Herb Warrior? Does he fight alongside herbs, or are they his sworn enemies? Personally I’d want Parsley on my side, if it came to an actual battle. Does having a tash and goatee automatically make you a Herb Warrior?

I was buying a costume for a murder mystery party, btw. I’m hoping somebody else has a picture of the final result…

Zombies - attack!

In one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard, San Francisco was yesterday invaded by flashmob zombies. The undead prowled from St. Mary’s Square to Union Square, eating any passers-by they came across before supplying them with fake blood and goo to join in the zombie prowl. As Boing Boing reports, they then headed for a picnic in the cemetery. Damn, I’d have loved to have done that There’s not much on flickr as yet, but there are a some cool cellphone shots here.

Update: Via Waxy, some great shots here.

I’m sorry to sound like a complainy old person, but sometimes you just have to. This evening I quite fancied seeing Madagascar, and an hour ago checked the times at the only nearby cinema: Cineworld in Solihull. There’ve been eight showings today, and the final one was at 1915. On a Saturday night. Geez. I’d say it’s a bias against kids’ films except that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is showing until 2130. I’d happily see that, but would prefer to wait a week or two for the crowds to dissipate a little.

Mope mope mope. Andrew’s cunning tips for mope-avoidance:

Get the hell out of bed
Get some breakfast

Get up as soon as you wake or you’ll just lie there moping. Make sure it’s a substantial breakfast, too - it may take a while to kick in, but you’ll feel much better once it does.

Great news.

Flickr’s down for a ‘massage’, with a message saying “we’re getting excited!”. I wonder if they’re preparing to come out of beta? Or maybe adding some major features. Or maybe nothing.

Update: It’s back up with nothing new that I can see…

My car was purchased on a three-year lease. I paid monthly, and after three years could choose to hand the car back or pay a final lump sum to keep it. I decided to pay the lump sum then sell, but messed up the timings. As a result, thousands of pounds were taken out of a bank account containing little more than £700, and I have no overdraft. This was bounced twice as I didn’t notice for a couple of days. The bank charged me £30 for each ‘reversal’, which was fair enough. I transferred the appropriate money and the payment finally went through last week.

This morning I received a letter telling me that due to late payment I owed ‘administration costs and interest payments’ of £350. £350! This was annoying, and I’d have to severely curtail my holiday plans to pay it. Then, unbeknownst to me, Dad phoned the finance company to query the breakdown of the charge, as it seemed a little high. He was on the phone for perhaps 45 seconds, during which time they said ‘ok, we’ll cancel it’. Just like that! Bastards. They said that the account is fully closed and paid off, so there’s no need to worry.

I’d suggest they didn’t really have to charge that amount, and were just trying their luck. As Mum said, the silly thing is that if they’d just asked for �100 I probably would have paid it without the query. Such is businesswank. The company in question was Renault Financial Services, btw.

A small tornado hit a Birmingham street yesterday afternoon. The first I knew of it was traffic reports of downed trees, then the evening news had a reporter standing outside a small shop with a collapsed roof and broken windows. The reporter pointed to a CCTV camera recording the whole scene, but explained that because it’s on a 12-hour loop they didn’t have access to the footage yet. A fair few people were injured, but nobody killed. So this morning I opened the paper to see this:

Holy crap. From the news you’d have thought it just knocked over some trees and destroyed a shop.

Tornado facts:

• There are 33 tornados on average annually in the UK. So far there’ve been 28 in 2005, which, depending on your perspective, makes it either a good or bad year for twisters.

All right, so that’s the only tornado fact I know.

• BBC NEWS | Doughnut-shaped peaches hit shops - Peaches come from a can. They were put there by a man. In a factory downtooooooown.
• Windows Vista In-Depth Information - A great roundup of Vista links
• Hillary vs. the Xbox: Game over - The best rebuttal of ‘video games make kids violent’ that I’ve ever read.

Update on November 22nd: The Feedlounge interface has been upgraded substantially since this review was written. I’ll try to update it soon.

Update: Alex of FeedLounge responded to various of my comments on his blog. Cool or what
I was lucky enough to get onto the FeedLounge alpha a while back. Like Bloglines or Newsgator, it’s an online RSS aggregator. FeedLounge is trying to better the existing apps, and it’s certainly very impressive. It uses ajax technology heavily, meaning that javascript fetches the information and updates the screen. As such, there’s no need for continual page refreshes that Newsgator suffers from. The system also supports tagging on both feeds and posts. I like this idea a lot as the Bloglines ‘clippings’ folder isn’t really customisable enough for me. There’s a lot more, but I’ll introduce that as we go.

The heart of any aggregator is the interface for viewing feeds.

FeedLounge has a choice of two layouts. The classic interface consists of the feed list on the left, post list (Items panel) on top and post content (View panel) on the bottom. Or there’s the three-column layout, which I personally prefer. Changing between the two takes place without a page refresh, which I bet took some doing.

The feeds list is very configurable. When adding a feed you have the option to tag it. The tags are listed at the top of the list - you can see my comics, delicious, flickr etc. tags. It’s very much like a folder system, except that a feed can have multiple tags, so can appear in multiple locations. The total unread count appears next to each tag, and clicking on each will show all posts from the feeds below it. This works very well. I’m too used to the old-fashioned methods so still have most feeds untagged and in a very long list. I must go through and assign tags at some point.

New items appear in bold in the Items panel. Due to the ajax nature of the site, new items will appear as you are browsing - there’s no need to refresh the page at any point (update: not quite true as yet - see Alex’s response). You can select whether to keep or discard read posts, on a feed-by-feed basis. The view is paged, with 30 per screen, presumably to keep loading times down. The ‘mark all read’ button does exactly what you’d expect
The View panel is where all the action happens. Each post is dated, and there are links to the particular post as well as the website it came from. There are toggle buttons for ‘Read’, ‘Flag’ and ‘Save’. ‘Flag’ adds the post to a special ‘Flagged Items’ feed that appears at the top of the feeds list. There’s also a ‘Tags’ button, which when clicked provides a text box to enter tags for that specific post. I tend to use the Flag option as a ‘toread’ tag, then add other tags if I know I’ll want to find the post in the future. As with all of the site, all of this happens without a page refresh.

Tagged posts can be viewed in the ‘Tags’ page:

I don’t have that many tagged posts yet, as you can see. The only disadvantage to this system is inherent to tags; it’s easy to end up with hundreds and hundreds of tags (see my del.icio.us page for an example) and I worry this page could become unwieldy. Still, that hasn’t happened yet Will it be possible to subscribe to feeds of other FeedLounge users’ tagged posts, I wonder…

The other page is the ‘History’ view:

This shows any posts you’ve read, sorted by day. It’s surprisingly useful.

Adding feeds is pretty easy, although there’s no bookmarklet as yet (it can be found here). You currently have enter the feed address manually:

Or import an OPML file - a standard listing of all subscriptions that almost all aggregators support. It’s possible to subscribe to feeds that require authentication (although this may become a pay-only feature). There’s also the ‘Private’ option, but I confess I don’t really know what that is. FeedLounge has a few pre-configured feeds that you can edit, including flickr photos and technorati tags.

I’m a pretty heavy RSS user:

That’s 220 feeds with over 19000 items in total. FeedLounge is handling all this very well, in my opinion.

Ok, so with the tour finished, how well does it actually work?

Issues:

• My main issue is to do with the RSS refresh period. They’ve cleverly implemented a system which looks for feed updates based upon the average time between new posts, up to a limit of 48 hours. Some feeds, like Slashdot or Boing Boing, will be checked every half hour. But less frequent blogs may only be checked once per day. I can perfectly understand why they’d do this - they have to pay for their bandwidth, after all - but one of the things I like about RSS is its immediacy. I like seeing new posts pop up that were written in the past hour. I’ve been watching my own site and have seen it take more than 12 hours for new items to show up. I’d personally prefer a maximum limit of an hour. But that’s me.
• There are occasional pauses when there’s a queue of ajax commands to process. Having said that I’ve never seen it go wrong or get confused -that’s very impressive!
• It’s a little slow currently. It’s faster than Newsgator but not so snappy as Bloglines. This could well be a side-effect of using ajax, to be fair. Hopefully things will speed up as more hardware is purchased. Update: Alex says this is more to do with the hardware than the software, which is good to know.
• The unread items count next to each feed sometimes goes out of sync with the feed, but refreshing the page solves that.
• Links in feeds currently open in the same window - I’d personally like the option of opening links in a new tab by default. Update: See Alex’s response.

Features I’d love to see:

I have no idea whether these are being considered or even in the plans. Some may well be unworkable and I’m by no means complaining - they’re just ideas that occurred to me:

• Tagging feeds and individual posts is great, but I’d like to see it go further. A ’smart-tag’ of some kind, that can link into the category systems on the major blogging engines, would be great. I talk about a huge variety of topics on my site and try to categorise them using the built-in Wordpress category system. This information is published in the ‘category’ tag of the RSS feed, and it’d be great to have a tag/feed that picks up anything with the category name ‘politics’, for example. This would by no means always be accurate, or even work with most feeds, but it’s more elegant than having the same feed appear under multiple tags as happens presently. This would likely go hand in hand with searches for specific words, but that’s much more general, I’d like to see something specific.
• Selecting multiple feeds at once (so as to alter the ’save items from feed’ setting) would be good.
• This is very likely just me, but I’d like to be able to fine-tune the ‘Unread Items’ a little. I subscribe to the BBC news feed, which has > 100 new items every day. As such it tends to take over the Unread Items list. An option to exclude specific feeds would be cool.
• An ‘only show new posts’ option would be great. When you have 220 feeds, it’s handy not to be able to see feeds with nothing new. Bells are ringing in my head that there’s a good reason for not implementing this, so I’ll probably kick myself later.
• And, of course, I’d like Opera support. They’ve said they’ll work on supporting other browsers as soon as they’re happy with how it works in Firefox. That of course means IE, and I hope Opera too.

Overall Impressions:

It’s a very smooth and polished web app. The interface is definitely superior to Bloglines, my current aggregator of choice, and I see no reason not to move to FeedLounge permanently. The lack of page refreshes makes for a much smoother experience. Of the issues, none are really show-stoppers. The feed refresh time is a little disappointing, but I can live with it.

Once FeedLounge launches its public beta, I highly recommend you give it a try.

I mentioned this in the del.icio.us linkage, but have just discovered something weird. Rob Lowe’s going to be starring in A Few Good Men on the London stage. His co-stars are Suranne Jones and Jack Barrowman. So the main characters on the stage are going to be Sam from The West Wing, Karen from Coronation Street and Captain Jack from Doctor Who. Now that’s something I have to see.

(incidentally, I typed ‘Suranne Jones’ into Google Image Search and it found a load of shots from “tartydoris.com” - you think that could be a british site?)

I wonder whether it’s NASA or the media who like the phrase ‘grounding the fleet’. It’s like when the pope was dying, and everybody was falling over themselves to say ‘last rites’. It sounds all dramatic and isn’t something that comes up very often, so I can understand the enthusiasm. Still, it’s not like NASA have more than one shuttle launched at a time, and they’re not actually bringing the existing shuttle back early. So ‘grounding the fleet’ isn’t really very accurate. But I’m just a pedant, and shall shut up now.

Also on Boing Boing is BuddyBuzz. It’s a fascinating experiment to aid in reading on small screen devices. Only one word appears at a time, and they flash by in rapid succession. The software automatically increases the screen time for longer words, and pauses slightly at commas and periods. It’s an attempt to get around the problem of reading on small screens, which is rarely a pleasant experience. There’s a demo in Mark’s writeup here.

I put the software onto my phone, and it really works! I’m amazed. You can control the overall speed of text with the up and down buttons, and after a few seconds to adjust I found it actually quite easy to read. Perhaps it’s something to do with just seeing the isolated word, but I found I only needed a fraction of a second for comprehension, and I never became confused in the midst of long sentences. You can skip back to the beginning of a sentence if you do miss something. The only problem is that the screen backlight turns itself off without any user input. This is irritating, and it’d be great if the software could override that somehow. Currently you can only read articles from BuddyBuzz affiliates, but I’d love to see it become a general purpose reader. Plugging an e-book into BuddyBuzz would be very interesting. They claim it’s possible to read (and understand) 700 words per minute with a little practice. As it says in the article, that’d get you through the average novel in an hour and a half.

Last night I was watching Michael Palin travel around the Sahara, and this morning Boing Boing pointed out that all of his books are now available for free. Like Cory says, it’s really a step in the right direction. It’d be great if they were in .pdf format, but html’s good too

• "A Few Good Men" stage play coming to London - Written by one of my favourite writers - Aaron Sorkin - I’d really like to see this
• |CONDOM|coloribus| - A collection of Durex posters / advertisments. Fantastic. Via UNEASYsilence.
• National Novel Writing Month - National Novel Writing Month (50k words in 30 days). I’m going to do this.
• London’s buses, tubes and trains ‘all-on-one’ pocket map - Fantastic little map, now available for free in this time of ‘travel difficulties’. Yes, I know I don’t live in London.
• Commentary, July 25, 2003