July 2007

After a few days of tinkering around*, I’ve finally got the blog burned with Feedburner, the resource for feeds and syndications. To be honest, I only recently got on the RSS bandwagon. For the longest time, I wasn’t very interested in aggregating feeds: I didn’t feel like visiting a handful of sites regularly every day wasn’t so much of a hassle that I needed to subscribe using an aggregator. I also just liked seeing the sights of the web, so to speak, and check out the individual flavors of unique homepages.

RSS is kind of laden with this aura of geeky mystery, that they are too technical for the regular person to use - that’s probably one of the reasons why feed aggregators have not quite gone mainstream. Feeds are starting to show up everywhere though, and without you really knowing it: iGoogle with easy gadgets is an obvious one but even something like Facebook operates almost entirely on the concept of feeds (remember the uproar about the introduction of mini-feeds months ago? Probably not - they’ve become such a natural part of the platform and user experience now.)

I’m slowly coming around to it, though. I’ve personalized my iGoogle page to include feed gadgets of various news sources and blogs. I recently downloaded Google Reader when they announced that feeds could now be read while offline, which is super for my hour-long shuttle commutes to and from work when the shuttle wireless is busted.

Feedburner looks like it has some very robust and flexible offerings for the blogger. I’m not so sure that my little website here is even valuable enough to burn, nevermind subscribe to but hey, it’s here. The little orange chicklet up at the top of the page awaits you!

* by the way, the days of tinkering had nothing to do with the difficulty of setting it up - the set up was totally fast and painless. It was just me being lazy.

Monday night, Sam and I were having dinner at Hyde Street Bistro near our apartment, a cute little place serving traditional French bistro fare. We finished placing our order with the waiter when a party of two sat down at a table near us. The woman was accompanied by an older Asian man with an unfortunate hairstyle, a terrible combover attempting to cover up his obviously balding head. After having a quiet laugh over the man’s unfortunate hairstyle, Sam and I went back to our own conversation.

A little while later in the night, we heard the combover man speaking animatedly with the waiter.

Combover Man: “I asked for my scallops to be cooked with no salt and no butter, just grilled.”
Waiter: “Yes, they are”
Combover Man:”Well, that may be the case but then you’ve gone and put all this sauce over it, which defeats the purpose of no salt no butter.”

The waiter kindly offered to have the cook prepare a dish of just plain scallops and the situation was defused. What I want to know is: what kind of person goes to eat French food when they are looking to avoid salt and butter??? Mr. No Fun, that’s who.

It’s hard to put in words what makes a city a “city.” Is it the population? Diversity? Density? Culture? Monocle Magazine makes a great observation in their piece City Slickers:

the measure of a city is more about everyday wonders - pavements, well-designed schools, punctual transport - rather than one-off grand projects.

In support of their assertion, they offer 25 urban elements that make a city. Includes bike lockers, trams, well-designed apartments, urban landscaping, convenience store, street clocks, perfect parks, and street seating.

From the desk of Martin Lukes, to his ex-wife upon learning that she had joined the board of a rival company:

FROM: MLukes.MBE@a-bglobal.com on 02/07/07
TO: Jenny.Withers@hotmail.com
SUBJECT: what a turn up!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi Jens - Did I ever share with you my take on non-execs? They’re like bidets - no one knows what they’re for, but they add a touch of class!!! …

Lucy Kellaway pens a weekly fictional column at the Financial Times that follows the hapless Martin Lukes, an incompetent and completely oblivious executive at a-b global. The weekly installments are in the form of emails that he sends and posts to his company blog. He is the cringe-inducingly hilarious in his egomaniacal splendor. Some of his recent exploits: he was awarded the honor of MBE and demanded that all his stationary, business cards, and email signature include the MBE title, while at the same time getting rid of all printers and paper in the office to help a-b global “go green”; he thinks he’s in on the company’s plan to be bought out by a private equity group but is confused when they are having meetings behind his back; he’s about to marry an motivational office singer and expense the wedding. He is my favorite part of the Thursday paper.

It’s a fun read that is unfortunately not very available on the FT website (try a site search for Martin Lukes and some non-gate protected entries will come up). See, who says that business papers have to be all numbers and dullness?