We recently moved, and as always happens when you move, much of our mail has been going to our old address. We picked a stack of it up tonight, and as Francesca was going through it, she pointed out that we had received a notice from the North Delta Health Unit pointing out that chicken pox vaccination time was coming around for our oldest son.

That’s not all that notable, but the fact that at the bottom of the postcard there was a large section that stated “Listen to a podcast with Dr. Monika Naus on Chickenpox at: www.bccdc.org” sure was. As Fran said, it’s not that long ago that they started using email and pointing people to their website. Now they’re using podcasts? Cool!

Tags: podcast, podcasts, health unit, public health, chickenpox, chicken pox, mail

These are so cool - ice trays that make Lego bricks. Obviously they don’t actually work, since the backs of them won’t be properly shaped, but they’re still darn cool!

Tags: Lego, Lego bricks, ice, Lego ice

By far my favourite way to read RSS feeds is using FeedDemon on my laptop. While there tons to love in FeedDemon, there are a few things that I wish were a little different, and rather than submit them to the NewsGator newsgroup where they might get lost under the deluge of feature requests, I thought I’d outline my feedback right here on my blog. NewsGator has shown that they’re on top of what’s being said about their products in the blogosphere!

So here are the things I’ve noticed that I think could use a little work:

Bug: The Unread Folder View sometimes does not show all feeds with unread items in them. I think this happens when FeedDemon updates its feeds; the total unread number for the folder containing the feeds updates, but the feeds that went from no unread items to greater than one unread item don’t automatically show up. Quickly choosing the (all) Folder View then back to the Unread Folder View displays the missing feeds.

Usability issue: Another issue I’ve found is when a feed update occurs while I’m reading a feed in “river of news” mode, (i.e. click on the feed’s title and all unread posts are showing), if new posts show up for the feed I’m viewing, it’s not made immediately clear to me that I’m not seeing everything available for that feed. Obviously clicking the feed title again will show the new stuff that just showed up, but the problem is that if I don’t notice an update has occurred, I will blindly press the hotkey to mark everything in my feed as read, thinking that I’ve actually read everything in the feed when I haven’t. So then I’ve just marked posts as read that I actually haven’t even yet seen. I’m not sure what the solution to this is - I hate dialog boxes, but maybe that’s the way to go - if you happen to be reading a feed in “river of news” mode and that feed is updated, maybe a dialog box needs to notify you that you’re not seeing everything for that feed. Actually, a better alternative might be to ensure that pressing the “mark feed as read” hotkey only marks items read that have actually been displayed on the screen. I’m sure this is the more difficult solution, but it’s definitely the most user-friendly approach.

Feature request: Hotkey support. For better or worse, I’ve come to know and love the hotkeys used by Gmail and (gasp!) Bloglines… and for that matter, Google Reader. It drives me crazy that I need to hold down modifier keys to do almost anything in FeedDemon. I want to be able to move from feed to feed with the “J” and “K” buttons, instead of “Ctrl-Space” or some other multi-key combination. Ideally, the focus would remain on the reading pane even when using the hotkeys, so that for example I could press “J” to move to the next feed, and use the space bar to page down as I read, then hit “J” to move to the next item. (Like how it works in Gmail, etc.)

Feature request: As a future enhancement I’d love it to see Nick take a page out of Bloglines’ book and implement the ability to scroll between posts in the “river of news” view. I prefer reading one document top-to-bottom like this, but it drives me crazy that I can’t easily skip a long article that I’m not interested in - I have to scroll down, down, down. I should be able to jump to the next article with one keystroke. Like “J”! Even better, it would be great if I had the option of marking each post that I put the focus on as read as I arrive at it (or leave it), similar to how the new Google Reader does it.

Nick and the rest of the NewsGator team, please take my feedback as it was intended - I’m hoping to add value to the product and help steer it in a direction that will benefit all users (as well as myself). And for anyone else that has read this far and doesn’t understand how great FeedDemon is, and why you really should pony up and pay for a great news agreggator, take my word for it - FeedDemon is awesome, and combined with NewsGator’s synchronization engine is simply unbeatable. And Nick Bradbury’s blog (he’s the creator of FeedDemon) is my favourite developer-written blog. He writes for the rest of us, while still managing to discuss the challenges he faces as a coder, while striking that hard to find balance between topic-specific posts, and regular life / family stories.

Tags: FeedDemon, Feed Demon, Nick Bradbury, NewsGator, Bloglines, Google Reader, Desktop Aggregator, RSS, RSS Aggregator, News Aggregator, Feeds, Feed, Feed Aggregator

My brother-in-law Scott has started a blog focused on his adventures in the wine industry up in the Okanagan. He’s gone through all of his winemaking courses, and is now a winemaker’s assistant. Right now he’s bottling after pulling some nasty hours during the crush. If you’re at all interested in wine and the art and science of wine making, check out Scott’s blog.

As a side note, I’ve never personally been much of a fan of wine, but Scott’s managed to help me find a few varieties that I quite like. Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc… good stuff. Speaking of Pinot Blanc, we had a bunch of it while setting up Scott’s blog, and let me tell you, working on a Mac (which I never do) and drinking wine does not make me at my most productive. But it sure was fun!

Tags: wine, winemaking, Okanagan, Penticton, winery, wine tasting

Wow. According to How Stuff Works caffeine isn’t out of your system in 4 hours, as I’ve always heard. Instead, it has a half-life of 6 hours, meaning that if you ingest 200mg of caffeine at 9:00 AM, by 9:00 PM when you’re trying to wind down, you actually still have 50mg of caffeine left in your system from that morning java.

So now, if you look forward to 9:00 AM of the next day, you actually still have 12.5mg of caffeine in your system from the previous day. Then you have your typical 200mg more of caffeine, and by the time you’re winding down at 9:00 PM again, you’ve got 53mg of caffeine left in your system instead of just 50. Obviously this cycle gets worse as time goes on.

No wonder coming off of caffeine is so difficult and uncomfortable. But maybe it’s even more worth it than I previously thought.

Note that I’ve determined I’m a “slow caffeine metabolizer“, compared to some people I know. *Cough* Francesca… *Cough*

Most people reading this will know that I’m a huge Vancouver Canucks fan.

This is the second year that the Canucks will have had an official team blog, and they seem to be taking it more seriously this year, with more frequent contributions from varied sources, including some “super fans”. Unfortunately, they just recently went from full RSS feeds to partial feeds.

Unsubscribed.

[Update] I just showed this post to my wife, and I think I should probably clarify my point.

The Canucks are doing a blog for the purpose of engaging their fans. They want us to think about the Canucks as much as possible. The only reason to turn off full-text RSS feeds is to force readers to come to their site and read the content there, rather than being able to read it in the news aggregator of their choice.

Since I read most of my feeds offline regularly, a feed that is not full-text offers me very little value, and basically just annoys me when I realize I’m actively being excluded from that content.

So, as a blogger (who gets paid for it) who’s words get given away in full-text feeds every day, I have a hard time stomaching the awful decision someone in the Canucks PR department has made. So I’ve unsubscribed.

I’m their prime demographic.

Their loss.

Tags: Canucks, Vancouver Canucks, VancouverCanucks, Canucks blog

I’m not even sure what I think of this, but as an upright bass player, and incurable geek, it appeals to me on many levels. Of course, the musical purist in me also cringes every time I watch it, although I can’t stop watching it. Here’s the video:

From boingboing.

Wow.

My buddy Ernie got a hole-in-one while golfing about a week ago. The local newspaper put his picture in print, with the story of it… so I thought I’d link to it here. Congrats, Ernie!

This video clip is pretty long at 20 minutes, but it’s totally worth it. Kevin Smith is giving a talk and is asked about his aborted attempt to write a script for Superman back in the ’90s. He was actually hired by Warner Bros, and completed two full drafts before Tim Burton was hired as the director and decided to go in a different direction, which ultimately was never done. But Kevin Smith can sure tell a story, and this one is worth the time invested to watch.

I figured this is somewhat relevant given the upcoming release of Clerks 2 and the recent Superman movie.

Tags: Kevin Smith, Clerks, Superman, film school, Tim Burton, Nicholas Cage, Warner Bros

I just wanted to make a note that after using the new smooth scrolling feature in Bloglines for the weekend, I’ve decided that I actually enjoy it for the most part, with occasional exceptions. My only beef is that I’d like it to scroll slightly more quickly (which Ben assures me is on the table for discussion as a feature addition), and I’d like the bug to be fixed where feeds with no title take 3 hotkey presses to move past. I understand that fix has already been coded and is currently in QA’s hands.

Of course, I have to admit I was more willing to give it a second chance after being personally contacted by the person who wrote it - it’s amazing what personal contact can do - but I believe I would have eventually come to this same conclusion regardless; it really is an upgrade.

Just wanted to set the record straight.

Tags: Bloglines, Bloglines scrolling, scrolling, Bloglines hotkeys, hotkeys, RSS, feed reader

Is it just me, or is everyone getting a “smooth scrolling” effect in Bloglines now when they use the hotkeys to jump between articles? I can’t find an option to turn it off, but boy do I dislike it. I may have to find another reader if I can’t get rid of this awful new “feature”.

[Update] It’s buggy too. I’ve noticed that on some feeds it can occasionally take up to 3 presses of the ‘j’ hotkey before it jumps to the next item. *sigh*

[Update 2] Er… wow. I just replied to an email I received from Ben Lowery, who works on Bloglines and actually wrote the smooth-scrolling feature I’m complaining about in this post. He asked me for details regarding the bug I noted, and mentioned that they are planning to add an option to turn off the smooth scrolling function. I’m pretty blown away - Bloglines is huge, and to think that they are paying close enough attention to touch base with me when I complain is pretty neat. Hopefully I was able to help him!

[Update 3] Looks like the example feed I gave Ben helped him find the bug, and the fix is working its way through their QA department. How cool; how many people can say they helped improve Bloglines?

Tags: Bloglines, Bloglines scrolling, scrolling, Bloglines hotkeys, hotkeys, RSS, feed reader