to plug the iPhone in at the end of the day. Time was, that was enough – normal workday meant the phone went down to about 30%, but that was good enough. Then the retina display, and live podcast updating instead of syncing off the laptop, and then Verizon and LTE…and now I have a charge cable at my desk and a spare charge pack in the bag and, most recently, an actual iPod shuffle for the reliable standby music once the podcasts are done. It’s almost enough that I can get through the day and have battery enough to go to dinner or something and not be completely wiped. It’s also why I stick to the Kindle for reading at home rather than use one of the iOS devices. Using two devices – three, now, on Tuesday nights – might see woefully inefficient, but the Kindle charges once a week and the dumb phone once a month. And there’s something to be said for never having to worry about charge.

So now we’re back to Facebook Home, which is essentially replacing your phone’s UI with a live feed of your FB account. Status updates. Pictures. Chat. All in real time, or something close to it, and no doubt running location services the whole way (how else to sell geolocation-connected information to advertisers? Because yes, Zuck admits as much, there will be ads in your feed in FBH eventually). All this plus Android’s well-known fruit-fly battery performance? You’ll be plugging in the phone twice a day minimum.

And that’s what will do for them. Not privacy concerns from the kind of user base that would have equated AOL with the Internet fifteen years ago. Not performance issues from heaping superfluous code on superfluous code. What’s going to make Ed Earl Brown chuck his FacePhone out the truck window is when he plugs it in at lunchtime to top up and still plugs a dead phone into the cigarette lighter for the drive home. It’s the same reason the first iPhone didn’t ship with 3G capacity, or a higher-res screen, or an app framework or any kind of user-alterable code: because if the first 2007 iPhone couldn’t make it through the whole day, there probably would never have been an iPhone 3G.

Mark my words, Facebook Home will live or die on one metric: whether your battery does.

Best block quote ever, part of a brief and incisive piece:

 

“A critical reader should not assume the word means anything. I grew up Catholic. In no way shape or form can you call me religious in any sense, but it does stick with us in a few ways. The most consistent one is an emphasis on action, and that belief without action is just pissing into a stiff wind and calling it a sunshower. Another is a lifelong focus on blood, violence, and the Old Testament, since that was the part we really enjoyed asking CCD teachers about. We were the worst CCD student ever, and apologize to our teachers for ever being there.”

Long story short: Facebook Home is Zuckface’s effort to get you to run the Facebook app as the UI of your Android phone.  Apparently it’s going to be a full middleware piece, designed to run all your chat through Facebook and ease your camera shots into Facebook and use your News Feed as your home screen and…

This was inevitable, really.  They have to get pride of place on your mobile device to maximize the amount of data they can collect and advertise against, and the middleware approach is a lot cheaper than coming up with an Android fork (like Amazon) or an entire phone OS (like Microsoft) or an entire whole-package phone (like Blackberry or Apple).  But the pitch of “make the Facebook app the UI of your whole phone” appeals to me not at all.  Nothing ever worked better by adding more plumbing.

(Of course, this all assumes you have Facebook at the core of your social strategy rather than “that one thing hanging out on the side that I check once a week to make sure nothing’s happened to my East Coast gang or my old high school friends” – which is increasingly not the case.  Facebook has a way of turning into an avalanche of your mother’s forwarded chain emails punctuated by ads.  I couldn’t function without Twitter, but I wouldn’t notice if Facebook disappeared tomorrow – and the risk that we’ve passed Peak Facebook is probably what’s driving the urgency to get onto mobile in an unmissable way as quickly as they can.)

I suppose it began with the ill-advised acquisition of the Saboteur jacket – the waterproof silk-lined sport coat I bought in 2010. Way too expensive and a hair too small, and ultimately not quite right. But it was the start, and it broke the seal.

I suppose things were made worse by the arrival of Team Black Swan East, who brought their Southern sense of dressing well and forced us to step up our game a little. I bought a pair of American-made Lucky Brand jeans, then a pair of American-made Bill’s Khakis, then broke down and finally bought that seersucker sport coat just in time to wear it to New York and buy two Uniqlo blazers for $60.

That really did it. I had the peacoat. I got another pair of Lucky jeans, then bought three more pair of my old reliable 501s – each in a more fashion-forward wash than before. I obtained an actual seersucker suit. My first new pair of Docs in over 3 years were chukkas. My key Christmas present was the Levi’s-Filson tin cloth trucker jacket i had coveted for some time. And this week, I dropped $300 on hand-sewn American-made gray suede wingtips, the most I’ve ever spent on a single pair of shoes in my life.

So why? The guy with the famously predictable DC wardrobe, who wore the same model jeans with the same pair of workboots for five years in California, who owned 11 pair of Dr Martens and half a dozen black or gray American Apparel T-shirts and a bunch of Vanderbilt gear – why the sudden onset of boat shoes and Palladium boots and new colorful button-ups?

Maturity, possibly. Vandy Lifestyle, for one – need to look the part. Continued life and work in Silicon Valley, for another – I have the old EUS urge to look a cut above the average paste-eating neckbeard in this industry. For a third, as the old campaign poster said in high school, clothes make the man – naked people have little or no influence on society.

Maybe this is all part of the regeneration. This is just who I am now. It’s not the cheapest hobby, I suppose, but when your fixation is finding stuff you can wear for the rest of your life, I suppose it’ll pay out over time.

So Google killed off Reader with only three and a half months’ lead time, to the outrage of the entire Internet.  And a week later, they dropped the all-new Google Keep, an addendum to Google Drive meant as an all-purpose note-bucket…which everyone immediately saw as aimed squarely at Evernote, the best-of-breed all-everything data repository (one I make a LOT of use of, including notes toward these very blog entries).

Add to that the rumblings that there’s now a Google Watch in the offing – not surprising, but given the focus on Google Glass, it seemed as if the Beast of Mountain View was going to put most of its “wearable computing” eggs in the “eyewear” basket–

Hold up.

That phrase.  The Beast of Mountain View.  Shouldn’t that be the Beast of Redmond?  Nope.  In fact, one Mac partisan has gone so far as to declare that Microsoft is no longer the enemy.  Sure, Windows is still out there and PCs running Win7 and its predecessors are a dominant ecosystem, but in the post-PC world? Microsoft is an afterthought.  Its digital music offerings ranged from worthless to risible.  Its phone offerings were too little too late, and while intriguing currently has little prospect of rating better than a poor third in the smartphone world.  It’s not aiming to dethrone Android or iOS, it’s aiming to lap Blackberry.  The XBox – itself starting to get a bit long in the tooth – is the only spot off the desktop where Microsoft has made a dent.  And their attempt to repurpose and rebrand Hotmail as Outlook.com, complete with Google-bashing commercials, was roundly mocked and ultimately dismissed.

Meanwhile, Google’s push into new areas continues.  G+ remains a point of emphasis to compete with Facebook.  Google Play continues to be pushed as the alternative to the iTunes Music Store or Amazon (especially given the irony that Amazon built its own tablet ecosystem on Android). Google Apps for Business have reached a point that one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley is running its entire ecosystem on them – eschewing Office, Exchange and Outlook altogether.  The Nexus line now includes a 4″ phone, a 7″ tablet and a 10″ tablet to cover the entire range of touch devices, and there’s a nice slim metal ultrabook-style Google Chromebook. And now there’s apparently going to be a mythical Google watch, to go with the mythical iWatch and mythical Samsung watch.

Google has become the new Microsoft again – they were truly indispensable for years in the field of search, especially map search, and Gmail overwhelmed Yahoo and Hotmail and all its other competitors, and one thing led to another and now way too many of us couldn’t get by without at least one Google service.  And tragically, somebody just beat me to this post while it sat in my drafts folder, so here is his take – and he’s spot on.

The fact that people are talking about how to live without Google should be the most disconcerting thing of all for the powers that be out on 1600 Amphitheater Parkway.  For my own part, now that Reader won’t be a thing anymore, it’s possible for the first time to contemplate life completely free of the big G.  Hell, Apple Maps got me to my physical therapist this morning bang on time and without a hiccup.  2013 may turn out to be the year that Google got added to the old EUS creed: “We don’t drink flavored liquor, we don’t smoke machine-rolled cigars, and we don’t put mission-critical work on Microsoft products.”

The bit of Avenue Q that always makes me gulp very hard is the line in “I Wish I Could Go Back To College” (hell, that song is triggering enough) when Princeton sings “I wish I had taken more pictures…”  Because there are almost no photographs at all of my seven years indentured to higher education.  In fairness, a lot of that stems from the fact that there wasn’t very much worth taking pictures of, and my lack of memories is more painful than my lack of evidence – but I don’t remember even having a camera between high school and the ill-starred purchase of one of those Advanced Photo System cameras in 1997, which itself barely lasted a year before going askew under circumstances unremembered. (I chalk it up to 1998 generally.)

My then-girlfriend bought me a digital camera around…when? 2002? 2003? It was a birthday present, and it got some use, though I don’t know what ever became of it.  I’m sure I took some shots on the honeymoon trip, but I don’t recall…but the point is, that was a 2.1 megapixel camera.  And in 2007, I took possession of my first iPhone…with its own 2 megapixel camera.

Now, it wasn’t as good a camera, obviously. No optical zoom at all, no flash, and certainly no prospect for video recording.  But it was a camera that I had on me.  As with flasks and pistols, so with cameras: the one you have on you when you need it is infinitely better than the highly superior featureful model sitting in your drawer back at home.  And yet, with 2 MP and poor focus and no flash and no HDR mode to help clean up and no video for a pinch, “I have it with me” was the only real feature it presented.

If you look through my iPhoto library, though, there’s a huge spike in pictures in 2010, even correcting for the import of my wife’s pics of the trip to Europe that year. (When you correct for her pictures during The Summit, the historic weeklong visit of Team Black Swan East en route to their eventual emigration, 2009 is of a piece with 2008.) No, in mid-2010, I upgraded to the iPhone 4, which offered HD video capture, an LED flash, and – most importantly – an improved auto-focus-capable 5 MP camera.  The picture totals go WAY up.  And then in 2012, the phone gets warranty-replaced with the iPhone 4S, which improved to an 8 megapixel camera, and that’s when I start taking pictures all the time.  Sure, you could probably adjust for Twitter and Path and Instagram and Facebook, but the presence of a point-and-shoot replacement in my pocket at all times meant that I finally started taking more pictures.  Landscapes. Cocktails. I have a better record of my life since 2011 than I have of the entire 1990s.

Too, I have blog records going back to 1999.  Not always current, not always frequent, but my life now is on record in ways that it wasn’t before my great regeneration at age 25. And it’s been surprisingly helpful to be able to go back to, say, late 2003 or early 2004 or most of 2007 and 2008, and compare history and see if I’ve learned anything.  But equally important to me, in some ways, is the fact that I have a past now. The black hole has been pushed back; the void in my life is reduced.  I have memories, I have proof, I have fifteen years of experience to look back and say “I remember when” and things I can draw from and build on.  And that, on many levels, has slowly started to patch up the empty place that made me wish I could go back to college.