Monthly Archive for January, 2006

Microsoft Live Betas

Windows Live mail I was just sort­ing through the 500 spam mes­sages in my Hot­mail inbox, and noticed that I received both a Mail Beta and a Mes­sen­ger Beta invitation.

Mail looks nice and simple, and the drag-and-drop func­tion­al­ity is showy. But, it only works in IE6/PC, and it’s slug­gish as hell. I wasn’t able to select & delete more than 10-15 spam mes­sages at a time with­out it timing-​out. SIGN UP HERE

Windows Live Messenger Beta Mes­sen­ger got a face lift, and they added some VOIP func­tion­al­ity. The “Shared Folder” fea­ture sounds inter­est­ing, but I don’t know any­body else with the Beta, so I haven’t tested it.

SIGN UP HERE

FeedLounge

FeedLounge Casey was talk­ing about Feed­Lounge a while back, so when the beta finally launched, I plunked down $5 for a month sub­scrip­tion, mostly out of curiosity.

They seem to promise you the world, but I’ve found FL deliv­ers what it promises – a hosted, Ajaxed-​up RSS reader, com­plete with Google Reader-esque key­board shortcuts.

Inci­den­tally, I’m a big fan of Google Reader, because it facil­i­tates speedy con­sump­tion of a lot information… learn a couple of key­board short­cuts, and you can quickly read through your favorite web­sites on your lunch-​hour. How­ever, it’s nearly impos­si­ble to manage sub­scrip­tions once you’ve imported that OPML.

Feed­lounge rec­ti­fies this by using a Rojo-like tag­ging func­tion, to orga­nize feeds into cat­e­gories, with­out the pain of having to actu­ally create and set cat­e­gories, like Blog­lines. All you need to do is add or remove tags from any given post, and the sub­scrip­tion struc­ture will auto­mat­i­cally adjust. Cool.

One gripe I have is the three-​column layout – I know it is a cool selling-​point, but I found it to be a bit of a pain… kind of buggy, espe­cially when nav­i­gat­ing via key­board. Plus, I don’t really want to read my feeds by tag (cat­e­gory) – I’d much rather just read the latest posts, in what they call the “river of news” view. Nice that they pro­vide users with a choice.

Bottom-​line, if you’re still using a desk­top client to read RSS/Atom feeds because you think all of the online ser­vices suck, give Feed­lounge a try, m’kay?

Waitin’ Tables

Can’t help but pass along this Remain­der from Jason Kottke – NY Times food critic Frank Bruni spends a week “undercover” as a waiter at a [Cam­bridge] restau­rant. In the end, he real­izes the hell that is being a waiter:

trying to be fluent in the menu and the food, calm in the face of chaos, patient in the pres­ence of rude­ness, avail­able when diners want that, invis­i­ble when they don’t. It’s a lot, and I should remem­ber that.

Does this real­iza­tion dampen his dining expec­ta­tions? Nope:

I’d still like fre­quent water refills. And a mar­tini from hell. Straight up.

It reminds me of the polite little argu­ments Pres­ley & I have on whether or not to leave 20%, even when receiv­ing shitty ser­vice. Though I never advo­cate leav­ing less than 15%, I also think that the bonus tip should be reserved for com­pe­tent, polite servers. What’s wrong with that?

9 years

cardThe years are just flying by, I can’t believe it… on monday, the girl and I cel­e­brated 9 years together, in the best way we know how: shar­ing a tasty meal.

And what better place to have a nice dinner, than a 4-star restau­rant in a con­verted Burger King? Seriously.

Ren­dezvous just opened up in Cen­tral Square, in the old Burger King, and it is really really good. The Phoenix loves it. So does the Globe. And we do, too.

Birthdays

A couple of Jan­u­ary birth­days help con­tinue my trend of post­ing to Flickr only photos of my friends drinking…

toast

Stef’s 31st Birthday – More on Flickr »

birthday girl

Nobuko’s 33rd Birthday – More on Flickr »

links for 2006-01-20

Pre-mature Upgrades

Damn… I’ve got a bunch of photos of somebody’s birth­day cel­e­bra­tion, but no way of export­ing them easily to Flickr. I upgraded to iPhoto 6, before I real­ized that Frasier Spiers hasn’t yet made his indis­pen­si­ble Flickr Export plugin com­pat­i­ble with the new ver­sion. Oops.

So, I just made a small dona­tion to Frasier… You should too, if you rely on this plugin as much as I do.

Music for a Cold Sunday Afternoon

  • Depeche Mode’s Pre­cious –  The per­fect track – I want this played at my wed­ding, should that day ever come.
  • The Sundays’ Wild Horses –  I like this better than the Rolling Stones’ original… Harriet’s voice is haunting… As a kid grow­ing up in Buf­falo, I used to sit in my base­ment and teach myself to play guitar. I had a Bea­t­les song book, some records to play along to, and printed-​out tablature.
  • Matisyahu’s King With­out A Crown –  The only hasidic reggae star I know of… incred­i­ble live performance.
  • La Laque’s La Sirène dort –  I’m still wait­ing for a properly-​recorded LP, but their live show is awe­some. These girls (and guys) are on to some­thing here.

links for 2006-01-15

links for 2006-01-13

‘Eff Sirius

Still wait­ing… Thank god for Bit­tor­rent, or I’d be bored out of my mind at work.

In fact, I think a lot of people at work are lis­ten­ing to my shared iTunes library – I hear my boss laugh­ing every once in a while.

Saabs Don’t Age Well

One of the smartest things I’ve ever done, was to pay a little extra for Cer­ti­fied Pre-​Owned status on my used 9-3, which more or less just extends the war­ranty. For an extra $1500 or so, I’ve received more than double that amount in parts and labor over the past 2 years.

So, on thurs­day, I dropped the 9-3 off in Fram­ing­ham so they could replace the Water Pump, which was going bad. Look at the piece of crap they gave me as a loaner:

chevy aveo

Later that after­noon, I received a call from the ser­vice depart­ment, saying that I also had a blown head gasket… great. That’s not good. So, they keep it overnight, and I don’t hear any­thing all day friday… so, I call them up, and they ask to keep it until monday, because they hadn’t fin­ished up the job. All the while, I’m riding around in a tin-​can amer­i­can car, with no power-​windows, no Fast-​Lane, and it’s bright-cherry-fucking-red.

So, today (monday), I call them up, and they tell me that they can’t get good oil pres­sure. WTF? And they want to replace the engine’s short block… which is a huge job. I can’t figure out what the hell hap­pened, but I’m get­ting to the point where I can’t wait until the day when I don’t have to rely on a car every day of my life.

Mr. Yovanoff sold his 9-3 on eBay this week… but, he now gets to walk to work.

links for 2006-01-09

Airfoil 2

Airfoil 2Rogue Amoeba released ver­sion 2.0 of Air­foil, one of my absolute essen­tial mac appli­ca­tions. If you own an Air­port Express, and are less than impressed by iTunes’ trans­mit­ting capa­bil­i­ties, plunk down $25 now.

The first ver­sion of Air­foil let you trans­mit audio from any appli­ca­tion, but this new ver­sion has some great new features:

  • Sup­port For Mul­ti­ple Air­Port Express Units – Send audio to mul­ti­ple units
  • Audio Effects – New effects built into Air­foil allow for enhanc­ing audio with a 10 band equal­izer, volume adjust­ment includ­ing volume over­drive and bal­ance controls
  • Full Apple­script­abil­ity – Con­trol Air­foil with AppleScripts

And, to top it off, the UI has been much sim­pli­fied. Nice job!

UPDATE: Ver­sion 3.2 was released in May 2008. See Rogue Amoeba’s web­site for more information.

Letterman’s Politics

I still love Dave… he stood up to Bill O’Reilly on his pro­gram this week, (video here). There were two main points of contention… first, O’Reilly’s imag­ined “War on Christmas”, and then his calous attacks on Cindy Shee­han. Dave wasn’t as thought­ful or inteligent-​sounding as he can be on polit­i­cal topics, but I love the way he sums up O’Reilly:

Let­ter­man: “I’m not smart enough to debate you point to point on this, but I have the feel­ing, I have the feel­ing about 60 per­cent of what you say is crap.” (empha­sis added)

Indeed. Oh, and get your Tshirts.

Damn Sirius

Sirius Sportster ReplayWell, it’s going on damn near a week since I finally ordered my Sirius radio, directly from their online shop, and I still haven’t heard boo. My order status has been set to “checked-out” since last Friday, but I’ve received no ship­ping confirmation.

I decided to order directly from Sirius because every retail outlet that I checked were sold out the day after Christmas… I guess a lot of us didn’t get what we wanted under the tree, (I’m look­ing at you, mom).

And, I’m con­vinced their cus­tomer ser­vice representatives’ job is to bla­tantly lie to their cus­tomers, in order to cover up defi­cien­cies in order ful­fill­ment. When I called up the hot­line, the man on the other end couldn’t tell me any­thing more than the web site could, how­ever he added that I would “probably get the ship­ping con­fir­ma­tion in a day or two”… when I asked him how he knew this, he replied that it usu­ally takes 4-5 days to ship. Nev­er­mind that Howard Stern is going on-​air next monday! (I sus­pect that they are back-​ordered.)

Of course, con­sid­er­ing that every retail outlet (both online and tra­di­tional) are sold out of this model, I’m not cross­ing my fin­gers. Good thing I paid extra for Overnight shipping!

links for 2006-01-04

links for 2006-01-03

Resolution

shaken
Martini anyone?

Happy New Year, every­body! I’m back at work today, after a (I think) deserved rest. New Year’s Eve was a bit more restrained than years past, but it was a nice cap to a great year.

My only real res­o­lu­tion is for us to finally cut the cord on Boston, and move to NYC. Pres­ley fin­ishes Grad school in Sep­tem­ber, and I need to think more seri­ously about my career, grad school, and the future in general.

A lot of things could happen, but that remains my #1 goal for 2006. What’s yours?