I have been following J. Phil and Corvida on their quest to throttle the RSS feeder fire-hose a bit. I’d participate but I’m still starting from scratch: I’ve only been using an RSS reader for less than a month now and haven’t built my subscriptions up past 70 feeds yet.

That I’m not an RSS fiend would probably surprise some people I know. In general, I’m the source that a lot of my friends depend on to keep track of new technology and services on the web and I do a pretty good job, despite the fact that until recently I haven’t used a feed reader for more than 4 years.

How can any self-proclaimed geek and technophile possibly not be chained to a feed reader, you say? By burning myself out so well early on that I didn’t even have a partial interest in trying again. Back in 2004 I found Bloglines.com. It was exciting, cool, shiny, hip and kept me “in the know”. I subscribed to around 1K feeds within a few weeks in my enthusiasm. After a couple of months checking my feeds turned from fun to a major chore. Categorizing and labeling every feed and post to keep things organized (OCD, I know), “clearing” out each folder only to notice 10 more entries instantly pop up: I finally realized that it was completely stressing me out and quit the whole thing cold-turkey. I had associated the whole concept of RSS with that horrible overwhelming feeling and had no desire to use another reader again.

I couldn’t resist RSS entirely, though, and during my reader hiatus I subscribed to about 10 feeds (off and on) through an RSS to email service called R|Mail, which is now in the deadpool. When I realized it had died, I started using SimplyHeadlines.com instead, a service that emails you a daily summary of the feeds you subscribe to with it. The comforting bite-sized chunks of information, easily scannable in a few minutes a day made me feel like I was still informed, but, as a geek, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed that I didn’t use a reader.

Toluu is what got me interested in readers again. Since I signed up I have been discovering interesting new sites by browsing what other people are subscribing to. I like the idea of having a “home” for my list of feeds (OPML) as well. I started out importing my feeds from SimplyHeadlines, but the Toluu bookmarklet for GoogleReader kept calling me. I was pretty apprehensive when I first imported my OPML into GoogleReader but so far it’s been a good experience. To keep from getting bogged down again I force myself to ignore the folders and tagging and just scroll through new items. Starring things to come back to and sharing things I want to discuss on FriendFeed is quick and painless. GoogleReader is actually working well for me and that’s a relief. I feel some of my geek cred is now restored. I’ve dipped my toes back into the RSS ocean and I haven’t drowned yet. I’m not sure I will let myself subscribe to more than 100 feeds though: I’m still afraid of the overload.

So since I can’t really participate in the RSS Reset project, I thought I would at least list some of the feeds that I am subscribed to and am enjoying now:

Favorites for Web 2.0:

• Museum of Modern Betas *
• TechCrunch *

Favorites for Photoshop / Graphic Design:

• Smashing Magazine
• BittBox

Favorites for Web Development:

• Web Developers Depot
• Ajaxian
• John Resig

Favorite for Life:

• Lifehacker
• Unclutterer

Favorites for lolz and hmmms:

• Lolcats
• Billy Poobah Lives
• XKCD
• Indexed

* always subscribed to these even during my reader-less days.

I’m glad that Toluu pushed me back over to the not-quite-as-dark-as-I-remember-it side! I’m looking forward to seeing what gems J. Phil and Corvida unearth in their experiment. If anyone has any suggestions for things I might like in the categories above, please leave me a comment!

Yesterday a friend of mine coined a new term that will be one of my favorite words for a while. I was doing some testing of a functional area of the website we’re working on and found some unexpected behavior that at first I thought was a bug but on more thought, and realizing that it had some benefits, determined it might actually be a feature that we just didn’t document very well for the user.

I IMed my friend who’s managing the project and explained my thoughts…

Friend: interesting… what’s the cross between a bug and a feature? beature? fugture?
Lindsay: heh.
Lindsay: I like fugture
Lindsay: or fug for short
Lindsay: beature is too much like beautiful… and a fugture is anything but beautiful!!

So it’s all Fugtures now, baby!

New terminology can make old problems into their own solutions! Instead of spending hours working out the fixes for the mile long list of change requests you inherited with maintaining someone else’s old code, just tell the client that it’s fine the way it is…call it Fugture-Rich!

Too bad it doesn’t really work that way… oh well, back to searching for some more fugs to squash.

Yay!

Update: We’re at break so I got to go pick up my prize: two Griffin iPod products. PowerJolt, a cigarette lighter car charger and an iTrip for the iPod mini. So now I have to go get a mini I guess! We just got the iPod Video for Christmas. Always an excuse to spend more money .

I discovered Scott Karp’s blog today and the Top 10 List he created to evaluate yourself and discover whether you’re a geek or not…

Well, I definitely qualify if that’s the total criteria, but I think there are levels of geekness. Scott’s quiz defines the entry level. Here’s a quiz for the next rung of “You might just be a geek if…”

1. You have ever installed an open source blogging framework on a server and then proceeded to customize themes and write plugins for it
2. You have written a custom RSS aggregator and integrated it into your website projects and/or blog
3. You have arguments about what Web 2.0 is and what it isn’t with your friends. Bonus points if you argue with your non-techie family about it anyway.
4. You have ever stayed up past midnight playing with coding your new todo list with expandable priority sections just to say that “yeah, I can do AJAX”
5. You have ever done a happy dance when someone on your “A-list” blog roll left a comment on one of your blog posts, your digged article hit the front page, or your blog post got listed on del.icio.us/popular
6. You have 10 or more links in your del.icio.us archive that have the tag “daily” or “infodiscovery” (or eqivalent).
7. You have attempted to sell your attention data on eBay (ok, I haven’t done this one, but it’s an idea!)
8. You have made a podcast
9. You subscribe to RSS feeds that alert you to brand new beta sites and sign up for every beta you can. Bonus points if you try to contact the developers to discuss enhancements!
10. You were ever picked on by your tech-savvy friends for being a geek

Admittedly, two of these I haven’t done, so I’ll say if you score an 8, you’re at least as geeky as me and that’s pretty dang geeky. I’ll leave the next tier list to someone else!!

I have been wondering about something lately and I thought I’d see if anyone else has some insight to offer. This weekend I bought some clothes at the mall and I was asked to show my driver’s license. That in itself isn’t odd, since some stores ask for that as a policy, and sometimes clerks just ask for it when they don’t think the signature on your credit card is legible. This time the clerk actually did a double take… she looked at my picture, then looked at my license and then at the picture again for a minute before shrugging and handing it back to me. And that didn’t suprise me… but what did is the fact that she didn’t say anything after all.

About a year and a half ago I reached a significant, life-changing personal milestone: I stepped on on the scale and weighed 95lbs less than I had almost 2 years before that day. I lost all that weight faithfully following the Atkins diet and during the process watched the surprised expressions on the faces of family, friends and acquaintances that hadn’t seen me in a while when they didn’t recognize me and suddenly realized who I was. I look like a completely different person.

Judge for yourself:

Driver’s License pic	Recent similar pic

Knowing that I am the same person in both those pictures, you can definitely see the resemblance, but if your responsibility was making sure that a person is who they say they are, wouldn’t you at least question it if you were presented with my license? Especially if you were an airport security agent in the U.S. with our perpetual state of “Orange Alert” because everyone is a potential terrorist?

So, why is it that I have been through several airports and many financial transactions where I’ve been asked to show my license but never once been asked whether I was really the person in the picture? Am I (and other people I know) deluded into thinking that I look significantly different now? Is it simply a race thing, not questioning because I’m a white female? Do I look particularly trustworthy? Could it possibly be people trying to avoid embarrassing me (I can’t imagine that!)? Or is it that no one pays attention to ID pictures after all? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking to be interrogated every time I show my license. I’m just curious as to why no one has ever asked…

If you’re wondering why I haven’t updated my license, mainly it’s because I’m lazy. I’ve been waiting for it to become more of a hassle to not change it than to wait at the DMV for 3 hours and stand in 5 or more lines to get it fixed. But since no one has ever bothered me about it, it’s not yet worth the pain. Besides, I figure if there is anywhere where I will encounter trouble proving that I’m really who I say I am, the DMV will be the place.

I learned several lessons this weekend starting with this one: be careful what you Digg. If it becomes popular, you’re going to piss off a lot of people, possibly even the owner of the site you were trying to promote!

I like looking at Digg because I usually find some pretty awesome things there. My understanding of the purpose of the site is to be a community that allows you expose interesting things you “dig up” on the web to an audience who might also find them interesting. I haven’t played with it as much as TAD, and I have never had a lot of success (digg count) with things that I have submitted myself. Until a few days ago.

I was looking at del.icio.us/popular and there was a link to a site that had a video of some very freaky magnetic fluid moving sculpture art. I thought: “Woah, that’s cool! I wonder if that’s on Digg??”.

I searched and didn’t find a match. I considered posting something about the video on my blog and submitting my post to Digg so that I might get some traffic off of it, but decided not to because I’ve seen so many horribly critical (to the point of abusive) comments on submissions that other people have made about how evil blogs are for “exploiting” Digg to bring traffic to their own sites by “stealing” the content from others. So I submitted the link as I found it. The whole process took about 5 to 10 minutes without a lot of deliberation on my part, and I figured, like most things I submitted, I’d be lucky to get more than 20 diggs of people who shared my fascination. I was very wrong.

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I was looking at a new beta search engine called Browsr that had some potentially interesting features for creating your own private and sharable directories of links. You have to create an account to see what those features would do, so I started filling in the info and then dutifully read the Terms of Service.

I have friends that laugh at me for doing that but I don’t sign up for anything online until I’ve read the ToS, and many sites I’ve ended up declining joining because of the evilness that I find embedded in that document. I’ve even been known to go so far as emailing the site support asking for clarification of points in the terms if I’m still interested in joining the service. About half the time I actually get satisfactory responses, and I also have written documentation to fall back on just in case.

But back to Browsr. There are some evil conditions listed in their ToS unfortunately, so I will not be joining their membership. Browsr is a link aggregator, a collaborative filter, a bookmarking service… it points to things, but it has this in it’s terms:
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Pete on Mashable.com reviewed a site today called EgoSurf. It’s a popularity meter that you can enter your name or aliases and sites that you associate with and get a reading in “egopoints”.

I thought I’d give it a try…

Well, my ego is apparently very small. Fortunately, I’m an introvert so I don’t need a lot of external validation (that’s what I can tell myself, yeah).

I only got 1108 points for this new blog. I suppose that’s not too bad considering it’s only existed for 3 weeks.

I got 4095 for my old not-updated-for-more-than-a-year personal blog.

Running the alias I use just about everywhere with del.icio.us, flickr, and a few other sites as the site got me 2966 points.

I guess it’s better than my Technorati Rank: 1,063,755!

Oh well, not everyone can be popular, I guess. I have better things to do than worry about my popularity on the internet, like slinking off in my corner and singing the worm song to myself!!

I probably shouldn’t be so entertained by this but I am. I was deliciousing and saw a post with the title Doogate and couldn’t resist clicking on it. Doogate is a search engine with a Googly feel. Clicking on the About link to see what’s different about it provided me with a good chuckle:

The search engine is on the Internet one of most important applications, user can find the information in the vast Internet information which the user needs, deeply user’s affection.

Obviously the site must not originally be in English, though no where does it say what country it’s actually from.

This transliterated gem was toward the middle of the page:

Doogate pay great attention to the user the use contact surface.
Doogate designed the search result, lets the user use human nature design contact surface. The user glances over the search result no longer is looks from side or left, that really too tired cross-eye clear vision said doogate let you look to front and smooth. Doogate search to let your search conveniently, is more comfortable!

For some reason the idea of the UI as a “contact surface” appeals to me and I think that will be my new buzzword for a while. I will also take inspiration from Doogate and work hard from now on to design projects to avoid the bane of user experience: “that really too tired cross-eye clear vision”!

It’s now 2006 and there are mere hours left in my vacation. I’ve accomplished about 50% of the things I had planned to do. I suppose that’s better nothing. To be honest, my full TODO list is so long it’d take me most of 2006 to finish anyway, even if I didn’t have to go back to work.

My biggest accomplishment over the holidays was getting this blog set up. I am getting close to happy with my layout, having made about 1000 changes to the theme I started with (one reason I’ve been a bum about posting over the last few days).

These past two weeks I’ve had a crash course in figuring out WordPress and PHP and I think it’s starting to pay off. I might even start working on some themes to give back to the WP community in a while and figure out how to make my own plugins.

Working with PHP is like a flashback to my pre-.Net ASP days with the in-line scripting and lack of strongly typed variables. I’m not really sure why many people prefer it over the nice, clean, code-behind, pre-compiled ASP.Net. I guess it must just be an anti-Microsoft thing, but maybe someone can enlighten me if I’ve missed something. I still vastly prefer ASP.Net for my general web programming needs but it’s always good to learn a new language, if, for no other reason, just to be able to talk intelligently with the “guys in the other camp”. In any case, it’s what Wordpress is built on so I’ll have to learn it to be competant under the hood of my blog.

So I guess it’s back to the daily grind tomorrow. It will actually be nice to get back into normal routines again. Let’s hope I can implement one of my top resolutions this year: “Write something useful in my blog every day!”.

Happy 2006!

Here’s a couple of movie clips that I took this week.

This one is of flock of birds in Tempe at Mill Avenue. We like to go there every now and then to have dinner or meet friends (it’s central to where we all live). About half an hour or so before sunset the birds come from all over to congregate in the trees that line the street. It’s quite a spectacle for the eyes and ears.

You’ll have to pardon Avynn’s commentary. He’s been into WW2 airforce history lately so that’s what was on his mind.

The other clip is one of my cockatoo, Kaelin singing and dominating our poor shi-tzu. It’s sad when a prey animal has the upper hand on the predator!

Well, the grand Christmas 2005 hunt for an XBox 360 is finally over and I am victorious. The prey is sitting on the bench in my hall. And it will soon be in the hands of some happy local family via Ebay. Why would I give it up? Well, TAD got one too and after what I’ve gone through to get one of these things I’m going to thoroughly enjoy the small profit we’ll be making on it.

For the last 2 weeks I have learned a very important lesson: Unless you enjoy whining, pouting, begging, driving all over town, depending on the mercy of disgruntled minimum-wage store personnel and standing in lines in the cold for significant amounts of time, never tell your tech-geek husband about the XBox 360 that you won in the company raffle until you can physically hand it to him. Sometimes blessings start out as curses!!

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Well, here we go. My blog breathes and says “Hello, World”. The world sighs and rolls its eyes. Does it need another blog? Probably not. But do I care? The answer is obvious.

My goals for Macro Linz are to occasionally post something that might be useful or at least interesting to people with my interests and educate or at least entertain myself in the process. Tutorials, code snippets, commentary on interesting developments in the evolution of the internet, geeky stuff in general, absurdity and paradoxes are all things you’ll find here eventually. As well as probably a few rants and raves. We’ll see how it goes.

Assuming that anyone will actually read this post, then I’ll go ahead and say that things are going to be in flux for a while while I learn how to use WordPress, PHP, WordPress themeing, and decide what, if any, ads I should I use and generally get back into the blogging groove.

So I guess that’s the first post down. Stay Tuned!