IMS_Blog

It’s been a few days since Bloglines rolled out their latest updates (Bloglines has been my preferred solution for a couple of years now). In general they seem to have improved things to be a bit quicker and cleaner but there are a couple of things bothering me. The bar at the bottom of the left frame which appears when it updates the unread count I find unnecessary and distracting, especially when it simply states there were no new items (why tell me that?). And they’ve broken shift-A for read all (worse, clicking on read all also now brings up an annoying confirm box—while I appreciate that some people never mean to click that, I want a setting to turn the confirm off).

On what I think is an entirely unrelated note the Firefox alert extension is stuck thinking I have 4653 unread items, though I haven’t investigated that yet.

Google Reader has just been updated as well to have a much more Bloglines style interface. I’m becoming very tempted to give it another try (I really disliked it’s last incarnation). Now if I could send emails to it like I can bloglines…(maybe I can…and I can certainly envisage ways around…)

FeedBack Logically enough on writing this post I also sent Bloglines feedback through their online form. After the auto response I just got an actual acknowledgement, which is good to see. It didn’t say more than the comments are being passed on to the appropriate department but it’d be pretty surprising to get more. Hopefully someone might read them… On a (possibly) slightly more interesting note a look though referrer logs shows this very post was hit via something inside alpha.bloglines.com (that’s restricted access), which makes me wonder if someone inside Bloglines is having the sense to track posts tagged with the obvious keywords. You’d hope so.

I think I’ve solved my Winamp ignoring tag updates problem. It’s only taken another (actually quite useful) plugin, a bug which wasn’t the bug I thought, more bugs, and all afternoon an afternoon, an evening, a morning, some more afternoon. Read on for the epic journey, or skip to the solution if that’s all you want.

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We should have bought a defender. We should have bought a defender. It seems such an obvious mantra that it might barely be worth saying, except that it is such an important one that yet again seems to have been…

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I agree with pretty much every word. To be fair, at least Asa has called for comments. Well, these are my initial thoughts on Firefox Beta2’s theme (and a couple of other things)…

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Andorra. The only thing I associate with andorra is some sort of wool. They certainly came unravelled against England, which really wasn’t surprising. Did England learn anything from this game? No, but at least they’ve got some points. Andorra were, frankly, awful (for about 20 minutes in the first half I thought Hargreaves was simply politely asking for the ball back). Defoe showed why he should have been left with the world cup squad rather than some little kid, we showed strength in depth. Not much else to say.

I would just comment on this whole not putting the ball out for an injured player (“letting the referee decide). First it’s worthy of note that referees are not under any obligation to stop the game for anything other than a head injury, so “rely on the ref” has something of an empty feel to me. More fundamentally though it sheems a great shame to me that one of the most sporting attitudes in the professional game is being lost. Have we really nothing better to crack down on (the diving, the whinging to and arguing with refs, the waving of imaginary cards) than a sporting act which more or less spontaneously appeared amoung the jungle of professional money grabbing and give no quarter attitudes? There may be an argument that some players may abuse it by faining injury but surely they should be punished rather than simply stamping out the act itself? Is getting rid of something which is in essence essentially noble really the message we want to send to young supporters?

Oh, and Peter Crouch still looks like he’s performing river dance everytime he plays.

Er, Edit:Bah, I don’t even know that about Andorra do I. That’s Angora with the wool. Some might say that the whole wool thing only relates to my brain. Move along now, nothing to see here.

I’ve said it before…why are England playing the likes of Andorra at Old Trafford? Given Andorra’s entire population could fit in the stadium they’re hardly likely to bring a large travelling army of fans. With the success of England playing around the country (enforced by the continuing lack of Wembley) wasn’t this a good opportunity to go to somewhere different that maybe wouldn’t normally see the national team. At least then there might have been something of an atmosphere…

I quite like Winamp actually. It’s my player of choice on Windows, mainly because it helps me keep track of all the music, does video too, plays pretty much whatever I throw at it, updates my website (see the music panel on the blog front page) and isn’t iTunes. One of winamp’s best features is the media library which keeps track of songs, playlists and the like and has quite a powerful query language. The one thing the media library isn’t really good at (which you might argue it ought to be) is updating the ID3 tags on a bunch of files (it can just about be done for one but it’s painful for more). For working with tags I quite like mp3Tag. The problem is getting everything to play together exactly how I want.

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