newpageone.com

For at least a year, the sweating, greasy masses (of geeks) have been speculating amongst themselves about what Apple’s Next Big Thing™ might be.  After the touch-screen advances made by the very cool iPhone and iPod touch, geekdom decried that the next step could very well be a tablet.  Take into account the popularity of Apple’s Macbook,  which has proven that they’re fully capable of making a thin, yet powerful laptop.  Now look at the popularity of the Amazon Kindle and the Nook from Barnes and Noble.  They’ve proven that people are actually willing to read books and newspapers on a handheld device.  The iPhone gave us the ability to surf the web on our phone with relative ease.  Simply put, we are quickly moving toward a world in which we will all have Starfleet-issued PADDs.  Apple, logically, should be the entity to nudge us in this direction, seeing as how they revolutionized listening to music with the iPod and everything that followed.  It was a concept in motion, but it took Apple to make it cool.

Get ready to get told!

We geeks love talking about the future of technology for two reasons.  The first can be seen in the previous paragraph.  We love to look at what we’ve got and where we’re going.  I was fortunate enough to hear the great Leo Laporte on the radio this weekend and he was talking about what he thought this new product might be.  His ideas sounded great, and sounded a lot like what I had in mind for such a tablet-like device.  “The great thing is that Apple really gets our imaginations going,” Leo said.

The other reason we like to speculate on upcoming tech is because we are almost inevitably going to be disappointed, and we take lots of pleasure in that kind of grumbling.  When Steve Jobs emerged with the iPad yesterday, I was left wondering where all of the features I expected to see were.  I expected to see a camera and some USB connectivity.  These just seem to be no-brainers.  The cheapest cell phone has this kind of stuff.  I also figured that there’d be some sort of OSX interface; instead it’s the iPhone’s operating system running things.  But I think that the biggest surprise was the fact that 3G is not standard on the iPad.  In the end, the basic model goes for $500.  So not only do I think it’s underpowered and underequipped, but also overpriced.

I’m sure that this is only the beginning for the iPad, though.  The iPod has been improved upon numerous times.  The iPhone had a newer, better version released only a year after the original.  It’s how Apple does things.  Only this is the first time that it makes me kind of angry.  I love Steve Jobs, but I feel like this is really the first time that he’s actually holding back on consumers.  Did Apple not flesh this thing out on purpose?  Is there a grand plan to come back in a year with a superior version?  I can hear him now…

“Oh… and one more thing…  I know that a lot of you weren’t all that enthused about the iPad when it launched.  You didn’t think there were enough features.  You didn’t think it was powerful enough.  Well, we listened to you, and that’s why I’m proud to present the newest generation of the iPad.  We’ve literally been working on it since launch of the original.  And it’s remarkable.”

Search your feelings.  You know it to be true.

Of course, I haven’t gotten my hands on this puppy.  Maybe it is cool.  Maybe it’s a great little gadget to have and a lot of fun to use.  But $500 to $829 for what pretty much turns out to be an underwhelming accessory is pretty steep.  I hate to say it, but Apple’s winning streak may have come to an end.

I don’t often talk politics in this space, but I have to give props to Scott Brown for winning the open senate seat in Massachusetts, effectively bringing the healthcare reform bill to a screeching halt and loosening the Democrats’ grip on Washington.  In doing so, Scott is now in the very early running for the 2010 Golden Troll Award.

Brown would only comment by saying, "Cool story, bro."

For me, this is like winning the World Series all over again.  I’m a registered Republican and a Yankees fan living in Massachusetts, so the last few months have felt pretty sweet.

Here are some things that I can say that I’ve learned from this election:

• The Democrats have been rebuked only a year (nearly to the day) after Barack Obama took office.  The evidence of this is that this happened right here in Massachusetts.  I’m sure that the election would have been decided by a slightly wider margin in any of the traditional “battleground” states, so this was pretty much a Republican landslide in terms of MA elections.
• We need more term limits.  I’ve always thought this, but for Christ’s sake, if you have to literally wait for your senator to die before you can get him out of office, there’s something wrong with the system.  Sure, you can make the argument that anyone can come along and challenge the incumbent, but the point that I am trying to make is that once someone has been in power for a long time, voters tend to just let them stay there.  Eventually, would-be opponents don’t even bother challenging, and that’s where you can run into very serious trouble.  Inaction is the deadliest mistake a population can make and this sort of apathy is the cause.
• Negative ad campaigns are a surefire way of pissing voters off.  Martha Coakley just assumed that trying to make her opponent look bad was the best way to get ahead when Brown stared to pick up steam.  But when all you do is remind people he’ll vote against the healthcare bill (albeit with scary music), that only furthers the likelihood that people will vote for him.  Maybe she should have looked at some poll numbers before hammering that note home.
• On that note, Coakley’s ineptitude about current events and local lore was appalling.  For one, she seems to not know who Curt Schilling is (the now-infamous “He’s a Yankee fan” remark), and also seems to think that the war in Afghanistan isn’t worth fighting anymore (thanks to a soundbite I recently heard of her saying that “the Taliban are gone” in the region).  Do your homework, lady.
• On Wednesday, no matter what happens, the ads stop playing on TV and the radio.  Thankfully.  Which makes me wonder why the winner doesn’t take out ads that simply gloat about their winning.  “I’m the Wiz!  Nobody beats me!”

What will the rest of the year hold for politics?  Will this be a harbinger of things to come this November?  Will the president finally start working from the center, as he said he would when he was running?  We’ll have to see.  I don’t get paid to think about this sort of thing and as I said, I don’t usually write about it, either.  I just saw the efforts of a good guy who managed to troll the bluest of the Blue States this week and had to write about it before it wasn’t news anymore.

According to UrbanDictionary, a “troll” is:

One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument.

That’s the first entry.  Most of them are something along the same lines, but if you only scroll down to number six, you’ll pick up this nugget:

One of many unsung internet heroes who are almost entirely misunderstood. Contrary to popular belief, many trolls are actually quite intelligent. Their habitual attacks on forums is usually a result of their awareness of the pretentiousness and excessive self-importance of many forum enthusiasts. As much as people may hate trolls, they are highly effective – their actions bring much of the stupidity of other forum users out into the great wide open.

Both definitions are most certainly valid.  But it’s the second one that I find more truth in.  These days, it seems like just about everybody needs to get trolled once in a while to keep them in line.  And like most things that seem to Internet-only phenomena, trolling can spread into real life.  And boy, was 2009 a good year for trolls.  That’s why I want to recognize some of my favorites from the past year.

The Balloon Boy Family: Sure, we know the aftermath.  The kid’s father, Richard Heene, was just sentenced to 90 days in prison.  But for one wonderful afternoon, the country could remember a simpler time when kids could fall down a well or something like that and lie about it for attention (like Bart Simpson did).  Give them credit for saying they sent the kid up in a hot-air Jiffy Pop balloon.  Let’s see Sting get ‘em outta that one.

Michaele and Tareq Salahi: AKA the White House Gate Crashers.  Another couple of attention-seekers, these two trolled their way to the top.  Not only did they get to rub some elbows and shake some hands (one of which belonged to the president, I believe), they exposed the fact that even the Secret Service has become just as inept most other government agencies.  And that’s scary.

Mark Teixeira and Nick Swisher: Tex gets on the list for telling the Red Sox that he’d join them, only to turn right around at the last second and sign with the Yankees instead.  Sox supporting colleagues gave me the stink eye all year long, never with more vitriol than after the Yanks took the World Series in November.  Feels good, man.  As for Swish, the dude was obviously in the wrong place all season.  Nobody, not even Johnny Damon, caught onto the fact that this guy should have played for the Red Sox in another life.  He’s a full-blooded “idiot” if I ever saw one, and just knowing that his switch-hitting, relief-pitching visage is in pinstripes only makes it sweeter.

Mahmoud Amadinejad: As long as this guy remains in power in Iran, he’s trolling it up.  And he’s not one of the good ones.  Election protests?  No problem.  Round them up, arrest them, shoot them, whatever, just as long as it shuts up the opposition.  Holocaust?  What Holocaust?  Oh, and the whole nuclear power program has nothing to do with building missles, even though I really want to blow up Israel.

James Cameron: Avatar is probably the best example of the long con that I can come up with.  For years, geeks like myself had been reading all about The King of the World’s glorious return to science fiction after spending years underwater taking pictures of jellyfish.  When he came back up, he announced that he’d be making Avatar with all sorts of new CGI, mo-cap, and camera technology in order to create a hyper-realistic movie experience.  The rumor mill was going crazy, saying that the film was going to be revolutionary and that the story would be beyond epic.  And then the trailer hit the Internet, and all of geekdom reacted with a unanimous, “Meh.”  Remember the last time a visionary director said he’d wait years until the special effects were good enough to produce his magnum opus?  Yeah, thanks, Mr. Lucas for those prequels.

Had our hopes been built up too much by all the hype?  No.  Not this time.  You can get out-hyped by Transformers 2.  You can’t get out-hyped by being told one thing and given another.  This didn’t look like something I’d never seen before.  It looked like a video game.  It’s a cliche, I know, but it’s true.  Then again, I still haven’t seen it (probably tomorrow afternoon, incidentally).  But I’m nowhere near as pumped.  If I still was, I’d have seen it already.

Barack Obama: You know, I’d give the president the number one spot, but you have to look at it like this: he’s nowhere near done.  It’s like when the Lord of the Rings trilogy was coming out.  The Academy didn’t give Peter Jackson the Oscar for The Fellowship of the Ring or The Two Towers.  That’s because they all knew that The Return of the King was coming.  They’d shower him with little naked golden men when the story was over.  It’s the same here.  And boy oh boy, if this is where we are after just one year, you can only imagine what the next three can bring.

And the winner of the 2009 Golden Troll Award:

Lady Gaga: Yeah.  Lady Gaga.  There, I said it.  That’s one reason she’s my Number One.  She made people have to say the words “Lady Gaga” with a straight face.  Why?  Because she sold records.  Tons of ‘em.  And the music is terrible.  It’s like the second coming of Italo Disco.  Plus, those ridiculous outfits.  It’s beyond Bowie or Madonna when they hit the scene.  She’s even been accused of being a hermaphrodite.  And the kicker?

Her lyrics are fantastic.  Being a person with working ears, I am subjected to hearing these songs all the time.  And after hearing “Poker Face,” “Just Dance,” “Paparazzi,” and “Bad Romance” as many times as I have, beneath that mind-rotting beat, there are plenty of lyrical gems.  I won’t get into it, but if you can stomach such aural torture, you can’t help but notice that she can write a good song.  Yeah, she writes the words.  That makes her legitimate.  I can only hope that she picks up a producer who knows what “melody” is so that I don’t want to shove sharpened pencils into my ears.

So good on you, Stefani Germanotta of Yonkers, NY.  You are the Golden Troll of 2009.  Take a bow.

You should have seen that coming.