A quick tribute to my dad, original Hax0r.

There was a period of time from Thanksgiving to Christmas when I wasn’t contributing the same amount of literary/journalistic content that I usually do, and it wasn’t because of the holidays or anything. It was because my dad passed away.

My mom died when I was only seven, and my dad and I never had the best relationship, partially due to the fact that our communication skills are shit, partially due to the fact that he was doing clandestine government work throughout the cold war and was sort of limited in what he could even talk to me about.

I never knew much about my dad because he had top secret clearance and couldn’t tell us much about his day-to-day work in the bunkers of Aberdeen Proving Ground or his four-day stints at the Pentagon once a month. One time when I was a kid, I asked him what his job was like, and he said, “You know everything you read in science fiction stories? It’s all real, and that’s what I do.”

I believe my next question was something to the order of, “You work on jetpacks!?”

I had never even seen the above picture of him until yesterday, and it made me wish we could have made it to the level where we could speak to one another as gearheads, because this is goddamn cool. I’m dating the picture around ’76 by my dad’s appearance and by our family’s location at the time.

He was totally going for the “Meathead” look.

Rob Reiner...Not my father.

I believe machine in the picture above is a Commodore because I zoomed in on the placard on the left, and it looks like it says “CBM Termicare.” I’ll continue looking that one up.

But the real sci-fi shit my dad was working on was ARPANET. Long before the term “Internet” even existed, that was a major part of his job…check this out:

This article is from 1980…so this is in the period of time when it was still ARPANET, before it got turned into MILNET, when the packet-switched network was still a new concept, and there were only 100 something nodes in the entire Internet.

What he was researching is anybody’s guess, though. The only thing I know about this is that he once gave us a full-sized injection molded replica of an AK-47, and two smaller calibre replica handguns from his lab. Once he came back from one of his weekends at the Pentagon with a gasoline-soaked russian tank driver’s helmet. My stepmom says those monthly trips actually took him places like Cuba and Russia during the Cold War, and I know he went to Panama and Germany in the 80′s. I may never know exactly who he was watching.

He was a spy, after all…and an Internet espionage pioneer. Pretty cool. I just wish we could have talked more about his work when I had the chance.

10+ new Android phones from Motorola in 2010? FALSE.

Being a tech industry analyst has got to be a hell of a job. If you make it to the point where people look forward to hearing what you have to say (the point of punditry, maybe?) you really don’t have to make any huge, Earthshaking predictions. You just use what you know about market trends, developing technologies, and company/leadership personalities, and you won’t sound like a fool…even if you’re not exactly right.

But some analysts aren’t that conservative.

There are also the big game hunters, who go for the big predictions and the big payoff. Unfortunately, the more big predictions you miss, the more you need to make to get your reputation back up.

Last week, Trip Chowdry of Global Equities Research predicted that Motorola will release at least 10 new Android phones in 2010, priced between $39 and $399.

I saw this prediction, and I instantly got the “do you believe this guy?” look on my face, with palms upflipped and a half smile against a scowling brow…the Andrew Dice Clay look.

No disrespect meant, but Chowdry doesn’t exactly have the best record for big predictions. In May, he predicted that the Palm Foleo would make a comeback. In January, He predicted that Costco would sell $149 iPhones. In 2007, he even predicted that Google would “lose its technological edge” to a semantic search startup called Powerset (which was bought by Microsoft in 2008.)

Track record aside, a lineup with “at least” 10 Android phones is an insane prediction, and here’s my reason, using some simple reasoning instead of what appears to be bombastic inference.

Premise A.) Motorola averages between 26-30 handsets a year.

Premise B.) Android is a smartphone OS.

Premise C.) Motorola’s best-selling handsets are not smartphones.

Conclusion– Motorola is not going to have a lineup made up of more than 30% smartphones, especially when 72% of all phones sold are feature phones.

Yes, Motorola has said it will be shifting its focus from feature phones onto smartphones, and it has said it will put Android at the heart of that, but a launch of more than ten devices on Android in one year would not only be an unprecedented shift, but totally bonkers. I’m not saying I don’t think it will happen eventually, but Motorola has gone through literally dozens of different OSes in its history, and this is another instance of past behavior shaping our preception of future behavior.