neurological dryer lint

the crappy thing about not being able to surf the web freely (as well as actually having things to do) at work is that i can't keep up on the sites i used to get to read every day. slashdot, engadget, boingboing, joystiq and autoblog used to be staples of my diet, and now it's only like once a week i can sit down after i get home from work and dig through the news, usually days behind, because most of those sites assume their readers hit them every day. so i'm stuck wading through seven or eight pages of material per site.

RSS readers have blown up (like dynamite sticks, according to biggie) but i haven't really found them useful. i prefer actually going to a site versus reading a series of text documents in a big aggregated list. i don't know. maybe i haven't found the right one yet.

podcasting is also getting bigger, but i didn't ever like the idea of auto-syncing my MP3 player. i manage the playlists on the old-school and the shuffle manually, cause i'm anal about it and itunes' music library feature is still too inconsistent to rely on.

today, though, i gave it a shot and grabbed a couple of podcasting apps. i tried the most popular, ipodder, and doppler. ipodder's interface was pretty weak, though, and it wasn't able to grab some streams. doppler works well, however, and the shuffle is perfect to throw a couple of the audio shows onto, so i'm sticking with it.

engadget's was basically a digest / discussion of the big stories of the week. i also grabbed leo laporte's, where he reunited some ex-screensavers crewmen. i just grabbed autoblog's too. this way i can get digests of the sites, from their authors, and listen to them at work (or on the way).

i may also just grab full RSS feeds and throw them on a thumbdrive at home, and bring them in. i guess that would work too.

geez. boingboing really hasn't had any new posts for a week? that's nuts.

welcome to the bengals, david pollack. looks like a great addition to the defensive team. funny - an espn anchor called us the 'sleeper team to be able to take down new england's dynasty'. that's cute. he obviously doesn't live here.

listening to: juvenile - sets go up