Notes from my inner Old Man

I can take it no longer. I have done my best to resist the tide of terrible spelling, punctuation and grammar, but it is not working. Today I received an email at work that looked like it was written by a dyslexic 4 year old walrus. How hard is it to right-click on the words underlined in red? Am I asking for too much?

I have noticed that over the last 10 years there has been a substantial decrease in the amount of crap people give about their writing. It started out slowly, dropping the vowels of common words in a text message here, adding an “lol” there. But now it is everywhere. Someone sent me a quote last week that contained several lowercase “i”s. This is supposed to be someone who is trying to win my business. Is it futile to try and stop it? Can we only ask “how far will it go?”
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Things are once again heating up in the ongoing war between the two technology behemoths, culminating in the recent statement by Adobe’s Mike Chambers terminating Adobe’s investment in iPhone resource development (his full post can be found here). This comes just days after the release of Adobe’s CS5 which contains a Flash to iPhone compiler.

This latest confrontation will have large repercussions for the communications industry and digital media producers. The iPhone and iPod Touch are currently the giants of the mobile application industry and cannot be ignored, but limiting access to developers will mean that any multimedia campaign that includes mobile applications will become more costly.
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If I have to be honest, I can’t complain. I have a pretty great life; a beautiful and talented wife, a nice house in a great neighborhood, my own company doing what I love. That being said, I have the worst luck of anyone I know.

I have never been lucky. I have never won a raffle, or a contest. I have never even won a lousy $2 from a scratch-and-win ticket. Everybody wins $2 with those. If you ever find yourself playing poker with me at the table, always call my bet. If there is one card in the deck that will beat me, you will definitely get it.

And to be perfectly honest, I would be OK with all of that; some people just aren’t lucky. It’s just that my bad luck won’t stop there.
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Is there anything scarier than the argument that something is good solely because it is tradition?

I am glad to see that Red Fisher has the strength to stand up for tradition in the NHL. There are too many people who want the game to evolve and adapt to a changing society. Fighting in hockey has, as Fisher describes, “been part of the game since the Ice Age.” If we capitulate to the changemongers every time they whine about barbaric practices we will start down a slippery slope that can only end in the total destruction of our society as a whole.

Are we now going to allow the goaltender to freeze the puck whenever he wants, creating endless stoppages in play. If we force the players to wear those newfangled helmets, how are we supposed to tell who is who on the ice. I have even heard that they want to get rid of the two line pass, creating breakaway after boring breakaway.

Tradition must be the most important factor in any decision. The way things were done in the past is the only way they should be done now. Just imagine how difficult life would be if we were forced to get rid of our slaves.