Distractions, reflections

David Ing, at large … Sometimes, my mind wanders

Wallowing in Atom 0.3 wars

I had previously written about getting onto RSS Bandit after giving up on Thunderbird, and then a little fancier configuration to (potentially) thread comments.

I’m now working my way through some issues on a thread in the RSS Bandit forum. More web searches turned up some writing by Dare Obasanjo on how end users may suffer as a result.

I see potential for recommending something like RSS Bandit (or another Windows-based feed reader) to help reduce e-mail in-baskets. Working ways through some of these details could be the difference between getting someone over “the hump” of a new technology, and having them get sufficiently frustrated that they’ll balk and make do with the ever-increasing e-mail backlog.

Sushi, American style – big!

I’m at the Disney Contemporary Resort. That’s one of three original hotels on nearest the Magic Kingdom. (It’s famous because the monorail runs through the middle of it.) The California Grill, on the 15th floor of the hotel, is supposed to be one of the better onsite restaurants. It has sushi on the menu, so I thought I would try it.

When I phoned earlier in the week, it sounded like this restaurant is pretty popular. Upon checking into the hotel, I asked the clerk, and she said that there’s a bar area that serves the full menu, and it’s usually not too full. I stopped by the downstairs entry at 7:15 p.m. and asked if I could go there, but they said that the bar area was already fully reserved. They phoned upstairs, and the sushi bar in front of the open kitchen was available, so I went up the elevator.

I ordered the sushi deluxe. I got to watch the sushi chef. This isn’t the Japanese style of sushi bar where the chef multi-tasks to serve multiple people, it’s a production line. After 10 minutes, the waiter brought me some crusty and chewy (Italian-style) bread, and some olive oil. Nice, but not exactly in line with traditional Japanese service.

My order came from another sushi around the corner. Nice presentation. Twelve pieces of sushi, half maki and half nigiri: tuna (red), salmon, and yellowtail. The nigiri was a generous cut. The maki was overly generous. I think each the maki was at least 1-1/2″ in diameter, and I really needed to eat each piece in two bites. This was messy, because the nori wouldn’t tear cleanly.

I asked for side order of seaweed salad — they had bowls of it around, used primarily for garnish — and the chef was nice enough to give me a large bowl of it. (It wasn’t on the menu).

Although the sushi looked good, I think that my son Eric has made better sushi at home. It was tough trying to figure out what was wrong. Behind the counter, I could see the chefs had large chunks of fish already cut up and wrapped towels. I then noticed that one sushi chef was making a dozen uncut maki cylinders, and put them down in the refrigerator. In the final analysis, I think that none of the fish was really special — there’s usually one type that better than another on any given night — the rice was on the cold side, and the nori wasn’t toasted crisply.

I seem to recall that sushi at the Teppanyaki Dining Room in the Japan pavilion at Epcot was good (last September), so the style at the California Grill must really reflect the American bent on cuisine.

To balance off dinner, I asked around where fresh fruit was available. They have it at the food court beside the video game hall, so I got a fresh taste of Florida. (At least I assume they’re Florida oranges!)

Economists need (more) math?

Eric has to pick his Grade 12 classes tomorrow, and was asking about various courses. (I’m really not a fan of business, economics and law classes, because they’re content that universities typically build from the ground up). Eric was planning on taking 8 classes and dropping two. The presumed minimum is English and one math class, then electives.

Just to make sure, I thought I’d check the admission requirements at U. of Toronto. Eric isn’t exactly sure what he’ll study, but he isn’t a math guy. He could end up in international relations, or economics or something along those lines. For the U. of T. faculty of arts and science, we found …

Minimum Admission Requirements

  • Ontario Secondary School Diploma
  • Six Grade 12 U/M courses, one of which must be English 4U
  • Grade 12 U/M courses for specific program of interest

Humanities and Social Sciences (including Economics)

  • Six Grade 12 U/M courses must include English 4U. Students applying to the Economics program must have Advanced Functions and Introductory Calculus, as well as either Geometry and Discrete Mathematics or Mathematics of Data Management.

That’s two Grade 12 math courses, not one. That’s a higher standard than the admission requirements at Queen’s University, UBC or McGill.

We’ve been encouraging Eric to keep up his math, because he’s pretty sure to need the first year university math course, to get into the requisite statistics class that comes in second year university.

I wonder how many high schools targeting arts programs will get surprised a year from now, when they’re writing their applications to the U. of Toronto.

Shanghai circa 1910-1920

On the stack of videotapes that I’ve had in backlog was Temptress Moon, a 1986 movie directed by Chen Kaige. (I had recorded it some time ago from TV Ontario, and was especially brain dead on Saturday, having stayed up from Friday night into the wee hours, finishing up a presentation at 5:30 a.m.)

I’m sure that many other people liked Gong Li and/or Leslie Cheung, but I was actually rather taken by the story. It starts with the children around 1911 (at the fall of the Qin emperor), and goes through the period of opium. Most of the movie takes place during the 1920s, with a sharp contrast between the village and Shanghai — which had western dress, modern buildings, telephone and streetcars.

In the movie, there’s a phrase something like “don’t you know what’s happened in the last ten years”? The opening of China must have been amazing. In addition to opium use, the movie also depicted prostitution and gangsters, so I’m probably just as happy to be now in middle class Canada.

This movie also reminds me that I really enjoyed The Last Emperor, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and released in 1987. I remember buying (probably in 1987 or 1988) and reading Twilight in the Forbidden City by Reginald Johnson. Pu Yi was the ruling emperor between 1908 and 1912, and non-ruling emperor between 1912 and 1924, so the times on these two movies overlap.

When I was in Shanghai in summer 2002, I visited the former residence of Dr. Sun Yat Sen — where he lived between 1918 and 1925. In touring the house, I was impressed on how modern it was, with electric lighting and indoor plumbing. I could have been quite comfortable, living there.

Since I’m not into doing more reading, I’m now trolling for other movies that happen in this period of Chinese history ….

RSS Bandit: Subscribing to blog entries with comments

I’m used to reading newsgroups, where the responses are threaded (i.e. appear underneath the main entry).

In RSS Bandit, this feature seems to be on the list for the next release. In the meantime, the solution appears to be twofold:

  • On (WordPress, at least) blogs, there’s two feeds: one for posted entries, and one for comments. This means two feeds per blog, for the ones in which I’m really interested.
  • There’s a UnconditionalCommentRss feature described in the RSS Bandit Forum, as well as under Bandit Help (under Advanced Topics … Advanced Configuration Topics … Supported Options …). This seems to work on WordPress blogs only (and not Blogspot or Xanga). This doesn’t appear to download all of the comments when the feed is refreshed, but only when selected.

This is a minor temporary shortcoming that I can live with. I’m getting to be a fan of RSS Bandit. One thing I’ve learned, though, is that it’s better to leave the history of entries “marked as read” rather than to delete them. (I guess I’ll worry about space considerations, later.)

Off Thunderbird RSS, onto RSS Bandit

I like the Mozilla community. I’ve moved over almost entirely to Firefox — particular, in thanks to IE View, a plug-in that allows me use Firefox for surfing, and then start up another window in IE when the page calls for it. For personal e-mail, I was a long time user of Eudora, but switched over to Thunderbird when it was released.

On my work e-mail on Lotus Notes client, I typically work up against the 3-month expiry deadline, with somewhere between 200 and 300 message in backlog. A lot of these are push e-mail, as subscriptions from magazines such as Business Week and Forbes. (I used to subscribe to the paper editions by mail, but my stack was so huge, I had to do something to simplify my life).

So, with Thunderbird v1.5 supporting RSS, I stopped my e-mail subscriptions . Unfortunately, as I started having problems with the RSS feeds stopping, the clock has been ticking. It’s not absolutely crucial to keep on top of everything, but there doesn’t seem to be much encouragement in terms of movement on Bugzilla. I’m sure they have their plate full.

So, I started search around again for another newsreader, … and ended up choosing RSS Bandit. There are a number of reasons for this:

  • Web newsreaders don’t cut it for me, because there’s the latency of waiting for pages to load. I’m trying to find way to speed things up, and I know I’ll get frustrated waiting for a page to load.
  • Of the Windows platform choices, RSS Bandit is an open source, sourceforge.net project. Although part of my motivation is open source philosophy, I’m also pragmatic in choosing packages that have a lot of activity. There’s some other alternatives that don’t seem to have much going on.
  • I had previously installed RSS Bandit when I was trying to find a route to manage blog feeds down onto my Palm TX. I did figure out how to get Bandit2Plucker working, but settled on Sunrise, instead. Still, I may have to revisit that choice sometime in the future.

I’ve already done some “weird” customization of RSS Bandit that I may not ever be able to do on Thunderbird. I’ve moved one of the menu bars (so that it’s easy to get to “next unread’ and “mark unread”) from the top of the page, to the right side. In addition, I’ve positioned the reading pane at the top, and list of headlines at the bottom, so my eye doesn’t have to move so much when I switch from reading one article to another. So far, it looks like subscribing to audio (i.e. podcasts) works, too.
I had complained that tabbed messaging would have been nice in Thunderbird, and it’s already a feature of RSS Bandit . RSS Bandit seems to be usable a browser by itself — I’m not sure how it does this, but pages look fine. On newsfeeds (e.g. Business Week), Thunderbird use to render a full web page, whereas RSS Bandit seems to focus on just the text. Is this because RSS Bandit has actually downloaded and cached the pages, whereas Thunderbird would just load the page dynamically?

The immediate crisis of dropped subscriptions is over, so I’ll have to see how I like RSS Bandit. One thing that bugs me is to have yet another application open on my desktop — Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, Sametime, AIM, MSN Messenger and Skype are just the beginning before I actually do any work! — but maybe that’s what the operating system is for.

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