At my 6-month teeth cleaning earlier this week, the dentist found a hairline crack in both of my lower back molars. Ouch. One was worse than the other, so I went under the drill Thursday to get a crown. I *hate* the dentist, especially when the drill, novocaine, or impressions are involved. Wearing my iPod and listening to Chris O’Reilly helped, but only marginally. I’m still sore, close to 24 hours later. Time heals all, right? Can’t wait for the visit in two weeks for the final porcelain. That’s also going to hurt, I’m sure. Then we get to do another one in a few months. Yay.
RSS Madness
This is a site update. I’ve added a pretty slick feature to Trotz.com, a set of (for now) four headline aggregation pages, implemented with the spiffy PHP program ‘zFeeder‘. Listed on the left rail of most pages of the site under ‘B L O G R O L L’, these pages assemble RSS feeds from some of my favorite sites. It’s a whole lot easier to check out these sites here, and visit headlines I’m interested in. Check them out, and let me know what you think.
The categories include:
DailyGeekOut: Sites like BoingBoing, Engadget, Gizmodo, TheFeature, Screenhead, etc.
News Feeds: Includes feeds from CNN.com and SI.com (where I work), The New York Times, The Boston Globe, etc. Easy way to glance at the top news of the moment.
Mac News: As a big Mac-geek, I need my daily dose of Mac news, tips and rumors. So here it is. Macslash, TUAW, etc. Good stuff.
MCE Feeds: I’ve been fooling around with Windows XP Media Center Edition for a while now, so this page lets me keep up with The Green Button, various Microsoft employee blogs, and hardware/software news from the gadget sites.
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The Best Media Center That Isn’t
Guest columnist Ross Rubin blogs on Engadget today that despite Apple not calling the Mac mini a media center device, it has all that in spades. DVD-player? Check. Rip, Mix, Burn? Check. Ken Burns hi-res slideshow effects? Check. Add on a USB TV tuner, and this thing is your TiVo on steroids. Rubin suggests the mini is a stealth MCE. The apps in iLife are all that a user is looking for when they want to access their media (movies, music, photos), and of course, there is the elegance factor. He also talks about the possibility that Apple is waiting to enter this market for a true media center once the CableCard standard is settled. That’s a great point – you should see how my IR blasters are scattered around with my MCEs, TiVo, etc. Anyway, others have blogged about ‘mini as media center’, but I think he hits the nail on the head here.
Opting out of the Swimsuit Issue
The New York Times Richard Sandomir reports today (free registration required) that subscribers to Sports Illustrated can call a toll-free number to skip the annual Swimsuit issue and instead extend their subscription by one issue. SI management is quoted as saying that this has always been the policy – but the mag decided this year to post a message in their pages stating this explicitly. So far, 25,829 have opted out. That’s 0.8% of the magazine’s stated 3.2 million subscribers. When the policy wasn’t publicized last year, a total of 21,065 skipped the issue.