Jack Hardcastle

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.

Today closes with huge news out of several states across the country, as Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton two-to-one in all three states holding Democratic nomination contests today. Obama’s momentum looks as though it will carry him through the big-win states next week (including my own dear Maryland) and on to the DNC in Denver in August. True, Obama has always done better in caucus states (which perhaps suggests to a smart analyst that he is the stronger candidate, with a more devoted following and more sound logical arguments) than in primary states, but the tide has absolutely turned for the erstwhile runner-up. With superdelegates changing their minds and political pressure on many of them to back the candidate with the most popular support (and thus succeed in not creating division in the Democratic party) I am confident that the huge groundswell of support may actually push the Senator from Illinois over the top.

Across the fence, the GOP looks as though it will continue to splinter itself down incredibly stark ideological lines. Huckabee, who I must admit I thought would have been knocked out of the race a month ago, is showing strong support among the “anyone but McCain” crowd. If it ends up coming down to the wire with the Republicans, the in-fighting and public backstabbing will rise to the extreme. Arch-conservatives cannot stand McCain’s liberal stance on a majority of issues, nor can they stand his vague position on just about any topic that matters. The Flip-Flopper needs to get his story straight before his handlers let him out on stage. I must also admit that I thought his campaign was over a year ago, but I was wrong there too.

I only pray I’m not wrong where it counts.

Don’t ever select “case-sensitive” HFS+ on your Macintosh.

This is one of those rare cases where it becomes obvious that OS X is actually a compromised form of UNIX/BSD.

Some major applications (e.g. Photoshop/Adobe products) were built with case-insensitivity as a requirement.

I wish, like this guy, that I had done more homework before I selected the more rigorous option.

I’ve never really had any basis for my belief that actor Johnny Depp is a genuinely nice guy. Perhaps I heard it in a news story once, or someone suggested it based on something they had heard. I’ve just always had this feeling that he’s the kind of guy who generally does the Right Thing.

Turns out, he is that kind of guy.

So guess what doesn’t work with anything! The answer is Ruby 1.9. Breaks Rails, rake, mongrel, Shoes, etc.

Hooray for the one-click installer, savior of my CLI!