Are my eyes really blue?

God knows I have, in my time, said some things that an objective observer would classify as vain, arrogant, perhaps a touch egotistical. However, what I am about to write may genuinely be the most outrageously vain, arrogant, egotistical, megalomaniacal thing I've ever put to print.

Nevertheless...onward.

I guess I have to say something about alma mater. I never expected, after the disaster that was California football in 2007, that I would replicate the same experience with Vanderbilt, of all teams, in 2008. Five straight to open the season, a couple of high-profile victories, an unprecedented national ranking and all kinds of attention at 5-0, and then a sudden and inexorable collapse leading to a loss over the underdog arch-rival and a final record of 6-6. But there you have it. The same team that owned Thursday nights, the team that took down Steve Spurrier in week 2 and got Auburn's offensive coordinator fired within 48 hours of the loss - that team shat the bed against Mississippi State and Duke and Tennessee and Wake Forest and almost managed to piss away a 21-point halftime lead over Kentucky.

I know it's meant to be some sort of breakthrough, our first bowl game in 26 years, but it's 6-6. It's one whole win more than we've managed countless times since 1990. It's a team that by rights should be sitting on 8 or 9 wins - hell, in theory we should have beaten everyone bar Georgia and Florida and be ticketed for New Years' Day, and we beat two teams that probably will play on January 1. And for those six wins, it looks increasingly likely that Vanderbilt's bowl trip won't even take them out of 615, let alone the state of Tennessee.

So yeah, dynamite, blah blah. It doesn't feel like much of a winning season, because it's not - yet. In fact, despite the bowl berth, the odds strongly favor Vandy posting their 26th consecutive losing season. And ultimately, that's the reason I can't get cised: we haven't turned the corner, not by a long shot, and next year is going to tell a lot about what this program actually has.

First off, NBC commits to nothing but reality programming in the 8 PM hour and now Jay Leno at 10 PM five nights a week?

What you're saying is that the network of LA Law, Homicide, ER, The West Wing - they're going to only 5 hours of weeknight primetime that MAY contain scripted programming? I mean, assume they're going to shuffle around the comedy block, that's 2 hours right there. Assume that some version of Law & Order will stick around, that's 1 hour, assume that Heroes isn't getting the gas pipe, that's another hour...

Seriously, this is the plan? Extend late night into prime time and hope for the best? I knew Jeff Zucker didn't have the brains God gave a cockroach, but it's not the sort of thing you expect to see someone flaunt. Plus it's not like Heroes hasn't gone completely suckadoodledoo, because seriously, I think they've replaced the showrunner with a chimp or something.

I have more personal stuff to blog about, but it'll be along later.

No, seriously, this is a test of Drivel running under Ubuntu. I sort of have in the back of my head that if anything goes awry with my MacBook to the point I can no longer use it, I will splash out on a Dell Inspiron Mini9 running Ubuntu Netbook Remix - the Dell looks easiest to open up and upgrade, the Linux seems the easiest to handle (compared to something like Linpus Lite or whatever), the reviews all seem positive, the build options are flexible and I can get $100 credit with my leftover AmEx membership reward points.

The big thing right now (and honestly, this post is me thinking out loud) is not "what do I need a laptop for" but "what do I need a laptop for that an iPhone cannot do?" The biggest thing, obviously, is text entry. I can get my mail, surf the web, check my RSS feeds, diddle about with Facebook and Twitter and WIkipedia, all sorts of stuff - hell, I can even stream Absolute Radio now, even though it would kill my battery - but the two big things a laptop can do that the iPhone can't are videoconferencing (via Skype) and long-form text entry (I wouldn't want to write anything much over a Twitter post with the iPhone, let alone a thousand-word blog post). Plus, let's be honest, anything on the web looks better at 1024x600 than at 480x320. Firefox 3, all the usual plug-ins and codecs, Zimbra (yes, my new job uses Zimbra for its collaborative groupware)...well, there you have it. Like it or not, there are some tasks that the smartphone is not yet up to, even the likes of the iPhone or the G1.

Of course, much depends on how long this machine here lasts, and when (if ever!) the Powers That Be from my first California job come looking for it again ;]

It was a really, really different time. For one thing, it was the last time I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas down South - and both apart from my new girlfriend, who has already demonstrated whatever is the female equivalent of "balls the size of church bells" by moving to the Washington DC area a month after September 11, when anthrax was still a going concern and guys with M4 rifles still patrolled the airports. I clearly remember walking around the Riverchase Galleria with all its security measures and wondering if Al-Qaeda really had designs on trying to donk off a bunch of hicks grasping for bargains. The fact that I would even consider a possibility of foreign terrorist attack on Ala-freakin'-Bama should tell you what a different era it was.

(more after the jump)

Christmas in 1988 really started the Saturday after Thanksgiving, when I heard Alphaville's "Forever Young" for the first time while driving to a math tournament. I was a ringer - despite the fact that I was in Trig/PreCalc in 11th grade, I had been entered for the Algebra II competition. I didn't normally do math, as I had no aptitude for it, and the math team wouldn't normally have had me, but things were desperate and they were reduced to borrowing from the Scholar's Bowl team. Which was sort of akin to Billy Graham borrowing from the Hell's Angels.

Things really kicked into high gear when I got the ring. My class ring arrived the first week of December. White gold, 10K, fake aquamarine, and "1990" - a magical date, a number to conjure with, a deadline with the promise of better days ahead. When I wore it out at night, and the starlight hit it just so, all the hope and potential of an unlimited future was clearly visible at the bottom of that synthetic gemstone.

"Forever Young" and "Photograph" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" were our Christmas carols. I was 16, I had a reasonably viable car, I had my crew, I had a starting spot (alternate captain!) and a trophy to defend, I had a name and a nickname and a callsign and a growing reputation as an over-caffeinated psycho with a vicious wit and some serious social defects, because they hadn't standardized the diagnosis of Asperger's back then. And the world was just waiting for me to own it.

To be honest, the future wasn't all that unlimited. In a lot of ways, it was badly limited by my own lack of imagination (what person, given unlimited power to travel through time and space, would carry out all his adventures within a 40-mile circle?) and there were practical considerations - I really didn't have a future as Alabama's quarterback, for instance. I say that because as I look at things now, there may not be as much unlimited future potential as there was twenty years ago - but who's to say it was so unlimited then? Or that it's so limited now?

The big difference is that I now live in the future. Don't believe me? Do the list. Device in my pocket the size of a pack of cigarettes, with a thousand songs and a mobile phone and instant communication with "E Mail" and all the world's knowledge to hand. Living in Silicon Valley. In California. Six-foot blonde girlfriend wife. NASA in my backyard, futuristic dirigible overhead, honeymoon in Edinburgh and vacation in Paris, listen to radio from London and Washington DC in real time, and - how crazy future-unlimited is this for a kid from rural Alabama? - Black President.

The future really is now. And it's just waiting to be pwned.

Not been a real good weekend for computers in my house. My own laptop is having some serious power issues, which I am not sure whether to attribute to the battery or the internal power management. Pulling hard for the former, because I don't want to have to replace this thing. And yet, it might be feasible...see, the current contents of my laptop are ~154 GB. However, if you remove all the iTunes content and the VMWare virtual machines, the entire remaining contents make up about 38GB. That's right, 3/4 of my data is all in music, video, and emulated PCs.

As an experiment, I created a virtual Ubuntu system - 512 MB RAM, 8 GB hard drive - and only added four things to the stock Ubuntu install: Skype, the Lifera (sp?) RSS reader, a simple blog-posting client and the Zimbra desktop client. And all the updates obvs. It includes things like Firefox, a music player suitable for streaming Virgin Absolute Radio, Pidgin for IM, OpenOffice if you need it - long story short, there's the OS and 90% of what I need from a laptop on a regular basis, taking up just under 4 GB. Which in case you were keeping track is 10% of what the same general stuff takes up on my MacBook.

Now, add to that the fact that I could scam up $100 worth of Dell credit from my AmEx points, and all of a sudden, an Inspiron Mini 9 that does all of the above in Ubuntu drops to around $320. Obviously not money I want to spend right now, but if this laptop were to shat the bed, what would I rather lay down: $320 on a mini Linux laptop, or at least $1000 (and probably more like $1500) on a new MacBook?

Now here is the catch: the iMac's hard drive is near failing. Its SMART status indicates that it is probably beyond saving, just make sure it's backed up. Since it is completely and utterly backed up, heroic measures to save it are impractical at best (once a drive is failing in SMART, basically all you can do is make sure it's backed up and then go through its pockets and look for loose change). The bigger issue is that the first-generation Intel iMac is damn near impossible to open and replace a hard drive without doing things like removing the LCD screen and disconnecting thermal sensors and assorted bad nasty things like that. And for other reasons relating to a former job that I can't really discuss, there's no way I can have somebody else attempt to service this system (or my laptop for that matter).

What we ended up doing was running to Fry's over the weekend to pick up a half-gig FireWire drive for $80 (!!!!!!!) and clone the entire failing drive, then boot the iMac from it. It works (kinda sorts; Parallels Desktop is being a bitch right now) but it's not exactly the sort of solution you could leave running 24/7, which both thwarts my normal wireless-backup scheme and limits my original plan, if my laptop failed, to resort to the iMac as the base station for syncing iPhone and iPod and the general repository for that 75% of my hard drive that consists of tunes and movies.

In other bits of news and thoughts:

* It's cold out there. In fact, it's cold enough that I've resorted to my international-travel jacket with the fleece vest zipped in. Only thing is, it has nothing in the sleeves, and as a result, it's not really all that cozy unless you're wearing a sweatshirt or something (and if you've ever worked in an old-ass government building, you know that heaving clothing really isn't an option once they turn the radiators on). So now I'm sorting through jackets options and wondering if I'm not actually just trying to come up with an excuse to break my 4-year streak of not buying superfluous outerwear.

* IKEA is a mind-altering substance. We have proof. They also sell THE weirdest soda known to man, and it Bothers me.

* One of my favorite things about Christmastime is going through the old James Bond box sets of an evening. Right now we're in the middle of the Sean Connery retrospective. One of these days I really need to see about getting around to the theater for Quantum of Solace...

* I know they say God has a plan and all, but all I can say is this had better turn out to be one hell of a plan.

* You think I should tell my end-users that Friday is my last day? Naaaaahhhhh....

* Things must really be going tits-up if they're canceling the Arena Football season. That league has stuck around like a cockroach or a Cassidy brother through thick and thin for 20-something years.

* My last unmarried cousin got engaged last night. I know he's 25, which is a fossil in Alabama years, but still...I guess this means that media pressure is now focused on my oldest nephew (turning 10 next spring) and I'm not even joking.

* My Buddy Vince Sez, "F you and your gov't cheese-payin' job." (He didn't get Veteran's Day off.)

Finis.

One more thing to cross off the "requires a laptop" list...

-- Post From My iPhone

Yes, Apple is pulling out of MacWorld. No, this is not as big a deal as it sounds. Remember MacWorld Boston? MacWorld New York? Apple pulled out of those, too - and basically killed them. What you may not know is that Apple didn't exhibit at this year's NAB convention, either - and that used to be near the top of the show schedule, at a level below only MWSF and WWDC in the hierarchy.

I went to MacWorld twice - 2006 and 2007 - and not once did it strike me as that big a deal once the keynote and product announcements were done. If you walked the show floor, the only things that might be of interest would be obscure things appealing to technical niches - the rest was a flood of accessories. In fact, after my first trip, I openly speculated on whether they would be renaming it "iPod Case World" for next year.

The much bigger deal is having Phil "Steve's Pal" Schiller delivering the keynote. Partly this is to further de-emphasize the importance of MacWorld, partly (I suspect) it may be a concession that there's nothing that big on the way. The only bit of Apple's product line that's really ripe for a refresh is the Mac mini and maybe the XServe, neither of which strikes me as the sort of thing you could wrap a keynote around.

The point is, trade shows aren't integral to the operation. Apple announces its stuff however they like. In fact, the "September iPod announce event" has become almost standard since 2005. And trade shows themselves aren't exactly healthy - COMDEX shuffled off this mortal coil some years ago, and CES is 10% smaller than last year according to some reports. And given that Adobe and Google, among others, were massively scaling back their MWSF presence - well, Apple's not going to be the last rat off the ship.

What this really is about is what happens with no Steve. Life without the big Barnum and Bailey events every six months, life with Tim Cook and Phil Schiller at the controls and occasional appearances from big wheels in the iPod and Mac OS groups. The stock is already down 5% in after-hours trading and I fully expect a bloodbath tomorrow, because the market is seriously starting to contemplate Apple's prospects for life after Jobs.

My theory: Apple has nothing to announce. And when you're diminishing the role of Steve Jobs as the public face of Apple, you don't use him to roll out a 17" MBP and a Mac Pro speedbump. Even a new Mac mini probably doesn't rise to the new threshold of Steve-ness. Some entirely new product that nobody was thinking about? Sure. Is there one on the horizon? Unless you buy into the netbook hype, nothing really springs to mind.

Now as to why they waited so long...maybe they did have something to announce, something big, and it's not going to be ready. But again, I can't think of anything that would be big enough to warrant the shift up that wouldn't have all its Ts crossed and Is dotted by now if it were rolling out at MWSF. No...I think that for the first time in a long, long time, the cupboard is bare, and Phil gets to roll out there and put a brave face on it.

At least he has the Sharks, though. I'm not going to challenge him on anything hockey THIS year.

Slingin' Sammy Baugh, 94, last living member of the inaugural class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and the QB who turned the Washington Redskins from a castoff Boston franchise into one of the NFL's crown jewels in the late 30s and early 40s (that Chicago title game in 1940 notwithstanding). At the time, most of the league was still running an offense based on a single wing or box set - to have a passer like Baugh was very much like carrying a machine gun to the Battle of Hastings.

In 76 years on the field, the Redskins have only ever retired one jersey, and it's ol' number 33.

There are people actually complaining that Obama doesn't have any Southerners in his cabinet?

Really? After the last 8 years, we are somehow concerned that a lack of Southern influence is a BAD thing?

Well I may have had a few DRANKS, but if I'm not the best, I'm still the best yet, so listen up, you !ing necks...

So here I am in theater 9, AMC Cupertino Square. This is where I saw Transformers...I can only hope Quantum of Solace is better. Worst case scenario: it's Die Another Day II, I eat some Uno pizza and drink a big Zero, and that's two hours donked off. At least I had credit on last year's AMC gift card, so the flick itself is paid for. Makes me feel slightly better about $12 for a mini pizza and a small vat of soda...

In a lot of ways, Christmas 1994 was the high-water mark of my grad school career. I hadn't gotten any grades yet, so there was no real sense that I might be doing quite badly. My then-girlfriend was off to California for Christmas with her family, so I didn't have that hanging over me. As the semester wound down, there was a whole social ramble to contend with, and when it ended, I went home with a big leather coat, a goatee, and the air and aspect of the big-alligator alum returning to the old patch.

What really stands out, though, is the crew. I hadn't had "my gang" in five years - certainly there was nothing of the sort on offer in college, and my team graduated a year ahead of me in high school for the most part. But within a couple of months, our oversized class of first-years had somehow becomes known as "the Herd." Which was a subset of the larger "Family" of grad students in PSCI (for "Family" think "Manson" or maybe "Gambino"). We did things together, had signature features (Red Dog...I actually drank Red Dog. It isn't a crime exactly, you can't go to jail for it, but it's kind of a disgrace, almost as bad as being vice president), had a reputation as the Oakland Raiders of Vanderbilt Graduate School, won the C-league intramural softball title. Our women got dated and our men got fleeced (trust the sucker from down South to admit having $70 in his pocket when everybody else was mysteriously broke in line for beer at the Mapco). We dressed up to go drink at the Oak Bar and went bowling at midnight and howled drunkenly for the GRINCH and slumped in hung over as one.

So when I swaggered home, in my Maynard G. Krebs starter-kit goatee and my huge overstuffed leather coat (which another grad student christened "the Elk"), it was with a confidence and sense of belonging I hadn't had in years, and it made it all the better to link up with my old crew again back home. Especially now that we could all drink, which meant that horrifyingly bad Garcia Y Vega cigars ($3 for four!) on the concourse at Bulls games were followed by beers at the Garages and vigorous debates over SLIP vs PPP and whether it was worth paying extra to have other than a terminal connection to the Internet.

Oh yeah...I had Internet access for the first time. And it was so amazing that I actually drove back to Nashville during Christmas break to check my email. It was, as it turns out, a life-transforming experience.

Naturally, it would all go wrong in the spring, but under the cold clear skies of December 1994, life was just about perfect. And to this day, whenever I hear Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers wailing "Christmas All Over Again," I can close my eyes for just a second and there I am...first-round draft pick, shiny Saturn SC2 with less than 20K miles on it, new Nikes laced up tight, class rings on both hands, leading the charge with Chris, Craig, Nicole, Stephanie and Tracy. The good old days may not be as great as we remember...but those? Were.

Food poisoning is no joke, kids. At least I'm pretty sure that's what it was. All I know is that I woke up at 4 AM on the 26th with my entire metabolism on blue-screen, and spent the next twelve hours hanging out with Bobby Hurley and Rhea Perlman (ask the DC folks) and outright delirious (ask the wife) before finally crashing to sleep, hard, for the next 17 hours. By morning on the 27th, the fever was broken and I was generally asymptomatic, and I posted on time for the Emerald Bowl tailgate on a rooftop in China Basin. What can I say, I'm a gamer.

I will say, however, that it was basically the WORST hangover of my life, and I treated it as such - nothing stronger than a couple bottles of Guinness save for one very dilute Irish coffee at the ballpark, nothing wilder or spicier than a plain hamburger on the rooftop or a bowl of oatmeal at breakfast or cold fried chicken after the game. (I didn't eat one bit of solid food on the 26th, but I can put away the Pedialyte and Gatorade like a CHAMP.) And I had to keep the shouting to a bare minimum - in a state like that, every decibel is precious and has to be saved for the most vital moment, like that defensive surge in the final moments that led to the Pain Train liberating the football and Cal eking out a bare victory over Al-Qaeda University. Actually, I suppose I would reluctantly root for the 'Canes over Al-Qaeda...but I would pray like hell that they didn't cover. EIther way, there's nothing like seeing a bunch of Miami fans trying to chant that Cal didn't cover and telling them "Congratulations, you're officially the Miami Commodores."

I'm not sanguine about our bowl, obviously.

Christmas? Oh, that went very well. I got a lot of nifty little things (especially the $illy coffee siphon, which is a brewing mechanism for engineers and smart-asses if ever there was one) and will finish with a whole stack of books and DVDs that have long needed reading/viewing. And before you mock me, I will point out that the wife has had the Wii on her Amazon wish list since the summer and when I found one available for ready money, I took the opportunity. She has controller #1, in case you doubt whose it is. (And in case you think "oh right, he got HER a WII, suuure," I also got her another little something that came in a box in a fetching shade, so I did my husbandly duty and don't you forget it.)

I did however get myself NCAA Football 09. I'm not made of stone.

I also got a High School Musical night-light in the White Elephant swap, but managed to unload it in trade for a teapot. Not a particularly fetching teapot, I must say, but there's another swap next year...

I fly like paper, get high like planes
If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name
If you come around here, I make 'em all day
I get one down in a second if you wait

Sometimes I think sitting on trains
Every stop I get to I'm clocking that game
Everyone's a winner, we're making our fame
Bonafide hustler making my name

Pirate skulls and bones
Sticks and stones and weed and bongs
Running when we hit 'em
Lethal poison through their system

No one on the corner has swagger like us
Hit me on my Burner prepaid wireless
We pack and deliver like UPS trucks
Already going hell just pumping that gas

Four months ago, when somebody borrowed a lyric from M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" to advertise their season-opening house party at Vanderbilt, the idea that the Commodores had anything to offer this season seemed laughable at best. The stars were poorly aligned in conference - Ole Miss and Georgia on the road, a brutal Mississippi State defense (Sly Croom coming off coach of the year), Auburn coming to town, and Kentucky not really suggesting pushover. In the non-conference, at Wake Forest looked tough. Nobody looked at the schedule and saw more than three or four wins.

Nobody saw 5-0.

And then, it just all went to hell, so badly and so inexplicably - slipping away against MSU, falling apart against Duke - and you wonder if you're really going to piss away the best start since World War II. And then one more win, there's Big Six, and then two more losses, and suddenly you're sweating out even getting a bowl bid before trying to make the best of playing in your hometown. And it turns out that playing at home is the best thing you could have hoped for, because your home fans are there for you in force.

They finally did again what they'd done in the first place: perfect football. No turnovers. No penalties. Nothing to beat yourself. When you can play like that, you can play anybody tough even if you can't deliver a single offensive touchdown. And you can usually turn out just enough to win, beat your third ranked opponent of the season, beat your fifth bowl team of the season, deliver a winning record for the first time since 1982.

They don't call it a hard six for nothing...but you'd much rather just throw the seven.

365 days ago, I padded downstairs to make coffee and watch the Rose Parade. As other people woke up from the party the night before, started putting together breakfast and generally recovering their senses, I watched a bunch of anthropomorphic M&Ms advertise themselves with a song that sounded vaguely familiar. I did some Googling and found it out was a song by The The.

Yeah, that's right. My great inspiration for the year came from a chocolate commercial.

I don't think it's any secret that 2007 just sucked out loud. I told myself that day, "Are you better off than you were 12 months ago? If not, what are you going to do about it?"

I'm not all the way back yet. I'm out to resolve some things that have been out there in my life for a long, long time, and one of them is to recognize that there's no quick fix for the things that are really important. So the comeback is not complete, but the trend is 180 degrees from where it was this time last year on the afternoon of December 31.

One thing I did manage was to write more than I had been. I thank you all for bearing with me, and dearly hope I can keep it up without the crutch of a Presidential election or without descending into utter solipsistic wankery. I promise to come up with more diverse amusements in 2009.

So...another 365?