We were getting tired of all the pollsters calling up, trying to sway our votes one way or another. We decided to have a little fun with that. Let me say I don’t believe in voting in the primaries, as that will force me to vote party lines, which is something I don’t do. Sorry. I’ve got a mind of my own. I don’t let any party tell me how I need to vote. I vote my conscience. Party lines be damned.
So when Obama’s people call, I tell them I’m voting for Hillary. They hang up mad. When Hillary’s people call, I tell them I’m voting for Obama. They hang up mad. When McCain’s people call? Nader. Hahaha. Now I can’t wait for them to call me. Just to hear their reaction.
Carol took it a step further. They had a bunch of poll people hanging out at the school. She asked them if there was some sort of big election coming up or something. They swarmed her like a school of pirana! They were handing her all kinds of cards and flyers, telling her she should vote. She asks them where she needs to go to register to vote. After that, they left her alone.
iBank mess
Reading about all the goodness of the new and improved iBank, I thought I’d download it and give it a whirl. Yes it does support direct download for many banks (including mine), but check out the screenshot here. Yuck.
All I did was go to the download screen to communicate with my bank and make the fields larger by dragging their boundary lines out to encompass the whole word or phrase, or date, i.e. “Withdrawal” can now be seen as a whole word instead of “wit…” After that, this is what the window looked like, and it only became worse as I tried to adjust it.
So kudos on the new features. Especially the direct connection to banks, but maybe we should work on the basics. Like Windowing. I will be keeping my eye on you iBank. You are bound to give Quicken a run for their money. Now that you can direct connect, you can run with the big guys.
Imagine my surprise when I went to www.foxnews.com tonight on my iphone, and it automatically redirected me to iphone.foxnews.com. An iPhone version of my favorite news site. Sweet!
And they even copied the dock’s background for their top banner. More and more sites are coming up with iPhone-centric sites all the time.
They even did it all with the iPhone-goodness. Large buttons. Click on the share button and it summons the Mail application with a built-in link to the news story.
No advertisements. I wonder how long that will last huh? Surely their not going to give all this goodness away for free? Not that I’m complaining. I just don’t see the business sense here.
NOT HD DVD!!! It’s been a long time, but here I was talking about the format war of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD back in October of 2005. It’s been a long and drawn out fight, but Blu-Ray appears to be the winner.
Microsoft is being all nonchalant about it saying “We do not believe the recent reports about HD DVD will have any material impact on the Xbox 360 platform or our position in the marketplace,” as reported by eWeek.
You know they’ve got to change their drawers. They picked the losing side. I’ve got to admit, even though I thought Blu-Ray was the better technology, I still figured HD-DVD would win just because they were cheaper. Microsoft apparently thought so too in order to include the players for their Xbox consoles.
I’m still in no rush to go out and buy a Blu-Ray player yet. I watch all my HD movies either with Pay-Per-View or Apple TV rentals. It’s not often that I want to watch an older movie. I would only use a Blu-Ray player to watch new releases. That just kind of follows right? You can put older movies on to Blu-Ray, but they won’t be in real HD because the originals weren’t. They just upscale the signal.
If cable companies have their way, they may end up charging us for our download capacity. Then it may end up being cheaper for me to rent movies on Blu-Ray than it would be to download rentals.
Posted
on February 11, 2008, 9:32 pm,
by Walt,
under
government IT.
If you’ve read this blog from the beginning (circa 2005) then you know my disdain for government IT skills, or rather, lack of. Read this for a good example. At the time I wrote that article there were 3 people in our IT department. There are still 3 people in that department, but they are all different from that original skillful crew. I use that term loosely. Though the following story is intended for those in the know, it’s only funny if you understand why. So I’ll explain it a bit as I go along. First, you might be wondering what IT is. Information Technology. These guys are the ones paid to set up an agencies computers. Keep them in top running condition. Set up the employees’ email accounts. Etc. In sum, these guys are paid to know how email works, among other skills.
My favorite IT department gave me some new material last week. Anyone who works in IT, or has the least bit of knowledge how mail servers work, knows that you can’t have spaces in an email address. For example, the following would not be an email address that you would use:
my email address@whatever.com
Sorry folks, no spaces in your literal email address. Now you can set up your mail client to display your name that is associated with your email address, but you simply can’t have spaces in your email address. You can see this at work when you reply to someone’s email sent to you. You click on the reply button, and if your client is set up to quote the original email, it will look a little something like this:
On Feb 5, 2008, at 9:00 AM, “My Email Address” < my.email.address@whatever.net> wrote:
Just what does that mean? Well, “My Email Address” is the associated (or display) name with the email account of my.email.address@whatever.net. When you copy email information to someone to create an account, you give them the display name (can include spaces) and the actual email account (no spaces).
Can you guess what our IT guys did? Let’s say the display name is Houston HUD and the email address is supposed to be houstonHUD@email.com. This guy was trying to set up the email account as Houston <insert big honkin’ space right here> HUD@email.com. Now, I’ll wince when I see things like this, and then try to give them a nudge in the right direction. Sometimes they’ll take the hint and try it. Other times, like this time, if it’s not written out for them on a piece of paper, they’ll just give up. I tried to explain to him that the email address can’t have a space in it. He said “No, that’s how they have it written here.” Then he showed me the paper. Whoever gave it to him, assumed that he would know what “Houston HUD” <HoustonHUD@email.com> meant and know what to do with that information. But not our guys.