Jack Hardcastle

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).

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.

Why is it actually impossible to add RSS feeds to Safari when all you possess is the URL? Don’t believe me? Try it.

Other RSS readers let you happily “Add a Subscription” to you heart’s content. In Safari, you can’t do it, no matter how hard you try. As near as I can tell, Safari’s only option to add RSS feeds is to browse to the site the RSS feed is hosted on and pray that the webmaster is smart enough to have done the necessary code to put the blue RSS button in the address bar.

Seriously, if I know what RSS is and I want to use it, you can bet I know how to handle a real URL and locate the proper feed for the site I’m browsing. And what about sites like, oh, I don’t know, every major publication, TV station, and news corporation, that offer dozens or hundreds of sub-feeds based on the category of news: local, breaking, sports, etc.? How does that one little blue button help me at all?

So, Safari, you earn an F as a news reader. You also earn an F for being stupid about your Google search key command. And those are two reasons that you won’t find the compass icon in my Dock.

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.

John Edwards is holding out on backing one of the two front-runners for the Democratic nomination, despite having dropped out of the race himself.

There’s a story in the Post today about how some of Edwards’s delegates are swinging towards Obama. If I understand it correctly, the pledged delegates belong to Edwards until he “gives” them to another candidate. The only reason I can come up with for why he has not already done this is a desire to be named as a running mate for whomever comes out on top.

Ignore for a second the fact that I think Obama will win the nomination. Let’s apply a little bit of game theory to this situation.

The best and worst case scenarios for each of four different outcomes: Edwards backs Obama and he wins, Obama and he loses, Hillary and she wins, Hillary and she loses.

If Edwards backs Hillary and she wins, she’s not going to make him her Veep. He doesn’t give her any boost, anywhere, and brings no political capital to the table. If he backs her and she loses, Obama probably won’t pick him.

If he backs Obama and he wins, he’s got a pretty fair chance of being named Obama’s running-mate. Say 50/50. Obama will not ask Hillary to run with him. This is a 100% guaranteeable fact. If he backs Obama and he loses, he still won’t be Hillary’s running-mate.

All that being said, Edwards has the power to give Obama another state worth of delegates (26 at current count) and he brings his “brand” onto the Obama bandwagon, giving the candidate a small but welcome boost.

What are you waiting for, man? You know the right thing to do, so do it!

daw·dle
–verb

1. to waste time; idle; trifle; loiter:
   Stop dawdling and help me with these packages!
   
   
2. to sit at one’s computer for as long as possible in the morning before going to work, repeatedly checking e-mail, blogs, the news, and reddit just to see if something new will come in:
   I’m a professional dawdler. Sometimes I wake up 2 hours before I have to leave for work and I’m still late.

I just googled Houlihan’s restaurant to see a menu as we’ll be eating there Sunday night. I’m blown away by their site. Not only does it come with it’s own jukebox (I’m downloading half of the songs on iTunes now) but the site is incredibly informative and well designed. I can’t find the name of the firm that designed it, however.

Wow.