Symphonious

It's really worth subscribing to "kazem's"
cartoon feed for some quality geek laughs.  Occasionally he turns into a bit of a Sun shill (he does
work for Sun) but mostly it's just general laughs from a (software) bug's life.  Fortunately
there's now a happy little orange icon linking to the RSS feed - it took me ages to find it originally as it
was in no way linked (it's here for the record).

Ugo Cei commented on the new technorati
interface and while I think it's an improvement over their previous attempt, it still needs work.
 Searches work consistently now, but it's still way too hard to find the RSS feed for the search and
there appears to be a few bugs which prevent you from getting access to one at all for some searches.

Oh well, looks like I'll be using the Feedster integration with NetNewsWire
for a while longer.  I did send them some feedback which hopefully made sense, I'm not really sure how
to accurately describe the problems I was having with finding feeds.

While this site is graciously hosted by Iain I'm in the process of
developing another site (non-blog) and the more I think it through the more likely it is that it's going to
drive a not insignificant amount of traffic and I definitely want it to be snappy all the time (as opposed to
slowing down when Iain decides to download too much at once).  At the same time I keep playing with
different technologies from J2EE to Ruby on Rails to custom perl apps and whatever else, so being able to set up
whatever I want is a pretty big bonus.  Sounds like a virtual server might just be the best bet but I
really don't want to spend much money.

Anyone got suggestions for cheap virtual hosting providers that are still of reasonable quality?
 Australian based is a bonus but not required.  The best looking one I've found so far is EApps though I really haven't looked around much.

Hey I stopped short of saying this is why I hate marketers…

How many more Microsoft sites will open
without RSS? Sigh.

Sigh, Microsoft
opens another cool but lame site. Cool cause it's for digital photographers. Lame cause it doesn't
have an RSS feed. After Gnomedex these kinds of lame sites will look even lamer! When will Microsoft's
marketing departments get the memo? EVERY site MUST have RSS from now on. Got it? No? Pay attention to Dean
Hachamovitch's keynote at Gnomedex, OK? He runs the IE team.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Gee, anyone would think Scoble was trying to drop hints that the IE team are announcing something to do with RSS
at Gnomedex.  For all Scoble's talk of how blogs are a conversation that let you see more transparently
into an organization he sure spends a lot of time massaging his posts to fit the marketing message he wants to
push.  It's probably too harsh to say it's deceptive advertising because that normally means the
message they're delivering is deceptive, rather than just the way they deliver it.  I just get really
annoyed when companies try to play the friendly, upfront, honest card while they've marked the deck and have
carefully selected which cards to keep up their sleeve.

Wouldn't it have just been easier to put out a post that says "Hey, listen out for a cool message from
the IE team on RSS in the Gnomedex keynote"?  I've tried to resist joining the crowds of people
criticizing Scoble for just being a Microsoft shill but it's getting harder and harder as each post seems to
reach new levels of "I'm towing the company line but pretending not to".

And don't even get me started about the "conversation" Scoble's having with his son which just
so neatly advertises Microsoft's music initiatives and tries to steer people away from using the iPod.
 No mention of what his son's looking for in a music player, just a torrent of reasons the iPod is crap.
 Maybe it is for his son, but maybe it's not - there are good and bad points to all MP3 players and in a
lot of cases the iPod family has the best fit for the requirements and not just because it's cool.
 Heck, the prime requirement for most tweens is coolness.  Couldn't let that
interfere with the marketing message though could we?  Oops, I got started.