Shades

I put Dayna Manning‘s CD back into my car player today, and was struck by how quickly her songs had become not just familiar, but comfortable, as if I’d been listening to them for years. Oddly, most of the (few) other groups I’ve had that experience with have been ones I’ve only discovered recently: Sirens, The Great Uncles of the Revolution, and the exception that continues to prove every rule, Lenni Jabour and The Third Floor.

I’ve also decided that when it comes to recent music, objective genres such as jazz, rock, folk, country, etc. mean very little. The closest general term I can come up with is fusion, which has its own semantics in the biz. Really, there are only two very subjective categories that matter, and they’re ones that can’t be easily defined: stuff I like and stuff I don’t.

Irony x2

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.

Linux RSS aggregator search

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.

Older

You’re older than you’ve ever been
And now you’re even older
And now you’re even older
And now you’re even older
You’re older than you’ve ever been
And now you’re even older
And now you’re older still.

Today’s blog entry

Doonesbury cartoon

Garry Trudeau, Doonesbury

Frame 1
ZIPPER'S BUDDY
What's that?

ZIPPER
Today's blog entry.

Frame 2
ZIPPER'S BUDDY
Get out--you have a web log?

ZIPPER
Yup.  My daily take on what's going on in the world!

Frame 3
ZIPPER'S BUDDY
Wow... that's impressive, dude.  I had no idea...

Frame 4
ZIPPER'S BUDDY
Wait, don't you have to have something to say?

ZIPPER
A common misconception.