Archive for January, 2007

Do I buy it?

Published on 17 January 2007 in waste, navel-gazing, renungan, toys and world. 6 Comments

I’m really relieved that we’ve sold our house. It didn’t take that long, I suppose, given that we only put it on the market in October ‘06.

Once settlement’s taken place we’ll have more money than we’ve ever had before - at least for the split nanosecond before the bank takes its share. We will have a bit left that we can use to do things like buy a new fridge (ours is twenty years old and sounding very rattly) and a barbecue, to complement the nice outdoor area we have in our back yard.

We’ve also promised ourselves each a bit of money to play with (read: indulge ourselves). I am really looking forward to this. The only thing that remains a constant on this wish list is the Pelikan M450 Tortoise fountain pen that I have wanted coveted ever since I saw it. I don’t think it is even available in Australia so it is going to be a bit of a challenge importing it from overseas… The other challenge is going to be resisting the temptation to buy a few other pens so that I make the most of the shipping costs. Actually, I probably won’t be able to, given that the pen costs a bit (ranging from US$380 to US$450, depending who I get it from). Must investigate.

I don’t know what else I’ll do with the money, yet. We finally saw An Inconvenient Truth on Monday evening, which has given me a lot to think about, especially about Being A [Mindless] Consumer. Reading Dave Pollard’s response to the announcement of the Apple phone was also good. It’s too easy to forget about all the hidden costs of all those Bright Shiny Toys.

Taronga Zoo

Published on 16 January 2007 in zoo and Sydney. 4 Comments
While in Sydney we visited the Taronga Zoo.

A view of the elephants from the zoo cable car.

Shed snakeskin.

Lioness drinking. This reminded me of a particular cat.

We spent about three hours at the zoo, but I only took nine photos. Most of the time I was too busy looking at things to remember to take pictures. The silverback gorilla (leader of the zoo’s troop of gorillas) was awesome and had the most amazing expression on his face. I would have felt rude to point the camera in his face while he gazed at us humans. I’m sure it’s just me.

More on Google Reader

Published on 15 January 2007 in quibble, RSS readers, blogs and experiment. 5 Comments

Despite saying that I would be using both Bloglines and Google Reader because Bloglines seemed to be slow (and for the sake of comparison), I’ve actually been using Google Reader exclusively for the last few weeks. It was too much work to use two readers to read the same feeds, and I thought I’d just give Google Reader a go for a while and see how it went. I can report that I have been quite pleased with its performance, and at this point, see no reason to go back to Bloglines.

The only (minor) quibble I have with Google Reader is that any text a blogger may present in a light colour, like yellow, for instance, is faithfully reproduced in the reader, but with a white background, making it rather difficult to read the text in question. Of course, on the original blog, such lightly coloured text is usually displayed on a dark background and is quite clear. One of my favourite litblogs, Bibliobibuli, illustrates this problem.

This is the blog as it appears in Google Reader. The red arrows point to the ‘problem’ text.

And here is the original blog - all quite readable, of course.

(And should you want to read the post the screenshots depict, do! It’s here.)

The same post, as it appears in Bloglines, is also quite readable.

Hopefully Google fixes this sometime soon.

Yesterday I noted a nice feature: the personalised Trends that Google Reader generates of your feed reading habits.

The screenshot shows my Top 10 Reading Trends for the last thirty days.

It looks like Global Voices Online and Scobleizer are the blogs with the most posts that I look at most regularly. Third in the list is Kathryn’s blog!

The percentage of read posts for some feeds would probably be higher if I hadn’t had a week off last week (i.e. I would normally have read all of those feeds).

Other blogs that are in the Top Forty:
food pornographer, JadedLotus, Walt at Random, Mooiness, Random Acts of Reality, RobandWend’s Ramblings, Terra Nova, Pegasus Librarian, Rambling Librarian, Orange Crate Art, Moment to Moment, languagehat…

Screenshots in this post created by Snapper, one of my favourite Firefox addons.

Addendum: I didn’t add a link to the Trends page because it won’t work for you unless you are a Google Reader user. If you’d like to read more about the personalised trends, take a look at “I like big charts and I cannot lie”, from the official Google Reader blog.