Month: October 2004

On RSS

I guess it is pretty much obvious by now that I like RSS a lot. Actually, some of you can go as far as say that I am absolutely crazy about it. And they won’t be too far from the truth you know…

I knew about RSS for some time now and was following the subject once in a while. But it was BlogLines.com that really opened my eyes. It has been only about a week since I have started to use the service, but it seems like ages. I already find it hard to believe that I could live without RSS. Just in this one week the number of sites that I can visit daily increased from 10 to 50. And I am using less time.

Before, I used to get annoyed if sites that I am visiting daily were not updated for days. I felt like I was losing a lot of time visiting it every day while nothing was changing. Now I don’t care how often the site updates. As soon as it does, I will know alsmost instantly. This does save a whole lot of time. Now I can visit more sites because I will be coming only when they update. On the other hand, I do get annoyed now if the site does not provide a feed.

And it is not only new articles that I can get update notifications about, but comments too. I started to comment on other people’s blogs not being afraid of forgetting the discussion. Most blog sites provide me with feeds to discussions that I participate in.

Yet another great feature of using RSS is that I can get the pure information now without being slowed down by a stupid web design or browser incompatibility. The majority of sites provide full articles/posts in RSS feeds. That means that I can configure my RSS aggrigator to look the way I want it to and it will show me the posts from all over the Internet the way I want to see them.

Does that seem like a lot to you? If not I can throw more. Take for example, search engines that index RSS feeds. These babies give out information that is minutes old in their search results, not days or months like all the others.

…and there is plenty more.

If I got you interested, check out these two articles: Three ways RSS can make your Web life better and “Using RSS to increase relevance and maximize freshness“. These should broaden your horizons.

On tea

I am not a great fan of tea. I used to drink it a lot back in Russia, but there everyone was doing it. In Cyprus, most of the year is so hot that I don’t even think about drinking anything warmer than a cold beer. On occasions when it happens I do drink coffee like most of the local people do.

The closest I came to tea for the last few month (if not years) is taking a sip from my wife’s ice tea can. But that’s a totally other drink. If I can remember well, the last few times I drank tea, it was the fast making, small packet stuff from Lipton or competitors.

Today I realized that I want some real tea, the one which is made of tea leaves, and needs some preparation. Luckily there still was some tea in the darkest corner of the kitchen closet. It took me less than 5 minutes to boil the cattle, warm-up the teapot, put a couple of tea spoons of tea in it, pour some hot water (not boiling though), close the teapot and cover it with a towel (I do have one even though I am not planning any travelling around the Universe.). I than had to wait for another 10 minutes and voula! Pour the tea into the mug (roughly 1/4th), fill the rest with hot water from the cattle and enjoy a cup with a piece of apple pie.

Now that is, ladies and gentlemen, what I call a pleasure!

P.S.: If you don’t happen to have apple pie, put a couple of teaspoons of sugar in your mug and mix well. You will enjoy it too. If you like to mix more stuff in your drink, than by all means add some milk. I prefer to stay out of these pervertish experiments though.

Blogs for Kids

I came across an interesting article – “Blogs for Kids“. Author suggests that bloggin is very useful for kids. It helps them to develop a number of skills, which are difficult to teach otherwise.

After thinking some time about this, I tend to agree. Typing, writing, and editing skills with better grammar and spelling are obvious, of course. That is if you can prove to your kid that these things matter, which can turn out to be more difficult after years of your own blogging in poor style.

Communications, I am sure, will develop as well as discipline. Familiarity with technology will increase too.

I think there might be some problematic areas with faith of the Internet though. Also, keeping the time spent in front of a computer in control will prove more difficult.

Maybe there is something else. What do you think?

Sniper

“Sniper” was on TV. I must have seen it a thousand times by now, but I watched it again. There is something about this film that makes me watch it once in a while. Maybe I just enjoy everything about snipers. Maybe because there are not so many films about snipers. Maybe because of something else.

Anyway, the film is good, although it is about 11 years old by now. There is action. There is coolness. And there are, of course, snipers. There are no naked women, but who needs them when you’ve got marines in the jungle?

I’ll rate this film as 7 out of 10. A whole lot of points go the flying bullet which looked pretty impressive back in the last centure. So impressive, that even Matrix-makers noticed it. ;)