Mental Compost

Caltrain's bogus photography ban

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:30:00 +0000

While I was getting bumped from Caltrain three times last night, I talked to Shirley Johnson, who has been leading the "Bikes on Board" movement to get Caltrain to increase capacity. If Caltrain were regularly running trains filled with walk-on passengers, I could understand their resistance. In reality, however, Caltrain runs trains with half-empty cars for walk on passengers and full bike cars.

Shirley told me that when she tries to document this discrepancy, conductors have been telling her that she cannot take photos on Caltrain. This is a transparent effort on the part of the conductors (directed, I assume, by Caltrain middle management) to suppress free speech by activist cyclists. I mean, it's not like they're preventing tourists from taking photos of stations and rolling stock. Caltrain should clarify its policy on photography. If, as I suspect, there is no such ban, they should not invent one on the fly to suppress free speech. Nevertheless, if there is a ban, the conductors should enforce it consistently. They should not invoke the policy selectively when cycling activists take photos that illustrate a reality they don't like to admit.

Bumped from Caltrain three times tonight

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 05:22:00 +0000

Dear Caltrain Customer Service,

I am a regular cycle commuter who has been riding Caltrain ~~regularly~~ since 1998. As a daily commuter, I spend over $1000 in Caltrain fares. [EDIT: that should be $1000/year.] Tonight I was "bumped" (denied boarding) from Caltrain bike cars three times, on trains 267, 271, and 275. I was finally allowed to board 277, along with four other cyclists, although several cyclists were bumped from that train as well.

Because of the one hour delay, I was unavailable to care for my children this evening while my spouse ran necessary errands. In compensation for this delay, please provide me with a free Caltrain ticket.

Caltrain regularly runs trains with full bike cars but many empty seats for walk-on passengers. Specifically, trains 267 and 271, among others, are regularly filled with bikes but have plenty of space for walk-on customers. Please provide more space for cyclists during commute hours by running trains with 64, rather than 32 or 16, spaces on high bike traffic runs.

Sincerely,
John Markos O'Neill

New phone, new ISP

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:55:00 +0000

I've been a bad blogger, not posting for several months. Of course, I rationalize this by thinking that if readers are subscribing to me with RSS readers, they'll just get another post when I post and not notice when I don't. But if someone is returning day after day to Mental Compost, hoping for a new post, I'm sorry. It has been a long wait.

Anyway, I've had two recent tech developments that seem appropriate to post here, since this is sort of my personal tech blog (actually, it's my anything goes blog, but it has a personal tech slant). First, I got a new old phone. Second, we switched ISPs to Comcast.

As for the phone, the headset/headphone jack broke on my Treo 650, and I replaced it via insurance. Sara and I were dismayed to find out that we owed a $50 deductible, and after replacing the phone, we canceled the insurance on both our phones. My new phone is just like my old phone, except that it is running the current version of Palm OS, and it lacks branding on its faceplate. I like the lack of branding (my old phone said "Treo" and "Verizon" on the faceplace). It looks slick.

As for switching to Comcast, I have mixed feelings about this. When we switched to Speakeasy, I was very enthusiastic about moving to an independent ISP. Also, Comcast does not have a great record on net neutrality. Recently, however, Speakeasy was purchased by Best Buy, so they're part of a big company now. Also, we didn't get great speed -- 1.5 Mbps down/384k up. In addition to these issues, Sara was often noticing problems with our VOIP. The phone would cut out suddenly under certain circumstances.

So we switched to Comcast Triple Play (TV/Internet/phone) last week. The speed is quite fast, as advertised. If I'm hooked to ethernet, I'm really getting 16 Mpbs down and more than 2 Mbps up, which is as much as I need right now. Internet video seems reasonable now. It's too early to tell if there are any problems -- right now, everything works quite well.

DRM for printers

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 16:35:00 +0000

A San Francisco company is developing DRM for printers, which restricts consumer choice by only allowing approved ink. Absurdly, the story refers to owners exercising choice over their own property as "printer-ink piracy." It's not piracy! Pirates steal. In this case, the owners of a piece of property (a printer) are using something they own in a manner that the manufacturer just doesn't like.

Looking at the comments on the story, I notice that the response is overwhelmingly negative: who did C|Net News think would read it? Consumers don't like being called pirates for exercising choice over their own property.

This restriction is like a car that only runs on gasoline approved by the manufacturer or a glass from which you can only drink soft drinks from one company. Or how about a phone that only calls subscribers to the owner's network? It's Defective by Design.

Technorati tags: DRM, printer, ink, piracy

I don't want an iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:37:00 +0000

My wife and I agree: we don't want iPhones, at least not yet. I'm not entirely immune to the Apple bug: "Oh, it has an Apple logo on it? Cool. I want one." Nevertheless, I wanted an iPhone for about two hours.

Then I found out it won't run 3rd party apps, like our Treo 650s do.

Then I found out it has slow Internet over AT&T Wireless, like my Treo 270 did. I gave up on Internet over smartphone -- more trouble than it's worth.

Apple has a way of coming out with amazingly cool products that look amazingly primitive a few years later. On the other hand, if you wait a few years, you can get an Apple product that really fits your needs. We own a 5th generation iPod, for example, that shows no signs of becoming obsolete any time soon.

Anyway, maybe I'll get an iPhone in 2011. But I'm really happy with my two year old Treo. Perhaps I'll still still be carrying it then.

Technorati tags: iPhone, mobile, Treo, phone, AT&T, Apple

Please unDRM iTunes

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:15:00 +0000

Record companies and Apple: if you remove DRM from all iTunes tracks, I'll buy music again.

Like many people my age, I have several boxes of cassette tapes stored under my bed. I haven't listened to any of them for over a year and I no longer possess a high quality cassette player (I think my parents may have one that belongs to me at their house, or maybe they sold it). I'm interested in getting digital copies of maybe 10% of what's in that collection -- that's still a few hundred tracks. I could rip the tapes but I don't have the time or patience to do that. Anyway, I'd be willing to go through what's in there and make a list of what I actually want, but I'm boycotting RIAA releases until digital (mp3, Ogg, whatever) releases are available without DRM.

EMI has already said they'll release their collection without DRM. When the other RIAA labels do the same, I'll end my boycott. Don't they want the sales?

Technorati tags: RIAA, music, cassette, mp3, DRM, boycott, Apple, iTunes

My message to the Democrats

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 19:16:00 +0000

Here's a letter I wrote to the DNC in response to their appointment of an RIAA executive as Deputy CEO for Public Affairs for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.

As a registered Democrat, I am writing to protest the appointment of Jenni Engebretsen as Deputy CEO for Public Affairs for the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Engebretsen is currently the Director of Communications for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), an organization that was recently voted the "worst company in America" by a reader poll on The Consumerist.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/04/12/dnc_appoints_riaa_sh.html

The RIAA sues college students, fights network neutrality, and lobbies against technological innovation. Currently they're fighting anti-pretexting legislation in California. You don't have to be a downloader to realize that this organization represents a force against technology, against free culture, against free speech, and against progress.

http://consumerist.com/consumer/riaa/

This appointment is a poor choice for the Democratic party. As a response, I plan to withhold any financial support I would have otherwise given to Democratic candidates for the 2008 election. I could change my mind, if the party takes positive steps towards endorsing a pro-innovation and pro-free speech platform.

Sincerely,
John Markos O'Neill

Technorati tags: RIAA, Democratic Party, DNC, Democrats,

Caltrain should buy one of these for each car

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 21:42:00 +0000

I saw this EVDO wireless router on Boing Boing today. I want one. Or rather, I want Caltrain (San Francisco peninsula commuter rail) to buy a whole bunch of them and let us surf on the train.

Why are there so few car companies?

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 21:37:00 +0000

I'm wondering -- why are there so few car companies? Is it prohibitively expensive for a startup to design and bring a new car to market or is it because of the existing oligopoly's market control or something else?

Would things be better if there were, say, twenty or thirty (American) car companies to chose from and maybe a few hundred internationally?

In the beginning were the legos

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 21:34:00 +0000

Assuming that the universe is actually some kind of gigantic computer, I wonder what the creator(s) think of us making computers in the universe? It must seem both beautiful and sort of awkward at the same time, like legos making legos out of legos.

Technorati tags: Legos, computer, cosmology, creator

Vernor Vinge on semiconductors as a "single point of failure."

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 21:19:00 +0000

In this interview (also in these notes), computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge says that he worries about semiconductors as a "single point of failure" for society. He envisions a catastrophic scenario in which "the machines stop" because computers will no longer work due to a monoculture of semiconductor technology.

Is this a realistic worry? He points out that semiconductor technology is vulnerable to EM pulses, for example. However, there are other homogenous technologies that we rely on all the time -- nails, for example, or lightbulbs -- whose uniformity we ignore because we see those technologies as so simple and essential that we take them for granted. Is semiconductor technology dangerous because of its uniformity or are we heading for an environment in which it is simply taken totally for granted? Are the two scenarios actually not contradictory? That is, we could regard these technologies as basic and primitive but they could actually be vulnerable.

On the other hand, immediate, catastrophic failure is often easier to deal with than slow, subtle degradation. Because it's easy to identify the problem, it's often possible to fix it. However, we have to endure the initial catastrophe before we know what's wrong.

Technorati tags: science fiction, Vinge, society, catastrophe

Open Source Science Fiction World

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Wed, 03 May 2006 00:08:00 +0000

I like science fiction; I like open source. Today, as I was biking home from the bike shop (they actually did replace the middle chainring this time), I thought of a fun way to combine my two interests. Now, I don't know how viable this would be in the long run but it would be a fun thing to experiment with. Maybe someone's done it already.

The idea would be to create a world -- a future, a universe, a "verse" -- that anyone could write a story in. Although the stories could be copyrighted, anything that actually affected the world as a whole would have to be open source too. The project would require a benevolent dictator like Linus Torvalds to make sure that there was coherence in the timeline.

One reason that this appeals to me is that when I read science fiction, I often find myself more interested in the background than in the story itself. I'm curious about the history, the social changes, the economics, and the politics of the imaginary world. I love when an author takes time to write an essay giving background on the verse.

Anyway, I thought of a real easy one that I could start with just a simple tweak on real reality. This alternate reality, which doesn't have a name yet, diverges from our own timeline yesterday, on May 1st 2006. In my verse, which I plan to release under conditions similar to those I described above, the demonstrations of 5/1/06 are even bigger than they were in real reality. Twice as many people turn out for the demonstrations. San Francisco, LA, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Houston, and NYC are shut down, Parisian style. I'm imagining they continue into the rest of the week, perhaps expanding into a more general walkout of low wage workers. Of course, much of the verse would be looking back on this as history and reflecting on implications rather than on the event itself.

Here's some info from Boing Boing on the demonstrations, which were pretty huge. Apparently they were pretty big in San Francisco, where I live. However, I didn't witness anything first hand -- I just read about it all on the Internets. Imagine if they had been big enough that every resident of San Francisco had first hand experience of the demonstrations. That's the kind of divergence I'm talking about.

Anyway, I won't go on right now. The point is, one could start with this single divergence and end up with a "platform" or "springboard" reality for science fiction.

Technorati tags: science fiction, open source

Net Neutrality

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Mon, 01 May 2006 22:51:00 +0000

Here's my letter to my congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, as well as to my senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.

Subject: Save Network Neutrality

Altering the architecture of the Internet so that some content is treated differently than other content would hurt the network for everybody. Network neutrality is not simply good politics; it makes technical sense.

When the CEO of AT&T claims that companies like Google and Microsoft are attempting to use "his pipes" for free, he ignores the fact that they are already paying for Internet connectivity. In addition, extra fees for fast connections would hurt small businesses, startups, and individual contributors. Network neutrality promotes innovation.

I can envision a future in which everyone is producing and consuming high quality audio and video and transmitting it over the Internet. A few years from now, this may be common practice for teleconferencing. This is a future in which individuals are not just consumers, passively sitting in front of a television-like device. Rather, we are all participants in business and culture. This is a future in which telecom companies can make money but in which the democratic structure of the Internet is preserved.

Technically speaking, it's a bad idea to treat some bits differently than other bits. Also, I get nervous any time a big company with deep pockets and "ownership" over the "pipes" through which everyone's content is transmitted tries to exert power.

I don't think the vision of the Internet that AT&T and other telecoms are promoting has much of a future. Generally, the content provided by ISPs is not what people really want. Think of AOL ten years ago -- what people really wanted was the *real* Internet. AT&T won't get very far giving preferential treatment to "their content" because their content isn't very good.

I'm worried. Although the Internet has been great for democracy and the spread of knowledge throughout the world, our freedoms are increasingly under attack from content providers, telecommunications companies, and lawmakers who seem to take into account the interests of big corporations but not those of the people and small businesses. What will become of the Internet in five, ten, or fifteen years? Will we still have a vibrant marketplace, a place for innovation, and a realm for free speech? Or will the Internet become a shadow of itself, a form of television, through which media companies feed their content to passive consumers?

As a technology professional, I depend on the Internet for my livelihood. I will definitely take into account your vote on this issue when I go to the ballot box. Please let me know what you intend to do to preserve the democratic structure of the Internet and net neutrality.

Sincerely,
John Markos O'Neill

Technorati tags: neutrality, net neutrality

Firefox tweak

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 22:20:00 +0000

Something just occurred to me today that should have been obvious. In the "bookmarks toolbar," edit the "Name" property of bookmarks so you can fit more in. Only five or so could fit on my toolbar with their predetermined titles. When I abbreviate or eliminate them (if I have a good icon), I can fit at least 10.

A guitar that teaches you how to play

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 00:25:00 +0000

I was just thinking -- do these things exist yet? That would be totally cool. A guitar that basically guided you through lessons and evaluated your progress. It would need some way of "hearing" the notes you were playing. The lessons could be stored in flash memory. You could get special cards that taught you the particular things you wanted to learn.

In fact, it would be neat to have all the instruments work this way. Imagine, "band in a box!" All the instruments you need and instruction in how to play them. The instruction is built into the instruments.

Update: OK, so apparently there are some early-stage "teaching" guitars. My first impression is that they look a little clunkier than what I was imaginging. For one thing, I was imagining that the guitar would talk to you, working through each lesson kind of like an audio practice tape. However, it would move at the learner's pace, stopping where necessary and allowing repetition when needed. If the learner was quick, the program would speed up, too. It should probably connect to your computer via Bluetooth. However, I'm picturing an interface more like that of a game than a piece of office software. At least for beginners, it should be guiding the learner through the process.

This is obviously not a core part of the idea but I'm imagining one of those guitars with a built in speaker. The idea would be to create an instrument for the absolute beginner that would be useful with a minimum of tweaking.

ProcrastinOS

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 00:20:00 +0000

Here's an idea, an operating system (really just a GUI) built around productivity principles and meant to maximize the happiness and effectiveness of those who have trouble focusing, on those who tend to procrastinate, and on those whose minds tend to wander.

In some ways, a typical modern OS allows too much freedom -- so it's possible to read Boing Boing while intending to study calculus, for example. What I would like to see is an interface that does more guiding. Obviously, as the user, you have the power to override it but the point would be that if you wanted to study instead of surf, it wouldn't be too easy to surf.

Instead, you get a full screen that allows you to navigate through what it is you actually want to do but keeps you away from temptation.

Not everyone can be Sting.

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 07:58:00 +0000

I was thinking about systems like Whuffie and how in an actual such system, you are not necessarily interested in getting a super high score, in being the most popular person around. Rather, what you want is to increase your standing among people you respect and like.

Not everyone can be Sting. In fact, it might not be the most fun thing in the world to be Sting. Everyone always wants you to play Roxanne no matter how cool your new material is. I mean, it might be thrilling in a buzzy, drug-like, adrenaline kind of way but it's probably not the most satisfying experience in the world. It might be way more cool to play with a few people you like and respect with an audience of 20-50 friends.

Maybe the best experience (enhanced by reputation) is like a St. John's seminar -- not freshman seminar, certainly, but maybe senior seminar or the seminars that never happened because there is no fifth year at St. John's.

Technorati tags: reputation, Whuffie, St. John's, St. John's College, Sting

Noise pollution solution

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:49:00 +0000

We have some neighbors who like to party. Apparently they're restuarant or theater people (or both). They're in their 20s, I guess, and they like to play music and giggle out on the deck, which happens to be two feet from our bedroom window. Often these get togethers happen without us noticing them because we're already asleep. However, the other Saturday night (I guess it was really Sunday morning) they had a real rager. Another neighbor called the police at midnight with a noise complaint and then at 2 AM opened the window and said, classically, "If you don't quiet down I'm gonna come over there and it's not going to be pretty!" Although my wife and I were irritated by the noise, that made us chuckle. It was like something out of an old movie.

Anyway, I was thinking of a technology that would allow sound to be directed only at those who wanted it and not at those who didn't. I'll be short on details here -- I don't want to get bogged down on where this technology resides or who or what controls it. The end result would be that you could have a party in which your house and your deck and your yard was filled with sound for those who wanted it. On the other hand, for the parent types next door, silence. This would also make the party somewhat cooler too. For example, you could go into the room where people were dancing and, if you wanted to dance, raise the volume of your own experience of the music to an appropriate flailing volume. On the other hand, if someone entered the room whom you wanted to talk to, you could both lower your volumes for a moment while you talked.

Eliminating all undesired sound and controlling the desired sound -- isn't that a nice goal?

Technorati tags: noise, pollution, etiquette

Cold Coffee Paradox

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 00:08:00 +0000

Why does cold coffee at four in the afternoon taste so good?

Technorati tags: coffee, paradox

Short poem

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 05:39:00 +0000

Ixaccihuatl

One gets an ataxic waddle
Hiking atop Ixaccihuatl.

Technorati tags: poem, altitude, Ixaccihuatl, hiking, mountain, Mexico

Meat Stream

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 22:08:00 +0000

I heard this on public radio yesterday -- apparently it's from the AP wire. "A group of cattle ranchers, known as Ranchers Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America, brought the suit on behalf of U.S. ranchers. They said allowing the imports from Canada threatened the U.S. meat stream with mad cow disease." (The quote and link are from sfgate.com.)

Meat stream? Ew. What is the meat stream? That is not a term the cattle industry should be using unless they want all of us to become vegetarians.

Update (15 October 2005, 9:26 PM): I thought of some bad meat stream jokes. Is a nation's meat stream part of its gross domestic product? Where is the meat stream? Is it near the big rock candy mountain?

Update (21 October 2005, 4:14 PM): Another bad meat stream joke: does the meat stream originate in Liverpool?

Technorati tags: meat, cattle, mad cow, BSE, disgusting, terminology, meat stream, vegetarianism

"Themepunks" is great so far

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 22:48:00 +0000

I'm really enjoying "Themepunks," Cory Doctorow's serialized novel in progress about a near future in which hackers build cool hardware toys and tools like present day hackers build cool Web toys and tools now.

The neat freak in me really loves today's installment, in which one of the inventors uses RFID to "solve messiness."

Tried Google Reader

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 20:05:00 +0000

I'm not crazy about Google Reader, their new aggregator: I tried it today and found it basically unusable. Everything is really slow and the layout is confusing. It's possible that I'm simply used to Bloglines and that anything else wouldn't feel right. But I suspect that Bloglines is simply a better aggregator. If someone can point out some good features in Google Reader that Bloglines lacks, I might give it a second chance.

The poor quality of Google Reader is a shame, because I was really hoping Google would make feeds and aggregators easier to understand for more people. They're still a little confusing for the average Internet user. Even my sister, a power user and an active blogger, doesn't use an aggregator, as far as I know. They're just too complicated and the initial time investment is too great. Eventually, someone will come up with a really good one that's easy to use and understand. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.

One disadvantage of Bloglines is that one cannot use it to reach one's Intranet feeds, those that are hidden behind a corporate firewall. This seems to be an identity problem of the type that Sxip intends to solve. It's not really the fault of Bloglines.

While I'm on the subject, why do people want to get feeds in their e-mail? If you get your feeds in your e-mail, they're continually pinging you like e-mail. Also, you're stuck with the limitations of your mail client. I still haven't found my Thunderbird replacement yet.

Today I was thinking that some sort of Web mail would be ideal, one that supported tagging. I haven't used Web mail clients with large amounts of e-mail. Although I would try Gmail for that, I prefer using my regular e-mail address. I would like a Web mail interface where I could store and view all of my e-mail accounts. Even better, how about a permalink for each message? Then I could use the private equivalent of del.icio.us to tag messages.

Come to think of it, that's the ideal. Sxip, or something like it, sorts out all the identity issues so I don't have to worry whether something is public or private. Everything, including e-mail, comes in as a feed. I sort through the incoming feeds with an aggregator and tag the incoming stuff with a tagger.

My disk

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 07:18:00 +0000

Remember "My disk?" That is, your floppy disk, the one that you stored everything on? If you're about my age (I'm 34) and you used computers in the 80s and very early 90s, you probably had a "my disk" disk. I was talking to my sister today and she was telling me about her disk. "It had the OS [probably Mac OS 6.0.x], my copy of WriteNow (awesome word processor from olden days) and all my files on it," she pointed out, "and it wasn't even an HD disk! It was a regular old DD 800K disk!"

I think we need to get back to the days of my disk. Instead of a floppy, my disk will now be a flash memory card. And instead of 800K, my disk should be about . . . well, a terabyte would be ideal but maybe that's a little ambitious. I've heard they're talking about 32Gb flash memory cards now.

One of the advantages of my disk is that I never have to worry, "Oh, which computer did I leave that file on?" I carry my disk around with me in my phone most of the time. When I'm on a computer, I simply pull my disk out of my phone and plug it into the computer I want to work on. I boot from my disk, not from the machine's internal hard drive. My disk can boot from any OS I want to use. In my case, those are some flavor of GNU/Linux, Mac OS 10.x, and, if absolutely necessary, Windows. My disk also contains any software I want to use, plus all of my files. It can be backed up seamlessly and quickly (automatically when I plug it into my home machine, perhaps) so if I lose my disk, I don't lose all my stuff.

Alas, my disk is not yet a reality. But I'm looking forward to the triumphant, imminent return of my disk.

Conversation with my sister

noreply@blogger.com (John Markos O'Neill) — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 20:51:00 +0000

Here's part of an IM session from this morning, edited for punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar.

John: Subscribing to feeds makes it look like you're everywhere at once.
John: Yeah.
Amy: I thought you were everywhere at once!
John: No, I'm just on the Internets.
Amy: So, when I subscribe to feeds on Firefox, it makes a separate bookmark for each one. I find that a little annoying, I'd like to see them scrolling on one page.
John: Why not use Bloglines?
Amy: Yeah. I know, but I have to actually *go* to Bloglines. I want pull-style feeds. I want them in my e-mail.
John: Want, want, want.
John: You're so demanding.
John: What e-mail client do you use?
Amy: [Mac] Mail
John: Is there a plugin or something?
Amy: I think there is once I upgrade to Tigrrrrrrrr.
John: What's wrong with the bookmark thing?
John: I don't understand
John: If you have more than, say, 5 feeds, you wouldn't want each post as a separate bookmark.
John: You know what would be cool?
John: Some kind of GUI for tag clouds.
John: What if it was 3-D and they were really cloudlike?
John: You could be, like, "OK. I want the union between this tag cloud over here." Grabs tag cloud.
John: "And this one over here." Grabs tag cloud.
John: Pushes clouds together.
John: Splorch!
John: Out come the RSS feeds that match the two tags, right into your brain.