November 2007 Archives

November, not the month, is an incredibly cute cat perplexed by exercise machinery. The power ballad
accompaniment just adds to the excitment as she's carried off the far end once again.

Great!

Now, as I said previously, this rate of updates just cannot keep going.

So, I've teamed up with Bloglines to give you a handy notifier - all without me having to do anything.

I realise that most people just do not get RSS, because it's one of those things that you never really hear about. But it is mightily handy for websites you visit that are either updated regularly or fairly rarely.

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

(Source)

RSS solves a problem for people who are online a lot by getting information from sites you're interested in and putting them in one handy place. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually, you don't need to share you email address with everyone under the sun by not needing to join each site's email newsletter and the number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly.

Now, you do need to have a feed reader normally that does all the work for you by gathering things together, but the reason for using Bloglines is that it's all done in Internet Explorer, or I assume any other browser you use. There's a small notifier program to download which pops up a descrete little information balloon whenever your feeds are updated. Very handy.

It would beunfair for me just to mention Bloglines though, so here are some others depending on your system:

• Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac)


• FeedReader (Windows)


• NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook)

There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers along with Bloglines.

Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available and in IE7, there is a button next to the home page one that lights up orange when a feed is available. Really, you have no excuse if you're a time short web user!

[some links and information via What Is RSS?]

Bloody mice.

As if it was trying to live up to the reputation for wacky japes set by cartoon mice, a non-cartoon mouse has been taunting an old man in America and stealing his dentures. 68-year-old Bill Exner, from Waterville in Maine, has been plagued by the mouse for some time now. Three times he has captured it, only for it to escape three times, like the A-Team. The third time he tried to incarcerate it, it not only escaped, but also ran off with his lower dentures.

The false teeth were eventually recovered after the family had to pull apart a section of the wall that had a small mouse hole in it. Exner said: 'We moved the bed, moved the dressers and the night stand and tore the closet apart. I said, “I knew that little stinker stole my teeth” - I just knew it.'

Now Exner's wife Shirley claims that the mouse is upping the level of psychological warfare against her husband. She says that the mouse will regularly emerge from its hiding place to stare out her husband. She commented: 'He's taunting him - I swear he's taunting him.'

The mouse was unavailable for comment.

You can't beat a nice bit of mouse thievery.

[via Metro.co.uk]

There's something slightly wonderful about this selection of spiral based photos.

Don't really know what it is or why. But, er, there you go.