jr conlin's ink stained banana

i'm getting the feeling that RSS is such a cool idea that no one really has any idea what to do with it.

Right now, there are a ton of free and pay RSS aggrigators. These apps do all kinds of spiffy things and are written in any number of formats, from client based perl scripts, to .Net apps, to stand alone processors. Not surprisingly, each do one or two cool things, and a bunch of really annoying things. Some are just dumb right from the get-go. Much like text editors, there seem to be a bajillion ways to do the exact same thing.

But what is it they're doing?

i don't know about you lot, but for me RSS is Biff for Blogs. (Biff, for those who came of computing age after the introduction of the mouse, was a program that would blip whenever you had mail. It was named after the original programmer's dog who used to go nuts whenever the mailman stopped by.) When i want to read or respond to a blog, i don't mind going in using a normal browser.

Steve recently posted about the demise of Synderella.

While i didn't mind Synderella as a news reader, it was that good of a Biff. i still use feedreader24. Why? Well, it's free (yep, i'm a cheap bastard), and it tells me not only when there's a new post, but pops up a quick annoy-o-tron that lets me know what and who posted. It's a great Biff.

You know what's even worse though? There's no such thing as a standard .rssrc like there is .newsrc for usenet agents. Every time i try a new tool, i've got to go through the painful process of re-adding links.

Naturally, a fair number of these tools will die off. Others will eventually grow to do email, have a built in browser and, oh yeah, do RSS as well. i suppose i could add RSS updates to my blog (so that visitors could see what perls of wisdom await them at other sites), but why bother? i'd just wind up wasting CPU on the server and…

Damn, have to cut this short. The mailman's here. gotta go bark at the door and confuse him.

Ah, well, now i understand why so many folks were looking for the Altoids Sour Ads, although no guinea pigs were harmed in the making of the film.

Unlike some others, i actually like Daylight Savings Time. Granted, i also think that setting the clocks forward or backward an hour is stupid, but that's probably just me.

The thing i like is having daylight shifted by an hour or so, and each year i keep telling myself i'm going to continue to live in the Mountain Standard Time Zone even after everyone else switches to Pacific.

i really don't see why folks are complaining. Most of my fellow engineers rarely live in this time zone anyway. Most i know tend to keep banker's hours, Japanese Banker's hours. Still others seem to be temporally adjusted by more than ten hours and are ready for life in Israel or Saudi Arabia.

The hardest part about living in a time zone other than the one you're currently occupying is the fact that everyone is always trying to convince you that theirs is better. i had an old boss who insisted on living in the aforementioned Tokyo Standard Timezone and would roll in at about twelve or one in the afternoon. The only problem was that since i was the only employee at the time, i'd get in at nine and deal with all the folks from Europe and the East Coast who'd already flooded our mail and phones wondering why we weren't there. Of course he'd want to spend a full (read, 12 hour) day which generally meant i got four hours of sleep a night for about three years.

Now-a-days, i carpool with my wife which gets me in around 8:00-8:30 or so, and i can spend that precious time doing stuff i can't do the rest of the day. Things like… uhm… check my email… and… err… post to my blog… and.. stuff..

But it's really valuable time!