We had a very frustrating evening trying to be good A's fans. For a 7:05 game, we didn't leave the office until 7 p.m. (long story), and tried to listen to the game up North 880 only to come back late from commercial and have missed Frank Thomas' home run... the only run the A's would score in the game. We eventually made it to the park just as the bottom of the 5th was ending in time to see Jason Kendall popping up. An hour later, we were all done, and the A's lost 2-1, on a two-run bomb, despite starter Kirk Saarloos pitching well. I spent more time in the car than at the game.

What made it worse? We were surrounded by people who didn't pay attention to the game and thought they were paid by the word. One woman was so adept at making noise that a guy bought her an ice cream cone and said maybe that would shut her up. It didn't work.

Grrrrrrrr...
Listening to ''Ping Pong'', by Stereolab (Play Count: 7)

Living on the bleeding edge can be fun, so long as you don't mind all the blood.

It's a long-standing tradition to download new software right when it comes out - and version 1.0 can be very exciting, especially if you've anticipated it for some time. But with 1.0 software, it's fairly common to see things crash and burn, or the new features you were expecting to be so "cool" might actually not work after all.

The best example of this was when I moved from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X Public Beta. I can even tell you the date - March 24, 2001. I was at home, working to launch my new company's Web site, when a knock at the door, on a Saturday, delivered me the very, very beta copy of Mac OS X 10.0. It was all I could do to finish my Web projects before obliterating all my files, and I had to be diligent enough to back things up to an external drive or Zip files... just in case. As it was, I still installed the OS that evening, and was tinkering with its Aquaness, even though I no longer could play DVDs, I didn't have anything that really was a "Finder", and it seemed the most-robust app was the included Chess program. But I did it anyway. In fact, I think I payed $29.95 for the privilege to beta-test Apple's new OS. Five years later, it's pretty clear they had a pretty good thing going, but I've gotten a tad more conservative in my old age, and don't know if I'd do it the same way again.

Speaking of which, the software I use to power this blog, RapidWeaver from Real Mac Software, is turning the big 3.5 tomorrow, up from its current iteration of 3.2.1, which has been in use since we relaunched in January. If you peruse the software developer's forum site, you can see the massive anticipation this release has brought. Everyone wants their grubby hands on it now - so they can mess with new themes, Permalinks and automatic Technorati pings, to name a few things. But the more I read, the more I see how the company is warning people it is "beta" software, and it could go kablooey. I'll definitely be doing a backup of everything from 3.2.1 at the very least before we go crazy. But if you expect me to sit around while everyone else gets to muck around with the new version, you'd be way off. Now I just have to stop visiting the page and refreshing to see if the software's been posted yet!

Listening to ''Spinal Column'', by Stereolab (Play Count: 6)

At this point, nothing really, truly, surprises me anymore about Bush and his cronies. But I don't think any of us could have foreseen the rampant overturning of civil liberties made possible through the Patriot Act, and the unsanctioned and probably unconstitutional NSA wiretaps, first for foreign calls and now domestically.

Today we learn that the FBI, teamed up with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would like to demand ISPs keep two years of Internet data online, at the very least. Their reasoning? The same as always. It could "aid investigations into terrorism" and pornography to boot - not that pornography itself is illegal, but it can be if you're twisted enough about it.

As with all of Bush's other mandates, no outline is given as to how this will be paid for. I don't expect that Congress is going to "gift" the technology providers with the required software and hardware, and massive amounts of storage necessary to store everything for two years, beyond that they already archive today. They're just supposed to get it done - in the same way businesses have had to react to Sarbanes-Oxley to avoid running against new federal regulations that demand data be archived.

The question is - where does it end? We thought it ended with the government looking into what books you got at the library. Then we thought it ended with them looking into calls to suspicious countries. Now we learn that the US may be one of those countries, as domestic calls are monitored. Now, our Web history and postings are to be stored. Are we going to go completely "1984", and talk to our leaders through the television set and be forced to think happy thoughts? That doesn't sound like the "land of the free and the home of the brave" to me.

Listening to ''Metronomic Underground'', by Stereolab (Play Count: 3)

Just like any other self-respecting techie, I'm subscribed to dozens of RSS feeds - from technology and sports news sites, to popular blogs, and Google news alerts on a whole host of keywords, for both personal and work use. One of the first tasks each morning after opening up the laptop is to click on NetNewsWire and scroll through the night's news until I'm caught up.

However, even with this diligence, by the time I get to the office and log in, there are dozens more new stories that have popped up on RSS. I've synchronized my work and home computers through NewsGator, meaning I don't have to read the same stories twice, but it doesn't mean I have the luxury of sitting back while the world revolves around me. In fact, just in the time it took to write these two paragraphs, a simple refresh picked up 27 new articles for perusal, boosting the 89 new items at the time of the below screenshot to a more robust 116.


NetNewsWire In Action

The benefits of RSS are obvious - instead of looking for news and information, it comes to me. Combined with alerts from Google News, I can track for news coverage on my company and the competition - instantly, always staying a step ahead of colleagues, the PR firm, and others not utilizing the services. Even better, the latest edition of NetNewsWire now lets users click and view the stories inside the application, instead of opening up to a new Web browser. I'd say I now read a significant percentage of my browsed articles within NetNewsWire instead of Safari now, and that number is ever-increasing, as the sites I regularly visit are supplanted through their feeds.

But I think I may just have reached the level where I don't want to add much more. If I do add regularly-updated feeds, I give some thought as to removing others that offer high quantity, but not high quality. (I'm looking at you, InformationWeek and News.com!) If you're not at this stage yet, give NetNewsWire a spin. And if you're on a PC instead of a Mac, NewsGator also offers FeedDemon, which is probably good, but not nearly as fun. You should just get a Mac anyway.

Listening to ''Columbia'', by Paul Van Dyk (Play Count: 3)