Archive for the 'quibble' Category

What do you do for Christmas?

Published on 19 November 2007 in grump, quibble and Christmas. 8 Comments

It’s five weeks to Christmas, or 36 more sleeps, as Meg at Dipping into the Blogpond puts it.

Like Meg it’s the present-giving that I find most stressful. Every year I find that I dislike the whole present-giving rigmarole more and more. Between my two families there are some 40 - 50 presents to be given (more or less depending on whether we buy gifts for ‘couples’ or individuals), and it just degenerates every year into an exercise in comparative list-making (comparative in the sense that I keep a tally of what I gave people in 2005 or 2006 so that I don’t give them the same thing. It’s so meaningful!).

Some might argue that I should just plan my Christmas shopping better, start earlier, even. My riposte to that is that I work fulltime, and 40 - 50 presents is a lot of shopping. If I was to plan it well in advance, it would mean that I would be spending quite a lot of my year shopping for these gifts, and making sure people are crossed off that infernal list. I dunno, the whole exercise utterly takes the joy out of giving for me.

I don’t know what the solution is, really. Last year we made gingerbread and cookies instead of giving people things, which was a nice idea, but at that time of year there’s just so much food around I don’t know if edible gifts really make much of an impression. Also, some of my family members now have to watch what they eat, so a sugary/ high fat/gluten-laden gift isn’t really the best thing to be giving them.

Let me stress here that I don’t begrudge children (say under the age of 15 or so) their pressies, but for everyone else? Although I do sometimes wonder what sort of message we’re giving children when all it becomes is a gimme gimme gimme session. (And I haven’t even mentioned the cost of all these presents!)

I’d rather just spend Christmas with people, and not worry about the presents. I really enjoy the get-togethers and catching up with people.

Am I just being churlish? What do you do for Christmas? Do you find it as painful as I do?

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.