Saturday, May 25, 2002

Sam Gentile has two Philip K. Dick books in his Must Have Science Fiction Classics. Excellent! I was in the bookstore the other day and I noticed a hardcover edition of the short story Minority Report and bought it even though I don't think I can read it in its unusual form factor. There were a handful of other PKD titles on the shelf as well. I've been shopping at that bookstore since I was a kid, and they rarely have any PKD titles. The new movie must be driving the bookstore's interest in these titles. As long as people buy and read his books, I'm happy. 1:39:04 PM

Jon Udell is amassing a list of personal RSS aggregators. I use Meerkat to aggregate news that I'm interested in, but every now and then, I like to check out the personal aggregators. My dream? An RSS aggregator that doubles as an NNTP server. That way, I can: use a Usenet newsreader to read my news take advantage of a scorefile mark items as read look up articles that have long since scrolled off annotate a story by replying to it as though it were a Usenet posting. (this last item could be useful for group-based discussions of stories that come in over an RSS feed). I have experimented with this briefly, but I didn't end up with anything I felt was production-quality. Still, if this interests you, see my rss-nntp project. 1:22:06 PM

John Lam: "This is a story of me successfully resisting my urge to repave whenever I run into a nasty problem." I can easily waste a whole day reinstalling the operating system, applications, and my home directory. John's essay suggests that the alternative is a different frame of mind. 12:48:02 PM