I tried various different ways to express this thought on twitter, but 140 characters just wouldn’t do it. So instead I’ll expand a bit and vent as part of a proper blog post. I don’t make enough of those anyway.

I am firmly addicted to RSS feeds. This despite my assertion when they first came out that they weren’t useful to the end users of a website. They say the ability to change your mind is a mark of intelligence… right?

I currently subscribe to 66 feeds in google reader. On an average day this amounts to about 150 to 200 items that come through GR. I skim over quite a few and take my time reading the ones I like. This is a very manageable arrangement that take occupies about an hour of my day.

Then there are days like today in which just about every blog on the internet with any leaning toward technology has posted basically the same stories about iTunes, iPods, TC50, and/or Demo. As a result I’ll probably have sifted through about 500 feed items by the time the day is over.

What I want it some basic filtering built into to Google Reader. I am a big fan of the app in all other ways but the lack of filtering may actually end up being a deal breaker. I blame Apple… or at least the echo chamber that surrounds it. My desire for a GR filter started with the iPhone, grew to a serious annoyance with iPhone2, and has come to a head with iTunes8.

I know there are options out there. There’s a Greasemonkey scripts to add filters to Google Reader, but I have no desire to have Grease Monkey installed. There’s also yahoo pipes, but Yahoo’s been shutting a lot of stuff down lately and it would mean running every feed through Yahoo before I add it to GR which is less than ideal.

Now taking bets on when my desire for a filter starts to out-weigh my lazyness to the point where I switch to another RSS reader.

That was what, 4 characters more than 140?

Failure? I say no… because I said so.

I made it 55 hours without using the internet for anything personal. Then I got bored. Then I discovered some things. First I discovered that we’re going to Portland this weekend and a long drive means needing podcasts. My “Buzz Out Loud only” rule thusly had to be abolished. Secondly I learned that Spore came out yesterday and not Sunday as I had thought. This means my preorder should arrive at some point today and I’ll be damned if I’m going to wait.

Therefore I must fall back on the theorem of 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2. Two+ days without internet plus 2 very good reasons to use the internet equals 5 days without internet. Success!

I actual have more reasons, but that makes my theorem more complicated. They include the season premier of Bones being available on Hulu, Friday company lunches with usually involve a fair amount of non-work related youtube, a need to brush up on my Perl skills, a largely empty DVR, and boredom. Oh the boredom.

Things I learned while not online: Aside from TV being far more insipid than I remember the last time I spent a fair amount of time devoting all my attention to it… not much. I played with the cat more than usual, which is good, and I finished (mostly) sorting all our CDs away space saving wallets.

Bonnie noticed this when we were watching Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog last night. Here’s a picture of Neil Patrick Harris as Dr Horrible.

And this is a photo from my 2007 Halloween cosume.

These are a creap pair of welding goggles that Bonnie found on eBay and I modified for my cyberpunk costume. I painted mine differently than they did and I added to optics from a very old digital camera. I also added the LEDs which blinked. Still if you look closely they are very similar.

I think I’ve about had it with Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It’s a sad day when my windows box is more stable than my linux laptop. I also made the mistake of upgrading my work machine from Gutsy Gibbon to HH last week and I’ve been regretting it ever since. Three times today alone I had Nautilus crash on me without the ability to restart it. When I’d kill the existing Nautilus process a new one would start automatically and crash until I rebooted the box. Reboots like that are unacceptable to me on a linux machine.

I’ve been playing with Ubuntu since the Warty Warthog days and this is the first upgrade that has not been a significant improvement. That makes me want to not give up on Ubuntu completely and instead downgrade back to Gutsy until the issues get worked out. Then there’s the bandwagon part of me that wants to jump on the the PCLINUXOS bandwagon.

Tomorrow after work I’m going to install PCLINUXOS on my home laptop and if things go well I’ll consider putting it on my work machine too. PCLOS has it’s .roots in Mandrake… aka Redhat, but it’s a full fledge distro in its own right now and it uses APT. I can work with anything so long as I have APT.

Thanks to Hayden Simons for the photo

It never ceases to surprise me just how hard it is to find decent PHP developers in Eugene, Or. I never intended to make a career out of PHP, I learned the language on a whim because I was tired of having to treat all my scripts as CGI as must be done with Perl on the web. Now I not only code PHP for a living but I spend part of my time looking for people with PHP skills.

My company is looking to fill 2 positions, Palo Alto has at least one open, EngineWorks recently moved to Portland in part for a better employee base, and I know at least one other company is looking too. I never would have thought that PHP would be the big in demand skill I would have. Glad I have that biology degree to fall back on.