Mando.org

Straw has been good to me so far, but it has some warts. The feed parsing sometimes gets flaky (mostly seen as double or triple instances of the same story), and the UI leaves quite a bit to be desired.

I was never able to get a hold of the devs (although I could have tried harder),so I’ve been keeping my eyes open for an alternative news reader. Jeremy Zawodny pointed his readers over to Bloglines, so I decided to give it a try. And I’m totally sold.

Granted, it’s a web-based aggregator, but it does everything I need and more. It’s supa-sweet, and if you’re looking for a new sort of aggregator, I highly recommend it. It’s so choice.

Lord God, lift me up and out of myself, out of the shark-infested waters of my self-opinion and into the greater ocean of Life.

Let me stop trying to be perfect.

Lift my thoughts from the closed loop of ME, from the painful awareness of my own shortcomings, from selfishness.

Let me be a disciple of Christ, not of myself.

Amen. Let it be so.

*Shamelessly stolen from Correction

Or, rather, InfoCom games. Play Zork via IM.

Totally sweet.

_rac-on-teur_

*n.*

> One who tells stories and anecdotes with skill and wit.

That’s what I want to be . I’ve got the stories and anecdotes part down, I
just need to work on the skill and wit part.

My good friend Brandon Salinas is out in LA and he’s looking for writing or game designing gig. He’s great at both, so if you (and by you, I mean the royal You) or anyone you know is looking, you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone better.

His contact info is at http://www.bpsalinas.com.

So I’ve got a wiki up for the book club. For some good info on what a wiki is, why we’re using it, etc., check out Oddmuse.

This is the wiki engine we’re using.

I was talking with my most excellent friend Mark last night, just catching up and what not, when our conversation turned to books. He mentioned that he was almost finished with Snow Crash and was looking for something else to read. I told him that I hadn’t read anything worth recommending in recent months.

Upon lamenting this sad state of affairs, the M&M Book Club was born (until we find a better name, M&M is it).

Since I’m in lovely TX and Mark is in God-forsaken CA, we’re gonna do this remote style. Maybe a Wiki is called for…

So we’ll need a book to start with. I’m thinking maybe one of these:

• Books I’ve always wanted to read:
  • On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
  • The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. I hear Foucault’s Pendulum is good as well.
  • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
  • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
  • Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• Religious books I’ve always meant to read:
  • Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton.
  • The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis.

“Knock Knock, Daddy!”
“Who’s there?”
“Apple!”
“Apple who?”
“ME! HAHAHAHAHAH! That’s funny, right Daddy?”

Substitute “Apple!” with banana, ice cream, and Cheeto and you have our dinner conversation last night at Chuy’s. The funniest part is that it actually got funnier and funnier as the night went on .

Break My Gentoo has an ebuild of Gnome 2.6.0 Beta 1. It’s built, installed and running on my work machine.

I haven’t noticed any real difference other than memory usage (which is down), but if you’re already running Gnome 2.5, there’s no reason NOT to upgrade.

Does ANYONE know of a good news aggregator for linux? I’ve been so spoiled by NetNewsWire.

The closest thing I’ve found is Straw, but it’s not really the same thing. It’s usable, but there are so many things that I would like for it to have…

I’ve signed up for the mailing list in the hopes of contributing, but I haven’t gotten any mails yet. If I don’t get one in the next day or so I think I’ll try my hand at writing my own. Anyone want to help?