Patrick Tulskie

I have this disturbing lack of confidence in both presidential candidates.  I don’t really want either of them.  Today I was trying to decide who to vote for because, well, it is election day.  I was walking into the office from lunch when it dawned on me: the best way to pick a president is based on their website.

Presidential Candidate Websites.

Shock and horror came over me as I scanned their websites.  There was stuff all over the place, explosive gradients and backgrounds that simply don’t jive.  Youtube videos are injected in every nook and cranny.  Since both websites are full of crap I don’t fell like reading or watching, I thought that I’d go a step further and do a good ol’ W3C Markup Validation on them.  The results were astounding to say the least.

John McCain: 171 Errors, 46 Warnings (217 problems)
Source: W3C

Barack Obama: 220 Errors, 37 Warnings (257 problems)
Source: W3C

You would think that with the Democratic party doing anything and everything to get Barack all over the media, news, magazines, to the point where I check under my bed at night to make sure he’s not there, they would have made sure his website was W3C compliant.  If he wins, what does that say about their concern for web standards.  It makes his “net neutrality” talks sound like complete crap.  McCain’s site is not much better than Obama’s but the fact is that McCain’s site is better.  Winning is winning.

You’d think that my selection process would be over, but you would be wrong.

VP Candidates.

I went to JoeBiden.com and SarahPalin.com and both were serious let downs.  Biden freeloads off of Obama’s website.  Palin’s website says “This space intentionally left blank.”  Serious disappointment.  Not even a picture of Palin for me to hang up on the wall of my gun locker.  Biden too… dude what’s up with that?  You gotta have Obama carry you through the whole damn election?  Complete rubbish from both the elephant and the ass.

For giggles, I ran ‘em through anyway…

Sarah Palin: 5 Errors, 0 Warnings

Joe Biden: 72 Errors, 29 Warnings

…and let me tell you, I did giggle quite a bit.

Because of how atrocious both VP candidates’ sites are, I won’t be including them in my decision.  Their awfulness cancels each other out.  If you wanted to play a numbers game though, Biden’s piggybacking on Obama’s site does more hurt than good.

The Tie Breaker.

Don’t listen to my drivel.  This blog post is balderdash.  You shouldn’t judge your presidential candidate based on how compliant their website is with W3C standards, even if I am.  When you don’t like either candidate, you need to pick one small issue that you can judge the candidates on go from there.  That’s the tie breaker.  Could be something as lofty as religious beliefs or something as trivial as who has a better choice of neck ties.

Fact of the matter is, you need to go out and vote, no matter how irrational and illogical your selection process might be.

Update

Just tested Change.gov and I’m slightly more impressed.  Seems like since Obama is now president-elect he is able to rocket past anything McCain could ever compose with a WYSIWYG with a cup of coffee.  He has created quite a website that is pretty damn compliant.

Change.gov: 20 Errors, 3 Warning

This makes me feel much better, because the one thing that keeps me up at night is web standards.  Seems like we’re getting much closer to changing.

The other day, I noticed something that sort of pertained to what I wrote a few months ago about killing off JiveMasterT.  I see a lot of people doing this, albeit, subconsciously.  I’m not sure when this change in mentality began and I believe I was actually late to the party.  What follows here is what I think happened.

Over the past ten years, the way that people identify themselves on the internet has changed drastically.  It’s not quite obvious because the change was very gradual and it has not totally affected every area of the internet.  Despite this, it definitely happened.  It’s almost like when your girlfriend asks you if you think she’s lost weight.  It happened so gradually you didn’t notice but when asked - you notice.  There was a time when someone could jump onto IRC and chat with their friends using a username that had varying value.  The username could be thrown away if its reputation faltered and it could be retained if it had meaning and significance to those that interacted with it.

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You know what I am talking about.  It happens to us all at some point.

Oh no it doesn’t, you’re just being silly/bragging/etc.

No.  It will happen if it hasn’t already so just shut up and listen.

The Night Before

You’re working on a project, it’s late at night, you can barely function, so you close the lid on your Macbook and go to sleep.  A meer fifteen minutes later and you’re coding again.  How is this possible?  You’re not at your computer anymore.  You’re off in la la land and yet the project you’re working on continues to consume your subconscious.

Suddenly, at 3am, you spring out of bed, open up Textmate, and write in some code, relaunch your application and sometimes it works perfectly, other times the foos and bars don’t line up properly so you start trying to fix it.  Next thing you know it’s 5am and you need to wake up for work in an hour.  Then you get back into bed, angry at yourself for ruining your sleep, and get out of bed an hour later, shower, head into work a complete zombie.

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My father IM’d me this afternoon because he wanted to comment on my article about Digg vs Mixx. Apparently no one could register and no one could comment on my blog as a result. I had initially turned it all off so that I didn’t have to deal with spammers and the like but I had forgotten to turn it all back on once I had some countermeasures in place. Oops.

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I spend a pretty equal amount of time on both sites.  On Digg I mostly go to read whereas on Mixx I go to participate in a community.  Both get me my news and both deliver different content, but it got me to thinking… what makes these two sites so different?

If you Digg this then you Dugg this.

The typical workflow at Digg is that you go, submit an article, people digg or bury it and if it’s popular and makes it through their algorithm it makes it to the front page.  If you aren’t up for submitting something you can just read the articles, make comments, and digg or bury them.  The comment stream at Digg is really great.  Sure there is a lot of stupid stuff, but the user participation is fantastic.  It’s not uncommon to see a few hundred comments on an article.  Furthermore - you can actually digg or bury the comments.  If people are saying stupid stuff then they can be burried so no one has to look at them.  If you leave a good comment then it can be dugg up so you and everyone else can see what the community is thinking about things today.

More after the jump…

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The fine folks at Twitter have been talking about a search feature for quite some time now.  They never actually pulled it off since they were busy focusing on stabilizing the platform and restoring functionality to the service.  Off in the distance, a website called Summize rose up and filled that void.  The nice thing about Summize is that it was able to provide a realtime query into what’s going on in Twitter without having to visit the actual Twitter website.  It also proved to be a solid failover for developers for when Twitter had gone down or was busy firing off whales like a mad man.  Aside from that, there was no real cap on the number of API requests one could make in a given time frame.  It just worked.  Period.

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Welcome back to the saga of Patrick’s battle with the Chinese.  When we left our hero, he thought he had battled off the Chinese internet registrar and the government in a few short emails.  Alas, he was wrong.  Carol had one more thing to attempt to sell to him.  Sensing that this was a scam of some sort, and not really caring about who looks at his lowly blog in China, he decided it would be fun to start messing with them.

If you haven’t read the previous posting about this nonsense then you should probably do so.  Basically a Chinese company contacted me with some nonsense about someone wanting to buy my name in China and wanted to know if I would allow this.  I said no, and they started trying to convince me to register the names with them… and then this happened…

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UPDATE: I had taken this down since I didn’t want to blow my cover but it looks like they realized I was onto their game.  I believe this company that has contacted me is actually just trying to screw people in other countries out of money by threatening them with fake companies.  If that’s not the case and they are reading this then I’d like to see some proof otherwise.  The rest of the emails will come shortly when I have time.

I know.  I know.  There are plenty of questions going through your head right now upon reading the title of this… How could this possibly happen?  Why do they want some Irish/Polish mixed name?  Don’t they have enough to do with the Olympics this year?  How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie pop?

Well, I’m as bewildered as you are.  Let me start at the beginning since it was only this morning and I am pretty sure I can re-count it.

I woke up to my blackberry going off next to me for an emergency email.  No one sends me emergency emails, with the exception of the Chinese government, so naturally I had a look see.  I skimmed it quickly and determined it could wait until morning because they did not say anything about me needing to wake up immediately and get dressed.

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A screen name is something you use to communicate with friends and the internet at large. It is who you are when you sit down at the keys and get to spreading your word. Some people are more than comfortable to step away from this screen name and get out there into the real world. Afterall, that screen name has done nothing but chat on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or something else along those lines. Sure it might have a few frags in Counter Strike, but unless you are playing competitively, no one really calls you by THAT name.

There are the other people that dwell on the internet and use it for socializing or a means of communication with people in the outside world. Social networking and building communities and websites with a “screen name” can draw away from what you have actually accomplished and steal away some of the recognition you deserve.

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