I’ve finally convinced Francesca to start a blog, and here it is. There are too many fun stories about things Josh and Milo do, and this will be a good way to document them. I hope she continues to write, because if she hits her stride, watch out!

Welcome my non-geek wife!

I gotta say, I tried it briefly, but I just don’t give a Flock. (ooh, aren’t I clever?) I tend to be late to the party with cool new stuff sometimes, but I just don’t get the big deal about this. It’s a non-standard Firefox implementation as far as I can tell, and although it has a few nice bells and whistles built in, I can’t honestly say it does anything that can’t be done with a few well-chosen Firefox extensions. Who knows, maybe I’m wrong - but I’m not sure I care either way.

Well, that was interesting. It’s amazing how much sound a towel rack can make when it falls off the wall in the middle of the night. Assuming that Josh was awake and trying to find something to play with (as 2 year-olds will sometimes do), I barged into his room, and scared the bejeezus out of him. Of course, when I realized he hadn’t made the noise, I started to get a bit nervous too.

So I started around the house turning every light on to see if I could figure out what had made the “bump, whack, clang!” noise. Eventually I wandered back to the hallway where the bedrooms are located, and glanced into the bathroom. Sure enough, there was the towel rack on the floor.

The most amazing thing about all of this is that Milo, our amazing-doesn’t-ever-seem-to-need-sleep 3 month-old, slept through the entire commotion. And he only went down 20 minutes ago!

I’ve just updated this site to the latest version of WordPress. If you notice anything odd, please drop me a note.

I was afraid to be the first person to publicly bag on the Google Reader (Google’s newly released beta RSS feed aggregator). But now that Ed Bott has nailed it so accurately, I don’t feel so bad spouting my opinion.

Firstly, I don’t like the reading paradigm they’re using. I used to go for it - I call it the “one post at a time (like email)” RSS paradigm, but now I find it really inefficient for scanning. They make it fast, since they pre-load the next post so you can burn through them quickly, but there are some other things I don’t like about the interface. It’s important to me to know how many outstanding (yet to be read) items there are on a per-channel basis. If I have relatively few items per channel, I might want to read them all in one fell swoop by clicking the channel group rather than a channel name. The two most popular online aggregators (Bloglines and Newsgator Online) do this, as does FeedDemon, and presumably most other aggregators.

There are some other very prominent features missing, like the ability to perform bulk actions. For example, I imported the wrong OPML file, and now I want to purge all my feeds and start from scratch. The only way I’ve found to do that is to manually unsubscribe from each feed (150 of them!), which takes a good 20 seconds minimum per feed. Ack. That just sucks. And I’m probably going to have to do it at some point, since it’s linked to my google ID and therefore my Gmail account, and at some point I’m sure my feeds will show up in other Google properties.

It’s definitely Beta - but by Google standards more Alpha.

What do you think?

Oh, how I wish I was a Comcast subscriber!

These just make me laugh:

The future is here! You can actually buy a flying car now. Unfortunately, it costs 3.5 Million dollars, and each one is a prototype. Even worse, you have to fly it out of airports with a pilot’s license. Might as well just save your money and get a little Cessna.

Wow. I didn’t realize how completely I rely on my Outlook task and calendar reminders until they stopped working. Yes, that’s right, and apparently it’s not that uncommon! I don’t know if I’m just stricken with bad Outlook luck, or what the deal is. There are a number of potential solutions to this problem, but unfortunately actual users report varying levels of success.

My problem started when I installed yet another “productivity” application, this one called Omea. For some reason, immediately after installing this application, about 35 of my contacts started popping up reminders in Outlook for no good reason. And there is nothing common amongst them; I have no idea why these 35 or so were selected out of my more than 300 contacts.

So, in an attempt to stop the torture, I ran Outlook using the /cleanreminders command line switch, which is supposed to help with matters like this. Well, it worked - I stopped getting reminders. Entirely.

Wow, that’s even worse than it was before!

So, I now bit the bullet, and tried using the /cleanfolders command line switch, which is much more comprehensive.. and scary! Well, again, it worked. My reminders came back - ALL of them. Including the contact reminders. Argh!!!

I guess for now dealing with a polluted reminders list is better than none whatsoever, but only marginally so. I really have to take responsibility for this though, since I know that installing that 3rd party application is what lead to the original problem. But, still… GRR!

Here’s me, as a South Park character:

Accomplished with the very cool South Park Studio 2. Beware of popups.