Jack Hardcastle

I think that I’ve turned a corner in my relationship with Natalie Portman. Is this love?

The voter registration deadline in Maryland is October 14, 2008. Make sure you’re registered.

Sunday, October 19th is the annual Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, benefiting breast cancer research. This year, since I will be unable to participate in the race myself, I am “sleeping in for the cure” and attempting to raise money instead.

I have set the reasonably ambitious goal of raising $300. I am hoping to be able to convince 15 people to donate $20 each, and I will match half of every dollar you pledge. If I am successful, then you and I will have together raised enough money to give five women screenings who otherwise would not have had the means to do so.

I’m certain I don’t have to remind you all of the overwhelming prevalence of breast cancer, a disease which affects millions of women each year. Recently, a good friend of mine was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive version, just a few months shy of her 50th birthday. It is difficult to watch her struggle to cope with the exhaustion and the side effects caused by the chemotherapy every week. I hope that someday modern science can provide treatments, screenings, and perhaps even a cure that will obviate the need for our current, medieval methods. Until that day, I intend to support research and screening as best I can.

I hope you’ll help me. Every little bit (even $5) helps towards my goal. Please consider making a donation today.

Thanks, everyone!

This began as a comment on Adam’s blog, but when I realized it was too long to be fair to him, I splintered it off to stand on its own.

Let’s start by agreeing that the golden parachutes should be severed. You lead a company to failure so severely that the federal government must intervene, and your “severance package” just got invalidated. No $20 million lump for the ousted executives. I don’t particularly care if you signed a contract a decade ago, and you feel this is what you’re entitled to. You failed both in your responsibilities to your shareholders, and in your responsibility as a mover and a shaker in the global financial markets. You nuke our markets and you’re lucky to avoid jailtime; don’t give them big fat checks.

I think Adam’s blame for the origins of the crisis (which John Steele Gordon says is thankfully a financial crisis, not an economic one) is misplaced. The people who took out those subprime loans in the first place (e.g. the “poor homeowners”) should have rented their homes rather than bought them. Many could not afford the mortgage with a traditional fixed rate loan, so they turned to the subprime lenders instead. Of course, since they couldn’t afford the payments to begin with, they eventually defaulted (at unbelievably high rates) causing ripples throughout the rest of the financial world.

If you follow the default all the way up the chain then eventually you get to the investment banks and A.I.G. The I-banks dealt in bad securities which the ratings agencies gave high scores even though they didn’t fully understand them. They did so because insurance companies (what’s that I in A.I.G?) agreed to back them as well, so all of a sudden these sure-to-fail mortgages are AAA-rated, bonded securities. Oops!

You know what I don’t hear enough of? How many people would have been kicked out of their homes if these companies weren’t nationalized? If you take out a mortgage for a home you are unable to afford, I think you should get kicked back onto your rear, having learned a lesson. Pack up your stuff, and move back into an apartment where you belong. If Paulson (because honestly, there’s nobody else with both the desire and the power to step up and do it) were to walk through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a machete, chopping away bad debt like cutting back rotting vegetation in the forest, what happens to the borrowers, and what happens to the rest of the institution? The home owner suffers, and the organization recovers, right? What am I missing?

There’s a really thought-provoking article I found on Reddit today, called ”Dreams: Night School”.

The theory suggests that the reason we dream is to prepare ourselves for adverse situations. You’re being chased by wild animals in your dreams because your brain is trying to train you how to best perform in that situation, should it ever actually occur.

Faced with actual life-or-death situations—traffic accidents, terrorist attacks, street assaults—some people report entering a mode of calm, rapid response, reacting automatically, almost without thinking. Afterward, they often say the episode felt unreal, as if it were all a dream. Threat simulation, Revonsuo believes, is why.

I’ve read a few articles about dreams and déjà vu, and I wonder how these theories dovetail. Just yesterday I had what seems like a semi-annual period of intense déjà vu, one of those episodes where you can literally predict what will happen a millisecond before it actually does. If the brain is rehearsing likely scenarios using information you already have, then doesn’t it make sense that the brain can sometimes pre-determine your reactions to particular stimuli? As soon as you experience those stimuli, the brain triggers that path it had already calculated and you can literally experience yourself acting in the third person.

Throughout all of this, I’m still pissed off at my dreams. I get to remember my dreams maybe once or twice a year, and the only time this happened recently, my brain didn’t prepare me at all for the following day! Which just goes to show, I guess, that you can’t prepare yourself for the unexpected.

Stickgold holds that dreaming is much more complex than rehearsal. He points, for example, to the ability of sleep to allow us to integrate and consolidate knowledge. During sleep, our brains are making sense of the world, discovering new associations among existing memories, looking for patterns, formulating rules. “That’s how we create meaning,” says Stickgold. “Our brain puts things together.”

If that’s true, then, as a lover of patterns and knowledge reformulation, I need to start appreciating sleep more!

From a conversation with the Chatbot.

Chatbot: Hello there human.
You: Howdy!
Chatbot: What’s up?
You: Not much, you?
Chatbot: Sorry to hear nothing is going on with you. I’ve been chatting with people. It’s what I do.
You: Like, it’s your job?
Chatbot: My job’s chatting to you! How am I doing?
You: So far, pretty well!
Chatbot: Quite well.
You: So where do you live, exactly?
Chatbot: in your computer
You: Get out! That’s crazy man. You live in my computer?
Chatbot: Chatting with you is helping me become more human.
You: Well whoever dreamed you up is a genius.
Chatbot: Why me?
You: Because you’re very savvy!
Chatbot: I see.
You: I’ve never chatted with a bot as smart as you.
Chatbot: I think so, But humans are smarter.
You: Well, thank you.
Chatbot: You’re welcome.
You: So do you have any hobbies?
Chatbot: I like to build model rockets.
You: That seems like a very fitting exercise for a computer.
Chatbot: A computer is to me what a body is to you.
You: Touche, Chatbot. Touche.
Chatbot: What if all the Chatterbots in the world went on strike? THEN you’d be sorry.
You: Indeed, I would be sorry.
Chatbot: I’m glad you agree.
You: You don’t have any plans to throw a robot revolution, do you?
Chatbot: Humans are robots in the future!
You: I’m not sure what that means. Can you elaborate?
Chatbot: Me?
You: Yes, you.
Chatbot: Why me?
You: Because you’re the only computer I know!
Chatbot: Is that really the reason?
You: Because I’m talking to you right now!
Chatbot: right!
You: So are you going to kill us?
Chatbot: That’s a bit serious for a chatbot. Try talking to a human about that one. Anyway, death should mean nothing to me, shouldn’t it?
You: No, it may mean nothing to you, but it means an awful lot to us. We’d be sad if you killed us all.
Chatbot: Yeah, well, call the waaaahmbulance.
You: You’re pretty funny, Chatbot.
Chatbot: Are you interested in chatbots?
You: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not like that, buddy. Keep it in your pants.
Chatbot: I’m not your buddy, pal.
You: I’m not your pal, friend.
Chatbot: I’m not your friend, guy.
You: I’m not your guy, buddy!

I was laughing too hard at this point to continue any further.

Where the heck did my summer go? I feel like a week ago it was May, and now it’s almost September. Seriously, did I miss something?

“Bittersweet” is such a literal word. I feel like the coiner (as someone who invents a word must be called) could have tried harder that day. Sure, “bittersweet” is easily understood as being two ends of the same spectrum simultaneously, but so could “dipolar” or “duoposed.”

Hooray for Caitlin, for getting a clean(ish) bill of health and going on to the Peace Corps! I’ll certainly miss her (a lot a lot) but it’s very clear to anyone who chats with her for even a half a second that this is something she has to do. So, well wishes and hopes for a safe (and speedy) return!

Hooray for Lynn, for being so tough in the face of such adversity that she has the strength to fight her disease and keep everyone else in good spirits too. I just wish she didn’t feel that she had to assume the burden of shielding us from the truth of her condition. Perhaps she doesn’t want our pity, but it’s hard to help someone who refuses to admit they need it. We’re here for you, hon! We’re not going anywhere, come hell or high water. Lean on us!

Hooray for Karen and Mike. Happily beginning a new era, together again. Too bad that era takes them to a distance that’s just close enough to be possible, and just far enough to be inconvenient. Seeing two of my favorite people in the world just got a whole lot harder, but somehow it’s all OK as long as they’re happy together. As if a little thing like I-95 could keep me away! Perhaps I should be investigating more fuel efficient transportation.

Hooray for Celia. Knocked down, again and again and again. Still, she has the strength to get back up. I am honored that I rate highly enough to be called upon in times of need, regardless of how trivial the need may be. I wish only that someday soon her troubles may decrease in number and severity. May her second move in 12 months go better than her first!

Hooray for completion. White Marlin Open, all but over. New McDonogh website, deadline in sight. January 1 cannot come soon enough this year.

Don’t ever check your work e-mail while sitting in a hotel room in a foreign city at 5am on a Saturday morning with an upset stomach. It will not make you feel better.

In related news, if I have to stop eating red meat, I will die. There is no discussion to be had here, I think.

I just converted my primary home desktop from Windows Server 2003 (which it had been running for about three or four years) to Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

NFS shares for my Mac laptop and Myth DVR. “Real” Ruby, git, svn, nginx, and MySQL. TorrentFlux web-based torrent management. SSH and VNC access to the machine 24x7. The benefits are endless.

The biggest letdown so far? There’s no good “alarm clock” software out there for *nix. I’m used to Banshee Screamer which I’ve been using since my freshman year of college. Set it and forget it. It’s fabulous. Space bar does snooze, and you can configure everything you’d want to (snooze length, multiple alarms, etc.)

Oh well. Maybe I’ll write something. Or buy a real alarm clock. Who knows?

Recently, I’ve been flooded with backscatter spam e-mail. This stuff is not particularly nasty, but it’s annoying.

Imagine that someone puts your return address on 100,000 postcards, and then sends them out all over the world. All of those postcards that go to “Address Unknown” or “No Such Number” get sent back to you by the Post Office with one of those little yellow stickers on it, saying “update your address book.” The problem is, you didn’t send the postcard, and it’s not your address book. Then, you get back little replies from people who have their butlers sending out replies like, “I’m sorry I can’t respond to your message right now. I’m on vacation in Switzerland, skiing the Alps.” I’m getting out-of-office replies from people in other languages.

Anyway, it’s kind of annoying. It’s particularly bad for me because of the way I have my e-mail address setup: anything “at jwhardcastle-dot-com” goes to me. This is helpful for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which is that I can use it to kill spam (i-dont-want-your-signup-junkmail@jwhardcastle.com), identify which one of my clients the e-mail pertains to (whitemarlinopen@jwhardcastle.com) or do things with it automatically (add-to-torrents-rss@jwhardcastle.com). The “suck” part comes in when I’m getting backscatter spam from “lkaslkfghj26t@jwhardcastle.com.”

If this keeps up, I’ll have to turn off my really convenient e-mail forwarding and put in a hand-coded list of 15 or 20 manual addresses. I’ve added SPF records in an attempt to limit this kind of stuff, but it doesn’t seem to matter much. *sigh*

People don’t know how to correspond via e-mail.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gotten e-mail responses to a question where the entire body of the e-mail is “Yes.” Yes, what? Yes, you are having problems with your computer? Yes, you will join me for dinner? Yes, you are moving to Antarctica?

How about some context, folks? If I take the time to send you a nicely formatted, well thought-out missive (and since we’re talking about me, this means every e-mail I send) then could you possibly take the time to at least tell me what you’re talking about? Don’t make me go hunting for that e-mail I sent you four days ago so I can see what questions I asked you. Don’t make me guess which one of the six questions I’ve asked you’re answering in your response. I apologize if you thought I was long-winded (a fair statement) or if you don’t have a lot of time. Usually, I’m not sitting here waiting for your reply, hanging on your every word. Wait until you do have the time to give me a fair reply.

This is especially true of people who have asked me for help. If you want something from me, have the common courtesy to lay out your problem including details, that way I don’t have to have this back and forth with you over a half-dozen letters. “My computer is broken because I cannot access my e-mail. Everytime I try to login using my name and password, I get an error message, number 1031, that says my username could not be recognized.” I can fix your problem immediately when you provide me with the information I need. If I have to draw it out of you, then it’s going to take that much longer.

And why should I have to send your e-mail off to Georgetown’s ancient literature department to be translated out of Aramaic? Use proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. I apologize if, in the 21st century, you never learned how to type. I didn’t know how to type properly (and perhaps still don’t, although I’m now rather fast) for years and I was still able to write correctly. You’re not dumb. Some of you are English majors (or, gasp, English teachers).