ScottK's Alter-blog

Originally, this was meant to be a reply to a post on Lockergnome.com which, from what I remember, went along the lines of "Welcome to Amerika" and had the gist of moaning about how protestors are mistreated and the "The Man" steps on "our freedoms". If the thread surfaces amongst the 15 or so RSS feeds I monitor with STILL my favorite, OS agnostic RSS Aggregator - Snakr - then I'll post the instigating thread. This is my reply...

There's a massive difference between the kind of protests that went on in Thomas Jefferson's America and the violent, mean-spirited "protests" carried out by the Leftist, Neo-Socialist cretins whom actually have a pretty good life.

Let's face the hard truths; 70% of the "protestors" these days are anti-government because the government keeps them from getting high every day, having sex in public, and putting people in the position of actually having to get a JOB to pay for housing, food, and the good things in life. The other 30% are just rabble-rousers and will look for any excuse to try to emulate the "Ultra-Violence" they saw in "A Clockwork Orange" in their local town.

Why do you never see the Right-wing, Republican conservatives protesting at Democratic Party conventions the same way that the Left-wing, neo-socialist Liberals? Because your average Republican and/or conservative thinks that getting high is stupid, unproductive and a waste of time, wants sex to be kept in the bedroom (where it belongs) and enjoys making a living at their JOB to pay for a nice home, good food and the nicer things in life. I love following these protests where I live - and when I'm close-by where they're having their freak-fest and I hear their "No More War" chant, I counter-chant with "Get A JOB, GET A LIFE!" - the effect always elicits laughter from the bystanders.

If these people have so much spare time and energy, how about helping to feed the homeless, or volunteering at the local Food Bank? Do something constructive instead of belly-aching about how "The Government" does this or that to them. Give donations to organizations like WorldVision to help feed children and keep them out of poverty. Volunteer at your Church. Give, instead of taking.

The last time I checked, "The Government" hasn't jailed Michael Moore, Randi Rhodes is still on the air, Sen. Obama is still in the race for the White House, regardless of his "self-annointing" as the creator of "Change" for this nation, still dodging questions that are in American's minds about his ability to actually DO something. Has he laid-out ANY kind of plan for ANY of the problems facing this nation? Nary a one!

--S

Over the years, people have either seen and/or been curious as to what software I've been using for the array of projects I have been working on, as well as the software I use on a daily basis. A lot of this has been generated by a screen capture program I used to use a year or two ago to post screenshots of what I was doing at any given time - SC Webcam 3: it performs a full screen capture and then posts it to my web site via a regular FTP connection.

What I've decided to do is to make posts to this blog (with the requisite echo-blog at the Blogger page) on a daily basis (which is what I really need to be doing), with each post highlighting at least one of the bits of software that I used regularly. So, with no further adieu...the first review!

RSS Aggregator: Snakr

I have been looking for and using several different RSS Aggregators since before RSS Feeds began to be so popular (yes, I know that I need to tighten-up on my own blog's RSS-ability, but "Real Life" trumps most everything), and I've used some that have been awesome, some that have been awesome and then imploded, and some that just never worked as well as they could have. Most recently, I've been using a nice ticker-tape RSS Aggregator called Particls. I had excellent results with this program (screenshots) up until they began working on their v2 release - which, for me, apparently killed the program due to changes on their back-end server. I haven't been able to re-install older versions due to what appears to be some differences between the bits being used in the Particls 0.9.2258.0 Build using .Net Framework 2.0 and the Particls 0.9.2375.0 Build using the .Net Framework 3.0. - which I can not find anywhere on my LAN.

After trying what appeared to be some fairly good RSS Aggregators, I happened along Snakr. This is, IMHO an absolutely awesome RSS Aggregator. It runs smoothly (even on a very busy system like mine), it's fairly easy to add RSS feeds for it, including importing & exporting OPML, and it supports multiple monitors. It's built upon Adobe Flex 3 and Adobe AIR, so it's fairly OS-agnostic; there is an Alpha release of Linux AIR, but there are some UI problems with transparency & scrolling jitter that should go away by the time it hits Beta.

One of the things that drew me to Snakr is that when I dock it to the bottom of my screen in Windows Vista, it's exactly (well, within a pixel or 2) the same height as my auto-hidden taskbar. It's minimally intrusive, the items scrolled stop when clicked on and then show a bubble-view of the selected item. Some sites like Lockergnome do their RSS feed creation so that if I select it from the scrolling list, I get the entire referred page - it will only take a moment or three, so I can deal with that

I'm not giving up on Particls yet, so we'll have to see how their v2 launch goes.

--S

Folks, I never thought that I'd ever be posting such a message to my blogs...but the other shoe, for me, has proverbially dropped. On Valentine's Day, Chris posted something to his site that, for me at least, has re-defined the term "turncoat".

Here's why:

Chris started his adventure with Longhorn Vista at the same time I did - by signing-up as beta testers at the WinHEC 2005 Conference, when we both were thanked by Microsoft for being vocal supporters of the 64-bit Windows push. There were times that I was in direct agreement on specific issues with Windows Vista and when I was in direct opposition to his comments; however, it seems that Chris has "Switched" over to the Apple Macintosh camp.

For those of you out there that know me or have read my blog postings, you'll know that I've been called a "Microsoft FanBoy" on occasion; that is somewhat true, only because of my long association with Microsoft on a variety of products over the years. In reality, I'm mostly "OS Agnostic", believing that whatever works for you, works for you. I have Windows, Sun, and Mac systems here, so I don't play favorites; however, when I see someone that I have great respect for make inane comments it really makes me re-think about that level of respect.

On Chris' site, he posts "50 Reasons to switch from Windows to OS X". After reading what he posted, I have come away with the distinct feeling that his post is nothing more than someone's attempt at fawning over products to get some sort of recognition; If you don't see what I'm talking about, read the article and you'll see what appears to me (and others as well) to be some well-placed product plugs for Mac software.

After reading Chris' post, please go to John Obeto's post on his blog - it's an excellent rebuttal to Chris' Apple love-fest. As far as my comments go, here are a few things that Chris has interestingly left-out:

• OS X "Finder" causes data loss when moving files.
• Graphics artifacts on screens that immediately lead to the system "freezing" (see this and other OS X Leopard problems on Apple's own forums! Go to Apple Discussions, enter "Freeze Hang Lock" and use the "Mac OS X v.10.5 Leopard" Category)
• Apple routinely purges or locks discussion threads on their own forums when those threads post negative comments about Apple or their software. (google "Is it me, or is Leopard just a mess?", and see what comes up!)

For more info from people who seem to be agreeing with me go check out this entry on tomsguide.com and John Oberto's post on AbsoluteVista

And, Chris: don't take this the wrong way, but my respect for you has dropped slightly.

--S

As many of you know, I regularly record TV content via Windows Vista Media Center and one of the vid-chunks I regularly record is The University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Colloquium Series broadcast provided by UWTV (University of Washington Television - you can also watch nearly all of the content on UWTV via the Interweb at http://www.uwtv.org). The most recent episode I viewed was titled "20 Questions for Startup Success", presented by former Macromedia President Norm Meyrowitz and founder of NKM Advisors - a company that advises new technology-focused business startups.

In his presentation, he mentioned an interesting site that I'm having tons of fun drilling-down into - The Museum of Modern Betas. MoMB is a site dedicated to showing-off a multitude of tech startup companies, many of them focusing on Web 2.0 frameworks and concepts. In the next couple of days I'll actually take a look at some of the startups featured on MoMB and showcase what I believe are the ones that actually have a good idea and good execution, and some of those that, in my humble opinion, just fall off the map.

--S