RSS at first blush

Finally! Something potentially useful to me! Honestly, curiosity about setting up RSS feeds was one of the main motivators for going through this program. Even so, reading through the intros and things that were supposed to motivate me into wanting this were a bit of a slog. Still! Here I am! I went through the directions and set up a bloglines account, only to immediately abandon it before really giving it a chance. Not that there was anything wrong with it, but I just realized that I've already got an RSS reader built-into my google account. So, lacking a good reason not to, I threw my couple of new feeds over there instead. Then began the long task of accumulating feeds.

Well, actually, it started out slow. I spent some time trying to think of websites I look at often enough to care about. I haven't more than glanced at Slashdot in a good long while, but as per usual found myself spending a good amount of time reading through the stuff there. So, first place on the list! After that, I perused a few of my fellow Discovery 2.0 bloggers works and tossed those on. A few word a day feeds that sounded interesting. Then, I remembered webcomics! And from there things just snowballed!

Now I've got a list of 17 different feeds and 152 new items to read. Of course, since I'm brand new to my reader, but not the content, much of it actually isn't new at all. But still, it's like suddenly having a whole new email box with a new set of friends that send you stuff all the time! Actually, I'm not really sure how I feel about that...

This has the potential to be the single biggest timesink of my day from now on...

...

Anyways! Here's my list of new feeds for those that are curious! I fully intend to par this down after I get a sense for what each provides.

"2600: The Hacker Quarterly"
"An American in Brighton"
"Darknet - The Darkside"
"Dictionary.com Word of the Day"
"Dinosaur Comics" title="Dinosaur Comics"
"Double-Tongued Dictionary"
"FVRL Discover 2.0 Program"
"Network World on Security"
"No One's Sane Behind Their Masks"
"SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green"
"Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (updated daily)"
"Slashdot" title="Slashdot"
"The Book of Biff"
"Through the Fog"
"Woot! - One Day, One Deal"
"Wordsmith.org: Today's Word"
"xkcd.com"

Mashups

The Flickr mashup that immediately caught my eye was the Trading Card Maker. It jumped right out at me because I used to play a lot of Magic: The Gathering. In fact, I've still got all of my cards! I've always wished I could make my own cards, and here comes an easy way to do just that! Or so it would seem...

The Trading Card Maker has a similar layout when it come to the main picture, various text fields, and the tiny symbols in the upper right for casting cost, but it is missing one critical piece for me. The lower right hand corner is where a creature's power/toughness is supposed to be. However, there's not a good way to get to the lower right hand corner. Adding a bunch of spaces to the end of the big text field doesn't even work right, so you can't even work around it. If I had just that extra piece of functionality, I'd be able to make a working game out of it that mimics Magic very closely, and could even be used in my old decks!

I wonder which would be easier. Finding the source code for this mashup, or just photoshopping the last bit onto each card...

Poker chips

http://www.flickr.com/photos/limowreck666/123811344/

This is kinda cool. We have a poker night every 6 weeks or so, and use these exact same chips! In fact, one of my favorite things to do with my hands during the game is to build little structures like castles and towers and such. I've never made anything quite so elaborate, but I think I'm definitely going to have to try next poker night!