But not a rant on all quitters and losers. No, I’m talking about a rant on quitters and losers among the 2008 presidential candidates. I know that although I’m a person who has strong political opinions, I don’t usually talk politics very much on this blog. But I’m just fed up with what we’ve been seeing in the past four weeks–that’s right, it’s ONLY been four weeks since the ridiculously early Iowa Caucuses–that I want to get this out of my system.

Let’s go back to the very beginning of this year: January 1st. Not that long ago. The Democrats had eight people running for president (in alphabetical order): Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson. But then, three days later (January 4th), after the Iowa Caucus, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd dropped out of the race. Bill Richardson dropped out on January 9th, after the New Hampshire Primary. I mean, only two primaries go by and already a third of the Democrats drop out? New Hampshire and Iowa combined only represent about 1.3% of the population of the United States–”cold white people” as Jon Stewart describes them.
But since then, Dennis Kucinich (last Friday) and now John Edwards (today) have both dropped out, leaving us with essentially three Democrats left, none of whom I particularly like very much.

The Republicans, too, have already seen some of them calling it quits (though most of them have had the backbone to keep going), such as Duncan Hunter on January 19th, Fred Thompson on January 22nd, and Rudy Giuliani today.

What’s dumb is why these people drop out so quickly. I mean, folks, Super Tuesday is February 5th, which is still about a week away, which decides 52% of the Democratic delegates and 41% of the Republican delegates. Things can change up VERY quickly with such wide margins. Not to mention that California, the state with the most delegates, is holding its election that day as well, but I’ve yet to see any of these candidates do any kind of meaningful campaign in California yet.

I mean, it just seems to go against all reasonable logic. Why would you put so much work during the year 2007 running for president (particularly given how ridiculously early all of the debates started happening), and then quit as soon as a small sliver of the country votes for someone else? What is the point? Doesn’t that really just alienate the choices that the rest of the country has available to them? Democracy can only really work when citizens have a true choice on the ballot; when these others drop out so early, it cuts this choice out of the equations. On the Democratic side, there were some Democrats that I liked, but because the early votes went to the so-called “front runners”, these other guys dropped out. Now all the Dems have left are Clinton, Gravel, and Obama, none of whom I like very darn much.

Back in the old days, before all this big media, it was not the primaries and the caucuses that determined the president; they did nothing more than determine which delegates were going to the party convention. The convention decided who the nominee would be, not the primaries. Now, we’re getting to the point where the nominee is decided even before all of the primaries are over, meaning that the last few states are down to having virtually no choices to make whatsoever, and practically making the whole point of “delegates” useless. This is where the whole thing about states wanting to move up their primaries so they can “be more important” then being rebuffed by the already-first-in-line states, and that’s why we ended up with half of the country having its primaries on February 5th, and Iowa and New Hampshire holding their primaries in the dead of winter in the beginning of January. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the beginning of the next batch of primaries being held in November or December of 2011. I would probably advocate for having a fixed date that all of the state primaries are held on–the general response to that is the claim that it’s not possible for candidates to campaign everywhere at once. However, my response would be that first of all, candidates for the November general election already have to campaign everywhere at once; second of all, things like planes and the internet and the like make it much easier to be in multiple places at once; third of all, twenty-four states are holding primaries or caucuses on February 5th, so we’re already halfway to having a single day for primaries already!

All I can say is, I think that it’s a very dumb system. In thirty-three days, from the January 3rd Iowa Caucus to the February 5th Super Tuesday, only a third of the Democratic runners are left in the running and just over half of the Republican runners are left in the running. It’s ridiculous and a very sad example of our very sad system. I don’t care if you’re a Democrat, Republican, or one of those third-parties that the media completely denies the existence of; it just feels like this whole 2008 election is a big joke.

Tags: 2008, article, caucus, Democrats, election, losers, nominees, president, primary, quitters, rant, Republicans, runners

In Physics class today, our teacher was talking about the Hydraulic Press, and showed us this great video that he happened to find on YouTube. It’s from a very very old David Letterman, in which they crush various things under an 80-ton Hydraulic Press somewhere in New Jersey. As if the virtual gore wasn’t bad enough, you get Letterman making one-liners through the whole thing! Absolutely hilarious and amazing to watch! And I thought Will it Blend? was awesome…

Part 1:

Part 2:

Tags: crush, hydraulic press, Physics, pressure, School, Video, YouTube

Hello everyone,

I’m going to be going on a school-related trip in the middle of February which will force me to be completely away from the computer and the internet-at-large for about ten days. Now, I had considered not doing anything on this blog for ten days, but I’ve changed my mind and decided that perhaps something that I should do is take the opportunity to invite folks to write a guest blog article to be featured here on Webmacster87.info during my absence, just to keep the blog going.

So here’s how it works. If you would be interested in guest blogging on Webmacster87.info, please let me know in the comments of this post and I will send you an e-mail with additional information. I’m currently just planning to run the guest blog articles while I am away (February 14-23), but if I get an overwhelming response, I may decide to expand them to cover the month of February.

If you indicate that you are interested in guest blogging, your post will need to be submitted to me no later than Sunday, February 10th. (Earlier than 2/10 will be great too.) I will be scheduling the posts in advance so that they will show up on here while I am gone and nowhere near the computer.

What kind of content? I would be interested in any guest bloggers who want to write an article about technology and/or teenage life. (You do NOT have to be a teenager to participate–in fact, I’ll probably be inviting a few people that I know who aren’t teenagers to contribute.) Note that unlike Lorelle VanFossen’s two months of guest bloggers, I will not be entirely opening up my blog to guest bloggers; I will be reviewing guest blogger articles that are submitted to me primarily for decency before I schedule it in the posting queue. However, if you are interested, I certainly invite you to join in and relieve me while I am away from the computer.

(Incidentally, I will also probably be doing another one of these guest bloggerthons for another long trip that I’m taking in June, so this will not be the only opportunity.)

Anyway, I just wanted to extend the invitation to anyone who’s interested. As for the trip that I’m taking in February, stay tuned for more details coming in the next week or two.

Tags: article, Blogging, guest bloggers, invitation, Technology, teens, trip

I recently realized that despite the popular demand from my visitors, I’ve never taken the opportunity to blog about my brand spanking new web host. Well, now I’m going to take the opportunity.

You’ll recall that during the month of December, both Webmacster87.info and phpBB Weekly suffered significant downtime, none of which was my fault. After a series of communication feuds, I found out why. My old webhost, Kazix, had merged with this Fat Network group of people, and so the excellent support that I had remembered having with Kazix was reduced to a very poor support desk “maintained” by Fat Network. My cPanel username/password kept changing under their watch, and they moved to new DNS nameservers without warning me (causing me to lose a handful of posts on here), and they were continuously having downtime. But worse, when I reported to them these problems, they would respond as though I had obviously done something to cause the problem. At the end, I got fed up and gave them a reply that I am not a total idiot and that I know what I’m doing here, thus I should know why these errors are coming up, and furthermore giving it to them about their horrible service and brutal customer support. Their reply was a pretty “we’ll look into the problem” response.

So, even though my hosting with them is supposed to continue into April, I got fed up with having to deal with these people and the continuous stress that I had to deal with in December of trying to keep my websites up somewhat. In particular, I was having to deal with a flurry of outcries from the relentless community of phpBB Weekly listeners. I’ve essentially declared my investment in hosting from Kazix to be a case where I was completely suckered.

However, I did have an alternative option. Back in June or July, Caitlyn Imburgo had pointed me out to Web Hosting Buzz, a link which I had remembered, although, looking at the packages they offer, it seemed like a “too good to be true” offer. However, at the end of December, with Kazix flailing out from under me, I went ahead and purchased their cheapest Silver plan.

For $59.40/year (=$4.95/month), this is one awesome plan. They have no setup fees, and the plan comes with 375 GB (that’s right, gigabyptes) of disk space, along with a whopping 2.5 TB (2500 GB) of bandwidth. Just to put that into perspective, right now, I’m only using about 64 MB of disk space (about 0.017% of my total allotment), and have used 4.54 gigabytes of bandwidth (which, although that’s a lot for most other webhosts, again is only 0.178% of my available total).

It gets better, because this plan has everything. If I had chosen to (I didn’t at the time), this plan would have come with one free .com, .net, or .org domain name, and the domain name would be mine (for free) for life as long as I was still a Web Hosting Buzz customer. But even then, the plan allows not only unlimited subdomains, but also unlimited parked and addon domains as well. (Back when I had Kazix, I had to shell out an extra $15/year for each addon domain I wanted!) They also have all of the major support for e-mail, PHP, MySQL, FTP, multimedia support, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff. They run their servers on dual quad-core Xeons with 8 GB of RAM and standard RAID hard drives to protect against data loss. They even support all the fancy stuff like Zend Optimizer, GD, ImageMagick, SSL, and all that jazz.

But the part that I was happiest to see (particularly after my recent debacle) was all the support functionality they offered. As opposed to the phantom e-mail only support of my old host, Web Hosting Buzz not only offers 24/7 e-mail AND online help desk ticket support (they claim that they’re there 24/7 but I haven’t had a reason to find out yet), but they also provide a customer support phone number (9 AM-5 PM M-F), an online wiki for support, and even their own community support forums! (Although nothing is entirely perfect; they use vBulletin.) With all of these support options available, I’m feeling much more secure about being on this webhost. Plus, after my first four weeks of using them, service has been reliable, fast, and perfect, so I haven’t even needed to try their support services yet!

In addition, they guarantee 99.95% uptime, and they even have a section of their website which tracks the uptime of their servers. Their setup was very fast, and I was ready to go with their hosting within a few hours. However, the best part has to be their Price Freeze guarantee, something which I have not seen from any other webhost: they guarantee that they will never raise prices for existing customers. The price you pay when you first sign up, even if you sign up with a discounted coupon code, will be the price you’ll pay to renew for the life of your hosting. Talk about awesome.

Anyway, so far, I’m really satisfied with my new web host. Not only have they been super-reliable, but at an unbeatable price, they’ve opened up so much more stretching room which will make it possible for me to easily expand my online presence should I choose to. If you’re interested, be sure to check them out.

Tags: bandwidth, disk space, features, hosting, Kazix, new, web host, Web Hosting Buzz, website

This is a hilarious piece from The A Daily Show with Jon Stewart, from the January 15th show. A pretty interesting reflection on the status of big pharma in the 21st century.

Tags: Daily Show, drugs, jimmy legs, Jon Stewart, medicine, restless leg syndrome, Video

Last week, I entered an essay in the North Central San Mateo Neighborhood Association’s 25th Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Essay & Poetry Contest. (How’s that for a long title?) The contest involved submitting an oratorical essay, which was also to be read and not exceeding 5 minutes in length. Well, Saturday afternoon was the awards ceremony during which they announced the winners, and in the 11th Grade Essay division, not only did my essay win first place, but it received a standing ovation from the audience when I finished reading it there, and I got numerous compliments and even got invited to read it again at some events that are a few months down the road.

However, today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and I will once again be attending the Freedom Train and Celebration in San Francisco today. We’ll be recording PreviewCast #050 afterwards (fifty episodes–a big milestone for us). However, for today, I thought that I would share my essay here for the reading pleasure of anyone who is interested. May we all remember what Dr. King’s legacy means for us today.
Continue reading »

Tags: article, contest, essay, holiday, Martin Luther King

Well, MacHeist has just sweetened their 2008 bundle for the last time. They’re trying to get $300,000 raised for charity through bundle sales within the next three days. I must say, over the last two weeks their bundle has certainly improved in its impressiveness factor, and so I’m probably planning to buy it and do my part.

However, there are three applications in the bundle which I will not be taking advantage of. I already have a license for 1Password, which is an awesome password managing tool for Mac OS X. I know that a lot of people really like Snapz Pro X, but personally I’ve never figured it out, and I have a license for iShowU, another app which does the same thing. And as for Wingnuts 2, I’m not particularly planning to play that kind of game. (However I’ll be keeping my hands on the mini golf game because it seems interesting, and even if I don’t like it, I’m sure my younger brother would.)

But anyway, I will be giving away a license each to 1Password, Snapz Pro X, and Wingnuts 2 from the bundle. MacHeist allows me to specially designate these licenses to you when I do the check out for the bundle, so these will be licenses especially for you with your name on them. If you weren’t planning to get yourself the full MacHeist bundle but are interested in one (or more) of these three apps, this is a great opportunity to get them free!

How does it work? Post a comment to this post on Webmacster87.info telling me which app(s) you would be interested in getting for free and why you want it/them. The deadline to make your comment is 7:00 AM Eastern time (4:00 AM Pacific time) on Tuesday morning, January 22nd–this essentially gives you 38 hours. I will announce the selected winners Tuesday morning, and will purchase the bundle Tuesday afternoon (the licenses for these three apps will go out to the winners at that time, and the licenses for the remaining 11 apps will come to me for my own personal use). Please be sure that when you post your comment you enter your Name and E-mail Address exactly as you want it to appear in the license for the app(s) you’re interested in. If no one is interested in a particular app, then I’ll just keep the license and file it away somewhere.

Also, do you plan to purchase the MacHeist Bundle, but haven’t yet? PLEASE use this referral link to buy the bundle! I really really would like to get a free license for LaunchBar, and if you buy the bundle through that referral link, I get LaunchBar for free! (If you use my referral link to give me LaunchBar before Tuesday afternoon, I’m willing to use your referral link as well to return the favor.)

Again, thanks to MacHeist for putting on such a great event, and doing it for a good cause. And, thanks to all the developers who are throwing their apps into the ring for this excellent cause as well!

Tags: 1Password, applications, bundle, contest, LaunchBar, licenses, MacHeist, referral, Software

Well, I’m fresh back from my trip to Macworld Expo, courtesy of the tech group at my high school that I’m an “honorary member” of. (The “honorary” part means that I don’t actually do anything with them due to my busy schedule.) But yep, we got to go to Macworld as a field trip, meaning we got to legally miss all of our classes today to do so. Oh, I can just feel your jealousy rising.

The general consensus among us was that there was too much stuff for the three and half hours that we were there. (We finished getting all registered by 10:40 AM, and had to leave at 2:15 PM.) It didn’t help that there were two exhibit halls in separate buildings, a block apart from each other. Obviously not the ideal setup, but Moscone North was hosting the United Motorcoach Association of America or something like that. Wow. So, my schedule pretty much involved registering at Moscone West at about 10:20, then going through the West Exhibit Hall at 10:40-12:15, then getting lunch nearby until about 12:45, and then spending 12:45-2:15 in Moscone South. Unfortunately, I only got to see about half of Moscone South’s exhibit hall, which is very, very big.

However, this year, I spent most of my time talking with the smaller developers, which took up the majority of the West Hall and most of whom were together in the Developer Pavillion (aka “Tiny Town”) in South Hall, behind Apple’s humongous booth. I actually really enjoyed that, because in general, the smaller developers are much more approachable than these huge companies with the humongous booths, and they’re much more interesting. I actually got exposed to quite a few new apps that I’m going to have to check out (look at wallet, here comes the fire…). So although I obviously didn’t get to see everything I had hoped (the MacHeist, Micromat, and Microsoft booths were all on my to-do list which I didn’t get to), I still had a good time, a much less stressful time, and came back with some great goodies.

Included in my goodies was the official Macworld San Francisco T-shirt, this time a black T-shirt with blue and white lettering. I also got a WireTap Studio T-shirt from Ambrosia Software. WireTap Studio just looks so cool, so I’m really going to have to try it out. One of the companies actually was interested in doing a promotion with PreviewCast, and gave me his card, so there may be some interesting news coming from that soon.

Oh, and I got OmniFocus, the totally-awesome GTD application from the Omni Group for only $30. The regular list price is $80, and I got more than half off through a Macworld discount and a student discount. I’ll definitely be spending some time trying out OmniFocus and you can expect a detailed review here soon.

Don’t worry, you haven’t heard the last of my Macworld experiences yet, but I thought that I’d share just some of what I did at the exhibit hall today. One of these days, maybe I’ll actually be able to spend a full week at the conference.

P.S.: Sorry, but I didn’t get any pictures there this time. But I did get something else just as good! Hint hint…

Tags: Apple, developers, exhibits, Macs, Macworld, Moscone, Omni Group, OmniFocus, PreviewCast, recap, San Francisco, School, trip, WireTap Studio

If there’s one way to summarize one of my biggest questions about what was announced at Steve Jobs’ keynote on Tuesday, this has to be the best way. Overall, this year, I was never really excited about this year’s keynote, and there’s not much there to excite me. Time Capsule definitely looks interesting, and (when I can afford it) may actually improve my recent 1.5 Larry-head rating on Time Machine, although I’m not in a position to get it for the time being. I have a number of qualms about the MacBook Air, and as for the Apple TV, iTunes rentals, and iPod touch/iPhone updates, I’m maintaining a solidly neutral stance on those.

Now, hold on Douglas, you’re thinking, why aren’t you coming out and either praising or bashing Apple the way you normally do? Well, for most of these, I can see pros and cons on both sides, so for me, the jury’s still out on my opinions of these. I’m holding off until I get a chance to play around with things before I start to come to conclusions, and I will be sharing these conclusions on this weekend’s “Macworld in review” episode of PreviewCast, and later elaborating here on my blog.

As for trying them out, that’s what I’m going to be doing tomorrow! Indeed, tomorrow, I’ll be going with the Aragon group (about six of us in total, plus chaperones) to Macworld to tour the exhibit hall for the day. This will be my third consecutive excursion to Macworld’s Expo floor, and according to what all the websites are saying, we’ll actually be able to play around with the new stuff, rather than just looking at a rotating object in a bullet-proof* glass case. Which actually sounds exciting.
* I have no idea if the case was bullet-proof or not, and am just making this up.

However, this year, I hope to spend some more time talking to the people whom I really think should be the stars of the show: all of the little developers. (Merlin Mann likes to call the “little devs” section of the show floor Tiny Town.) It’s THEM that make the show possible, because it’s their contributions of their applications that helps the Mac platform succeed. So, I’m hoping to spend more time there this year.

I have one class tomorrow–Calculus, my first period class. After that, the group of us are carpooling up to the Millbrae BART station and taking BART to Powell Street, a block away from Moscone Center (and right next to the SF Apple Store). Last year, we tried to drive to Macworld and had the worst nightmare with parking. We’ll get there shortly after the 10 AM exhibit hall opening, get all checked in, and then have just under four hours to do stuff to our heart’s content. We’ll gather up around 2:15 to head back to BART and catch a 2:30 train back to Millbrae, and then we’ll drive back to school and get back there around 3:30.

I have not yet exactly decided what I’m going to do there. (Well, actually, I have, but I want to save some stuff to talk about in an “after Macworld” blog post!) However, I definitely intend to visit a number of booths. I plan to definitely check out Office 2008; after all, I don’t feel right truly making fun of something until I’ve had the chance to play around with it with my own hands, and I also want to find out, in plain English, what “Special Media Edition” means. I also want to find out if the Omni Group is offering any nice discounts on their new OmniFocus, which sounds like a really exciting app (and did you hear that it won a Best of Show award), and of course come home stuffed with a Macworld 2008 shirt. (I outgrew my Macworld 2006 shirt. As for my Macworld 2007 shirt, in February, it got a huge red stain after an alcohol thermometer broke in Chemistry class and splattered all over my shirt. Yeah, Macworld 2007 was just NOT a good one for me.) Oh, and I intend to gather up as many freebies and handouts as possible! There was some great stuff last year, so I wonder what I can scrounge up this year.

There’s also been lots of other things happening in my life recently, which I’ll try to catch up on in other blog posts, as it is time for me to hit the hay.

However, I will close by mentioning that this is my 300th blog post since I resalvaged this blog back in October 2006. My blog has had a number of incarnations before that, but I’ve never been able to keep a blog steady enough to keep going continuously for 300 full blog posts, which have been put together in 15 months. (You math whizzes can figure out that I’ve averaged out at 20 posts per month, or about 2 posts every 3 days. It’s not quite at one-post-per-day, blog365ers, but it’s pretty doggone close.) Thanks to the many of you who have been subscribing and sticking with my various ramblings. I do this blog mostly for myself, but it’s great to be able to bring you along for the ride and be able to share things that may interest or entertain you.

Tags: Apple, Aragon, BART, blog, exhibit hall, expo, itinerary, Keynote, Mac, MacBook Air, Macworld, News, opinion, plans, School, Time Capsule, Webmacster87.info

Well, it’s the morning of Steve’s annual Macworld Keynote, and this year, I seem strangely unenthusiastic about the whole thing. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve just been too preoccupied recently, or maybe because I think the name “MacBook Air” is the dumbest rumored idea that I’ve ever heard. However, fifty-three weeks ago, on the eve of the keynote, I posted some Stevenote Funnies for your pre-keynote enjoyment. I’ve got a few more for you this year.

Most of these videos, by the way, are from the All About Steve collection by rmoisescot, and I certainly don’t want to hog any credit for doing anything but turing this up in a YouTube search.

Boom!

Pixar (not that Steve has any conflict of interest…)

Woo!

The Best in the World (so why doesn’t the market share agree…)

Really Cool

Premature Specification

And finally, although it’s not necessarily a funny, here’s a look back at the intro of the Power Mac G4 Cube, a great idea that never made it for some reason.

Enjoy these videos, and hopefully the keynote! Me? I’ve got a very busy day at school today, so I’ll just be surprised when I get home.

Tags: funnies, Keynote, Macworld, Steve Jobs, videos