Wyclifercules

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The more I read about what a paragon of masculine physique Wyclif is turning into since he switched to a job hefting hardware around the great outdoors, the more I wonder if I should turn my next career shift towards more muscular domains. Outside of web development and graphics, my two physical areas of focus are inline skating and SCUBA diving. Anyone got ideas for a career along those lines? Bonus points for something which combines the two skills mentioned.

Feeding Time

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I’m a latecomer to the world of newsreaders, owing to my stubborn insistence that the old habit of obsessively clicking through my randomizing blogroll was enough for me; but lately I’ve realized how much time I’ve been wasting, clicking repeatedly on links to high-traffic weblogs, only to find that that they haven’t been updated since I last visited five minutes ago. I was dipping a virtual soup ladle into a rushing river of content, and now it was time to get a funnel. Or something.

I tried out three server-side newsreaders (not client-side, as I wanted something accessible from anywhere beyond my computer):

  • Bloglines came well recommended, but the framed interface threw me off, as did all the links and tabs all over the place. I was also hoping for a single screen where I could read aggregated posts from all subscribed blogs in one place, but I saw no such function. (Update: Okay, Dan and Chris pointed me to the folder at the top of the blog list, which should show a full listing of all blogs. I guess the Bloglines devs thought it was perfectly obvious, but I sure didn’t see it. Where’s the “All Blogs” label?)
  • Feedster appeared to have a much simpler, more direct UI, but all I ever saw when I logged in was “Unable to get the recently changed feeds for current user.” Nothing changed, no matter what I added.
  • Finally, Kinja. I had originally dismissed Kinja offhand in my “I don’t need a newsreader” denial stage, but now it seems to be best suited to my aggregatory desires. The digest collects posts in reverse chronological order, giving them to me in a unified stream, and adding and removing weblogs is an easy one-click affair. My only major complaint is that something occasionally seems wrong with the timing logic: I frequently get “strafed” by weblog posts from the same source in quick succession, apparently displayed in the sequence that they were crawled rather than in actual chronological order. It’s a minor problem — except when someone in my digest posts two dozen weblog entries in the span of an hour or two.

I’m sure a lot of you out there have plenty of reasons to recommend one over the other, and I can see how Bloglines is useful to many, but I wanted a funnel, and not a filing cabinet, so Kinja it is for me. My digest.

(My apologies for all the mixed metaphors. Soup ladles, funnels, filing cabinets, and “strafing” all have very little to do with each other functionally, but hey, if the shoe fits…)

Escalator Out

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Dear WMATA: How much would it cost to erect and tie down a tarp over the Dupont Circle escalators, as compared to the amount of money spent on yearly escalator repairs and maintenance due to weather damage? To my experience, the south exit has never had all three escalators running for more than a week at a time.

And, in case you were wondering, this is what an escalator’s rubber handrail looks like out of its natural habitat.

Photo taken with a Sony Ericsson Communicam attachment (on T300 phone).

Madugo

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Check out the October “redesigns” of Shaun Inman and Jason Santa Maria. As we say in Tagalog, madugo.*

* madugo – literally “bloody,” but also used in tech and advertising slang to describe a difficult, complicated, or messy project.

So Long, Superman

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Christopher Reeve passed on today, due to secondary complications from his spinal cord injury. He’ll be missed; this guy was, bar none, the best to play Superman — and Clark Kent — on the big screen. I could never get over how he changed on screen once he put on those glasses, brushed away the spit curl, and spoke in that geeky falsetto. I don’t think any actor will ever be able to pull off Kent like Reeve. Ever.

Has Been or Denny Crane?

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Shatner’s Has Been album was in my iTunes shopping cart, all ready for checkout and download, but Jim Hart gives me pause. So, should I go for it? Or is it enough to just watch Boston Legal?

Update: Well, I’m going to wait for Has Been to turn up in some future bargain bin. Meanwhile, the money I would have spent on it has instead gone into Spanish Dances: Selections from Ruiz de Ribaya’s “Luz Y Norte”. Lovely, exotic album, and the second track is especially evocative.

Post-Debate 2

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I missed the first half of last night’s debate (Full Transcript), so I didn’t see the part where Bush appears more hot-tempered than he was in the latter half. The part I did see shows Bush performing a lot better than last time, and somewhat wittier as well. “Want some wood?” But I don’t think I would have even gotten the part about “battling green eye shades” had I not read L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz this morning, where the inhabitants of the Emerald City all wear green-tinted spectacles to make the city appear greener. I’m not sure what the reference is supposed to imply.

(Update: Apparently it’s something to do with accounting.)

Kerry elegantly dodged the “taxpayer’s money for abortion” question by talking about his own Catholic faith and how he would not legislate that faith as president, but, unfortunately, that still means he can’t deny the use of taxpayer’s money to kill babies. Bush’s response to that was subpar, failing to firmly elucidate his moral stand that abortion is murder and therefore cannot be legislated as a health issue. (More on abortion in some other post. One can of worms at a time.) Ironically, Kerry, though captive to his party, made a far better moral case on abortion, choice, and responsibility than Bush ever had. I don’t appreciate, however, his answer on stem cells, something to the effect that “frozen fetuses must fall to the march of science!”

Bush completely failed to answer the “Three Mistakes” question, which was obviously Iraq-War-Was-Wrong Bait. I’m not sure whether evading the mistakes query is politically shrewd or stupidly, proudly evasive.

More from Barlow, Talking Points Memo, Rowie, DCist, Wonkette, and lots of links from Instapundit.

A Larger Tremor

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Big late-night earthquake in Manila just now. Mom texted to say that everyone’s okay. Initial reports of an intensity of 6.2 on the Richter scale, with epicenter west of Tagaytay, from the Manila Trench. Anyone know if Taal or Makiling are affected by that trench?

Somehow, after last month’s tremor, I had a feeling a bigger one might follow. Here it is.

Update: A bit of a dispute: PHIVOLCS says MagnitudeIntensity 4-5, epicenter near Tagaytay, while USGS says Magnitude 6.4, epicenter in Mindoro. Here’s the USGS preliminary earthquake report.

Update again: This ABS-CBN story puts the epicenter at “61 degrees west of Tagaytay.” Degrees? Are we talking longitude? Wouldn’t that put it at about 14Nx59E, somewhere in the Indian Ocean between the Indian and Arabian peninsulas?

Update yet again: Official report from Phivolcs. Okay, epicenter was Mindoro, and 61°W simply refers to direction from Tagaytay as point of reference. That clears it up a lot.

Opera Looks Like a Browser Again!

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While searching for ways to make Opera work with GMail, I stumbled across Opera 7.60 Preview 1 for Windows. (Current stable Windows release is 7.54.) I downloaded it, started it up, and I’m quite happy to say that many of my complaints have been fully addressed in this version.

First off, I admit I was talking through my hat when I said Opera should go back to “just being a browser”; it was always a suite of additional applications, but I wanted just the browser, since the M2 mail client wasn’t doing it for me, and I had no need of IRC, feedreading, or “Notes.” In prior versions, the bells and whistles stayed out of the way, but Opera 7.5x would not let you ignore them, with multiple, hard-to-hide, too-easy-to-toggle nested toolbars. 7.60 rectifies that right from the start by asking you whether you want the full suite or just the browser, and if you want to hide the Personal Bar and Panel Selector; selecting just the browser without the panels gives you a clean, toolbar-free GUI. Some of the extras are still lurking around the corner, mostly in the menus, and the Panel Selector can still be toggled with a click in the left window border, but Right Click > uncheck Show Panel Toggle, and it’s like they were never there.

I still don’t like the default browser view, but that’s easily fixed with steps 3, 5, 6, and 7 from Make Opera Look Like a Browser Again. (I also found that the Main Bar / Google Ads annoyance in step 5 can be circumvented simply by selecting “graphical advertisements” from the advertising options. The interface adjusts itself accordingly.)

Oh, and the greatest improvement: Opera 7.60 supports XMLHttpRequest, which means it runs GMail! You need to bypass the initial browser warning (“sign in anyway”), but once you’ve logged in, it works fine.

It gives me a smile to know that I’m on the web with a client application that listens to feedback and stays true to its roots as the web’s simplest, zippiest browser for power-users. Great work, Opera!

More input on Opera 7.60 from Martin at City U HK, Redemption in a Blog, Exclipy, E-Musings Non Immorata, and TechWhack.