Please ignore this. Update: Man, Technorati is hella slow. (That is the first time I have ever said “hella”. I don’t think I’ll be doing it again.) I’m going to go do something more interesting for a while. If you’re really bored, you can look at my Technorati Profile, which has pretty much nothing in it, because I don’t really understand how it will benefit me to deal with Technorati. Hence this stupid, pointless post.
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In my quest to find a feed reader that actually meets my needs, I signed up for a month of Feedlounge when it was finally released on Jan 16. Here are my first impressions after using it for about 5 days. I am attracted to a web-based feed reader, because I really want to sync my feeds between my home and work computers. It drives me crazy to have to re-scan all my feeds to figure out which ones I’ve already seen, and hurts my productivity as well. The only client-based feed reader that offers syncing is NetNewsWire. This served me for a while, until all the servers I use disabled FTP access, switching to SFTP exclusively. I can’t blame them for doing that, in fact I’m glad they did. However, it rendered NNW syncing useless to me. I have tried just about every web-based reader out there, and am unsatisfied with all of them. Lately, I have been switching between Newsgator online and NNW synched through Bloglines. There are problems with both of these, though, and I looked forward to the release of Feedlounge as a potential replacement. Feedlounge’s interface is very nice compared to other web-based readers. You can choose between 3 different layouts, and use keyboard commands to navigate through feeds. It emulates a client-based reader, but is not quite as flexible; for example you can’t adjust the width of the panes. This kept me from using my favored widescreen layout, because the proportions of the panes caused the pane with the text to be too narrow for comfortable reading. But this is a constraint I can live with. Design-wise, Feedlounge is also much nicer than the other online alternatives. They really took some care with this, and the app is nice to look at. Compared to Bloglines, it is heaven. Feedlounge includes a couple of other bonus features, such as feed and article tagging, and a history of read articles. I don’t tend to use this kind of functionality in my feed readers, so these aren’t selling points for me. The seem to be functioning nicely, though, aside from a little bugginess in Safari, which is slowly being worked out by the developers. In general, the experience of using Feedlounge is very nice, and I would be very happy to make the switch if it weren’t for two factors. First the update interval of the feeds. From the Feedlounge FAQ:
We take the average time between posts for each feed and update the feed at twice that interval. If a feed has a new item every 8 hours, we update the feed every 4 hours. New feeds are updated every 4 hours until the average posting time is determined. No feed is updated more often than every 30 minutes. No feed is updated less frequently than every 48 hours.
Gypsy is pretty sure that my lap belongs to her. She can accept being occasionally ousted by the dog, who is much bigger, and way too goofy for her to handle, but she will not accept my new laptop into our home. We have had several battles of will as she insists on plopping down on top of the keyboard, whines incessantly for lap access, or tricks me into putting the computer away and making room for her, only to then sit on my lap and swipe at me whenever I try to pet her. This is a flagrant breach of our deal, which is that if she is on my lap I must get full tactile benefit of her fuzziness, and she must purr. No purring, no lap. After a couple of months, I finally had the cat trained to at least wait until I ran out of battery to jump on my lap. That is, until tonight, when a visit to the vet revealed that among the other things that are supposed to show up in a cat’s urine, she also had magnesium crystals, red blood cells, and kidney cells. And the whole shebang has a basic pH instead of the acidic one it’s supposed to have, which floored me because if anything smells acidic, it’s this cat’s pee. So now Gypsy is on a special kidney friendly diet, taking strangely banana-smelling antibiotics, and has first dibs on my lap. How this will affect me remains to be seen. I just finished a big freelance project, so now the laptop isn’t as essential as it has been for a while. However, I have a backlog of articles I want to write and now have the time to write them. So we’ll see how the battle wages on. Hopefully when she feels better she’ll rather play than sit on my lap anyway…
Today, we are given the day off to remember the principles of the good reverend doctor, and to make last minute preparations for Spring semester which starts tomorrow whether we like it or not. For us faculty spouses, today is also a much needed day of rest before the start of our least favorite time of year: Potluck Season. The hiring of a new faculty member is preceded by the bringing to campus of 3-4 potential candidates for each job in close succession. The candidates are put through the ringer with 2-3 day long interviews, during which they must meet with everyone from the undergraduates to the deans, give two seminars to the department, and attend the most important event of all: the potluck. It is here that they get to “socialize” with the department members, their children, and their spouses. The schedule goes something like this: the candidate has a full day of meetings, then gives a research seminar from 5-6 pm, which the whole department has to attend. Then all the department members rush out to Wildberries (the local health-food supermarket), buy a dish to take to the potluck, and then head over to the house of the lucky department member that is hosting the potluck. The potluck begins at 6:30, and the faculty spouse has somehow magically whipped up a main course for the 30+ people descending on the house in the 1.5 hours since they have gotten off work (assuming that they got out of there on time). If you’re lucky, everyone doesn’t bring the same thing from Wildberries, so you actually have a full meal, instead of 10 salads. Then there is the socializing, the inevitable beer drinking, the people staying too late, the cleanup, and then trying to get to bed early enough to get to work on time the next morning, because these potlucks are inevitably on weekdays. Repeat this all 8 times within a two month period (4 candidates each for 2 positions being hired), and you get the glory of Potluck Season. I swear, this tradition must be left over from when the good old faculty members’ wives didn’t work and could spend the day cleaning and cooking. There is no time built in to the schedule for the actual faculty member, who is the one who really has a stake in this whole hiring process, to help out the spouse with the potluck. But the kicker is that we have to do this EIGHT TIMES. By the end of potluck season, none of us have anything more to say to each other— all the pleasantries have been played out. And we have no energy left to try to explain what we do and why it’s important to the University to a candidate that is dog tired from the inhumane interview process and really in no mood to socialize. We are sick of eating the same food from Wildberries, and thinking bitter thoughts about those department members that never seem to show up to these supposedly mandatory social events. Brian and I get the privilege of hosting the first potluck this season, on a day that is right in the middle of another season of mine at work: Deadline Season. Which means that I will not be taking any time off to prepare for the potluck (and really, why should I even have to consider doing that?), and I am seriously thinking about just ordering pizza and being done with it. We have started to prepare for this event this weekend, a week and a half in advance, so that we are no too stressed out at the last minute. This all seems a little out of proportion to me.
Well, that was… interesting. What does it mean when the new year comes in with a fizzle? We drove home from Seattle in the midst of a huge storm. It has been raining constantly in the Pacific Northwest for a couple of weeks now, which is no surprise. But add to that a few days of torrential downpour, and you end up with floods, mudslides, trees down all over the place, and tons of road closures. Eureka/Arcata in particular becomes an island, since there is no way in or out of here without driving through one of several mountain passes, all of which are prone to mudslides an are closed during storms. (Which is a big reason why we live here as a week in Seattle made clear. Where the hell did all those people come from?) Anyway, we were able to sneak through Grant’s Pass right before it closed, and the trip was not what I would call uneventful. We hit several huge areas of standing water over the road, one of which we couldn’t see at all and almost ripped the steering wheel out of Brian’s hands. We also just missed hitting a rock about the size of a marmot that bounced down off the cliff and across the road, slamming into the barrier on the other side. We got to Crescent City in the pouring rain just after they reopened 101 after clearing away huge redwoods that had fallen across the road. We made it home just before the storm really broke loose and pretty much every road closed. We spent a night hearing the wind bounce things off our roof, and our power went out about 9 am on December 31st. We got it back yesterday, January 1 at about 2 in the afternoon, so we spent new year’s eve laying in front of the fire to keep warm and reading by candlelight. It was actually quite nice and beautiful. I wanted to take a photo, but then I realized that my camera battery was dead. As was my cell phone and new iPod. Our laptops had juice, but we couldn’t get online. No TiVO, no stereo, no clocks. It took us a day to realize that we had an old phone that wasn’t cordless that we could plug in and at least call some folks. I realized that I am much too dependent on electricity. I felt lost and way too upset that I couldn’t plug in. How did this happen? I spent a good year of my life living in a tent with no power at all to speak of, and I was perfectly happy. How can my whole life be disrupted when the power goes out for 24 hours when there was no electricity at all for most the the history of humankind? It really is incredible. So, 2006 came in without much fanfare, and with more reflection that I had planned. Maybe it was reminder to unplug every once in a while and realize how good we have it.