Thursday, December 25, 2003

Tweaking Radio I try never to do anything that seems like work on holidays, so I can find time for some of the more pleasurable activities I never find time for. To that end, I was really looking forward to playing SimCity 2000 for the first time in eons today; instead I watched my granddaughter play Thomas the Tank Engine for about a half-hour, then came down and started playing with all my blogging software. I'll tell you all first the things that you'll notice. Two major changes in "NFtM": I'm finally implementing Categories in a real way with this post, and there should be a TrackBack link to the page now. Someday soon, I will be getting my Blogroll going as well, for the new year. Something I hope you'll notice as well is more frequent posting. Yeah, I know, I keep saying that. But as of tomorrow, I should be able to blog from sites other than home. So you may see a test posting, followed by something truly of interest. Then I started playing with my aggregators. As I've mentioned before, I've been working with an assortment of Windows feed readers of late: Bloglines, FeedDemon and NewsMonster. I'll try to have a more comprehensive review of each in the coming days, but here's a capsule: Bloglines is starting to feel like it was designed for me and my multi-location, multi-browser, multi-OS habits. Feeds are stored at Bloglines, you can access them from anywhere, save and/or email interesting articles, categorize them--all sorts of cool stuff. FeedDemon is just outta beta (Downloaded the 1.0 trial today). Good selection of default feeds and fairly easy to configure. Don't yet know if it's worth $29.95--if it integrates better with Radio, that'll be a plus. NewsMonster is a Mozilla plug-in made with Java that's easy to install and run, but seems to slow Mozilla (and FireBird) down a bit. Besides downloading the new FeedDemon, I also tried uniting my various feeds, so at least whatever aggregator I'm using, I can get something reasonably close to what I want. I successfully imported my Radio mySubscriptions.opml file into FeedDemon and Bloglines. Now I just have to do this with NewsMonster, and I'll feel like I'm getting somewhere. One other Christmas/blogging related note: after reading Howard Rheingold's SmartMobs blog for several months, Jeanette bought me the book. As a longtime Rheingold fan (and former Electric Mind), I'm looking forward to reading it. Maybe it'll finally make me get a modern cellphone. 11:14:49 PM    comment []

On Christmas Day Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it; Happy Holidays to those who don't. In North America, especially, you don't have to be Christian to celebrate Christmas. In fact, the courts here have ruled that the celebration has become so secular, it doesn't violate church-state separation. Our minister at the First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee always notes that you don't have to believe in a supernatural god, virgin births and the like to mark the end of the year, and the darkness of this time around the winter solstice. Our celebration started early, as Jeanette and I grabbed a few final items for wrapping and/or consuming later. Some friends were visiting most of the afternoon. Then we went to the annual Christmas Eve service at the aforementioned First Church. It's a service that changes just-enough from year to year to make it interesting. Lots of carols, a candlelight Silent Night, and an offering split between the local food pantry and the Milwaukee InnerCity Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH), which fights for justice. In recent years, we have adopted a Mexican tradition of tamales on Christmas Eve. Not having the culinary skills ourselves, we make a pilgrimage to a terrific Mexican grocery and pick up two dozen hot husk-wrapped delicacies to take home. A terrific meal, with plenty of beer and munchies to fill all bellies. We served some excellent microbrews from Colorado and Wisconsin: Avery Celebration Ale from Boulder, a very tasty Estes Park stout, Berghoff Dark from the Huber Brewing Company in Monroe and the famed Leinenkugel Red (for the less adventurous) from Chippewa Falls. Jeanette read The night before Christmas to the grandkids, but we couldn't get them to bed early. So around 11 PM, we started wrapping presents--a task uncompleted till 1:30 AM. So when Hannah knocked on our door at 9 AM ("Santa came!!"), we were still a little groggy. But all was terrific, and the kids' excitement was palpable. It's just so much fun! Tonight, smoked ham and scalloped potatoes with our kids and the in-laws. Joy to the World! 5:17:48 PM    comment []