Are my eyes really blue?

Well, there goes that. Google Reader is going down in three and a half months, and the Internet is losing its collective shit. Not least because basically every RSS reader for mobile devices relies on Google Reader for backbone sync.

Be interesting to see who steps up, because from the outcry, there’s a market for people who need this service. Marissa? In the meantime, if you recall, of all the Google services, the two I couldn’t do without were Maps and Reader. Well, Apple has Maps covered for mobile devices now…not perfectly, but good enough. It would be easy to run Google-free. Inconvenient, but the last irreplaceable part of the Google ecosystem has just pulled the plug, and the makers of those RSS apps will not just throw up their hands and say “oh for fuck’s sake” – Feedly and Reeder have already announced that they won’t go quietly and Feedly is even working on an API that could be a drop-in replacement.

Meanwhile, one thing is obvious, and has been for a while: if you’re building a product that depends on Google for a critical function, you’re an idiot.

Not much news coming out of the annual computing-hipster gangbang in Austin, unless you count the risible panel that argued that 50% of Millenials would rather have no job at all than a job they hate.  In related news, 50% of Millenials should be ground up into free meatloaf for the unemployed. If you can have horse in a meatloaf you can have a horse’s ass in a meatloaf…but I digress.

The thing that gave SXSWi a name in Silicon Valley was its fame as the launching pad for Twitter in 2007 and Foursquare in 2009.  Twitter existed, but the splash it made at the conference as essentially a cheap and easy solution to blast-group-texting sent it on the rocket ride to where it is now.  Foursquare, meanwhile, added gamification to the social check-in functions of Dodgeball (from the same author).  But Foursquare had an advantage: it happened After iPhone.  Once the iPhone was able to run apps and use its internal GPS for location services, it was possible to take the key social features of Dodgeball and abstract away the need to fill in a place and location via text message.  Dodgeball was acquired by Google, died a slow neglectful death, and was forgotten.  Foursquare conquered the location-based social networking space.  Smartphone Time again.

Problem is, these things burn out quick. No real news out of SXSW this year, nothing interesting or captivating. You can’t turn it on like a switch, and “South-by” has rapidly turned into another promotional clusterfuck, devalued by expansion and overexposure (TED talks, anybody?) – I suppose it’s nice to let Austin feel like it’s vital to the technology world once a year for a long weekend, but there’s a reason Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook can all be found within fifty miles of one another.

Speaking of…it looks like Andy Rubin is out as head of Android within Google, to be replaced by him what runs Chrome OS.  If I had to bet I’d say convergence is on the way, and not a moment too soon – ChromeOS is a nice idea but a niche application at best and the Chromebook Pixel is the 20th Anniversary Macintosh of Google.  A convergence between Android and Chrome, with Chrome becoming the browser-based runtime for an Android environment that can go on Windows or Mac hardware…that would be interesting.

When the Riverchase Galleria opened in February 1986, I had barely been aware it was coming.  At the time, the best thing going for malls in Birmingham was Century Plaza, a mid-70s two-level brick Brutalist monster with four anchor stores, a flat exhibition deck in the middle of the second story (suitable for setting up Santa Claus in December and not much else), a scattering of eateries (including the much-missed Hot Sam pretzels) and a general feel that you could just as easily be underground.  And the anchors – Sears, JC Penney, Pizitz and Rich’s – were pretty much set in stone, in ascending order of posh and respectable.

And then the Galleria opened.

The first hint that things were different came as soon as you walked into Parisian, the major Birmingham department store not represented at Century.  It was huge, airy, with a mezzanine level floating between its two stories, and in 1986 fashion, that level was loaded with nothing but Swatch watches and Coca-Cola rugby shirts.  All by itself, that would have been a revolution in local retail.

But then, you walked out into the mall itself…and it was open and airy itself, with a huge glass atrium (with neon accents!) running the entire length of the mall proper.  It couldn’t have felt more radically different.  The mall had everything I needed at the time – two record stores, two bookstores – but it also had an actual candy store, something unheard of in malls around our area.  It had a store selling nothing but video games (Electronics Boutique), it had a music box store (seriously), and in a stunning turn of events, it had a whole lot of places to eat right next to each other, with a common dining space around a huge fountain spraying three stories high into an atrium between the office tower and the hotel (yes, a hotel in a mall). 

The first food court in town wasn’t the half of the amazements, though. There were glass elevators going to the third-level observation deck (itself mainly just an extension of the office building lobby).  There was a store called Banana Republic that appeared to be some kind of safari outfitter, complete with a jeep halfway through the front glass surrounded by jungle foliage. And Rich’s, the biggest anchor store, was itself three stories, and the top story even had a tiny grocery section.  You could presumably have a room in the hotel and come over to get Pop Tarts. And to cap it all off, there was space for another anchor store, one coming in 1987: Macy’s.  Macy’s.  The icon of New York City opening a store in Alabama.

Two or three years earlier, the notion had come to me in a dream that the mall would be a perfect place to hang out and walk around and spend time as a teenager – that’s how culturally benighted we were; I didn’t get it from movies or TV, it came to me in a freakin’ dream – so to have this amazing modern super-80s temple of American commerce dropped on me at age 14 was absolutely perfect.  The obvious problem, of course, was that it was on the wrong side of town and I didn’t have a driver’s license.  But any time I could get over there, I went like a shot – after a life spent largely on the rural side of town, this was my first routinely accessible exposure to a bigger, brighter, more exciting world.  One that would lead to a couple of major changes within a year…but that’s another story.

I hate my job. There it is.  This is not news.  In fact, this has pretty much been par for the course for most of the last fifteen years. 

This blog post nails it – if a job was fun they wouldn’t have to pay people to do it.  To quote in bulk:

Right now I have what by any criteria would be considered a good job. I’m paid decently, I have basic benefits, and the position is as close to Stable as jobs get these days. Yet I’m not happy because I’m expecting the job to make me happy. I expect it to not suck, when in reality on many days it does suck because it’s a goddamn job. Nowhere was I promised that it would be rewarding and fun all the time, or that it wouldn’t be frustrating, or that I would have days where I come home and wonder why I bother. I bother because they pay me, and getting paid is very useful to me. But that’s it. That’s the deal: I show up and fulfill my responsibilities, and then I get a check. Nobody said anything about fun.

As often as I give this advice to other people, I give it to myself lately. What I can’t figure out is why people in my age group (or younger) have this idea that the task for which they get paid will also be personally enriching. Is it because we lack fulfillment in our personal lives? Is it because we’re spoiled, believing that the working world owes us self-actualization in addition to a means of supporting ourselves? I’m not sure. What is certain is that we should be careful what we wish for. Those factory jobs that no longer exist start to look pretty appealing as our Career-as-Spirit Quest theory runs into reality.

It’s like this blog – I do it, I enjoy doing it, but it’s not something really monetizable.  Because to do that, I’d need to go out and hustle ads, I’d need to produce a base minimum of content, I’d have to start tailoring my output to maximize page views and draw traffic, and next thing you know, I’m not blogging anymore.  I enjoy writing what I feel like, when I feel like it, and I’m pretty sure that shortly after having to meet a deadline on SEO-maximized topics day in and day out, I’d wind up hating it.

When I took my first full-time job out of grad school, I remembered telling people that my job was as easy and profitable as picking up money in the street. It didn’t take that long to change, largely because our management situation melted down within a year to the point that our lead tech was reporting directly to an out-of-touch and irrationally unreasonable vice president.  But thanks to the foxhole mentality and the relentless churn of the dot-com era, we were quick to build a team of techs that weren’t just whip-smart and capable, but pleasant to work with and a boost to morale (lest we forget, “morale” is a measure of “how people are doing when they aren’t doing well at all,” to quote PJ O’Rourke, who famously pointed out that you never hear about the morale of people on spring break or at vacation resorts, just prisoners and soldiers and the like). 

So what would make my job suck less?

To borrow from Great Place To Work, employees believe they work for great organizations when they consistently:

1) Trust the people they work for;

2) Have pride in what they do, and

3) Enjoy the people they work with.

Well?

1) This is tricky.  I was lucky to direct-report to the greatest manager I ever knew for most of the first seven years out of school.  Since then it’s been a mixed bag – and almost without fail, my management from the director level up tends to be indifferent at best and actively antagonistic at worst.  The most constant problem in IT support comes from management that fixates on “customer service” and interprets it as how good we make the end-user feel rather whether the problem was resolved successfully and in the timeliest possible manner.  This frequently stems from managers who aren’t technical enough to understand the problems their staff is solving, along with the misbegotten notion that a company’s IT staff is providing a customer service to their co-workers instead of a peer function.  I never hear anybody going on about whether the electricians or the security or the custodial staff are providing excellent customer service.

2) I’m Winston Wolf.  I solve problems.  May I come in?  I daresay the one thing I do better than anything else in the workplace is solve problems – if you have a thing that needs to be made to work, or linked or integrated or just figured out, I’m your guy.  And inasmuch as I do that, I enjoy it and take pride in my success.  If there’s a real live disaster and I have to shovel coal twelve hours a day for a week to save our asses, I take pride in that too.  What I don’t take pride in is having to spend those twelve hours mopping up somebody else’s foreseeable mistake, or cleaning up from a disaster that we saw coming and which management ignored.  And I certainly don’t take pride in an endless array of having to walk around hand-holding the kind of people who never think to try rebooting the computer or sit in front of an open browser window with the cursor in the address field and ask “how do I get to webmail?”  (HINT: the address is webmail.company.domain, and if you were to just type “webmail” and hit return, YOU WOULD ACTUALLY GET THERE.)  Inasmuch as tech support is about problem-solving, I enjoy it.  Inasmuch as it’s a blend of babysitting and veterinary medicine, I hate it.

3) This is the problem…there are two splits here.  One is co-workers, and one is end-users.  End-users are always a problem.  Some are worse than others, some are really a pleasure to work with, but as the computing environment has evolved over the years, less stuff breaks.  We’re not using Token Ring some places and Ethernet others, we’re not struggling with System 7 and trying to make TCP/IP work reliable and trying to pass AppleTalk so people can print, we’re not running Windows NT 4 and terrified every time the virus alert pings.  Ten years of Windows XP, for better or worse, led to most of the rough edges being filed off, while OS X has gotten more robust and reliable with every passing release.  It’s reached a point where support issues, especially with a Macintosh, are only occasionally about “something is wrong with the computer,” and even those are mostly about a Java plugin that stopped working or a printer that requires deleting the queue and setting up a fresh connection – things that any user with admin rights ought to be able to figure out and fix themselves in 5 minutes.  And in the case of the younger users, they pretty much do.  That’s why I think the job is going away in ten years – partly because the technology is simplifying, but also in part because the generation that entered the workplace before their computers did is finally starting to retire and go away. Ten more years will be thirty years since I was in college, at which point it can be safely assumed that anyone in an office workplace has been using computers in an office since they started working.

The other split is co-workers, and here I was ruined, because my teammates at the first job were the perfect crew.  Replicating that has proven impossible, largely because we failed to weed out the toxic people quickly enough at my first California job and because I haven’t really had that peer-group environment since.  When everyone’s responsible for their own area, there’s commiseration, but not that common experience, that banding-together-against-the-common-foe.  Right now, I have a decent enough group of folks, but few if any are the sort of people I’d want to spend 8 hours at the Four Provinces singing and getting knee-walking drunk alongside.

So what’s the solution?  Right now, the plan is to agitate to move within this existing employer to a job with more future-proofing – something in data center or infrastructure administration, something that will still be necessary when all work is being dictated into iWatches from your home-working desk.  Something that will get me away from a customer-facing environment, something less interrupt-driven (well, slightly) and more project oriented, something not keyed to the workday hours of a call center.  And in the meantime, 5 PM means work is done, not to even be thought about until 8:30 the next morning (or Monday as the case may be).

Maybe this is all just project-related stress. Maybe once encryption is over and done with, it’ll be possible to have a more normal relationship with work.  But given that this was pretty much my situation and feeling for most of 2012, I suspect probably not.  This isn’t run-of-the-mill dysthymia either.  I don’t need antidepressants, I need something for stress.  And probably a ton of Xanax.  And let’s face it, a couple of cocktails wouldn’t hurt at all.  Not likely in the near future.  Of which, etc.

 

No one who lived through high tech in the 1990s will ever entirely trust Microsoft, or view them as other than a threat.  The Beast of Redmond used its effective monopoly for PC operating systems to leverage an effective monopoly in productivity software (killing the likes of WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 as alternatives) and then used the Windows-Office duopoly to control the personal computing industry. They missed the boat on web browsing, and then bought Spyglass’s commercial Mosaic code to turn into Internet Explorer – and knit it into the operating system to crowd out Netscape, with the side-effect of intro ducting vectors of vulnerability that would provide ten years of malware vulnerability.  They invested a mere $150 million in Apple for the sake of propping up the only other viable commercial operating system maker – and in return Apple got continuing production of Microsoft Office for Mac, because without it the Macintosh would have been doomed quickly as a platform.

Things are different now.  Companies like Google and Facebook don’t have a monopoly as such – there’s nothing preventing you from using Yahoo for email or Duck Duck Go for web search or Path for social networking.  What Google and Facebook do have is a crippling majority of mindshare, and the sense in Facebook’s case that you have to be there because everyone else is, while in Google’s case, you’ve probably relied on their services (which have been largely excellent for many years) to the point that you’ve given them a critical mass of data.

Google and Facebook don’t charge end users at the point of service. Essentially, the only way you can give Google money is by buying a Nexus device – even Android is free and open-source at the OS level (the Google-specific apps for Android may still be proprietary).  Facebook is constantly smacking down rumors that they’re going to start charging, but by and large the only way to give Facebook money is to pay to promote a post. Or…to advertise.

I often wonder whether Google and/or Facebook can’t charge end-users for their service. Think about it – if Google or Facebook got rid of advertising and just charged the necessary amount to make up the difference, how many people would stick with it?  And more to the point, could you make as much money just by charging what the market will bear?  Or is this a situation where Google and/or Facebook’s services are provided as a loss leader to allow them to harvest enough personal information to make a profit at advertising?

Microsoft certainly thinks so – they pitched their new Outlook.com email service with some risible ads about “Scroogling”  as if they are shocked, shocked that a technology company would take unfair advantage of their position to make more money.  Frankly they ought to be more worried about getting their uptime on Outlook.com above three nines, but that’s neither here nor there.  Microsoft is finally paying the price for having sat on their laurels after the launch of Windows XP, while Apple was skating off toward the iPod and then the iPhone and then the iPad, and Microsoft shat the bed with the Zune and took forever to produce Windows Phone 7 and then whored all its buyers with Windows Phone 8.  And then Surface…erm, surfaced. Essentially, Microsoft is still stuck into the idea of Windows everywhere and Windows everything, one ring to rule them all.

By contrast, Google’s one thing is its ability to aggregate data and sell advertising.  And they will do anything that feeds into that, and kill it gladly if it doesn’t work out.  Sic transit Google Wave, Google Buzz, Orkut. That’s why Google+ will hang on.  That’s why they’re happy to put a superior Google Maps product on the iPhone instead of keeping it themselves as an Android differentiator. Google doesn’t care if they make money on the bait; their money’s in the trap.  Which is the same reason why Facebook keeps adding things like voice chat and video calling, and is urging on Graph Search (which is basically asking you to make your life an open book for the sake of improving search results).  Everything Apple (and Amazon) does is about getting you to buy more Apple (or Amazon) stuff; everything Google and Facebook do is about getting you to let them sell more of you.  That’s why Google Maps and the Kindle app are available on iOS – Apple knows that you’re more likely to buy an iPad if it can be a Kindle reader too, and Amazon knows it will sell more Kindle books if it can sell to more people than just own a Kindle device.  Similarly, Google wants mapping information from more people than own Android devices, and Apple would rather you buy an iPhone and run Google Maps than buy an Android device to do so.

But at least with Apple and Amazon, they’re still charging cash on the barrelhead in the time-honored market tradition of “money can be exchanged for goods and services.” Google and Facebook are still dueling for the right to your online identity – e.g. Facebook Connect or the all-new Google+ Sign-In – and to make themselves the intermediary of your online experience.  Hell, Google’s new Chromebook Pixel charges you MacBook Air money for what is essentially a browser terminal, but has one terabyte of cloud storage connected. One terabyte of your stuff…to be stored by Google.  The mind reels.

The moral of the story is this: if you are in fact the product, you have to avoid letting yourself get locked into a single solution.  Putting your entire life in Google is hella convenient and easy to use, but to quote Spencer Hall, “there is always free cheese in the trap, and it is always a deal.”  You don’t have to let yourself be the product. Google and Facebook may be too big for their britches, but they don’t have to be too big for yours.  If privacy and control are important to you, they’re worth paying for.

Bloomberg appears to have decided to will an “iWatch” into existence today, and everyone is running with their report – apparently the nonexistent iWatch is a better investment for them than the nonexistent iTelevision, and the fact that they are advising investors on the merits of products that do not exist is just one more reason why the investor class should be ground up into free meatloaf for the unemployed. But I digress.

The problem is, I’m still struggling with the use case for a notional “iWatch”.  With Google Glass, as I mentioned previously, the model is JARVIS – Tony Stark’s real-time artificial-intelligence assistant tied to a voice and HUD interface in the Iron Man armor.  The idea of being able to look at something, have it identified and pop up its Wikipedia entry instantly? I like that.  Not to mention real-time navigation and directions, possibly tied right to my calendar and incorporating things like traffic and train delays. “Sir, you need to leave NOW if you are to make the connection at Millbrae in time for the Warriors game.”

But the watch?  What would I like to be able to see on the watch?  Well, notifications, I suppose – it would be nice not to have to take the phone out to see who’s calling or who just texted me.  I suppose there are worse things than having a couple of canned replies available from the watch as well. (On my way, etc)  It might be handy to have calendar events visible and reminder alerts for same.  Plus having the wrist alerting might be more reliable than the phantom vibrate that we feel for no reason (or the real one we don’t).

The other trick is Bluetooth 4.0, of course.  What’s the range?  Would this mean alerts in the shower while the phone is outside on the sink counter? (Assuming a similar degree of waterproofing as the Pebble, or my own watch.) How long before you have to charge the watch? Once a week is fine – pop it on the charger overnight on Saturday night – but if it’s only 3 or 4 days, that’s problematic.  And how much power does Bluetooth 4.0 draw?  Are the savings from not taking out the phone and lighting up that big screen going to be wasted in maintaining the Bluetooth connection?  If the early returns on the Pebble are anything to go by, very possibly.

So what does that leave?  Some of the Fitbit/Fuelband-type stuff, maybe?  Activity tracking, sleep monitor, count steps and miles run and etc?  Okay, sure, might be useful especially as I work to get in better shape.  But enough to make it worth spending the money? Maybe if everything is rolled in together…at this point, I can see the appeal in waiting for the Apple version of such a device.  It may not be feature-complete in its first incarnation, but those features will work.  It’s like the original iPhone: no cut and paste, no 3G, no GPS no 3rd-party application SDK, but largely because those features couldn’t be implemented well or without compromising the battery.  The features that it did ship with were well-implemented, which seems to be the difference.  Google (and through them Samsung) will release a boatload of features and let you beta-test for them; Apple will release a limited device that does only the things it can do and do them well.

And maybe they’ll come up with some way of making those things make sense, and come up with some function I didn’t know I needed until I can’t live without it.  But until then, I’ll stick with what I’ve got…

I wasn’t expecting it to be a great year, to be honest.  Price of doing business – aging sucks, and there’s no getting around it.  “Forty is the age that forces you to stop pretending.” I nailed that.

From a sporting perspective, it went well.  Vandy basketball won its first SEC tournament in 61 years and managed to get out of the first round in the NCAAs. Vandy baseball came back from a dismal start to make the title game of the SEC tournament and return to the postseason. Vandy football – well, the best season since 1915, and I got to see some of it in person for the first time since 1996. The Redskins collected the most electrifying young player in pro football and swept Dallas (including their first Thanksgiving win). Golden State picked up a Vandy player and sprinted out to its best start in twenty years.  Even a dismal Cal football team finally replaced Jeff Tedford (albeit two years too late), and the San Francisco Giants won their second World Series in three years.  So sports, at least, went well.

Friends did pretty well.  The cousins finally had to move out, but were replaced with a perfectly pleasant housemate who was not at all averse to Sundays camped in front of NFL RedZone and busting open a bottle of something.  We got to take a most excellent trip to New York for an old-style gathering of the old tribe and finally patch up some old ill feelings, which was nice. We did get visits with friends near and far, we rocked the 4Ps one last time, we hosted some very good parties (some better survived than others), and I even got to meet some of my actual fans (well, sorta) as part of a Vandy tailgate or two.

But.

The defining story of my last 12 months was the story of health issues.  The shoulder flared back into misbehavior worse than it had for a couple of years, and the usual course of prednisone and NSAIDs availed little.  Two steroid shots directly into the disc only barely staunched the pain, and the drama with the drooling idiots of Blue Shield undid a lot of the otherwise good work at pain mitigation. The numbers are in: HDL, LDL, triglycerides, blood pressure, TC/HDL ratio, fasting glucose, BMI – right down the line, everything worse than the year before. And then this past February at work came along and took my back pains right back to 2005.  

Because work has been a shitshow. Dullard users, feckless management, too many people who think IT is a form of magic that will do whatever they want by rubbing the lamp, and then a crisis, badly mismanaged with a poorly conceived response that – as usual – only led to more expense and agony down the stretch And ended up with me personally imaging 230 laptops in a day to be sold along for personal replacement at 75% off.  I’m really hitting the limits of what I can continue to do without inevitably flipping out – and I need to find some way to transition into a role that’s not customer-facing.  Not just for my psychological well-being, but because I firmly believe that “workstation support,” as a job, isn’t going to exist in its current form ten years from now.  Which at age 50 will be just in time to ease me out the door as an unwanted expense in favor of some cheap young wide-eyed naif fresh out of school who thinks $50,000 is a king’s ransom.

And the fact that I’m even thinking about that sort of thing at all is the surest sign that things have changed.  I have to start taking seriously concerns about my health and potential retirement income.  The sight of my 401(k) is disconcerting because the needle never seems to move that much – and that’s money that needs to be growing if I’m going to live off it.  It would be just my fucking luck for the baby boomers to cash out and then decide on behalf of all society that “70 is the new 50” and lo and behold I’m working for a living until 2042.  I don’t think I have thirty more years of this bullshit in me.  Hell, I know I don’t.

So there’s no middle-term view these days.  I either dread what may be coming in a couple decades, or else just try to focus on whatever will get me to the end of the week.  Which presents its own difficulty.  Is it better to spend $5000 on a week in London or $40 a week on pints and dinner down the pub – will two years of weekly indulgence provide the same quality of life as one big dream of a trip does?  And do I need to be going out of the country every three years anyway, given that I’ve only been able to do it once in good mental health while not dragging unwanted relations?  But then, I’ve been reading too much William Gibson to put off wanting to see Tokyo much longer, and the foreign travel should probably be done younger – Boston and Hawaii will be easier when I’m 60 than Tokyo or India or Ireland.  Then again, will I be able to get the time off at age 60 go to abroad?  Why couldn’t I just fuckin’ be rich?  I wouldn’t be an ass about it, I’d pay my tax, you wouldn’t catch me doing any of that Kardashian douchebag shit…

All right, let’s face it, I’m a hell of a lot grumpier than I’ve been in a long, long time, too.  Chalk it up to work stress, chalk it up to residual political annoyance, chalk it up to the ever-present shadow of my Confederate relatives acting like assholes, chalk it up to the fucking cyclists who glide down my crowded platform every day under signs reading “WALK YOUR BIKE” or “DISMOUNT ZONE”. Chalk it up to the fact that I can barely go downtown in Palo Alto or Mountain View without the dying-roadkill-skunk aroma of “medicinal” weed coming from somewhere. Chalk it up to people who repeatedly misspell my name in email when the correct spelling is right there in the sig file and in the address itself.  Or people who I tell via help ticket that no, we don’t provide cat-5 cable, you need to buy some, and then email me directly wanting it. I guess I’m a cranky old man now, because nothing pisses me off harder and faster than people who won’t follow the directions.  Yes, I fucking said fuck you, you’re bombing your bike down a tunnel full of pedestrians, you’re not Rosa fucking Parks, you hipster fuck.

Which is another thing that makes me feel old – this year is the 50th anniversary of the famous MLK action in Birmingham, the “dogs and firehoses” moment that shocked the nation into admitting how bad things were down South.  I was born in Birmingham nine years later.  Or in other words, that’s as long as I will have been a Californian come June. That’s a shorter time than the time that’s now passed since the September 11 attacks.  I should feel well old. At the very least, I have the kind of perspective to see that it’s comical to assert that the hearts and minds of the South had somehow transformed by the time I was born – for crying out loud, it only took 13 years after Bull Connor for Time magazine to trumpet “The New South” on its cover, and yet I have relations by marriage that had a Rebel flag on a pole out front of their house in 2007.  The Supreme Court may gut VRA, but until the generation raised by the last generation to remember segregation is gone (yes, that’s my generation, for what it’s worth) it’s moronic to think things have changed that much.  

Then again, some things do change fast – a show like Seinfeld is already comically obsolete fifteen years on because nobody has a cellphone, let alone a smartphone.  Even five years ago, people were digging for video cameras to record Punxsutawney Phil – now my iPhone will record higher-definition video than anything I would have taken on the last trip to see the groundhog.  I remember when a 2400-baud modem to call into a BBS was an amazing thing; now multi-megabit-per-second wireless broadband is as mandatory a utility of modern life as electricity.  For godsakes, a 42-inch widescreen television is $400.  I could snap up a Nexus 7 tablet for $200, if I hadn’t just splashed out for an iPad for my last birthday…when once again, I didn’t know what I wanted for my birthday.  I’ll admit, I don’t particularly need a laptop anymore outside work, and a good thing – traditional desktop computing seems to be one of the things that has done for my shoulder this year.  It’s past time for an ergonomic assessment at the office.

And that’s another problem…I feel the pain in my back and shoulder, I work the long hours, and I feel the echo of the old man. “Do the best you can and don’t be a horse’s ass.”  I don’t want to be a horse’s ass, but at the same time, I’ll be damned if I’ll exhaust myself and let my health and well-being be ground up for the sake of fixing somebody else’s mistakes.  When the higher powers cock something up and it’s on me to fix it, I fucking well want the credit, and if I have to provide the solution I damn well want to be listened to and taken seriously in how I provide it.  And there goes the abiding fear again…that if I wanted to be taken seriously, I should have gotten on the management path, or else climbed the technical ladder, and that when I inadvertently sandbagged myself in 2007 I permanently crippled my path to advancement.

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

Of which more later.

 

William Gibson (via Kevin Kelly) talks about steam engine time – the point at which all the pieces come together to make steam engines a thing.  You might have the technology, you might have the need, you might have the necessary infrastructure to make it cost-efficient and a viable business model – but until you get it all together, it’s not steam-engine time.

Thinking about the number of leaps it took to get to the modern world of mobility computing made me think of this.  It takes a lot to get us to “superphone time.”  Not smartphone time, which arguably began with the Sidekick, but superphone in that one device is replacing everything.  Here’s what it took, measuring from my first cellphone in 1997:

1) Cellular data service. First obtained by me in 2000, not really mainstream until about 2002, and arguably not really competitive with Wi-Fi or wired data speeds until the coming of large-scale LTE deployment in 2011-12.  Along with this, you need text messaging to become a thing, which doesn’t really happen in the United States until around 2004 or so.

2) A high-resolution display and a snappy processor, plus an operating system powerful enough to drive them (and run other programs besides) yet light enough to fit in limited memory. PalmOS had a lot of this by 1998 or so, in a very primitive form – the Handspring Visor and the Treo that followed it were painfully gimped compared to a modern phone, but you had an OS that could run third-party applications and manage a wireless data connection by 2000 or so.  After that, it just took Moore’s Law to get a sufficiently capable combination

3) Digital media and the ability to purchase and use it as a mainstream means of consumption. Arguably not a thing until the launch of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, which marked the point at which major labels were willing to accept that downloaded music was their future.  Even though MP3 had been a thing for years prior (I first heard of CD ripping in 1997) you don’t get to superphone time until music companies are willing to sell you everything in bits instead of atoms.

4) Broadly pervasive and free Wi-Fi, sufficient to offload the bulk of data burden from your cell connection, which only started to get outside Silicon Valley by 2002 or so.

4) Lithium-polymer battery life capable of running the aforementioned high-resolution display, snappy processor, and persistent wireless data connection for an entire day. I didn’t really notice all-day-multi-day battery on a phone until the SonyEricsson Z520 in 2006, which I could go four days without charging.

5) Mapping and GPS worth a damn. You needed civilian GPS plus Google Maps in a phone-sized package, which didn’t appear until around 2006 (and didn’t become realistic until it could leverage the phone’s A-GPS).  The phone needed both before it could replace a commercial GPS – but by 2012, a standalone GPS made as much sense as a standalone point-and-shoot still camera.

6) Speaking of, a camera good enough to replace a basic point-and-shoot camera. You didn’t start to get five megapixel cameras in phones until late 2009 or so.

And most of all, 7) a public awareness and demand for devices that would do just such a thing.  Despite Blackberry, despite Sidekick, despite the best efforts of Windows Mobile and Symbian, you don’t really get this in the United States in any meaningful way until the day Steve Jobs stands on stage at MacWorld SF 2007 and asks “Are you getting it yet?”  They had done a cellphone that played music, and they didn’t want an iPod that made calls – they wanted the all-in-one. And they had to make people realize that an iPhone was something to be desired, people who thought Blackberries were for lawyers and Sidekicks were for Japanese schoolgirls.

So it doesn’t really start to happen until 2010.  And then, you get the Nexus One and the iPhone 4.  The first Android phone worth criticizing, and the first iPhone that required no compromises on camera or network or screen resolution.

And it’s only when you get to superphone time that some things become possible.  If it’s not superphone time, Twitter is basically limited to being a blast-SMS service (and indeed was largely SMS driven for the first couple of years).  If it’s not superphone time, Foursquare is pointless, Instagram is impossible, and Facebook remains something that happens while wasting time at work.  If it’s not superphone time, I probably have to carry my laptop on trips longer than three days in case I need to do something for work. And if it’s not superphone time, I’m still having to download podcasts every day and sync them to my phone every night to play back the next day, and I’m always at least one and usually two days behind – instead of getting the Sports Junkies by 10 AM and Geoff Lloyd by 1 PM every day.

Superphone time changes things.  It renders point-and-shoot cameras and standalone GPS satnav obsolete and damn near puts Flip out of business. It means that when a flaming engine goes twenty rows up in the stands at Daytona or a meteorite scares the shit out of half of Russia, there’s video of the event flashing around the world in damn near real time. It transforms your life as much as the replacement of public transit with automobiles and trains with airliners.

So I’m chilling in the cabin in Tahoe last weekend talking to some folks about technology, as you expect when a bunch of people who work in the Valley are on a weekend winter break. And one fellow says that he is considering going with an iPad mini (with LTE) and a cheap Nokia phone rather than a smartphone. And I am intrigued by this, because I can’t stop looking at the iPad mini for some reason, but there is the rather small problem of needing to wear a jacket or carry a bag everywhere if I’m packing a 7″ tablet (not to dismiss the fact that the 7″ obviates the need for a bag that the standard iPad requires).

And then tonight, it occurs to me: if I were to do that, I’d need the iPad mini (or Nexus 7), the Nokia 1112 (or the newer Nokia 105, just announced today and probably not ever coming to the US) – and an iPod nano or shuffle, because I have musical and podcast needs, and if I need to update the podcasts on the fly…and just like that, I’m back from three devices to one, which is the problem the iPhone was meant to solve for me in the first place.

The iPhone, in all honestly, was the final result of the better part of a decade of paring it down.  At one point in DC, I was carrying a pager, a cellphone, an iPod, and occasionally a Blackberry (in their pre-phone incarnation).  The pager and Blackberry were long gone as soon as I left DC, but I still had separate phone and music for three years – and needed a separate camera for anything serious with photos or video until mid-2010.  Now the idea that I need any separate camera is ridiculous, given that my iPhone 5 has a higher megapixel count than my wife’s digital camera and records higher-resolution video than our HD Flip. And in the meantime, the definition of a phone has evolved to the point where a smartphone is the default meaning – a phone that does nothing but place calls is an anachronism.

It’s interesting how things have progressed so much not just in my lifetime, but in the last fifteen years.  When I left Vanderbilt, a pager and an analog cellphone equalled the height of mobility communication. I didn’t get a phone that could handle email until 2000, and it was another year before I upgraded to one that could receive AND send text messages (inspired not a little by communication issues on September 11).  Then came a smartphone in 2003, a more plausible one in 2004, and then no more smartphones until the iPhone made them practical in terms of features and battery life and layered iPod functionality on that.

There’s sort of a millennial watershed, actually.  Start with my first laptop in 1999.  Within a year, I had a data-capable phone (the old Ericsson LX280 on the original AT&T wireless, doing CDPD at 9600bps) and early DSL, and by the end of 2000 it was sort of an article of faith that most anyone I knew would have a cellphone.  By 2002, Wi-Fi had entered the scene for me – present in Apple hardware for years beforehand but only truly large-scale by then, which coincidentally was about the same time that AT&T switched to GSM. And with “mMode” as a mainstream offering and the ability to get the laptop on the network away from home, “mobility computing” was finally a thing.

Meanwhile, musically, I bought my last cassette player (not even Walkman branded despite my intense Sony loyalty for such things since 1986) in late 1997 and my first portable MP3 player in 2000…then got my first iPod as a gift in 2002.  The last mix tape I ever assembled was in very early 1998, and the first MP3 I downloaded was at the end of that same year.  I relied on Audion until SoundJam was acquired and turned into iTunes, and when OS X 10.1 dropped, I went all in on iTunes and never looked back.

Despite my best efforts with a couple of smartphones and a couple more unlocked handsets (including the then-state-of-the-art V635) I couldn’t really make a cell phone work as a truly smart device.  The limitations of T9, a proxy browser, and a screen that rarely got bigger than 220×176 were just too much to overcome. So my next big leap came with the iPhone, which finally gave me a usable device that had email AND a plausible browser AND the ability to use Wi-Fi to get faster data than mere EDGE could offer. Within a couple of years, the default device is a smartphone that has email and web access and Wi-Fi and a video camera to boot, and the game has shifted again.

In the meantime, the netbook appears around 2008 as a cheap-and-cheerful option for mainstream computing, and works well for a couple of years – until the iPad comes along and eats its lunch on performance and battery life.  All of a sudden here’s a device that lets you do 90% of what a laptop does, with legit 10 hour battery life and the option for 3G cellular so you can really go anywhere – and by 2011 with the rise of LTE, the curve is shifting on mobility computing.

Ironically, I have my own separate loadout for shutdown nights now – I have the MOTOFONE F3, which was basically already ten years obsolete when I got it as a gift five years ago. But it’s a basic lifeline, not a means of constant connectivity.  Then there’s the Kindle 3G, which is perfect for reading but whose universal wireless capability is only viable as a browser of absolute last resort.  Throw a $40 iPod shuffle on there for going to the gym or a run or whatever and you have the basics of modern technological convenience without actually being connected to much of anything – a slimmed down black-and-white version of what I described back there at the beginning.  Ultimately, that’s the loadout going back to the very beginning: a means of communication, something to read, and background music.  Back in college it was a rolled-up magazine or two, a Walkman, and a quarter for the pay phone to call the answering machine that would only pick up after two rings if you had messages to retrieve.  Now nobody even bothers to leave voicemail, for the most part.

Meanwhile, the daily carry in all circumstances is down to keys, handkerchief, pen, wallet and iPhone. And that’s basically it.  This is why the battery life of the iPhone is more important than ever (and why I have a separate dedicated charging cable at my desk at work) – it’s carrying the load for all three functions above. Even if reading means RSS and Twitter more than magazines – but make no mistake, they only get read on the electronic devices.  And that’s why the iPhone always wins: because in the end, it means I only have to carry one thing.

The Academy has one job tomorrow: call David Letterman and apologize as if he just caught them in bed with his wife.

You can be ironic, you can be too clever by half, hell, I’ll even allow for you to be as sexist and misogynistic as you need to be, but you have to be entertaining.  And the twenty seconds I spent last week with my doctor elbow-deep in my ass checking out my prostate health?  Was funnier than anything Seth McFarlane said or did the entire night.  Proof, if any were needed, that his entire career is a demonstration of the old saw that “somebody has to make humor for the mentally challenged.”

Still, Argo.  Mad love, folks. Like I said, this movie will make it make sense to people under 40 how it was that Reagan just fucking cleaned house on Jimmy Carter…hell, I’ll probably own it at some point.  I couldn’t be more pleased for Ben Affleck, who may turn out a better director than he was a writer/actor…and even if he is Big Blue, I love Clooney with the shit-eating grin and the pro-wrestler girlfriend and busting open the miniature right there in the audience…and standing back with a proud smile letting the other guys have the moment when it’s time to accept.  Nobody in Hollywood looks like they have more fun than Clooney, and he gets full marks as producer of Ocean’s Six. ;]