Sunday, May 30, 2004

New header graphic, the first black-and-white picture, probably taken in the late 50s in Georgia or one of the Carolinas, where my maternal grandfather, Rudy Kiesler, was wheeling and dealing schmattes from New York's garment district. He's the cowboy on the left. I'm not sure if he would have understood what a weblog is, but now his image graces the top of his grandson's blog. I think he would have seen it as progress for our family. He was the youngest of thirteen, Uncle VaVa's father, and Hedy Lamarr's uncle. 

Gnome Outliner, an "outline editor for Gnome." 

Russell Beattie's experience getting an Atom feed up and running. His experience mirrors the experience I had trying to write a driver to read Atom feeds. I asked some straight questions on the Syndication mail list but didn't get any answers. I think it's pretty clear that some very basic questions don't actually have answers.  

I'm listening to NPR in the background, then realize Hey that voice sounds wise and sensible and familiar, and then I realize it's Jay Rosen. "Daily life doesn't have press conferences." Amen. 

John Robb: "I noticed that Yahoo is now including an RSS 2.0 feed with every Yahoo Group. Nice. It even includes an orange XML icon." 

It's true. Here's a screen shot of the home page a group, and the feed.  

I finally found decent CD ripping software for Windows. It's shareware, and works pretty well, except it's got this annoying dialog that keeps it from doing unattended scans. I'd gladly pay the $19.95 to register, but I've learned the hard way that companies take a long time to send you a registration code, some of them never do. Go figure. We need a better system to flow money from users to coders. Anyway, I'm listening to a fresh scan of an Elton John song.. 

Today's song: "I entertain by picking brains. Sell my soul by dropping names." 

Very useful feed from CNET, lists the most popular shareware downloads. If we were going to try to collectively gather data on which apps are the most treacherous spyware tools, this would be a good place to start, the ones on this list are doing the most damage. 

A fantastic rant from 2001 about memes and why I dislike them.  

Scoble is hosting a "geek lunch" today at Buck's in Woodside. I could probably get there in time. Heh. Hmmm. Strange idea. Nah. Next time. 

Fascinating thread on Scoble's, where Joshua Allen says things that totally needed to be said about advocacy in syndication. Read the comments. We're getting beyond ad hominems. Good work.  

The revolution of RSS is "what people are doing with it, what it enables, the way it works for people who use technology, the freedom it offers, and the way it makes timely information, that used to be expensive and for the select-few so inexpensive and broadly available. RSS is the next thing in Internet and knowledge management. It's big. A lot bigger than a format."