I’m committed to keeping a blog, but I’m dissatisfied with the way my blog is set up, and the content I currently have isn’t a best reflection of what I really want to talk about. I’m going to be re-doing the blog again and I hope bring it more in line with my real passions: Boston, wine, cooking/food, and politics, and less about science and technology.
I will most likely archive in a non-public location previous writings. While this goes against my belief that blogging is a form of journalism, and no journalist gets a chance to change the past, I feel a clean break is the best approach. I’m not issuing any retractions, just no longer making content available.
Let me be clear: I love what I do. I enjoy programming and have thoughts for new things all the time that would be fun spare-time tasks. But I just have other outside hobbies and interests that I enjoy spending time on as well. It’s not that I check my programming hat at the door: I just put on my food hat (and wine hat, and Boston hat) over it when I’m not at work.
Speaking of work, it’s worth repeating that any topics I discuss here are a reflection solely on me and not any company or organization I’m affiliated with.
Sam Diaz over at ZDNet recently posted his death knell for RSS, claiming that it was “a good idea at the time, but there are better ways now”:
The truth of the matter is that RSS readers are a Web 1.0 tool, an aggregator of news headlines that never really caught on with the mainstream the way Twitter and Facebook have. According to a Forrester Research study about the reach of social technologies, only nine percent of U.S. online adults said they use an RSS feed monthly, down from 11 percent the year before. By contrast, 50 percent are visiting social networking sites, up from 34 percent last year and 39 percent are reading blogs, up from 37 percent a year ago.
Sam kind of misses the point about RSS. RSS isn’t a technology designed or implemented for the non power-user. RSS is an aggregation tool, designed to make it easier to blow through the Top 10, 20, 50 or 100 sites you visit daily, weekly, so on. That’s not really in line with people who use the internet as a communication tool, not as an information or entertainment one.
The common complaint with RSS as a technology is a valid one. RSS is a massive firehose; the sources never turn off, the reading never ends. I’m reminded of the Jay Leno Doritos commercials: crunch all you want. we’ll make more.
Reading RSS can be disheartening, because no matter how much you crunch at it, content providers will make more. Eventually, you will get full, and sick of checking. Many RSS users (Sam Diaz and me included) dread those high unread counts because they don’t symbolize what we have accomplished (staying informed) but what we have yet to accomplish (read the ninth article in a row about duck fat).
This is a problem not with RSS, but in the readers that use the technology. RSS readers universally have one major fault: they present information like it’s e-mail. There’s subjects, tags, folders, filters, and (worst of all) those unread message counts. Here’s a popular email client side by side with a popular RSS reader:
RSS is not e-mail. Thus, the successful RSS reader will present the information in a way that does not make it look and feel like e-mail. Unlike work, or even personal, e-mail, RSS doesn’t have to be read. Sure you might miss a fun recipe, or insightful political argument, but if your blog or friend network is robust enough, and the content is “important” enough, you’ll probably catch it later. And, unlike your bosses or clients missives, if you miss it, it’s not the end of the world.
Here’s a fun thought: since it’s got the potential and ability, why not make RSS the real replacement for the daily newspaper, with emphasis not on news, but on daily. Every morning at, say, 6 AM (customizable for early or late risers), your RSS readings are generated and aggregated from the sources you define. You can print it out, read it, ignore it, do whatever you want with it, but that’s all you’re getting so don’t come back until tomorrow.
There are all sorts of tremendous advantages to this: a bit of time delay allows authors to get the story right and make those post-publish edits. You eliminate the firehose feeling and can, if you do it right, present the information in a scheme that feels more analogous to RSS’s newpaper cousin instead of its e-mail one. You could also, I suppose, have some sort of algorithm to pick the “best”/”most popular”/”for you” stories up front, instead of the chronological layout of current RSS readers.
After two years without a data smartphone, I finally took the plunge and bought an iPhone. I couldn’t be happier with my purchase! I was very sad to leave Verizon, but I am so glad with what I can do. In fact, I am writing this on it right now.
When I went out for drinks last night, I didn’t get lost on my way to a bar I’d never been to. I can listen to music, make phone calls, read books, and write blog posts all on a handheld device. So, so sweet.
Even in the best financial times, knowing your credit score and what’s in your credit report is sound practice. Unfortunately, the three credit reporting bureaus make it just about impossible to attain your credit information, especially if you’re a young, mobile individual: the type of person who most needs to know their credit history.
I think Steven Leavitt (of Freakonomics) best distills this idea to its very core.
“So if you take the drug and pee on a special piece of paper, a secret message appears. If you don’t take the drug, you can pee on it all you want, but it will not reveal the secret message.”
I can definitely see this extending to doping at the Tour Du France, only the message would be “Allez directement en prison, vous porcine américaine.”
The graph above appears in a post over at Cognitive Daily. Basically, the colored columns for each age group correspond to three different “finding” tasks associated with objects underneath cups. In all three, a reward is hidden under one of two cups, and then the cups are hidden from view while the table rotates 180 degrees (to swap the location of the cups) or 360 degrees (to keep the cups in the same locations). The tasks vary as follows:
Colored cups: The cups are the visual indicator that a change has or has not occurred.
Left/Right: The cups are the same color, but the table is the visual indicator: half-black and half-white. The cups occupy exactly one color.
Top/Bottom: The cups are the same color, and the table is the visual indicator: half-black and half-white. The cups straddle the color division line. If the table is black on top, rotating it 180 degrees means it will be black on the bottom.
To me, the interesting thing is the decrease in performance in the colored cup task: arguably the most basic. I suspect that not enough data was gathered. I’d love to read the article, but not for the $11.95 asking price.
BumpTM makes swapping contact information as simle as bumping two phones together. No typing, no searching a list for the right person, no shaking your phone, no modem noises, no mistakes.
Finally, a business-card replacement that makes sense. Bump provides seamless transfer of information using a shared, secured, authorizable medium. You can’t have my contact information unless I want you to have it. I get to pick what contact information you recieve, and there’s no chance for error at data entry.
Simply brilliant. Another reason I’m still impressed with the iPhone and the developer talent.
Saw this list of Twitter uses the other day; kudos to Olin for the top spot (though the list might be unranked) for the 3rd-Floor West Hall laundryroom Twitter agent. Anyone familiar with this know how it works? I don’t remember how the LaundryView system works, but if I recall correctly, there’s e-mail functionality. It’d be interesting to learn more. Reply in comments if you’ve got the details.
You’d think my work laptop would have all the bells and whistles ready to go. After all, I run cygwin, the Linux emulator, as well as have full (legal!) installations of Office 2003 Professional and the latest updates from Microsoft. Apparently, my installation has issues, both of which are font related.
First, with cygwin. I tried to set up LaTeX, and hit wall after wall. Getting past using TeTeX instead, I still hit issues with installing Ghostscript, both the windows executable and the binary from cygwin. Something, deep within the belly of the machine is going haywire, but it pains me how easy it is to set up LaTeX and GS in Ubuntu: GS comes pre-installed in Hardy Heron, and after 10 minutes with the CLI I had a full PDF version of Professor Allen Downey’s How To Think Like A Computer Scientist, compiled from source. As of this writing, my windows/GS problems are still unresolved, so thanks, Windows.
The other issue is with unicode boxes in Firefox. Even in FF3.0, you can run into problems with boxes instead of text like this: さんぽ (if you’re seeing boxes here, you’re seeing the problem.) Apparently, Widnows doesn’t have full-on unicode support on by default, so you’ll have to get a full sans-serif Unicode font and install it. A simpler way might be to follow these instructions for Office installations, though YMMV. Don’t forget to restart FF if you go this route.
Even with years of experience, I still slap my head when it comes to understanding the pains and hassles Windows environments face. One of these days…..
