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I’m rebuilding my computer as one of my Christmas break projects, a long overdue cleaning of the system. And God bless Season Days!

A follow up to a long-ago post… The coolest symbol now has extended support from Microsoft. The interrobang (a combo of the question and exclamation marks) now has characters is many of the default fonts in Windows that use Unicode (Lucinda Sans, Arial, Palatino, etc..)

If only it would come into common usage. It needs to be included on cell phones for text messaging, or in IM clients.

Link

Do you ever watch a movie and sit there, staring at the credits, pretty sure that you missed something? And then, as you talk it over with the other people who watched it with you, you start to realize that none of them, intelligent as they are, caught that it. And then, as the conversation drifts out of discussions about camera angles and lighting, you realize, no, we all did not in fact miss something. It wasn’t there in the first place.

That’s Primer. Primer is one of those films that was shot so cheaply, you want to believe that there’s something meaningful there, something that made it drift onto your list of movies to see. But at it’s heart, Primer is the same story you’ve read about time travel and maintaining the purity of the flow of time, only so convoluted and devoid of direction, you have to fill in the gaps with made up story in order to have the movie make sense.

The clever part of the story is that one of the time travelers wakes the beast in all of us, the beast that realizes that by using the time machine, he can improve the present for himself. But the morality tale of what becomes of family, friends, and self gets lost in the self. The characters are simple until the last, when Aaron (played by the director, Shane Carruth), wings his way out of his life in the present to a world in which he is now prescient of that which will happen (thanks to an alluded-to trick of time travel). No regret, no thought about his wife and child, no connection to his friend Abe, the man who basically handed this new world over to Aaron. Abe is able to completely eschew all aspects of his past life and jump, happily, into a new existence. The complete disregard for any normal, human emotion is as ridiculous as the “science” that leads to the machine’s creation.

This movie, for all it’s appearances, is not Pi (that would be the other movie shot on under $10K that made it big). Pi had an engaging story, characters you hated or cared about, but at least felt something for, and acting. Primer is a study in misdirection and filmographic minimalism, but not entertaining or deep. It’s perfect fodder for the indie circuit, however, so get ready for lots of gushing from people who are pretty sure it means something, but can’t tell you what.

Adam Curry edits the podcast entry which, unfortunately, he has more than a passing interest in and gets crucified.

Jimmy Wales does the same thing and we’re cool with that?

Just so I know who to vilify.

For the record, I tend to fall on the side of argument that Tycho from Penny Arcade expressed recently; there are authorities. Believing otherwise is asinine.

What exactly do you have to eat to have this dream?

You’re trapped in a Mexican town (which you know because there are lots of Mexican people around) but it’s surrounded by corn. You also know that you have to kill a famous 40’s villian 8 times in different settings, since he has 8 lives, by sliding a knife between the 6th and 7th ribs.

Just wondering, because we’re never having it for dinner again.

It’s called Block M Records; mostly classical, and a little sparse right now. Something to watch, though.

Bloglines, my RSS aggregator of choice, will be going down today for around 6 hours (if all goes well) for a data center upgrade. The linked news post basically says that they are a victim of their own success, which is great news for them as a company.

However, I have to wonder why they are moving in the middle of the day? I work on a web application and the consideration to take down the app in the middle of the day just doesn’t even happen. How can a major service, owned by someone as big as Ask Jeeves, just shut down in the middle of a weekday?

I hope the move goes well, but come one Ask Jeeves, let’s act like you’ve worked online for a few years.

Bloglines | News

While it seems backwards, I’ve seen this work. On a recent trip, we flew a budget airline and they were turning planes over (deplaning and boarding the entire plane) in under 30 minutes, something I’ve never had on Northwest.

Link [via digg]

I have been a long time Bloglines user. I used to be a heavy RSS Bandit user. When the latest version of RSS Bandit came out, I saw they had added support to synch with Newsgator, a competitor to Bloglines.

Since I don’t really have any loyalty to Bloglines and I really liked using RSS Bandit on the desktop, this seemed like a great reason to once again give Newsgator a try (I had tried it a number of months ago).

I tried, I really did: I updated all my feeds in Newsgator and in RSS Bandit; I set up my account in RSS Bandit; I started my first synchronization. And…. nothing. After 2 hours I had to end the process manually. Bummer. Ok, maybe it’s a first try thing. Check the password, delete all the feeds from RSS Bandit, start the download. Error. Arg. I keep using Newsgator as my main web-based aggregator, getting used to the interface and digging in the settings.

So, I think to myself, self, it’s just a first day problem; the service is busy because lots of people are trying to do this. Something didn’t get configured right. I wait a day, uninstall RSS Bandit, clear out all the local setting on my machine, and reinstall. Same thing. Now I’m a little annoyed.

This morning, I went digging into my Bookmarks menu to find the link my Bloglines link. Why? I just like it better. Here’s why:

• Bloglines lets me mark all my feeds as read. Seems simple, right? You can’t do this in Newsgator. Have 3000 new posts? Too bad, get ready to click the Mark This Page Read link about 50 times.
• Both services allow me to sort by date, but only Bloglines sorts by source as well. If I open a newspaper view of all the feeds in a folder, Newsgator list them only by date. Bloglines first sorts them by source, then by date. This, to me, is the more logical way to present the data and mimics RSS Bandit.
• I know it’s bad design to some people, but I like having my feeds in a separate frame. When I scroll the newspaper view in Bloglines, the feed list stays visible in the left pane. Newsgator uses one page and the feed list scrolls off the top of the window as I scroll through the newspaper view.
• That said, I like the styling of the Newsgator interface much better. The fonts are a bit small, but scale. The colors and shading are attractive and well designed. One criticism for both services: let me choose a style. CSS is cheap, give us some choices.
• Bloglines lets me easily add feeds for tracking specialty items, such as UPS packages or weather; they put it right on the main page sometimes when I load my feeds. I could find an easy way to add these kinds of feeds in Newsgator.

Other than that, the services seem fairly similar. I do wish some of the desktop aggregators would integrate with both Bloglines and Newsgator, but I’m guessing that Newsgator has made it easier for developers to use their API as they’re the only service I see supported. Both RSS Bandit and FeedDemon have added or will add support for Newsgator; I haven’t seen any desktop aggregators doing the same with Bloglines. If I can get the synchronization to work, I’ll probably switch to Newsgator and learn to use it, but I’m wondering why I have to make that switch.

Get ready to update.

Firefox 1.5 also includes new support for Web standards, adding support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), JavaScript 1.6 and new versions of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Link