Rand Wacker

The Phonetic Alphabet

Sandwiches, Burgers, Fries, Beverages, Desserts from McDonalds India

Last week I bought NetNewsWire, the undisputed king of OSX RSS readers. This basically means that it goes out and downloads an XML feed of my favorite blogs and displays them in an easy-to-surf three pane format that makes it manageable to track a large number of blogs every day (right now only 30 or 40, but I can see that growing to over 100 quite quickly). NetNewsWire was actually one of the killer apps which made me want to get a Mac, and it is really a well done tool. (For a hilarious review of NNW itself check out Rands’ page (different Rand).

The achilles heel of NNW though is that its usefulness is proportional to the quality of the RSS feeds you subscribe to. Even though RSS is used by a large number of people as a structured format to publish meme-sized chunks of information, it’s standard was originally conceived as a way to publish pointers to stories, so the payload is wrapped up in what’s mean to be an “description” field. So by default, most RSS feeds include only a very small chunk of a story (usually 40 words or 500 characters), and this makes aggregators like NetNewsWire useful only to track when someone’s put up a new post, and then you still have to click on the link, wait for your browser to load it, and finally you get to see the article. If I wanted to do this I’d just continue to use Mozilla bookmarks and keep track of what stories are new in my head.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Notice that the entry just…

I’m not the first one to complain about this:

• Plasticbag complains about excerpt-only feeds and brings up many other good points about how to make RSS more useful. This article says everything I was thinking, and more.
• Dan points out a couple of good RSS 2.0 templates people can use.

So, what can you do?
Read more »

Confessions of a G33k

I’ve seen a couple of movies this week which I hadn’t heard much about before but I thought were pretty good. My general mode of operation these days is to expect very little from a new film, especially one I see in a theater. That way, I’m usually someone pleased by the experience and don’t feel like I wasted my money. This leads to me liking movies which I would normally hate.

The first (a commercial title), is “Basic”, with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, and a whole host of other actors you’ll recognize and like. It’s Travolta being Travolta, Jackson being Jackson, and an somewhat interesting murder mystery on an Army base in Panama. I don’t remember this film getting much advertising though, so that usually means that the studios thought it was good enough to succeed on word-of-mouth, which it was.

Then, Tivo caught “The Prime Gig” on IFC. A tiny film starring Vince Vaughn, Ed Harris, and Julia Ormond. I had never heard of this one, but it was definitly worth seeing, just for the acting alone. A quiet film about telemarketers (yeah, it’s not all that bad), or just salesmen in general.

I’ll also give a plug to “Whale Riders”, a beautiful picture from New Zealand which I saw more than a couple of times my last trip there. I haven’t been actively pushing it to my friends since it’s rather simple and I didn’t know if I liked it so much because of my connection with the land down under, but it’s getting thumbs up from people who’ve seen it, so I definitly recommend you check it out.

Maybe if “Whale Riders” does well they’ll get around to releasing “Stickmen” here, which was as funny and fresh as any early Guy Ritchie film.

I got a call from the Red Cross this morning saying that they were having a blood drive “near” me (they still had my old address). This was extremely convenient since I had just made myself a huge breakfast of eggs, toast, and half a side of bacon and had no motivation to go and exercise it off. When I was done I swear there was white fat floating up to the top of my unit.

They love me down at the blood center. Nice fat veins and I’m O- (the universal donor). I was suprised though that this was the first time they’d called me down in a year (you can donate every two months). They’re going to loose me pretty soon though, because they’ve put in a new rule that you can’t donate if you’ve spent more than three months aggregate in the UK or six months total in Europe since 1980. Having made a couple of trips to Europe (the last at the height of the Foot and Mouth scare), I’m starting to bump up against these limits. But these limits are significantly lower than the FDA recommendations (which only care about the period from 1980-1996 and then only about the UK).

So it’s unfortunate. I’ll probably be permanently banned from giving blood by the time I’m 30. Oh well, I guess better safe than sorry.

You should all go out and donate though as there is a national blood shortage.

tikiwiki :: open source excellence, one line at a time

“TikiWiki is an open source web application which provides a full Wiki environment, as well as Articles, Sections, User/Group Management (including optinal LDAP interaction), Polls and Quizzes, File and Image Galleries, Forums, Comments on many areas, Weblogs, and much more.”

As it seems the news has already been posted to other places on the Net, I thought I should mention that yes, Alexis and I are engaged. (Yay!)

I asked her last weekend on her birthday, then took her to a suprise birthday dinner where none of the guests (save one) knew about the suprise engagement. Needless to say it was exciting to all! Had a great time for the rest of the weekend celebrating with friends and family.

I’m just glad she put up with me for five-plus years before I finally got around to asking. I guess I have to blame it on my family history and the less-than-perfect models of marriage that I’ve seen, and my desire not to run in to anything major without being completely sure. But I can definitly say that I am completely sure that I’m more than thrilled about this!

So I’ll apologize in advance if I start yammering on about wedding planning and such over the next few months (years? hope not…). Maybe I’ll have to create a separate category.

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