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People are flipping out because Apple is no longer accepting cash for iPhone purchases, and limiting customers to two iPhones per purchase.

For the uninitiated, this comes on the heels of reports that many of the iPhones sold were subsequently unlocked and used on carriers other than AT&T. And they don’t need to guess; there’s some number of iPhones sold and some much smaller number of AT&T “iPhone data plan” subscriptions on the books, so AT&T’s losses are both immediately quantifiable and pretty significant. Anyway, by limiting purchases to personal checks or credit cards, Apple can map individual iPhones (by IMEI, a unique identification code inside every modern cell phone) onto the people who paid for them. Likewise, when AT&T starts up a new iPhone data plan, they register the IMEI of the phone associated with the plan. So the theory is, if you buy an iPhone then unlock it and use it on another GSM network (like T-Mobile), Apple or AT&T will be able to find you and mete out some negative consequence.

1. Raise your hand if you were going to pay cash for an iPhone, or planning to buy more than two at a time. Yeah. Thought not.
2. When you sign an exclusivity agreement with a gigantic partner, and there are a) incentives for actually caring about that playing out in practice, and b) perhaps far greater incentives for making it look to your partner like you care, then by all means feel free to play armchair quarterback. This solution is way cheaper to implement, and fewer implications to consumers, than getting into a game of cat and mouse with the reverse-engineering/unlocking community. In other words, Apple is keeping up appearances for their business partner, while looking the other way engineering-wise.
3. The best thing for Apple is for people to complain about this, because it adds some credibility to the idea that fewer iPhones will end up on other networks.
4. What, realistically, do you expect AT&T or Apple to do if they catch you using an iPhone on T-Mobile?

This (hopefully) concludes my own purposeless ranting for the day. By the end of today, I resolve to do music stuff, at home, on a computer that is currently under my desk at the office.

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For about ten seconds after hearing this news, I thought, “Awesome! This will help our property values!” But seconds later, I thought, “But wait a minute, won’t the traffi…OH GOD! THE TRAFFIC! THE HORROR!…maybe it won’t be too ba…OH GOD THE HORROR!”

So right off the bat, it’s clear that I’m on my way to developing a subtle, well-thought-out posture on the issue.

pros:
1. Easier access to semi-affordable, questionable-quality furniture.
2. “Good Times,” that familiar butt of jokes, that bastion of gamery and late-nite parking lot ghetto chicanery, will finally be booted out of Assembly Square, allowing decent folk to breathe smoggy-yet-gentrified air into their oft-washed nostrils. Good Riddance Times.
3. Positive side-effects for public transportation projects?

cons:
1. Soul-crushing traffic on the weekend.
2. Soul-crushing traffic on weekdays.
3. Easier access to semi-affordable, questionable-quality furniture.

1. “I need more tools.”
2. “I need more time.”
3. “I need more space.”
4. “I need more money (for tools / time / space).”
5. “My tools / time / space are too open ended; I don’t know how to get started.”
6. “I’ve been using this pro-level tool / space / budget for like a solid N hours now, and there’s still a huge delta between my artistic / scientific / philosophical vision and this heap of shit I’ve produced. I must be totally untalented / this thing I’m attempting must be impossible / fuck it.”
7. “I’m too advanced for the rote minutiae involved in actually making my brilliant idea work in practice.”
8. “All the brilliant ideas are already taken.”
9. “This latest wad of crap is a vast improvement over my original wads of crap, but still far below anything I would ever considering releasing for public consumption, and I think I’ve plateau’d…better shelve it all and forget I got into this in the first place.”
10. “So maybe man was meant to fly, okay, but can we at least agree that man wasn’t meant to fly upside down in a chariot of fire, dragged across the sky by teams of semiautonomous aerofoil drumkits?”

Pair of morning meetings at company X. The first was ostensibly to discuss a piece of our technology, ostensibly to gauge their interest in derivative work or some kind of related joint venture. On average, that would rank as “slightly interesting,” but the meta-goal was to let them sniff us. They do pretty advanced systems programming and cutting edge policy-based crypto stuff, all day every day, and we claim to have the chops to help them with, well, basically anything. So it’s fair enough that their heavy hitters might want to rake us over the coals a little with some “pop quiz hot shot!” and make us concede that their marquee tech is more classy than our sideshow act. So it was a subtle blend of letting them whip it out and swing it around, while making clear that we knew our shit and could bring armies of homunculi in line with our eminently-competent will.

Second meeting was refreshingly straightforward. They have some stuff, they want to make sure we can support it. I suggest we take a look, set time and expense targets for fixing something they’ve wanted fixed for a while, and let their opinion be influenced by both the targets and our performance relative to them. Lots of vigorous agreement. If only all business were that easy.

In the car on the way back, other engineering lead tells us about weapons systems projects he worked on for the Navy. Including, but not limited to, anti-missile systems that use x-band radar to track bullets. See, the 30mm gattling gun pops off a few rounds, tracks them for error-correction purposes, then essentially throws a solid wall of lead in the path of a piece of debris. See, this is the backup system for when they don’t intercept the incoming supersonic missing until its within 5 miles of the ship. Oh yeah, and the system also prioritizes the debris targets based on size and direction. It’s hard for an engineer not to feel a little twinge of red-blooded nationalism after hearing some shit like that. Hey that reminds me…need to pay some taxes. Nationalism mitigated!

Afternoon meeting with company Q. This time they brought their attorney, so it was on like Gina Gershon eating bon-bon’s in pink chiffon. Only, you know, with more ideas about how to mate their IP with our IP and build something cool…and get a dumptruck full of cash money the government stole from the middle class. Hah Haaaaahhhh! pwn3d!

The rest of the day was cool too. Also had a great dinner with the wife and TJIC, watched Wargames (in keeping with the themes of the day, I guess), and more good conversation about non-technical, relationship type shit. And robots.

I’ve been walking around the office with my head up my ass for the past couple days, ranting to all who would listen about my new BlackBerry’s inability to connect with the company’s internal BlackBerry Enterprise Server. It was an emotional roller coaster. It was eventually discovered that despite my very specific requests (on the bedside table, next to the lamp, on the kangaroo!), my data plan had not been provisioned for Enterprise Data. I know what you’re thinking: of course that was it!

So after a very cordial phone call last night, the “glitch” was “fixed,” and soon I was able to send and receive office email from everywhere. On the way to the elevator, on the way to the parking garage, while hurtling down the pike, in the driveway, on the couch, in my dreams. I set it to emit a sonar ping-like sound whenever I receive email…it’s all very high-concept, you see…right down to my “wookie roar” ringtone and my Mister Burns saying “excellent!” message notification.

Last night was a friend’s 30th birthday meet-up at a swanky bar in Inman. One of the other friends there had just been through leadership training, and we talked about various ways to try to keep on top of our schedules, delegation, etc. We also talked about an upcoming party involving Apples (the fruit), and he whipped out his iPhone to make sure I was on the e-vite. At some point in the evening, I heard my sonar ping-like sound, and briefly glanced under the table to read about a mainframe system problem occuring in Warwick England before taking another sip of Smithwick’s Ale. Is it any wonder that mashups are surging in popularity?

This morning I got up earlier than usual; there’s a hurry-up project at work that I wanted to get a jump on before the rest of the office shows up and starts bugging me. I walked out on the porch and found I was parked in by our downstairs neighbor. My first thought was “earlier than usual…she’s almost certainly asleep…to wake her or not?” My second thought was “I’ll Twitter this,” as I pulled the BB out of my pocket and hit the hotkey I’d preset to the TwitterBerry app; one deft motion, like pulling off one’s pants as one sits down on a toilet, arguably with similar results.

So yeah, fine, the present day is awash with grotesque behavior. And even among the tech-hipster community, there’s a tension between those who see one’s adoption of this technology as “ducking passively into a collar whose leash is held by The Man” and those for whom the technology is “a means to accomplish more of everything.”

The funny thing is, the correctness of each view is in large part determined by how one’s ambitions map onto one’s actual situation.

If you don’t really give a shit about pwning immodest swaths of the global economy, and you have a job that pays well enough to suit your tastes, and when you come home you don’t want to be bothered, well, a constant connection to work really is, like, some unchecked aggression that will not stand, man.

On the other hand, maybe you’re what the modern world has kindly labeled “ambitious,” and maybe through small competencies and large accidents of fortune you’ve clawed yourself up to the outer rim of some honeypot. And holy shit is it a jungle up there…the knowledge that foreign skills are both cheaper and constantly improving, responsibility not only for your own paycheck but the paychecks of people you care about personally, the sea of salty competitors and the harbor of smiling, hand-shaking partners…all trying to each your lunch somehow, all day, every day, while you sleep…especially while you sleep.

And you’ve seen the personal destruction that the sharp end of executive math is capable of, and if your sports car indicates insecurity it’s because god damn it you’re NOT secure, no one is secure, no one is safe, and besides if you’re going to get enough sleep AND get to work on time you need a machine capable of travling 160mph and parallel parking. Fuck it, you need a machine capable of traveling 160mph WHILE parallel parking…