Cas is currently

Firstly, thank you everyone for your lovely birthday wishes. They really made me smile on a day not normally known for it’s smile-worthyness.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming –

I have been remiss in my recent blogging, letting the Random folder once more reach dangerous levels of obesity. So, without further-ado, here is the best of the last two weeks.

Biological USB drives. Kinda.

Web 2.0 and glocalization – Danah Boyd being all sensible once more.

Worms to help combat allergies. *shudder* They would have to be proven to be very very useful. Then again, I am not as afflicted by allergies as some, so perhaps if I suffered more, I would appreciate this?

Universal Power Adapter. Geeky-gadget usefulness.

Joel Johnson, late of Gizmodo, doing his bit down in NOLA. Bookmark this page/get the RSS feed because it gets updated whenever Joel gets a moment.
Also, go to Jacob Appelbaum’s weblog as he is also down there right now.

AA Cell Phone Charger. So useful!

* Microsoft’s Ergonomic Keyboard. I have nothing against ergonomic design. What I have against this is the tenor of the article that implies Microsoft is the one and only company to ever think of this problem, or to try and address it. Grrr. And who wants a giant slab of black plastic anyway? I did find a pretty clear ergonomic one (and a shiny metal one), once, but I can’t remember the site. *Sob*.

Green Tea Ice Cream. *drools* This looks so tasty! And after tasting YoYo’s green tea and red bean cookies, I am open to the idea of matcha in sweet things. *drools*

Flying Spaghetti Monster game. It just wouldn’t be a Sunday morning round up without at least one Mata link. Ahhh, more ID-related humour.

BBC Creative Archive. You can now download BBC archive footage. I got the two penguin ones!

If I Had an English Accent. Funny. Very funny.

6 Degrees. We all know the “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, right? Well, I came across this book the same day I was writing my “6 Degrees of Wiki’s” section in the thesis. A bizarre confluence of events I thought. So here’s the link.

Bizarre Japanese male-cheerleaders in a game… The CC is totally to blame for this one. I do recommend the exam-study one. Quite why you need some black ninja-clad male cheerleaders to help you in your homework endeavors, I am not sure. I am even less sure how it then becomes a computer game?!

If the world were Goth…
One
Two
Three – is it wrong of me to find this dress totally gorgeous? I think in a nice deep wine red it would be perfect for me.

Pop-Idol Malaysian Style. The Malaysian public get to vote by text message for the next astronaut… Funny on so many levels. Will we get to see the footage of the astronaut-wanabees who didn’t make it?

Picking an MP3 player. People have been asking my opinions on these lately. I seem to be gaining a rep as the Queen of Gadgets. Alas, I know bugger all about non-iPod players (still not sold on the new Nano. For that amount of money, spend a teeny bit more and get the one with 20gb of storage), so here’s a dude who knows what he’s talking about.

Timetable for digital switch over. I’m a young person who is tech-savvy, and I don’t want analogue switched off. I have never yet lived somewhere where there is a digital signal, and that includes two large cities. In fact the only place I have been able to view freeview was on a boat, on the canal, moored up at the back end of beyond somewhere in the Midlands. And even that was Skyview, and not Freeview. My other main problem – before, you needed one aerial and the entire house could get TV if they wanted (and had a license of course). Now, you need a box per TV , an aerial, and a license. Grrr.

Nightmare on Elmo Street. Because it still makes me laugh days later.

* The Universe in a Single Atom. Reason number 23 to become a Buddhist. Or not. Whatever works for you. Nice to see that the Dalai Lama ^*1* is being all sensible on the whole science/religion debacle.

Cas is currently

WARNING: the following post was written under influence of jaffa cakes, extreme stress, tiredness, and more cups of tea than are probably healthy.

A housekeeping post before I get back to the business of serious blogging sometime later in the millennium.

People just keep on commenting. Really, I hadn’t realised how much it was true in the blogosphere ^*1*, but link, and they will come. Welcome Paul and assorted others, whoever you might be.

This blog is such a fricking ego boost! Loving it.

In a kind of weird and roundabout way in my head, this leads me onto the next point I have to make:

An open call to all you out there who have blogs/sites/whatever that generate RSS feeds. First off, feeds are great, I love feeds, they make my life a joy, and… I’ll stop now because my inner-geek is threatening to become an outer-geek. But, can you please make it clear what the URI of that feed is. Flashing neon signs saying “THIS IS A FEED” are always good. There are few things ^*2* that are more annoying than have Firefox tell you a page has a feed, but then be unable to get that feed into your aggregator.

I am surely missing some simple trick in Firefox, and I am going to feel so blonde when someone tells it to me, but right now that feeling is an old old friend. So, on the off chance there is at least one certified geek reading this blog, or even someone who uses Firefox with enough regularity to know the tips and tricks, is there any way of finding out the URI of a given feed? I can subscribe to feeds on a page, which puts them into my ‘rss blogs’ bookmark folder, but I don’t want to read them in Firefox. It’s an irrational thing of mine I am sure, but… I don’t wanna, and it was my birthday on Saturday, and I can apparently play that card for a few more days, so 😛

In happy and semi-related news, I have found the new love of my life. We’ve been on a couple of dates now, and things are hotting up, moving onto third base… ^*3*

Yes, I am of course talking of aggregators. Thanks to Google, I found Vienna, an opensource, sadly Mac-only, aggregator. It does all I want it to, has a beautifully elegant and clean UI, and (most importantly) doesn’t flash “GIVE US MONEY NOW” messages every five minutes like Newsfire used to. There is one small fly in the ointment (it’s late, and they’re cliches for a reason) and it is that Vienna has taken an irrational dislike to feeds from the NYT. It will collect them, and display them, but refuses to respond to the ‘open in browser’ hotkey, which then forces me to break my workflow and reach for the RSI inducing mouse every couple of seconds. Still, a very small bug, and one that might even get fixed in a new build of the project. It’s more likely to be the NYTs fault anyway. And Vienna also doesn’t like the feeds of a couple of the blogs I sometimes read when very very bored. It likes things to be all nice and validated and some people are lazy…

All things I can live with. It’s that stage in the relationship where such quirks are endearing. Only time will tell if they are going to become annoying as hell.

Last thing before I give in and go crawl into the bed which is looking so good to me right now – if you are one of the wonderful people who has their site generate an RSS/Atom/whatever feed, can you be a honey and make it generate a full feed, not just the first couple of lines of a post? When I have time, or it is looking like it is going to be a link-heavy post, or something I want to take time over, then I do open a given page in the browser. But mostly I just lack the time, and find it easier (and less CPU hogging) to view the post in the aggregator.

I still love your content, enjoy reading your content, and frequently go to your site to read the same content again in the original context, but times are, I’d prefer the choice. And I am staring a dial-up connection in the face from the end of the week, so logging on, getting the RSS feeds, logging off, and reading at my leisure sure sounds nicer (and cheaper) than logging on, getting the RSS feeds, opening and waiting to download upwards of 50 different pages (often with images), then logging off, trying to read at my leisure, but find you’ve gone onto a second page or something…

Ok, I’m admitting defeat now. There was an argument in there somewhere, but if you can find it you’re a better person than me. Just:
1) Make the URI of your feed easy to find
2) Make sure your feed is valid
3) Make sure your feed contains the full content of a given post. Comments I’m not so fussy on. Those I will go to your site to read. But content? Grrr.

Rant over. You can come out from under the desk now.
Night 🙂

Cas is currently

Short one today.

I figure that your true friends are the people you never appreciate enough on a day to day basis, then they go and do something which just reminds you why they are special in the first place.

The kind of thing I am talking about – coming home and finding that Moose has made me the following wonderful Blackberry Cheesecake Gateaux birthday cake. ^*1*

For reasons legion and depressing I don’t tend to make a fuss over my birthday, but I do like to mark the occasion quietly (if that makes sense), and this year that’s what I got. Great cake, brilliant friends, and penguin-related gifts. Truly, what more do you need to celebrate your birthday?

Cas is currently

I give up.
It’s been a long relationship for me.
Nearly six months of total fidelity.
I only strayed once, and that was a misguided drunken fling, and I was forgiven.

But things have been rocky for a while now, and the time has come to face facts and admit that we have grown apart.
We have different goals in life.

I want a some excitement with some oomph between the sheets.
He wants lazy evenings in, watching the footy, with me bringing him meals and letting him off the washing up.

It’s over.

We will always have the memories, of when it was new and exciting, learning new things about each other.
We’d wake up together, have a lazy breakfast in bed, with fresh coffee and tea. We’d have a laugh over the funnies, cry over the disasters.
Now I’m lucky to get a line out of him in the morning, and as for a beverage? Instant is all I get these days.

He has to go.

~ * ~

I really hate having to admit defeat, but I need a new RSS aggregator.
The new release of Newsfire is buggier than an ant-farm, won’t let me view more than three feeds before crashing, and is generally starting to piss me off with its incessant calls for registration (and a largish chunk of money I don’t have to spare right now), and limiting me to just 25 feeds.

So, if any one knows of a really nice aggregator that works (on a Mac), is free, doesn’t have a limit on the number of feeds I can subscribe too, and looks nice, can they share please!

WARNING: I am picky about my user interfaces. I know I shouldn’t care, but a certain elegance of design is important to me, and for some reason browser-based aggregators just don’t get me going, though I am prepared to make an exception if it’s a really good one. The UI should be simple, useable with the keypad (ie arrows to move back and forward through feeds, a hot key to open the feed in the browser), and if it supports grouping of feeds, and a ‘new items’ list all the better…

And yes, I know that Firefox lets you subscribe to feeds, but see my above comments about browser-based. That, the whole having to scroll through bookmarks thing, and that Firefox is just too slow and processor-hogging for me on the Mac, and it just doesn’t fit the bill. Sorry.

I do figure that software is one part in your life where you are allowed to be unfaithful on occasion. So, all you geek-fiends out there, what have you got for me? Cas is in need of some RSS-lovin’…

Cas is currently

Well you could knock me down with a feather. It would have to be a pretty hefty feather, because I am no light weight, but I am sure, given the appropriate plumage and enough force, I could be sent arse-over-tip.

Why, do I hear you cry, am I currently so easy to upend? Well, one thing is that I keep forgetting that links are two-way. You link to something and promptly forget that people frequently look at who is linking to them in return. I don’t know why I forget this, because I do it myself (very few people link to me, if you are interested), but forget it I do. Last Monday I posted about how the addition of different barnyard animals to one another does not necessarily create a new species ^*1*, linking to Paul’s recent tribulations with GIS.

And lo, I open up Gmail this morning, and it tells me I have a comment from the afore linked-to personage ^*2*.

Hence the feather-knocking comment.

Yes, ok, so it might not seem much to you, but I am in an odd mood today. I’ve already waltzed round the lab once, and the day is yet young, so who knows what the rest of it will bring?

The other reason I am in an odd mood is that I am currently listening to a band called The Mountain Goats. I am not sure what I think of them. Currently I am just settling for odd. They are a little… something… for my taste, but the CC has stolen the iPod to listen to the Eagles so it was the least I could do to steal his Walkman in return.

Cas is currently

Just in case you were under any doubt as to my geek credentials, the following is a common sight in the lab. (Cameraphones are great!)

Tilly on the left, Jeff on the right. (Click on the pic to see notes).

And yes, we do crack GIS and computing jokes when we’re in the pub at the end of a long day.

We need help.

Cas is currently and still a little

The Godhead is an absolute gem of a man. A complete honey. A total sweetiepie and a wondeful human-being to boot.