I’ve had 16 tabs open in Phoenix for several days now, full of good links (mostly discovered through blogs) that I need to get around to reading. Tonight I finally made it to Joe Clark’s In-Valids, and the rest of his NUblog site. (Oddly, his editorial we doesn’t bother me as much as Zeldman’s does. Go figure. [I do like the new design of the Daily Report, and he's always got interesting links... except, again oddly, recently while he's been focused on the redesign.]) Still outstanding: the San Francisco Chronicle’s ChronicleWatch and The Pragmatic Programmers’ Software Entropy (both from a single site that I neglected to record), Web Nouveau’s CSS Tableless Sites (linked from various sources previously mentioned that I don’t want to list yet again), an SF Chronicle infographic showing why it’s clearly impossible to hit a baseball and (Michael) Palin’s Travels (both via Rebecca’s Pocket), and a bunch of others.

Also having trouble with AmphetaDesk which may be related to my web proxy–it doesn’t actually retrieve channels that are updated, even when I kill it and restart, so I have to physically delete its cache. After I dissed it (more than I intended, upon re-reading the post) and got a nice response to the post from Morbus Iff, I’m hoping to figure out the problem and contribute it back instead of just complaining. (Had it worked, though, I would have seen Mark’s post that a new version is available or the announcement itself. Ironic, no?)

Finally, yesterday I delivered 50 copies of a CD project that I’ve been working on for a few weeks to Sirens… and promptly discovered that it doesn’t work properly on Windows XP (even though it did on Windows 2000). As a quality assurance person by day, you’d think I might be smart enough to actually test the thing before burning tons of copies and releasing it into the wild. Sigh. Donna discovered the error while showing it to Amber, and we determined a workaround that they can tell people to use, but I’m more than a little embarrassed that it’s there in the first place.

Aaron is going to get himself in trouble.

Say, why doesn’t [that satirical site named for a vegetable] appear at Don’t Link To Us yet? (I don’t see a way to submit it there, which probably answers my question.) Then again, I suppose if we’ve got a tear-free onion, a link-free one is just the next logical step.

I don’t particularly like Macs (remnants of my Amiga days, mostly), but this retro hack could get me to switch just out of sheer geekitude. [via Dive Into Mark]

Also from Mark’s entry is Clay Risen’s editorial on branding. I think life insurance company Clarica (formerly The Mutual Group) beats any of his examples–not only did they adopt a meaningless name, they flaunt it with their Clarity ads, where their insurance agents explain seemingly incomprehensible things like hoedown calls, opera, and popular music. I think I need one of those brilliant minds to explain to me just how Clarica means insurance… the name sounds like a brand of contact lenses.

I’m looking for an RSS aggregator.

I’ve been using HotSheet recently, until I discovered it can’t handle Dive Into Mark‘s RSS 2.0 feed. (There’s no report when a feed fails to load–why have a log file if you’re not going to log to it?–so it took quite a while to determine where the problem lay.) Peerkat can’t handle 2.0 either; at least it reports the number of “bad” feeds, but it doesn’t give a reason–it’s wrong anyway, because if there’s any feed that’s going to be valid, it’s Mark’s. (I’ve also decided, based on the debugging experience I had with it, that I hate reading Python code.)

Amphetadesk does nice things, like conditional HTTP GET, but doesn’t do a lot of the nice things the others will, such as interleave items from different feeds, distinguish old items, limit their displayed length or allow them to be deleted. (Some of these are in the TODO list, but they’re not scheduled for a particular release. Speaking of which, there hasn’t been a release for several months now.)

Straw looks the most promising, but I haven’t upgraded to GNOME 2.0 yet so it’s out for now. Lots of Python, so again I won’t be much of a contributor. I do like that the release changelog is available in RSS (although HotSheet can’t handle RSS 0.94 either, so that feed goes into Amphetadesk too). The time to upgrade may be coming soon, and I will admit to having set a precedent–I replaced my DVD player because I couldn’t watch a certain movie.