Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

You know when something has arrived when the comment spammers start adding sites related to the new technology, device or drug. Today I was disappointed to see that Podcasting now falls into that list. I won't honor the scum with a link to his site, but basicly the guy was selling a Podcasting Howto document for $5.00. I have no qualms with this guy selling his report. And I have no problems with him advertising, but come on, at least post your lame advercomment where it makes sense. I don't believe I have ever mentioned Podcasting here before. Instead of plastering your lame advercomment on everyone of my posts that vaguely mentions blogging, why don't you seek out people asking questions or having problems with PodCasting. Then you can gently offer your payware document as a solution to their problems. To me that sounds like a far better way to build sales and build a better rapport with the community as a whole. If you piss off the community as a whole, they are going to turn that Google juice against you and you will find your humble paper get trashed, all because you couldn't target your comments very well.

Nick Spencer's blog covers the plans for fountain square. I like most of the plans but not all of them. I really do like the idea of reclaiming or repurposing the Westin lobby for resturants. The Kinko's and FastSign (on the NE corner of the square) do seem like thriving businesses but it not like those things need a street level presence to succeed. They are much like the post office in that they are all provide support infrastructure for other businesses. Businesses will still find them and seek them out if they move locations.

I am ambivilent about moving the fountain to the center of the square. Prehaps if I saw some renderings or 3-D diagrams of what is proposed I might be swayed, but I am happy with it where it is and couldn't imagine what the expense of moving the fountain would be.

I don't like the idea of getting rid of the skywalk. For someone who has worked downtown for the last 6 years, the skywalk's shelter from the rain has always been nice for my group of friends when we are headed to lunch or the post office. I'd say keep it.

I also have reservations of axing the performance stage alltogether. I think some kind of permenant stage should exist since so many civic groups do things on the square during the summer (although admittedly these "events" are usually lackluster). What I would support is making a smaller, less intrusive stage. Right now its a hulking ugly structure. I think it could be redone a way that is a bit more subtle.

Lastly, I share his concerns about funding for these iniatives. Money is so tight now and there are lots of other things I would like to see done like the parking garages between Great American Ballpark and the Freedom Center.

I've written about GooglME before, but today was my first live test drive of its interaction with Froogle. It was very cool to be in a store Christmas shopping and have the power of Froogle at my fingertips to check prices. It will definitely be something I'll be doing more of in the future and GooglME makes it that much easier to use.

I'm very late here with these but here are my Thanksgiving pictures for this year. It was great to see all the relatives again. The food was really good as usual. In particular my Aunt's Polenta and stuffing was excellent. I have a call out to get the recipes which I will post as soon as I receive them. Also, it was another chance to have my my mother's homemade coconut cream pie. Its the best in the world by far. I really should post the recipe for that as well.

As usual, there are more pictures available.

While I was back at home for Thanksgiving, I had my first chance to see the after effects of all the water dumped on the Upper Ohio Valley by Hurricane Ivan and the other hurricanes of this past year. The photo doesn't really do its justice since my extended family has been working on this house for months now, cleaning out mud and ripping out damaged cabinets, carpet and goods. In this particular picture, the back wall used to have a counter top. It was submerged under water an mud for over a day so it had to go. They also tell me that there was so much water that the fridge was floating. That just boggles the mind.

I have one more pic in the gallery and the Intelligencer has an flood photo gallery.

Barb had everyone over for the grand opening of her new basement bar. For those of you who saw it when it was a bare concrete floor with cement block walls, you will understand why I am impressed. Barb and her family did a great job on the place and the homemade bar itself is very handsome and sturdy. Sorry no actual pics of it because there were way too many people in attendance for me to get a good shot.

In any case, you know the drill, more pictures are available in the gallery.

Cincinnati.com now has RSS feeds. There is an RSS button on each story within the Cincinnati.com and Cincinnati Enquirier sites. Its a nice first start, but there is some flaws in their implmentation. They are:

1.) Lack of a RSS link on the home and category pages of the site. For example, the dining feed should be linked directly from the Dining Section of the site.

2.) Lack of RSS Auto-Discovery Tags. This would make using smart RSS tools that will find the feeds for you. The tool I use, LiveLines , eases subscribing to a feed in Bloglines.

3.) The feeds should be named better. I'll use the dining feed as example again. Its url is http://news.enquirer.com/feeds/rss06.xml Would it have killed them to name the feed dining.xml rather than rss06.xml? I know the metadata in the feed will self-identify it as the Cincinnati.com Dining feed, but giving good names to URLs is a simple way of increasing usability.

4.) Links to RSS feeds not on the Cincy Post, WCPO and Cin Weekly story pages. Since these sites are all linked together and share content with Cincinnati.com, they should all get the RSS treatment.

I will end on a postive. It is nice to see that Cincinnati.com has given people abrief into to RSS, links to aggregators and easy to use My Yahoo! Subscription buttons. That's a nice way to ease people into the great world of RSS.

(via Nick Spencer)

I've always found Jython to be rather neat and always look forward to coming across more situations where I could use it in my work. That is why I was very pleased that Tim Bray organized a Sun summit on Dynamic Languages and Java. The broad list of attendees coupled with all the topics is definitely a boon for Java as well as the dynamic languages.

To me this is one of the coolest things that Tim Bray has done since joining Sun. Its really a testament to what bringing in fresh blood into an organization, letting them try out some historically unorthadox ideas and actually support his efforts can do. I applaud Sun for this and hope more good things like this happen.

I've just gotten word, that a guy I used to work with is making his Comedy Central debut tonight. Josh Sneed worked along side me at P&G and spent his nights doing stand up. When he was only playing in town, I used to go a lot of shows and definitely knew how to bring the funny. I always knew that he would be successful because he had a real passion for comedy and is relentless in promoting his career. He'll be on Premium Blend tonight at 10 and the show will be replayed tomorrow, the 11th at 8pm. All times EST. I've got the DVR all setup and can't wait.

PHP/SWF Charts is an easy way to add Flash charts to a web site. Most of the Flash out on the web is way over the top but this seems restrained and very reasonable. Just looking through their gallery of chart examples shows that it looks like you can produce some very pretty charts. I'm going to look into using this on My Weight Loss page.

This is a few weeks late, but the great PVR Blog has a very nice review of Beyond TV. It is a PC based DVR system that I would like to add to my office/exercise room to supplement the ReplayTV in the living room. It looks like a great product and the price seems very low. I think this will be a great addition to the Msacolino household.

Here is another item that is late coming but is a good read if you are confused by all the new terminology used in the high end television market. Slate has a very long and detailed article on top tvs. Besides going through all the types of technology used, they give you the best examples of products in each space. Its also the largest number of sidebars that I have ever seen in one Slate article.

Just got through reading the a very entertaining Washington Post story on Metro board members rarely using the Metro (for those that haven't been to the D.C. area, the Metro system includes a wonderful subway and a series of buses (which I haven't used)). Since the state of the Cincinnati transit has been in the news recently, it made me wonder how much the SORTA Board uses the Cincinnati Metro system. Prehaps I need to do some Citizen Journalism.

(via Tuesday Morning Quarterback)

Merry Christmas to everyone and espacially to the anonymous neighbor of my inlaws that is providing me with some free WiFi. I do have to hang out in the attic with the laptop perched at an uncomfortable angle to receive a good signal but it is nice to be able to check mail every once in awhile.

The ever so thoughtful Matt Haughley has posted "So you got a PVR for Christmas, now what" over at PVR Blog. Its chock full of links to forums and official/unofficial sources of help for your wonderful new toy.

There is a world of sushi out there in the Cincinnati area and CinWeekly has just posted a small list of places to checkout. I've already said that I enjoyed the Sake Bomb so I am looking forward to trying some of these other places.

The Type Ahead Dictionary is a neat extension of the tech that powers Google Suggest. Although the source data for the dictionary is pretty incomplete (its based on the public domain version of the 1913 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary), it does show promise. Even better is that they put up a detailed page on how it works with nice code samples. This will go to great lengths to help people add this technology to their web applications.

(via Ned Batchelder)

Johanna Rothman runs the very interesting and helpful Managing Product Development blog. She is now featured in a very revealing IT Conversation. Its a very good listen for anyone on projects, not just the managers since mere project members need to know what to expect from a good a PM.