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The End

Someone ripped my blog off. And it looks better than mine. That’s it. It’s over. Finished. Goodbye.

Google Reader gets revamp

Apart from the ‘vi’ shortcuts, I was slightly underwhelmed by Google Reader when it was released last year.

Imagine my surprise, when I just used Google Reader to quickly check that I had reinstated full text feeds for this blog. Unless I see it with my own eyes, I just don’t believe it.

Google Reader launches with a modest splash screen with some exciting announcement (which I immediately skipped) and I was greeted by some unexpected and welcome changes to the interface.

the fickle hand of fate

There I was - teetering on the precipice of getting my own domain name, a hosted blog, Website, anonymous FTP server, message board, Wiki and countless other stuff I would never use.

A fully hosted solution (with unlimited bandwidth) on a Linux platform, the bleeding edge versions of mySQL, Apache, PHP and WordPress, a ‘control panel’, SSH and the prospect of sharing my wonderful set of feeds to my adoring public using Gregarius.

full feeds are the work of the devil

When you turn to the light and start to fully embrace the River of News, the sickening realisation slowly dawns that you might actually have been mistaken and partial feeds may just have some redeeming features while full feeds are indeed the work of the devil.

Full feeds potentially interrupt the flow of the river. The title alone isn’t enough to determine whether the article merits further consideration. Expanding the article should give you just enough to determine whether you want to read the full text.

The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith

BBC2 Friday night. A repeat but memorable for some great footage, interviews and these two quotes from Mark E. Smith

John Walters wrote me a letter and said, you know, ‘you are the worst group I’ve ever seen in the [laughs] in the history of mankind’ [laughs]. He was good like that, John Walters was. You ever meet him? No, he was f**king fantastic. He said, ‘you were the worst, tuneless, rubbish I’ve ever heard’, you know, ’even worse than Siouxsie and the Banshees’. This is what he wrote ‘you’re even worse than Siouxsie and the Banshees. I didn’t believe it was possible.’ You know what I mean? [laughs] He was a gem, what a gem. He said, ‘please do a session’ [laughs].

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Google Notebook

Google recently announced some enhancements to the Notebook and I must admit that, while the concept left me cold initially, I am now starting to make more use of this software.

While I use Blinklist for shared (more permanent) bookmarks, I tend to use Google Notebook for snippets, jottings, interesting links and, err, notes that I may need to access from both home and work (in fact potentially from any computer).

For example, yesterday I had a query about my online tax return and was forced to call the pension administrator followed by the Inland Revenue and jotted down answers to my questions.

drowning in a river of news

I have an increasing tendency to skim all my RSS feeds in Netvibes just to finish reading them as quickly as possible and not really reading (or enjoying) the content.

My therapist recommended some diversion therapy; install the Gregarius aggregator locally on my PC, import my OPML and experiment with Dave Winer’s controversial ' River of News’ concept.

Now my previous experiments with Joomla and subsequently WordPress and Drupal have been made incredibly easy by Wamp (a packaged distribution of mySQL, PHP and Apache).

fast and dangerous

Richard Hammond, the 36 year old presenter of Top Gear and Brainiac, is critically ill in a Leeds neurosurgery unit with serious injuries after crashing at over 200 mph in a high-speed jet powered car, Vampire.

Let’s hope he pulls through.

Google's approach to software development

Rakesh Agrawal presents an interesting summary of a talk by Carl Sjogreen describing Google’s approach to the software development process.

• Google Calendar was a relatively small project (3 engineers, 1 product manager).
• Google talk to real users (‘Grandma in NYC’) not techy geeks to find what users really want.
• Google ’eat their own dog food’. Lots of internal testing prior to public launch.
• Gap in the market. Lots of calendar products out there but none do what people want. Typical Google opportunity.
• Paper based calendars are the real competition.

staggering incompetence

And just this once, not mine.

When you take out a Self Invested Pension Plan (SIPP), most SIPP schemes are unable to accept Protected Rights.

Imagine my surprise, then, when Sippdeal contact me asking for authorisation to make a payment from my SIPP to Equitable Life in respect of a refund of Protected Rights payments that the Government are requesting, in turn, from Equitable Life.

Equitable Life claim this refund is now very urgent because the original request was made in January 2006 and no response has been received.