Month: June 2006

Bloglines is way too slow today. For hours and hours now it only updates one feed at a time out of my 200+ feeds. I thought that it was a slow Sunday, with people going to the beaches, but when I checked out some of the most frequently updated sources, I saw that it isn’t the case. There are news out there that Bloglines isn’t picking up.

I wonder why though. Sundays are usually slower in blogosphere, and today isn’t any exception. There is less to fetch and parse, and Bloglines can’t keep up with it. It’s probably catching up with all those missed articles from the last weeks. Or reorganizing something. Will we see the Bloglines Plumber one of these days again?

Please, Bloglines, just update my feeds before I accidentally give you some more bad PR.

One of my greatest wishes of all times is for my wife to blog. She’s smart and she often has something interesting to say. And we see world just a little bit different. Talking is good, but we don’t cover all those interesting differences – there isn’t enough time or mood or something else.

I’ve been pushing her to blog for some time now, but she just isn’t interested. There was a minor spike of interest on her behalf, when I started Maxim’s blog. I still hope that she will contribute. Maybe later some day. She started with making a few pictures of Maxim with her mobile phone, and taping a few scenes with her new camcorder. There’s no regularity in either of those though.

I wish, I wish.

I’ll be spending most of today in house cleaning mode. There are two reasons for this. One is that it’s getting difficult to move around the house with all the trash everywhere. Plus all the smells and stinks. The second reason is that my mother is coming today. She is flying from Moscow to Larnaca in the evening, and there is no way I can let her into this mess. Boy do I have a lot of work in front of me!

On the good side though, I can listen to all the podcasts that I’ve been downloading. And that’s about 2 GBytes of audio, most of which is speech. There’s enough content out there for a planet cleaning event, I guess.

Anyway, I won’t be posting much today.

Update: I figured, if I am that much of a blogger, why don’t I just post the updates of progress on the web. So, here it goes. One and a half hour later, I’ve just finished with the dishes. That means, I got rid of 90% of biological weapons and 60% of stinky smells. I am tired, sweaty, and proud. Those damn dishes were depressing me for the last couple of weeks or so. Now they are all gone clean.

Update: 35 minutes later, I’ve picked up all Maxim’s toys and put them in one of the two toy storage cubes that we have. While doing the toys (I just love the expression), I also threw out all large pieces of garbage from the floor and other surfaces. Now I can move on to washing floors – the most difficult part, and the one I hate the most. I guess I need a short break.

Update: I called the airport, and found out that the flight arrives at 18:55. With one hour for the road to the airport, and half an hour for the shower, that leaves me with two hours for washing the floors. Enough, but not that much. I should get going…

I am rediscovering the podcasting world as I write this. Although I’ve been listening to a couple of podcasts for the last nine month or so, and even produced three episodes of my own podcast, I just realized that I am a total newbie to podcasting.

You see, most of my podcasting experience was around Adam Curry‘s show Daily Source Code. Adam Curry is a bit name in the podcasting world, so I just had to listen to what he is doing. I then made a couple of attempts to listen to other people, but I didn’t push myself enough to study the diversity of podcasting.

As a result, my view of good podcasting was something along the lines of: a 40 minutes to an hour show, daily or almost daily, a mix of speech and music, a couple of sound effects, audio comments from the listeners. You get the idea.

How stupid of me! With all the variety of topics and formats, how did I ever arrived to that view?

Anyway, I am happy to report that that has been changed. I am downloading about ten podcasts at this very moment. Some are about technology, others are about photography, one or two about productivity, and a couple of music ones too.

Obviously, not all of them fit my previous view of a good podcast. Some are as short as three minutes, speech only. Others are longer than four hours, full of music. Some don’t have large enough audience to get the audio feedback. Others, just don’t include it in the shows.

And while we are on the topic, I have to say that I ditched amaroK. It’s a beautiful piece of software, but it just doesn’t fit my habbits. I don’t need most of the bells and whistles of it, and what I really need is a simplier interface. Plus, amaroK doesn’t work too well with podcasts just yet. It never downloads them itself, although I have the program running all the time. It needs a kick in the butt to actually go out there and grab new content. That’ll probably get fixed in the upcoming versions, but I just don’t care.

For now, I’ll be using BPConf, which is a simple KDE interface for bashpodder. Content-wise, I’ve found a lot of good shows at Podcast.net podcast directory. I’ll post my favourite ones, when the dust of choice will settle.

And with all these changes, who knows – maybe I will start podcasting again…