Cheery Vitriol

Ok, I give up. I’ve switched to Google Reader. I dislike web-based RSS readers in general, the primary reason being that they show items that I’ve already read. But the newer Ajax-based readers work a lot more like desktop readers, with the added benefit of being accessible from anywhere.

I was using NewsGator. I like that it plugs into Outlook and was better than the other Outlook options, plus it had a slick web reader version. But the Outlook integration was very poor at work; it may be due to our internet connection or might be Newsgator’s fault, but it was rarely able to update during the day. So since I found myself going to the web viewer most of the time anyway, I cancelled my paid account.

But yesterday even the web viewer started acting strangely. I went a day and a half with no updates, and that never happens. I have a few rarely-updated feeds, but Yahoo News, Eschaton, Slashdot, and a few others update a lot, and there was nothing in the list.

I’d played with Google Reader, and it’s good but wasn’t as usable as NewsGator. But they did a big update last month, and kicked it up several notches. It now allows you to mark a whole feed as read, updates periodically (no need to click Refresh), and has a ton of keyboard shortcuts. And I’m sure there’s plenty of momentum behind it, being Google and all, so it’ll only get better.

electoral-vote.com is currently predicting 226 Democrats, 205 Republicans, and 4 Ties for the House. This is the widest margin I’ve seen, and with any luck it’ll widen even more in the next few weeks. It would be great to take back both the Senate and the House, but personally I’ll settle for just the House.

The House can impeach, and has subpoena power and will finally hold the corrupt republicans accountable. Of course not much else will get done in Washington for the next two years, but we’re used to that - nothing much productive has been done in a long time.

Just installed Google Maps for the Treo. It’s pretty cool - basically the same UI as the web version, with one difference being that it doesn’t overlay maps and satellite. But it does support satellite view, and traffic too.

The direction UI is a little weird, but it’s a hard form factor to work in. There doesn’t appear to be a way to just list all the steps; instead there are back/next buttons to cycle through the steps.

This is very convenient for me because I use Yahoo Maps for driving directions, but they’re migrating to their new version. It’s Flash-based, so it doesn’t work on the Treo; the old version is still active, but if they drop support for the HTML version I’ll need a replacement, and it looks like Google has come to the rescue.

They do have a funny hint though - “Don’t operate while driving”. Yeah, right