Occupying Wall Street

When the rain comes ... - Picture courtesy of Lionsgate

by blogSpotter
I’m sitting in Starbucks on my 54th birthday...yes, I’m 54 years young. There has been so much weirdness in my life lately, I’ve fallen behind on my blog entries again. Will try to do a system reboot here at Starbucks ….

Quick Update on Android

After 6 months, I lost my LG Optimus V phone. Think it fell off my belt in a 7-11 parking lot on Harry Hines Blvd. To be honest, I wasn’t loving that phone … it had some issues. The 3G was slow and often unavailable. The pop-up keyboard had tiny little keys. The screen had lots of glare and the contrast was poor. Worst of all, the Android operating system has a rigidness to it that I never mastered – I kept exiting an app when I wanted to look at its menu options. Esthetically, Android OS reminds me of the spare Linux Ubuntu compared to the lush and beautiful Mac OS X. It was a prepaid, pay-as-you-go phone so the separation shouldn't be too traumatic. OK, enough about phones, let’s talk about Wall Street Occupation…

Margin Call

I just watched Margin Call with Kevin Spacey and Demi Moore. The movie is loosely based on actual events that transpired on Wall Street in 2008, just prior to the epic meltdown of September 14, 2008. My initial prejudice was that the movie might be wonkie and dull, appealing mainly to bean counters and political science majors. It wasn’t like that at all – it was a gripping, financial thrill ride that moved at a good pace. Nobody in the whole cast of characters is blameless but the shades of moral slippage go from light indiscretion (junior analysts following orders) to pure, vile nastiness (Jeremy Irons as CEO using people as collateral blame objects). A warning – there are aspects of this movie that may remind you of things still on-going. You may walk away feeling like you need to occupy Wall Street yourself. This leads me to me next topic…

Occupying Wall Street

Ann Coulter who is my favorite mean-mouthed conservative wench wrote a hilarious piece recently about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Though I’m from the opposite side of the political aisle from her, I have to agree with Ann. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is without a leader and is without a manifesto. Its members are all over the map in their opinions – sometimes at odds with each other. Some are staunch pro-Obama liberals and some are libertarians angry about Obamacare. When I saw their profiles in Newsweek, I saw jobs like performance artist, life coach and unemployed actor. These don’t sound like people who would ever be working at anything resembling an office job in the concrete jungle.

I like the idea of OWS in general, but am an overly practical, middle-aged guy. I think OWS should have structure, goals and leadership. I know that rains on the parade of 20-something potheads who are mad at …the men who did … that thing… that was really bad. I totally support their right for civil disobedience – carry on. But do it with some semblance of knowledge and direction. I have my own thoughts about Wall Street and why it’s so discouraging…

Nobody went to jail – The only people who have done time are over-the-top con artists like Bernie Madoff. Where is anyone being held accountable for the largest loss of national net worth in history?

The insiders were recycled back into the Bush/Obama Administrations – What of people like Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Henry Paulson. These men weren’t necessarily directly involved in the 2008 debacle but their fingerprints are all around it. Why do we keep having the foxes watch the hen house? What was clear from the 2008 events (and made clear in Margin Call) is that many people in business and government saw the disaster coming. The insiders’ last 2-3 months were spent with damage control, blame mitigation, and how to break it to the public.

There were already laws on the books – My first impulse in 2008 was to say, “There ought to be a law!”. There were and are a host of laws – there should’ve been 3 layers of protection. But when SEC, Federal Reserve, Attorneys General and so many others turn a collusive blind eye, it doesn’t matter what laws were on the books. Why weren’t the laws enforced?

This is late 2011, and basically nothing has been done to rescue or mend the situation of 2008. The only reason it hasn’t happened again is that the American public has a newly cynical attitude – American’s are actually in a mode of frugality right now, much like Japan in its "lost decade".

I’ll close by saying to Occupy Wall Street – Keep it up! Wall Street needs to be occupied. But academia, the White House and Congress might also need occupy themselves – with a greater sense of what “doing the right thing” means in the aftermath of 2008.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Mind Odyssey

Exploring the moon and the ultimate meaning of life - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

Stanley Kubrick

Before reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’d like to briefly mention the director, Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick was a cinematic mastermind who left a small, but outstanding legacy of movies in markedly different categories – Lolita, Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, The Shining. The son of a Jewish doctor in Brooklyn NY, Kubrick was a modest, unpretentious young man and is said to have been a mediocre student grade-wise. In a bio passage similar to other super-accomplished people (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs), Kubrick was restless in school – he quit NY City College after less than one year. He became a well-known photographer and from there he phased into making films. He was known as a stern perfectionist in his later directing career. He would require sometimes 50 takes of one scene – he incurred the ire of many actors due to that. He’s generally considered one of the greatest film directors of all time and many of his movies rank in top indexes for various film institutions and critics. He’s considered one of the lucky, “unfettered” directors who held almost total artistic control of his projects while getting the financial backing of major producing studios. He was also a workaholic who is described by peers as working himself to death at age 70, on Eyes Wide Shut.

2001: A Space Odyssey

I watched 2001 on Apple TV last night. The last time before that was in 1969 at the Air Force Academy Theater when I was 11. I have to admire the fact that I could grasp some of what was happening at age 11 – an adult RTF / Philosophy major might have trouble deciphering the final scenes of the movie.

Act I

The movie was delivered in a quiet tone with little dialog and stunning classical music as a backdrop in several scenes. It basically plays out in 3 “Acts”. In Act One, prehistoric ape men stumble upon an alien monolith – a black rectangular box planted by a superior civilization. They touch it and suddenly acquire the knowledge to make tools, and also war. The first act just covers this one phenomenon but it sets the stage for subsequent appearances of monoliths.

Act II

Act Two is really the main body of the movie and is truly enthralling. What I like is the “near-term” sci-fi it conveys. There aren’t yet any Death Stars or Starship Enterprises. It shows humans making regular space plane flights to a permanent lunar city, Clavius. It shows lunar buses, space meals, interplanetary phone calls and mundane activities as they might really play out in a few decades. The writers ambitiously thought we might have reached this technology point by 2001 – a scant 3 decades from when the movie was made. Humans are way too selfish, self-involved and disorganized to do anything so grand, so soon. We do have iPhone 4 which gives us Facetime – that’s about the closest contrivance we have. Else, 2011 looks depressingly similar to 1968 when the movie was made. In fact, our NASA program is being gutted as we speak. Let’s hope that Richard Branson gets his Virgin Air “space port” up and running some day soon.

But I digress – back to our synopsis. In Act Two it’s revealed that a monolith (identical to what we saw in Act One) has been found on the moon, near Clavius. It’s clearly been planted by an alien intelligence and is sending a strong radio signal to Jupiter. Two young astronauts are sent on a mission to Jupiter to see what’s at the other end of the signal. They’re on an advanced ship which is piloted and monitored by the amazing HAL 9000 supercomputer (called “Hal”). The writers imbued HAL with human motives and emotions – something we are nowhere near at the moment. HAL becomes suspicious that the astronauts intend to unplug him. This is justifiable – they are. They think that HAL is making some wrong calls, technically. HAL preemptively (and vindictively) removes life support for the 3 hibernating astronauts on board. He cuts off oxygen to Astronaut Frank who’s on a space walk. This leaves Astronaut Dave as the sole human survivor, in an outside space pod. Dave outmaneuvers HAL and slips back into an open portal. He summarily disconnects HAL's circuits causing HAL to sound drugged and dying as he sings “Daisy” – a test tune he was initially programmed with. Dave assumes command and successfully guides the ship to Jupiter.

Act III

Act Three is so bizarre, I can synopsize it a little but not a lot. Even Kubrick said that the 3rd act might mean one of several things to the viewer. The space ship encounters another monolith orbiting Jupiter. The monolith directs the spaceship into a “Star gate” or “Worm hole” depending on who does the telling. You see the ship race though a strange series of brightly colored, shifting landscapes. Dave loses consciousness and upon awakening his pod has landed in an elegant, surreal luxury hotel room. Here I’ll recount what I thought I saw … He sees an old version of himself eating at a table, dropping a wineglass on the floor. He appears to merge into this older self, who is aging in a matter of seconds. He’s next lying on a death bed, looking at a monolith that’s appeared before him in the bedroom. A beam connects Dave to the monolith and suddenly Dave is transformed into the “Star Child” – a giant embryo floating in space next to the Earth.

Conclusion

2001 was based on a short story, The Sentinel, by renowned sci-fi writer Arthur C Clark. Clark was a pantheist who thought that what we see as God might in fact be a superior civilization that started out like us and achieved a bodily form of “pure energy” over millions of eons. Kubrick was on a similar page with Clark and favored sci-fi allegories over conventional religious stories. I, the blog author, don’t really understand what is meant by terms such as star child or pure energy. I can’t officially join a bandwagon which bandies what to me is nonsensical jargon. I’m open to new ideas and interpretations – maybe at some future point I’ll become enlightened about Clark’s ideas but maybe not.

2001: A Space Odyssey is considered the absolute best sci-fi movie ever made by many enthusiasts. Acts One and Three will possibly elude you – they may even bore you at points. But Act Two is stunning for the incredibly elaborate, realistic technology props. Some of these were actually custom-created by a British aircraft company. I have to count myself as an avid fan of such a dramatic, thought-provoking movie.

© 2011 blogSpotter

Apple Without Steve

The misunderstood Newton - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

In Memoriam

As a consummate, wild-eyed Mac head you have to know that I’m very sad about Steve Jobs’ passing at age 56. Like Macalope Daily’s author said, I’m not a poet laureate nor am I good at eulogies –wish that I were. I’d like to convey how big a loss we have. I’ve blogged tirelessly about Apple products, have had Apple as a blog sponsor, and probably own no less than 15 Apple devices counting iPods, Apple TV’s, mac mini, etc. My actions and purchases can probably speak as well as anything. The irony was not lost on newscasters that many (most?) people heard of Jobs’ death viewing one of his devices. His pervasive influence easily equals Edison or Ford – we were blessed to have him in our presence.

Apple After Steve?

I actually approached this topic a couple of times previously. See “American Song” or “King of Cupertino”. I opined and still opine that Apple should survive albeit with some sense of melancholy. Let’s ask, “What if Steve Jobs suddenly left Apple?”. Well that actually did happen in 1985 when Jobs lost out in a corporate coup to John Scully. Post Jobs, Apple made some wrong steps to be sure, but also some right steps. Lets cover some of these …

Mac computers – Apple expanded on the Mac computer innovated by Jobs in 1984. Unfortunately in this transitional era, the IBM PC (with its function keys resembling 3270 terminals widely in use) captured the hearts of American business. The Mac was a high-concept graphics maestro in a world that wasn’t yet ready for it. In some ways, it was too beautiful to be. IBM computers (and similar Intel devices) served as a pragmatic bridge between clunky mainframes and the desktop. Apple rested on its lofty laurels long enough that it lost a big part of its graphics advantage when Windows 95 emerged some 10 years after Jobs left Apple. By the mid-90’s America finally “got” the graphic paradigm and in that huge passage of time, so did Microsoft. WinTel got American business; Apple got the arts and design crowd.

1991 Powerbook – Let us not forget that this was a WIN for Apple, squarely in the non-Jobs years. Prior to Powerbook, laptops were huge heavy clunkers like the Osborne. Pre-Powerbook portables were called luggables – they had the heft and bulk of a large bowling ball. They were impractical, ugly and slow. Powerbook innovated the track ball and the slim profile – it made portable computing both practical and esthetically pleasing. Intel makers (Dell, HP, Gateway) took a big page from Apple in making their next generation of laptops.

1993-1998 Newton – The Newton was a handheld device that was sophisticated and really ahead of its time. Yes, the hand-writing recognition was off – SNL and The Simpsons had riotous fun with that. But in fact the Newton was a trail-blazer for all future PDA’s and even really the smart phone of the 2000’s. The term PDA was originated by Apple and the concept of a smart, handheld unit that graphically streamlines your schedule? – that happened with the Newton. By the time it was killed off in 1998, it had solved a lot of its problems.

I guess that my overall point is this – Apple kept its eclectic hipness even during the period of Jobs’ exile from 1985 to 1997. It didn’t grind to a halt nor did it run out of ideas. To be sure, Jobs brought thunder and lightning to a shop that was stultified in its market for desktop and laptop computers. Mac OS X, introduced in 2001, gave a hugely needed overhaul to Mac’s stodgy System 9. By 2001, System 9 compared poorly next to Windows XP. Even with Mac OS X, Jobs was unable (even by 2011) to rescue the office environment from Microsoft or Linux. The earlier inroads made by NT and Win95 were too deep. A man can only work so many miracles. But Jobs gave us a new dichotomy – a Windows workplace and an Apple home life. Thus you pound away on a Dell at work. But you check your emails on an iPad; listen to music on an iPod, talk to your BFF on an iPhone.

And what is the future of Apple? Did Jobs leave a 20 year playbook for Tim Cook and other “Apple scions” to follow? Jobs’ pancreatic cancer played out over 7 years – maybe he left a roadmap when he saw that his hour was drawing to a close. I guess it all remains to be seen. A new generation of Apple fanatics waits with cautious hope – what’s next for the iPhone or Apple TV? Let’s hope that Jobs’ incredible spirit lives on in all our collective energies and imaginations. Nobody wants to go back to beige boxes.

© 2011 blogSpotter