I never knew

The previous post was the first since Thursday morning. A couple of reasons for this, first the obvious; I didnt find a whole lot to write about. The second reason is a bit more serious though, I’ve been having problems with a weird display and subsequent freezing of my iBook. Seems the problem is somewhat common and requires replacement of the logic board.

With multiple hangings in the last few days and periods of not being able to reboot I’ve done less reading and even lost a browser full of tabs with articles I had found. Since the history was wiped out by Safari when I did a forced shutdown I couldnt easily find them again, it’s like I missed 2 days of news.

Best piece of info yet, my warranty expired 37 days ago! Which means not only do I have to wait for the store’s tech support to open on Tuesday but I might also have to keep it as is for a while because repairs seem to cost between 300$ and 800$ US, not something I necessarily want to pay now (or ever).

All of this to say that posting in the next few days could be thin and replies to comments and emails could be slow. We’ll see how the god of logic boards and that bastard Murphy are feeling.

A few months ago I was wondering if there was a way to get an email account as an RSS feed, the purpose being to register that email to various lists and get them in RSS. I got no answers to my request but did find something, in the end I spent about 10 minutes trying to install it and then forgot about it. (not a comment on quality, I just went on to other projects)

Nowadays though, it seems others are interested in getting email newsletters and mailing lists through RSS. This is being brought about by the latest waves of viruses and the exponential growth of spam. The latest idea though is much cleaner, simply publish the newsletter or mailing list straight to RSS, no need to get the email and convert it.

Lockergnome’s RSS ressource page has been involved with this concept since the beginning so you can find good info there. The klog news channel F. Andy Seidl created already lists many interesting articles on the topic.

To me newsletter are a given, it’s absolutely certain that an RSS feed can replace them. You might have noticed though that I also mentionned mailing lists, those are harder to replace since they include input from various people, not just publishing from one source. There is already some thinking along those lines and I’m sure solutions are close at hand.

The whole thing makes a lot of sense and I hope the trend picks up some steam and becomes popular. That would bring all my news within the same application and keep email and text messaging for the personnal stuff.

Prague

So true, so true;

Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity. When I was CTO of a web design firm, I noticed in staff meetings that we only ever talked about process when we were avoiding talking about people. “We need a process to ensure that the client does not get half-finished design sketches” is code for “Greg fucked up.” The problem, of course, is that much of this process nevertheless gets put in place, meaning that an organization slowly forms around avoiding the dumbest behaviors of its mediocre employees, resulting in layers of gunk that keep its best employees from doing interesting work, because they too have to sign The Form Designed to Keep You From Doing The Stupid Thing That One Guy Did Three Years Ago.

From an article on Wikis, Graffiti and Process.

A related note: In the last few weeks I’ve been getting interested in Wikis, even though I’ve known of their existence for a while I never got around to learning much about them, much less using one. It seems to me that there is a lot of content concerning Wikis popping up everywhere lately, am I just noticing them more or is there an actual “wave” happening? Considering all the linking the Pie/Echo/Atom project as been getting I think it might have started people thinking about the technology so maybe it is a wave, anyone else notice that?

Yahoo News is now offering various RSS Feeds, which means you can follow what’s going on without having to visit the site unless you see an interesting headline.

First Jason came out with these thoughts on the need to remember that standards compliance and semantical usefulness are not one and the same. Then both Dave and Doug shimed in with their own opinion concerning the original post.

Doug in particular makes the interesting point that yes they are different but by learning standards if you’re paying attention you will end up generating better semantic content by default, I tend to agree but I also think the difference has to be kept in mind when explaining the two to various people, always better to have everything in order when trying to convert/convince someone just so you dont bundle too many things together and “get caught cheating”.

One more thing, I think this is a good example of blogs being used as discussions. Jason posted at 11h42 on the east coast and by 11h42 on the west coast (3 hours) two thoughtful replies were already online and starting a good conversation from a good post.

Stunning pictures of a 737 that flew into a hailstorm. Quite a beating but no one was hurt. Imagine the pilots with those things bouncing off the windshields, tough job sometimes.

A very good interview with Douglas Coupland, one of my favorite authors.

Douglas Coupland is good at labels. He is an accomplished lifestyle taxonomist, an acute observer of social trends. His books and conversation glisten with consumer brands and pop-cultural name-checks. In the disaffected suburbs of Couplandland, such shared references are the glue that holds the post-political, post-religious, post-post (he was an early evangelist for email) world together. But he is not good at being labelled.

In recent years I’ve been reading a lot of novels set in contemporary settings, there are a few must reads in there, he’s one of them, along with Chuck Palahniuk.

If you ever wished you could study at MIT you now have access to something along those lines but from home. Wired reports on this online program from the renowned institution that lets you read up or even follow some courses online. No accreditation whatsoever but the article lists various ways people around the world are putting this to good use.

This morning I watched a physics lecture which was fun (yes I did say fun) but most of the other areas I looked at, such as architecture or anthropology were much more basic in what they offer. It’s still only a pilot project though, more content upcoming.

In the last couple of hours I’ve seen three tv ads I find odd, pretty close to bad actually.

First, Drano which for years has sold liquid drain clod remover advertises their new gel clod remover by makind fun of liquid products! Isnt this like McDonalds making fun of Quarter Pounders to sell Big































































































































Macs??

Second, Vanilla Pepsi making fun of Vanilla Coke for not being peppy and original enough (The not-so vanilla vanilla)… when they are the ones coming out with a copy of a Coke product, what? Two years after?

Third, Duracell’s ad uses Lord of The Rings, The Two Towers. Can you think of a movie that says battery even less? “When going through the caves of Mordor I always make sure my staff has a fresh set of Duracells”. I know they like to be linked to popular movies but come on.

Nothing witty to say about those ads, they just suck.