My morning ritual used to be, 1) make coffee, 2) go grab my laptop and 3) watch The Screensavers on TIVO. The Screensavers was a show on TechTV that was just chock full of good information to keep me current in technology. Unfortunately, Comcast bought TechTV and immediately fired everyone, and then told them they would have to 1) submit their resume, and 2) move from San Francisco to LA. That’s a sure fire recipe for losing everyone, and it worked. The two greatest things about The Screensavers were the two hosts: Leo and Patrick. I continued watching “The new screensavers” but it was so bad I deleted the Tivo season pass in disgust.
So now what to do to stay current? For me it’s the following: Step 1 and 2 from above, and step 3) has necessarily multiplied:
Check Slashdot headlines. (I use Winbar for Slashdot.)Listen to GeekNewsCentral Podcast (I use iPodder to grab podcasts like a TIVO and listen to later.)Listen to Leo Laporte’s PodcastListen to Adam Curry’s Podcast
Thanks to the above sources of information, I’ve been playing with lot’s of new web toys these days. The latest being Pubsub (Thanks GeekNewsCentral.) Pubsub will take any set of keywords from you and generate an RSS feed for those keywords so you can see blog postings that address the things you are interested in, right after they are written! Why didn’t I think of that!? So if you have an RSS reader, you can be informed within minutes when a new entry from the blog-o-sphere is talking about your interests.
Speaking of RSS Readers, I just purchased Newsgator. This RSS reader imports my favorite blogs into Outlook. So it’s as easy as ever to get my John Strain fix! Since Outlook is my email client of choice thanks to it’s bundled calendar, contacts and tasks, it’s great to get my blogs going into it as well.
Today, I switched from Mozilla to Firefox, mainly because I wanted the Pubsub toolbar. So now, when I’m surfing, Pubsub “hits” will show up in my browser. Very cool.
Apropos nothing, I was surfing around Paul Graham’s website who had a link to the Political Compass which, after filling out the questionnaire, gives you a 2 degree of freedom benchmark of your political views. I was very pleased to see that, of all the famous/infamous people, I was closest to Milton Friedman. In fact, he was the only person in that quadrant (right/libertarian)! Yippee.
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