Jack Hardcastle

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!

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?

A girl after my own heart:

Kimmy Lopes, 14, a freshman at Mineola High School, sent 3,700 text messages via her BlackBerry in May. She said she rarely uses abbreviations or slang in her text and instant messages. “I don’t want to get in the habit … ,” she said. “My friends think I’m weird because I write out the whole thing.”

I started doing that about 15 years ago, and everyone thought I was nuts too.

Excerpted from a longer article about the growing trend among teens to use Internet and text-message speak in school work.

I think that the Bank of America website is held together with packing tape and dental floss. It’s one of the worst websites I’ve ever used in terms of speed and reliability. The interface is okay, but not great.

I’ve been trying to access my account records for about three days now. It’s a good thing it’s not an important time for this stuff, like tax season, or the week when all my bills start to come due.

A fantastic article forwarded to me from Ms. Weigand on the perils of ignoring the natural circadian rhythm can be found in the Johns Hopkins Magazine.

Someone want to disable my melanopsin receptors for me?

I have not spent two consecutive winters in the same bedroom in nine years — not since the eighth grade. In that time, I’ve lived in Derwood, Columbia, Glenwood, McDonogh, Wiess (4th floor), Kerby Place, Wiess (different 4th floor), Wiess (1st floor), Snow Meadow, and Bonnie Ridge.

I’d love to say this is the end of the great migration, but that’s what I said last summer.

The only other person out there who might be close is Erin, but the last I heard her list stopped at seven.

I hope that I am half as sharp as Walter Matthau’s titular character in “Kotch” when I am advanced in years. Senility seems to me to be a fate worse than death.

Sitting on your living room floor, using Lynx to browse your GMail, check stocks, pay bills, and post on your blog, while listening to MP3s from 1998 on mplayer and compiling homebrew DVR software.

Ahh, bliss.