found drama

With the mind a-racin’, a few random thoughts:

1. Adieu and farewell to the Sampo blog.  When things run their course and all of that…  I trust its narrator will still pop by here for comments from time to time.  I’ve contemplated similar…  not abandonment, more like retirement, from time to time as well.  But I’m still getting the mileage out of this venue that I want.  I suppose it’s about your goals.  Of course, it was for that same reason that I ditched the MySpace profile.  *shudder*
2. A run of hardware issues, lately.  There was the near-miss with BenNevis back in May ¹ and now Malkovich is out for a power supply replacement.  Hendricks (A.’s machine) just had a logic board repair that was somehow tied to the battery’s flakiness.  All seemingly routine, non-catastrophic ailments ² but it’s irritating when they’re clustered like this.  One on top of the other on top of the other…
3. Run of weird dreams lately, too.  I’ve caught a couple of them before they escaped but there’ve been plenty more that were twice as bizarre but thrice as fleeting.  Just plain ol’ “eep”.
4. Every time I change H.’s diaper, I can’t help but feel like I’m basting or marinading him.
5. Declared RSS bankruptcy today.  Well over 6,000 unread items.  I feel like I do this on a regular basis: select a group of infrequently read subscriptions and “Mark All As Read”.  Just to get them off my plate.  To clear my conscience.  I tell myself: I care about the news, really.  Those borked elections in Zimbabwe?  I care, I do.  But how can I keep up?  And so it goes.  Now on a given day, I can manage some semblance of keeping up.  Five minutes here, ten there, a thirty second glance at new headlines…  Just to see what’s worth reading, or at least flagging to read later ³.  But the RSS feeds went by the wayside over the past two weeks.  Select All >> News >> Mark >> As Read…  This will make me feel unburdened for a day.  Two at the most.
6. While we’re on the subject of RSS feeds…  DEAR LAZY WEB: my feed reader should look at my click-through patterns and rank my feeds for me.  The software should know (on my behalf) which sources get the most action — how often am I reading the articles? versus just letting them expire and disappear? versus clicking through to the actual site?  I dunno, maybe this doesn’t really tell us anything interesting ⁴.
7. Our garden is blowing up.  It’s great.  The weather has really allowed the plants to take off.  We’ve got peas coming in, cucumbers — everything we planted this year is going ape-shit.  Too bad the weeds are doing likewise.  With H., we’re not managing to get up there nearly as often as we were last summer.  But we also planned better this year w/r/t/ mulching and some of the other pest management.  Not that this puts us ahead.  Just doesn’t put us behind.

1. A hard drive crash that fixes itself?[↩]
2. Especially considering the clock-cycles these machines do on a daily basis.[↩]
3. Thank you, NetNewsWire.[↩]
4. Perhaps I just haven’t finished thinking this through?[↩]

About Rob Friesel