Okay. Three times today I heard people talking about the weather, and all three times they had completely different – and completely wrong – explanations of this particular phrase actually means:

Percentage probability of precipitation.

Alright, enough. It’s a really simple concept. If the weather report comes on and the bingo caller says that there is a 60% chance of rain, it means that the last 100 times the weather was like this it rained the next day 60 times. It’s a historical reference, nothing more. The numbers, of course, are higher – it would be more like the last 2000 times it was like this, it rained the next day 1200 times – but the percentage would be the same.

Which, if you were wondering, does indeed mean if the weather droids say there is a 100% chance of rain tomorrow and it doesn’t rain … well, technically they weren’t wrong. It just means that it never happened before. It’s a pretty low bar as far as accuracy goes, but there you are.

And now you know. Feel free to correct morons around you who can’t figure this out.

Today’s amusing diversion for anyone who spends at least some portion of their life creating verbiage: I Write Like. You take a sample of your prose, slam it in, their engine masticates it for a while, and out pops the name of some probably-more-well-known-than-you author that you write like. Personally, I would enjoy this a lot more if there was some sort of explanation of what specific parts of your writing matched up to the famous person you are reminiscent of, or how the algorithm works, or something beyond “You write like so-and-so” but it is an amusing diversion nonetheless.

For what it’s worth, I got two hits on H.P. Lovecraft and two on Cory Doctorow for random submissions from this blog and the other (less profane) one. So I guess I can’t complain. It certainly beats ringing up some talentless hack like Dan Brown.

Curious? Give it a shot.

In past rantings on these pages I have mentioned the fact that the vast majority of “financial analysts” desperately want Apple to fail. They don’t understand the business model – the idea of selling a few premium products for a nice profit instead of boatloads of low-end crap is completely foreign to them – and because of that they hate and fear the company. When you hear an analyst talk about Apple and say that they “expect” lower revenues or poor sales or a downturn, you can safely substitute the word “hope” instead.

They hope – desperately hope – that the wheels will fall off. Spending time and money on innovation and a refined user experience is like some sort of financial small pox to these people.

The point of all of this is that we are getting close to the third quarter earnings report. Between now and then you will hear a lot of stuff from “the street” about revenue slowdown, stagnating sales, new competition from Microsoft, etc and so on. Remember the names of the people who say these things – they are to be mocked and reviled. To anyone capable of independent thought, it’s obvious that this quarter’s revenues will be scary huge – from the retail throughput, I would guess the biggest revenues ever for a non-Christmas quarter.

Don’t forget where you read that. And yes, the title of this thing is a Spaceballs reference. May the Schwartz be with you.

Why have major-league baseball managers taken to wearing these dumpy-looking windshirts?

So today I sat through a meeting were it was determined that we should maybe block any web visitors to our site if they are using Safari 5. Why? Because the new “reader” function in Safari takes completely unreadable pages on the web and makes them easy to read. Contrary to the ravings of the panicked publishing biz, it doesn’t block ads, or replace ads, or “declare war on newspapers”. What it does is take the actual content from a web page and lift it up into a single item that you can actually read. The function only works on pages that are cluttered with crap and/or use that reprehensible technique of splitting the thing you want to read across three or four pages – something content providers do to try and inflate their total number of ad impressions without any care for the fact that it makes readers crazy.

In a nutshell: Reading content via a web browsers sucks giant logs these days. Online content providers treat their readers like garbage to try and pad their revenue streams. So the solution is not to fix the content, no, it is to block a browser that lets readers fix this problem themselves and actually read your goddamn page, in the bizarre assumption that they will quit that browser, fire up another, and come back. Instead of, oh, fucking off to another site and never ever bothering with you again.

And the newspaper biz wonders why they are dying a painful digital death. Idiots.

The most reasonable take on the whole thing is here. But a far more entertaining way to grok this is to download Safari 5 and then follow Ms. Fletcher’s link to this bizarro rant. Try to read the lunatic ravings, but good luck to you, since there is so much crap on the page that it is generally impossible. Then hit the handy “reader” button in your Safari address bar. Voila – now the thing is easy to read, and even easier to laugh at since everything he whines about is his own fucking fault.

Apple hasn’t “declared war on newspapers” (and yes, I heard that three times in the stupid meeting I was in). Apple has given readers a tool to decide whether or not online publishers are treating them like shit and if they are, to do something about it.

If your readers are pushing a button that tells you that you suck, maybe you should have a meeting or two about that.

I don’t want to sound like I am saying “I told you so”, but … no, fuck it. I told you so.

And if you believe the response from Facebook and actually think that Shmuckerberg and his minions are going to give up this insanely lucrative stream of revenue, then I have a Brooklyn Bridge in Florida to sell you. This is the “enhanced value for advertisers” that they are always crowing on about, the holy source of their money torrent. Give it up? Not a chance.

UPDATE: If you are wondering how it actually works, wonder no more.

There was surprise – pleasant surprise – far and wide across the interwebs when AT&T announced (gasp!) fair and reasonable pricing for their iPad 3G service plans. Sadly, there was no surprise at all when Rogers announced the pricing for their Canadian equivalent – screwjob pricing that once again shows the complete and utter disregard they have for their monopolized customer base.

And it’s not just the pricing. They way they announced it – and their ongoing refusal to acknowledge the howls of outrage from the the chattels that line their pockets each month – makes it absolutely clear that they look upon their users as idiots and simpletons. They shovel forth pap and obvious misinformation, crap that only a complete idiot would fall for, with the bland expectation that (like all good Canadians) we will just stand there and say “thank you”.

Consider: On their official blogs, Rogers mouthpieces claim that their data rates “stack up pretty favourably with carriers around the world”, and point hopefully at the fact that both they and AT&T offer 250MB over a 30 day period for just fifteen bucks. Great – except that the 250MB plan is a fool’s errand, and is a pittance when it comes to actual consumption. The real comparison is the “might actually be useful in the real world” higher-level pricing: AT&T gives you unlimited data for 30 dollars, and Rogers gives you 5MB for 35 dollars. Since many 3G users that are already on AT&T are reporting usages of up to 200MB per hour an adjusted comparison would be:

AT&T: 30 dollars = all you can use for 30 days, or a buck a day
Rogers: 35 dollars = all you can use for 5 days (4 if you don’t sleep much), or seven bucks a day

Seven to one. How does that “stack up”? It doesn’t … unless the thing you are stacking is pure horseshit.

If that wasn’t insulting enough, any time one of the Rogers drones is willing to address this discrepancy they try to explain it away by saying that AT&T’s network is crap, Well, sure – everyone knows that the Death Star’s service is generally terrible. But everyone also knows that Rogers’ service and coverage is also crap. Well, okay, worse than crap. Trying to deflect criticism by throwing black pots in glass houses just highlights the torrent of insult and condescension they are spewing forth.

And, as the final dollop of disregard to the downtrodden masses, they are actually callous enough to have drafted in some astroturfers on their blogs – obvious Rogers drones and shills posting comments about how awesome this whole thing is and how anyone that disagrees must be some sort of commie fag junkie (with a tip of the hat to George Carlin).

It’s just pathetic. Not unexpected, but definitely 100% pathetic.

One day these clowns are going to get theirs.

One day.

If you drive all the way up Highway 11 in Ontario – past Huntsville, past North Bay, even past Rib Lake – you come to the scenic town of Cobalt. Okay, so it’s not all that scenic. There isn’t really anything to see at all … except for the Highway Book Shop, a gigantic and cavernous barn packed with a staggering selection of books. And I do mean staggering. The sign out front tells you that they have a larger selection of titles than any other bookstore in the world. If you stop in and browse you will find that the reason for this is simple – they have all of the books that you will find at any other bookstore, plus thousands upon thousands of offerings from every Tom, Dick, and Hemmingway who ever put a pen to paper or a finger to key. They don’t just sell the books, they make ‘em!

If you have written something – hell, anything – then the fine folks at the Highway Book Shop will publish it for you. Six copies (one for you), somewhat shoddy binding, laser printed pages, and a generic cover. The laser printing, it should be pointed out, is a somewhat new development – last time I was there I saw a lot of older titles that had been printed with dot matrix.

Note to younger readers. Go look up “dot matrix”. It will do you good.

Now – just because the books are there, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are good. Or even readable. Between the crackpots (my first exposure to the oft-linked Peacock was via his tome at the Highway Book Shop), the half-wits and semi-literate boobs with delusions of literary adequacy, the place is packed with dreck. Stacks and stacks and stacks of dreck. And some stuff which, if we are going to be frank about it, would outright tarnish the good name of dreck. Which – four paragraphs and a gratuitous Peacock link later – brings us to the whole point:

Universal access to being a published author is not necessarily a good thing.

A simple way for the masses at large to become a published author and get a spot in a global digital bookstore has the potential to be really, really scary. And that is what the fine folks at Lulu are promising. They are taking their “all play” print publishing program and extending it by way of a deal with Apple and the iBookstore. The premise is great – hell, hacking away at this blog shows that I believe in citizen access to both sides of digital media. But the execution is rife with pitfalls. Will this pollute the store with so much random crap that it becomes impossible to shop? Will these titles all get buried in the bottom layers so that no one ever finds the one or two real gems? Does the ultimate extension of this endanger of my long-standing assertion that editors are nothing more than unwanted filters between creator and audience?

There are a lot of questions. And not many answers. I want to like this idea, I really do. But … but … but …

Whenever someone mentions Facebook to me I don’t know whether to look at them with scorn or pity.

Okay, scratch that, I do.

Pity would be the response if I was just judging them on the fact that they are dim enough to willfully connect their computers to the world’s largest source of malware and system corruption. But scorn – outright scorn with a side helping of venomous disdain – is the correct response to people who willfully accede to the most reprehensible user agreement since … well, ever. Of course, feeble-minded people such as this probably don’t even read the agreement. They are happy enough to click on the “I agree, fuck me over” button every time there is a change, blithely giving away more and more of their personal data so that Goat Boy (yeah, I’m looking at you, Zuckerberg) can pad his pockets with a few more grillion bucks.

If you actually have more that a couple of functioning brain cells and you sit down and look at the evolution of the so-called privacy agreement over time, you realize just how distasteful this whole enterprise is. In fact, it blew right past “distasteful” and settled in at “downright evil” somewhere around the end of 2009.

The scariest part is how clear the language is. There is no legal mumbo-jumbo here – they let you know in plain english that they are going to bend you over and drive you nice and hard.

For profit.

And none of their users seem to mind.

So there was this “interesting” poll done for and released by the CTVglobemedia group this week. According to this poll, Wayne Gretzky was the top choice of Canadians – with 37 percent of the votes – to carry the Olympic flame the last few meters and like the cauldron in Vancouver on Friday. What makes this so “interesting” is that it was more-or-less rigged to give an answer that was acceptable to the organizers of the Vancouver Olympics and their media partners. Respondents to the poll had their choice of names from a short list of carefully vetted candidates, with no “off the board” answers allowed.

Why? Simple – two days earlier the Canadian Press did a poll that allowed people to answer with whoever the hell they wanted, and almost eighty percent of them answered with “Don Cherry” – someone completely unpalatable to the “media consortium” that is covering the games and, by extension, the Vancouver organizers who are effectively their willing lapdogs in this venture.

In other words, wrong network. Oops.

So who will carry the torch at the very end of the stupidly long and insanely commercialized run to Vancouver? Well, if we did things right it would be someone that is a huge hero to all Canadians for his or her exploits in sport. Period. This is what the Spaniards did with that amazingly cool archery shot in Barcelona, and what the Norwegians did with that swank ski jump in Lillihammer. Those guys were national heroes to people of all ages in their own countries, and if the rest of the world didn’t know who they were, well, fuck ‘em. Sadly, however, there are a bunch of factors at play here that will preclude that sort of choice. To wit:

VANOC And Their Media Buddies Are Evil Bastards Who Care Only About Sponsorship And Advertising Revenue. These are people who literally took sporting equipment out of the hands of poor kids all over the world to appease their corporate masters. And their biggest corporate master is the bloated consortium of Rogers, Bell, and CTVglobemedia. So there is no way in hell that anyone appearing on the super-happy-fun-Rod-Black-opening-show is going to have ties to any other media outlet in any way shape or form.

The Three Strikes Of Death. Canada is politically correct to the point of nausea, and the worst thing you could be in any sort of public or media function is white (strike one), male (strike two) and anglo (strike three, yer out). The chances of the final bearer or the sacred torch having all three of these qualities is functionally zero.

The Great Canadian Inferiority Complex. The Norse and the Iberians were happy – hell, proud – to pick someone that meant the world to them, and to hell with everyone else. Their games, their heroes. But here there is going to be some huge pressure to pick someone that is known to the rest of the world a.k.a The United States. People in the higher reaches of the VANOC cabal will be stressing about the choice being something that Bob Costas has to explain to everyone below the 49th parallel. I say big fucking deal, let Bob do his damn job and explain away, but there are not a lot of people in media in this country with the balls to support a choice like that.

Canadian Kids Have Gotten Really Stupid. Or, more to the point, they are sucking away at the American media tit all day long and all they know is whoever is on the front page of the tabloids or on American Idol or Dancing With The Morons or whatever. Our sports heroes of the past generation are completely meaningless to them, which is tragic and sad and really fucking annoying, but which is also a cold hard fact.

So who are we going to see? Frankly, I don’t have a clue. If 80 percent of average Canadians had their way it would be Don Cherry, but he works for the CBC and he definitely has the Three Strikes Of Doom. Sorry, Don. Liz Manley, who saved the Olympics for Canada in Calgary? Geatan Boucher, who should be a legend in winter sports here? Nope – the kids don’t know them and they are no-names south of the border. Kurt Browning? Wrong network. Gordie Howe, the greatest hockey player of all time? Nope – Three Strikes.

If you were going to be completely cynical you would suggest Celine Dion (Francophone, female, and famous in the states) or Shania Twain (female, famous in the states, and with a tenuous native connection) but even I am not ready to go that far yet. Yet.

If you want to go right off the board, a good wild card pick would be Bobby Orr. Sure, he has the Three Strikes Of Death against him, but he is also famous in the U.S. of A. and he has a contract with General Motors, the sponsor who has enough power with VANOC to force them to fuck over the people at Right To Play. GM carries a lot of weight in Vancouver this week, and Bobby is their number on celebrity pitchman. It might just be enough.

The only good part about this whole mess is that it probably means – despite whatever desperate anti-Cherry polls Globemedia is running – Gretzky is out. He’s packing the three strikes and he is a shill for Ford – see ya. And good riddance. The only thing he is worse at than coaching is being Canadian. He won’t even come north to slum with us hosers unless it is for some event where he can try and sell a few more bottles of his shitty wine. Bah.

They say the best inventions are the simplest ones.

Amen, brother, amen.

Why do supermarkets always assign their stupidest, slowest, and most inept employee to work the cash register on the “Express” line?

It’s been two hours since the unveiling of the “iPad” (sorry, I have to stop and gag now, I mean come on guys, that name is major suckage) and a whole bunch of people have emailed me with the same question:

“How does this ‘change’ anything? It’s not doing anything new!”

Well, actually, it is doing two things that are completely new. One of them will probably not be mentioned by anyone tomorrow when the mainstream news hits, and the other one will be mentioned, but in a manner that is one hundred percent and completely wrong. Follow along at home and you too can laugh and point at stupid people in the morning.

Thing one: Content providers no longer have to work within the limitations of a standard browser. Imagine if every magazine had to use the exact same format in print – whether it is Chatelaine or Men’s Health or Home & Garden or Hustler, doesn’t matter, same layout. That would be ridiculous beyond imagining. Yet that is the state now for online publishing via web. Sure, a few outlets have tried to do their own custom application on the traditional desktop, but that always fails because people have an aversion to downloading and installing shit … except on the new generation of smartphones, where people are used to “click and install” and are totally down with the idea of grabbing an application to deal with specific data instead of just surfing a web page.

Think about it – until the iPhone (and it’s Palm and Google progeny) people never used one app to check restaurant reviews, another to read books, a third to watch sports scores, a fourth to browse drink recipes, etc etc etc. Never. But now – happens all the time.

So the upshot is that content providers – if they have the brains to realize this and actually follow up on it – now have complete control over how their readers-listeners-viewers-whatever interact with their data. You have the opportunity not only to win customers and make revenue on your output, but how that output works. The possibilities are endless, and the opportunities are there for the taking. This is the big change at the user end – a win/win for both the consumer and the publisher, and a watershed that will put the brave and the innovative in the winners’ circle and will put the timid and the stupid in the garbage can of forgotten crap.

FENDERHEAD ALERT: You will see startling large numbers of media “analysts” and “experts” report this as a negative on Thursday. These people can safely and immediately be dismissed as idiots.

Thing two: This device could not have been built by anyone as little as six months ago, and right now this device can only be built by one company on the planet. No one else has access the silicon needed because until Apple designed and built them, the chips didn’t exist. Memory with the speed and power profile needed here, the video processor that can drive full HD in this form factor, the processor that can drive pages this fast within the limitations of the form factor – only one company in the world has these things because they built them from scratch. And without these things, you can’t do anything comparable, period.

The reason Uncle Fester showed a not-really-working prototype of an HP “tablet” a couple of weeks ago is because the day before a few select members of the press saw the working version and pretty much laughed Fester out of the room. He didn’t dare show the assembled press a “tablet” that could only drive video in 16 colours after you detached it from the main laptop and was so slow that you could literally see the windows opening pixel by pixel by pixel.

So now everyone plays catchup. Some companies are going to be bright enough to understand that controlling the chips and the hardware built from those chips and the operating system that makes it all go is a staggeringly huge advantage … one that right now only one company in the world has. And they will start digging in and working to get onto the same playing field. And some of them will make it, but they will be playing 12 month catch-up and it isn’t going to be pretty. And the rest? The ones who don’t clue in and just keep buying chips off the shelf and trying to make their functions fit the limitations of someone else’s silicon? A long slow slide into complete irrelevance. Unless you are named “Motorola” and then you will just be out of business in two years.

FENDERHEAD ALERT: You probably see a vanishingly few member of the media pick up on this tomorrow. Any reporter or media source that doesn’t mention this as the most important part of the story can safely and immediately be dismissed as an idiot.

Enjoy your night. I’m off to play with the new SDK until my eyes are burning. If you have any sort of stake in any sort of media, you should be too. Unless. you know, you’re one of those idiots.

No, I am still not going to make any predictions. No way. Not a chance. Like everyone else, I am doing the wait and see thing.

But … as you read through the endless drivel that will be written later today about Steve Jobs’ latest creation, watch for one phrase. If you see anyone talking about how the Apple Tablet/iBook/MaxiPad/whatever is going so save “print media” then may immediately label that person to be a complete idiot. See, nothing is going to save “print media”. Period. That ship has sailed, and anyone who still talks about “print media” after today is completely and utterly clueless. The problem isn’t the “media” part – people have more of an appetite for media (including the news and information that the dead-tree brigade has been selling in their rags all along) than ever before, the problem is the “print” part. The print part is broken, and in fact has always been broken, it just managed to hang around for years and years because there was no viable alternative.

After today, there will be. It might not be whatever Apple releases today – there is a small but non-zero chance that whatever they show today is “too much, too soon” and people just wont get it – but the die will be cast today, and media will forever change. Maybe not right away, but it will change, and the change will be one way and very, very drastic. Either after today or at some point in the very near future people will expect to have instant and full-time access to all of their media needs – books, news, music, “television” shows, movies, everything – in one spot, on one device, and in an enhanced and interactive format, and they will judge which items they consume (and by extension, pay for) by one criteria and one criteria only: Quality.

So how do you make the leap to the “new world” if you are an “old media”? Frankly, the answer is easy and obvious – but the groaning old fossils who run the “old media” outlets are too stubborn, too stupid, and too old to understand. All you have to do is this:

One: Whatever you are now spending on writers, reporters, photographers … double it.

Two: Whatever you are now spending on designers and production staff … double it.

Three: Whatever you are now spending on IT … keep it the same.

Four: Whatever you are now spending on management and editors … cut it. At least in half. And preferrably by 90 percent.

Five: Take all of the content you are now cranking out like never before and create it and present it for mobile digital media first and foremost. Use this platform as the canvas you create on from the ground up. Then offer an enhanced version on your traditional web site. And finally, if you really think you have to, you can reuse that content in whatever dead-tree publications you still insist on producing.

Now, for the benefit of the old sales and business relics that are still running the show, I will explain what is going on here, since you are generally stupid and are currently doing exactly the opposite of those five simple points.

Points one, two and three: In a world of instant digital media, where there are no longer any barriers to entry and anyone with some ideas and some drive can now publish things, consumers are going to make their choices based on which content is most interesting, which is most relevant to them, and which is the easiest and most appealing to look at. You need lots and lots of professional content, you need to be relevant to a shitload of tiny fragmented audiences, and you need to have a better layout and navigation scheme than you newly-created nine million competitors. And your creation and delivery systems have to work all of the time.

Point four: The one thing people no longer really want or need is you telling them what content they can get or what sort of spin it should have. Audiences are more sophisticated and want to make their own decisions – they want unfiltered data and they want to parse it themselves. They would much rather have a raw report from three different humanoids and then make their own mental edits and conclusions than to have you do it for them. Get off your high horse and stop wasting time and resources and money on filtering that your audience no longer cares about and will eventually start to resent.

Point five: Go back and read the first part of this item. Your print thingies are dead dead dead. As long as you continue to see new media as an “electronic version of your print product” you are doing nothing but hamstringing your potential new bread and butter with the considerations of your crappy dinosaur product. Get with the game, or get out of it. Shit or get off the pot. No one is going to put up with archaic bullshit just because it says “New York Times” or “Globe & Mail” at the top. After today content and quality are king, and your nameplate cachet no longer means anything.

Sadly, this simple advice is going to completely miss any media organization that has people at the top with either a business or sales background – which means pretty much all of them. The winners here are going to be the young, the hungry, the new, the brave, the people who use this model to get their information out there when they never could before. Just like iTunes took control of the music industry out of the hands of the record labels and put it back in the hands of the artists, this will take the right to publish away from the “chosen few” and give it to everyone. And when everyone wins, the stupid old dinosaurs usually lose.

Nope. Not at all. I will not even hazard a guess. Not even to the name of the thing which will probably be “iBook” but you didn’t hear me say that.

But I will say this. When you watch the coverage or read the recaps or whatever you do with the Apple event on Wednesday, remember this little anecdote.

A few months ago, after Jobso’s rather concise dismissal of the whole concept of a tablet, he came in to a small meeting with some of his inner circle at Apple and halfway through a sentence about something else entirely unrelated stopped and said “Why do we have television networks and broadcasters anyway?” There was about 20 seconds of silence at the table, and then Jobs got up and left.

This is not an uncommon way for conversations with the man to work. And if you were one of his inner circle you would have immediately known that his comment and subsequent silence and blow-off of the rest of the meeting actually meant this:

Broadcasters and television networks are nothing but a filter between you and content you may want to enjoy. They control the distribution, and because of that they control the advertising revenue, and because of that they get to decide what you get to watch and what you never see. Sort of the way the record companies and music retailers were before iTunes. Now you have a situation where no store manager gets to choose what you can buy. No slob of a record company executive gets to choose what you can hear. Anyone can put their work on iTunes, no middle man, no “choosers of taste”, no distributors, just the people creating the work and a storefront where the listeners can get it. And consumers have realized they like this. A lot. And if music consumers like this a lot, then consumers of all media will probably like this a lot too. And if they do like it then we better make sure we do it first, and best. Especially best.

Yes, I know, that extrapolation is not entirely obvious to you or I from the words that came out of Jobso’s mouth, but the people around him are paid staggering amounts of money to make that mental leap. Just go with it. Either way, shortly after this “conversation” he started putting his full-time attention to whatever-it-is that they are announcing this week.

Remember that on Wednesday. The idea of all media – books, music, current news, periodicals, movies, what we now call television, everything – available in a direct pipeline from the creator to the storefront. Anywhere, at any time. Open to all. And driven by pure demand instead of the money in the pockets of a few “tastemakers”. With the “entrance fees” to providers so low that it is just as viable to cater to a small market as much as a big one. It might not be the message that comes out on stage. And it might not be obvious for a while. But it could very well be the end game.

Stay tuned.

This is how you show without a doubt that you don’t have a clue about on-line media, digital content, or how to put 2 and 2 together and come up with a number that is approximately 4.

The end result of the New York Times’ “bravery” here is that people will read the articles until they hit the “pay event horizon” and then they will go somewhere else until next month. What none of these fenderheads seem to get is that good content wins if everything is free. But, as soon as you have to pay for on-line generic content … that is when similar-but-not-quite-as-good content is the easy winner. Game over.

The worst part about this is that the winning equation for on-line news is really really simple. So simple that I could type it here in one sentence. But seeing as how none of the “traditional media” outlets seems to be able to come up with the same simple answer, I am going to hold off for a bit and try and sell the solution to these morons for Big Consulting Bucks.

I have noticed that some younger types have taken to wearing baseball caps high on their head and with the brim dead flat. This, of course, makes them look like Gomer Pyle’s less-intelligent and much-more-inbred cousin. I was operating under the assumption that they are just typical youth drones who have no free will and are in the grip of some sort of inane fashion trend, but recent observations have made me change my mind.

Specifically, these people also seem to lack the mental dexterity to manage to take the sticker off the brim of the cap after they purchase it!

So yes … not only do they look like low-grade imbeciles, they actually are low-grade imbeciles.

Thankfully, there is help. If you know one of these youngsters or other mental defectives, point them to this helpful web site where simple diagrams can assist them in this basic task.

Just because you are a moron, you don’t need to walk around advertising it. Once again, the internet is your friend.

So tomorrow good ol’ Uncle Fester will get up and show off the fabulous new Microsoft tablet/slate/flat thing/whatever the hell they are going to call their little touchscreen device. The thing won’t be available anytime soon, and if you guessed an actual street date of “close to Christmas 2010″ you would probably be more or less right. They are rushing the thing out into the public eye now so they can beat Apple to the punch – you will be seeing a very similar event from Apple in the last week of January.

There is a statistically valid chance that the mockup they have tomorrow will not even be a functioning item … they are that desperate to look like they came out with a tablet first.

The problem here is that “being first” is completely missing the point. Instead of being first, you want to be the company that gives you an actual reason for needing to own the goddamn thing. You probably own a smartphone, so what compelling reason is there to spend your coin on another smartphone that is too big to put in your pocket and doesn’t even make phone calls? You probably already have a laptop, so why would you want another laptop that doesn’t do as much and gets a really dirty screen?

Or, as Steve Jobs famously put it last year, “What is the fucking thing good for except surfing the web while you shit?”

See, that is the question that the winner in this particular game is going to answer. Not “When can I buy it”? Not “Who made one first?”. And definitely not “Does it come in pink”?

Right now, none of that matters.

The chance of that question being answered tomorrow is generally slim, because coming up with that sort of answer is not Microsoft’s strength. They make and develop products for established niches and markets, or copy ones that are already in established niches, or if worse comes to worst, they steal something they need to get into an established niche or market. And give them credit, they are very good at these things … but innovation is definitely not their forté. So the tablet will in all likelihood be based on some sort of technology that already exists, and it will do functions that are already being done by something else. Something else you probably already own.

The smart move for Microsoft at this point would be to wait. Because the man who last year said that tablets weren’t good for anything beyond reading in the can is now putting his absolute and undivided attention to the creation of a tablet. Which means that at some core level the concept has changed, and the pickiest man in the world now thinks that this is a product that you absolutely have to have.

What’s changed? Dammed if I know. I can’t even figure out the most basic concepts. How will you carry it? If it is small enough to put in your pocket, then how is it better than your phone? If you cant put it in your pocket, then why not just have a laptop? Does it stand up? if not, how can you watch media on it? Does it fold? If yes, then you are back to a laptop. How do you get data into it? Does it have a keyboard? Do you type on the screen? How? Two hands? Thumbs? Yeah? Great, now we are back the phone you already own.

And – most important of all – what could it possibly do that will make it “insanely great”?

When development started on the iPhone, El Jobso told the assorted geek teams that there would be no phone at all unless they were able to come up with something that was beyond a phone – something that would change the way people thought about portable computing forever. If you have an iPhone, and you are like the average iPhone user, you reap the results of that mindset every time you do something – surf the web, manage photos, book a taxi, deposit a cheque in the bank, whatever – on your phone instead of your traditional computer. People never reached for a pocket device for nearly every facet of their day-to-day digital lives before, but now you do it automatically and probably don’t even think about it. You are doing freaky science-fiction shit fifty times a day and it’s no great shakes. The iPhone is not a phone that happens to do other stuff … the iPhone is a little computer that happens to make phone calls. That is the semantic leap that changed everything.

If the driving mindset behind the iPhone was changing the way the average mope thought about portable computing, then it is not a terribly large logical leap to think that the mindset behind some tablet thingie must be to change way that the average mope thinks about some other core facet of computing. But it is going to take a greater mind than mine to figure out how to do that. And if Microsoft shows a product tomorrow that does stuff that other things already do, it means that it is going to take a greater mind than Uncle Fester’s, too.

If you are watching the semi-final and final games of the World Junior Hockey this week, you may notice a largish value on the scoreboard during breaks in play or during the intermissions when the talking heads are blabbering away about the action you just saw. This will be a number that us usually over $100,000 and climbs visibly as you watch it. You may wonder to yourself, “What the heck is that number?”

Well, that number is the value of the 50-50 jackpot in the arena for that game – they have an awesome ticketing system to updates the current pot live on the scoreboard, and the fans go nuts when it passes big milestones. It goes way over 100 grand whenever Canada plays, and was over 200K for the New Year’s Eve game.

So wonder no more – that number is the amount of money some semi-drunk farmer is going to lug home. It boggles the mind.

I recently – okay, fine, not-so-recently – mentioned some of my literary kid-hood heroes. In the very upper echelon of Awesome Guys I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up – topped only by the über-cool Captain Nemo – were both the esteemed Mr. Sherlock Holmes and his stalwart partner and confidant, Dr. John Watson, MD. The key word there being “both” – Holmes the brilliant, grumpy, moody bastard and Watson the stoic and always-ready-for-action gentleman adventurer.

Unfortunately, the various cretins who have attempted to bring Holmes and Watson to visual life in movies and television have always had some unaccountable need to portray Watson as a kind of comic relief – a bumbler and a boob, a source of pratfalls and low humour. This filled me with seething rage in my younger years, and helped to solidify my core belief that the vast majority of the human population is worthless and despicable.

Stupid Hollywood fucks.

So I am stoked – stoked – for the new Sherlock Holmes movie coming out on Christmas day. Not only does it appear that they have found the true Sherlock Holmes – misanthrope, boxer, moody, manic, bohemian – but they have also rediscovered Watson. Man of medicine, recent from the Afghan Wars, decorated soldier, a gentleman rogue with a penchant for mayhem, fine clothes, and fine women. This is the Watson of my youth … not that stupid Basil Rathbone shit.

Guy Ritchie better not let me down here. I am in a veritable lather about this thing, and will be seriously pissed if I get disappointed.

Don’t make me come over there.

It’s Grey Cup day, time once again to settle in and watch what is inarguably (unless you are some sort of fenderhead or feeblemind – for example, I have heard Leafs fans and other mental defectives dispute this) the single championship event in all of professional sports. In fact, on a year to year basis the only thing that can make the Grey Cup better is to have the Roughriders as one of the teams.

Well, whaddya know.

So, in honour of the Cup (which is getting awfully close to its 100th go-around) and in honour of the organization that is truly “Canada’s Team” take a moment to listen to the coolest football fight song ever and get ready for one of the greatest traditions this country has to offer.

Green is the colour, baby.

All I can say is “about fucking time”.

My city just got screwed.

Being dragged along by our idiot mayor into Toronto’s Pan-Am Games bid is the worst thing that could have happened to taxpayers in this city, hands-down. This one is going to hurt the pocket for a long, LONG time.

Do we need a 15,000 seat stadium? No, of course not. Going to be a total white elephant. Do we need a velodrome? Well, yes, actually. Real cities have cycling infrastructure that includes velodromes … although the city of Hamilton’s long-standing and ongoing war against cyclists makes this particular ‘dome a choice bit of irony. But whether we need it or not, if you want it just need it. All doing it as part of a games does is make the price at least three times what it would cost if you just up and built the damn things. And as an added bonus you get some third-rate construction as the building bids get funneled into friends and cronies of the people on the take.

This is a disaster. Keep the games in Toronto, hooray. Good for amateur sport, good for the health of our youth, But keep my city – and my wallet – out of the mess that goes along with any sort of international games boondoggle. Unless, of course, I can somehow get into the pork barrel myself.

A dark, dark day. Fuck.

I am going to go way out on a limb here and guess that you already know this, but – if you have a jailbroken and/or unlocked iPhone, do not update to version 3.1 of the firmware. 3.1 updates the baseband yet again, and you will be left with a locked device.

However – you can downgrade back to 3.0 or 3.0.1 and re-activate with Redsn0w. so you don’t end up with a brick or anything tragic like that. It’s just an annoyance and a couple of hours of your time. But best to avoid the whole thing for now.

I’ll start here with the very obvious: Wicked Plants is an absolutely beautiful book. Traditional binding, fully-stitched spine, luxurious paper, typography to die for (are you listening, Ikea?) and world-class etchings of the plants in question.

Oh yeah, the plants. Evil miscreants of the vegetable kingdom, from petty hoodlums to mass murderers, spread across the world in jungles and meadows and in your very own backyard. Maybe even your house.

So – we have a gorgeous book, and homicidal plants. That definitely adds up to a winner in my world. If you love books this is a must-peruse, and if you love to own books it is also a must-buy – it is the kind of thing you can treasure and feel just a little bit decadent and smug about having on your shelves.

Unlike most “real” authors, who still seem to be fighting the inevitable progression of digital media, Stewart has a nice little presence on the web, so I’ll shut up now and let you find out more from the source herself. Highest recommendation for this one, whether you buy it to treasure for your very own or just pick up from your local library. It’s a wonderful little slice of evil summer fun in the palm of your hand.

So here we are – a mere 36 hours from Yet Another Apple Event. And all sorts of fenderheads are out there working themselves into a lather because they have convinced themselves that the long-rumoured Apple “tablet” will be handed down to the masses tomorrow.

Er, no.

These people need to get a grip. This is an iPod event. Period. When Apple has a music theme for an event (and I will go way out on a limb here and guess that “It’s Only Rock And Roll” is really a musical cue) that event is about iPods, iTunes, and … well, that’s it. Done. Finis.

Yes, there will be a tablet eventually. The thing is in the works, and you will see it sometime in 2010. And it will fill a need in a way that will startle you, and it will be insanely good (of course) and there will be rejoicing by all.

Just not now.

So – what will we see tomorrow? Here is a quick rundown, from the for-sure to the if-pigs-fly possibilities:

A new iPod Touch with a camera, compass, and virtually everything else in an iPhone except for that phone part: Definitely. The new SDK for the iPhone OS has explicit support for these hardware goodies in the iPod Touch code library. A couple of people involved in writing that code library have told me just what a crapload of work was involved. People don’t do that just for fun. Combine that with the age of the current iPod Touch and this one is a no-brainer. Probability: 100%

The last ever traditional iPods: Yep. This is the swan song for the device that changed entertainment and the music industry and interface design and what we expect from handheld devices forever. Look for the last ever “old-school” iPods with bigger-than-ever memory and lower-than-ever prices. No, they won’t tell you that these are the last ones, but they are. Probability: 100%

Full HD video on video-capable iPods: Probably. The timing of this event, just a couple of days before Microsoft launches their “last gasp” Zune with HD video is not a coincidence. Look for the repositioning of the Touch (and possibly the nano) from hand-held entertainment devices to portable whole-home entertainment devices / portable computing solutions. Probability: 80%

A startling new iPod nano with the iPhone OS as its interface: This might be less far-fetched than you would think. It’s not exactly a secret that the iPhone OS will be the interface of the future for all of the iPhones, and possibly all of Apple’s “handheld” devices (see the “wild guess” below). And there is reference to the nano in the current iPhone SDK. But how to integrate that sort of OS with the smaller form factor and screen? Honestly, I have no idea. One incredibly far-fetched idea is that the entire surface of the nano might be a touch screen – front, back, sides, all of it. There have been mentions of nanos with “freaky shells” floating around the Apple campus for the past month of so – could that be what they are? Probability: 50%

The splitting of the Shuffle from the iPod brand: This could be a real surprise for a lot of people. Shuffles sell in staggering numbers, but the fact of the matter is that Apple is committed to the iPhone OS as their handheld/portable interface. And for obvious reasons, the Shuffle just cant get onto that particular bandwagon. They aren’t going to axe the Shuffle, but they might change it drastically and send it out to do battle as its own product and its own brand. Probability: 45%

An all-new iTunes: Maybe, maybe not. The fact that iTunes is the only core piece left on the OS X platform that is not a full 64-bit application irks a lot of people at Apple. 32-bits is so ghetto now. But – there are more installs of iTunes on Windows machines than there are on OS X machines. And there are no viable tools for 64-bit application development in the Windows world as of yet. Rewriting iTunes for Cocoa would be a snap for Apple, but then they get into the nightmare of divergent versions on the two computing platforms. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the answer is “don’t” and we end up waiting for this until next year and the launch of the tablet. Probability: 35%

The super-awesome new media format that makes music and art and interactive media a single integrated and essential unit and by extension makes you want to buy albums instead of just the singles you want: Hmmmm. This is a poser. I am sure you have heard about this, possibly under the nom du guerre “Cocktail” and you can probably understand why the record companies want this so badly. For years they were able to sell entire albums on the strength of one or two songs and you had to buy all the dreck as well. Now people can pick and choose what they want, and quality counts. This is an ongoing idea to get more quality and value into the “package” so that you might buy the album even if you dont care for more than half the songs. Is this ready for prime time? Probably not. But someday … maybe. Probability: 20%

Steve Jobs making an appearance on stage: Nope. Forget it. He is back to work and healthy, but the torch has been passed. He won’t be on stage today unless it is just to introduce Phil or thank everyone at the end. Probability: 5%

Finally, under the heading of a “wild guess that you can file away for next year, look for two rather startling things: One, the tablet (when it comes) will be a huge break from Apple’s traditional “laptop” structure and actually use the iPhone OS instead of OS X. Two, the combination of the iPhone OS and the new “socially-based” iTunes will be the first solid steps into “cloud” computing for the average joe. Your library will follow you everywhere no matter what device you happen to be using, regardless of actual storage, and you can interact with your friends and cohorts on a “social media” front wherever you happen to be. Remember – you read that here first.

Meanwhile, various fenderheads out there have decided that painting your Twitter portrait green will somehow put an end to the repressive goings on in Iran. Yes, I am sure that shady and semi-totalitarian regimes everywhere live in constant fear of … gasp … green avatars!

Jeezus. Grow up, people!

One thing that was missing from the the conclusion of the whole Phoenix Coyotes saga was “Fake Gary Bettman” – as much as I am not a Twitter guy, his feed was pretty funny. But he seemed to fade away just when things were getting good. Too bad – like the Fake John McCain, he could be a real hoot at times.

The word in media circles today is that everyone’s favourite slimeball has told his PR team to forget about the print media, and concentrate solely on spinning every single morsel of news that comes down the pike to the electronic media – specifically tsn.ca, sportsnet.ca and the folks at the Fan590. Either he thinks the print hacks are already so deep in his pocket that it doesn’t matter, or he has decided that the only real court of public opinion is what people are seeing on TV, reading online, and hearing on the radio.

There are even whispers that he has a couple of flacks stationed in the Rogers building in downtown Toronto to keep an eye on and manage the output of the Sportsnet and The Fan. I wonder if they get their own office?

Sidney Crosby is a lot of things – diver, whiner, zero-personality mope – but I never thought that he would stoop to a public display of gutless poor sportsmanship. For someone who is usually more concerned about this public persona – and, by extension, his worth to Gatorade and Tim Hortons – than his actual on-ice performance, this is a huge surprise. Here’s a tip, Sid: Even if you don’t mean it, shake hands and pretend you do.

I wouldn’t have thought this guy could get any more un-likeable. Shows what I know.