• Is RSS dead?

    July 3, 2013 / No Comments

    So Google Reader died Monday. Is RSS dying? I sure hope not, and don’t think so. I’ve heard many people say they gave up on RSS reading and now just read Twitter. That just doesn’t make sense to me. Twitter is great for what’s going on now, but how do I catch up with what’s been going on after a long day at work? Sorry, but I’m not scrolling back fourteen hours on my Twitter feed. Hell, I seldom scroll back an hour.

    The other day I was trying to remember when I started reading RSS feeds. I know I started with a desktop app, and mostly used it to keep up with all the blogs I was reading. I remember wishing news sites had feeds so I could read my news that way, but none of them did. Gradually more and more sites got RSS feeds, and that’s pretty much how I’ve been consuming the internet for as long as I can remember. If your site doesn’t have an RSS feed, it doesn’t exist to me.

    Once I got internet access on multiple computers and places I switched to an online reader. I think NewsGator was my first and then I switched to Bloglines. I remember when Google Reader was first launched. It sucked at first and took a few years before it was good enough to make the switch. I lived it Google Reader for years. It wasn’t flashy, they rarely added any decent features, but it was always reliable. The best thing Google did was to allow third party apps to connect to their services. That was one of the reasons I bought an iPad the day they came out. My RSS reading finally became enjoyable in the mobile space. It’s so easy for me to keep up with my 1000s of feeds now because any spare minute I have during the day I can whip out my phone or iPad and read some feeds.

    I was a little shocked when Google announced that they were shutting down reader. I guess I had a hard time believing that “nobody” was using a service that I was using constantly twelve to eighteen hours a day. I wasn’t worried though. I was excited because I knew other companies would step in and have products that were better and actually work on them and evolve them over time. Many did, and I tried most of them, but for now Feedly is my choice.

    Feedly has most of the features of Google Reader that I used, and works with Newsify, which is a great iOS app. I made the switch, and didn’t skip a beat. Long live RSS.

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  • My not so “Super” Moon

    June 25, 2013 / No Comments

    Over the weekend there was a bunch of hoopla over the “Super Moon”. While it’s true it’s the biggest full Moon of the year, it really isn’t that much bigger. Visually you can’t even tell the difference People thought it look huge, but that was mostly because they don’t look up very often and see the full Moon every month. All the hype bugged me, but it really shouldn’t have. I guess anything that gets people to look up is a good thing.

    Amateur astronomer’s hate full Moons. They are super bright and wash out most of the sky making it harder or impossible to see other objects. It’s also the worst time to photograph the moon. When it’s full you don’t get any shadows and can’t see much detail in the craters.

    Here are a few pictures I took of the gibbous Moon last week. You can see more detail in the craters on the side of the Moon that’s shaded. Near the terminator—the line the separates night from day—is always the best place to see crater detail, and you can see on the other side of the Moon very little crater detail is visible. I prefer a crescent Moon, but sometime you have to take what you can get when the clouds are gone.

    Moon on 6-19-2013

    Moon on 6-19-2013

    Moon on 6-19-2013

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  • Remember 1990

    June 21, 2013 / No Comments

    This video brought back a lot of memories. 1990 was a big year in my childhood. It was the year my family and I moved. I was a sophomore in high school and had to leave all my friends and start over. I made new friends, but nothing like my friends from my old home town. To this day, the best friends I have now I’ve known since 1st grade.

    The music of 1990 was horrible too. That’s probably part of the reason why I learned to hate mainstream music. It got better latter into the 90s, but 1990 sucked. Best new artist Milli Vanilli? WTF?

    via laughingsquid

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