help me.... stalk you.

I recently updated my "homepage" to pull in recent items from the hodgepodge of websites I use. There was some interest from others as to how I did it, so here's the skinny.

Google Reader lets you share RSS feeds using "clips" (javascript you paste into your page's html source). If you specify "Color scheme: None" then the output of the clip is formatted like everything else on your page. I just created clips for each website I use that exports an RSS feed and let Google Page Creator do the rest.

Mihai then gave some additional tips: you can specify a feed clip without actually subscribing to it and you can hide the little "Read more" link at the bottom of each feed. To hide the "Read more" link, include the following style definition somewhere above the clip:

<style>
.reader-publisher-module .f {display: none}
</style>

This instructs webbrowsers to ignore the section of the page that has the link. To specify a feed without subscribing to it, change the clip to look like:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/publisher.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript/feed/http://akpatil.blogspot.com/atom.xml?n=2&callback=GRC_p%28%7Bc%3A%27-%27%2Ct%3A%27%27%2Cs%3A%27false%27%7D%29%3Bnew%20GRC"></script>

And you're set.

i want to cry.

This has to be one of the saddest customer service conversations I've ever listened to: Vcents (transcript). Warning: those of you who are sensitive to inconceivably stubborn stupidity may be offended.

more bar

As previously menioned, I went to BarCampNYC2 a few weeks ago. It turns out Fred Stutzman wrote a blog post about the talk/discussion I hosted entitled "Monetizing Social Networks." This is pretty cool -- not just because I read Fred's blog, but because I actually first heard of BarCamp through an earlier post of his.

Anyways, it turns out his post about the session was "dugg," (digg article here) which is a testament to the whiz-bang job he did summarizing and analyzing the discussion, as well as to the amount of interest there is in the tech community on this subject. Now I don't have to feel like a tech-nerd-poser when I'm sportin' my free BarCampNYC2 t-shirt.

it's been a while

but this is so totally me.

i thought there was a bar involved...

So I went to BarCampNYC2 this weekend, which is less exciting than it sounds (camp!? bar!? sweet!), but still a good time. In a nutshell, BarCamp is a bunch of (somewhat) geeks getting together and talking about (somewhat) geeky things in (and this is where the false advertising comes in) somewhere other than a bar*. Discussion topics ranged from Pervasive Games (hosted by Dens) to "Hacking the Long Tail" to "Xquery Redux" (whatever that means). I led a little discussion on monetizing social networks which was fun -- a number of people there were actually running their own websites and were grappling with that very problem and had lots of good insight to offer.

In the spirit of geeks getting together to talk about geeky things, the entire (un-)conference was documented on a variety of web 2.0 sites, all tagged with "barcampnyc2". In particular, you can see everyone's photos on flickr, watch videos of some of the talks on Google Video, or read what other people had to say via Technorati.

* BarCamp gets its name from FooCamp. "Foo" & "Bar" are the traditional names given to throw-away variables when programming.
Photo is of the free shirt given to attendants. We do love them tech swag.

I always knew math was involved

Which Is All About the Unknowns

Female tourist: I don't get it. This isn't a square, it's like... triangular.
Male tourist: No, no, they just call it that because... well... it's like... a square... a square of people. I don't know, it has something to do with algebra.

--Times Square

Overheard by: Luke

via Overheard in New York, Sep 14, 2006

the pink panther, resux

I'm on a Greyhound bus on my way to Wooster, MA and they're playing Steve Martin's The Pink Panther. Man it sucks. If the video store has any any Sellers version (except maybe Trail of the Pink Panther, which was made with a dead Sellers), or even the Benigni follow up, pick up one of those instead. Please. I can't play my music loud enough to make Martin's Inspector Clouseau tolerable.

(FWIW, Revenge of the Pink Panther has one of two movie scenes that has made me laugh so hard that I couldn't breathe)

Even though it's technically "reality television," Morgan Spurlock's 30 days on FX is amazing, compelling television.

back to beta

I never could tell anyone what exactly I was working on at blogger.com, but now a year's worth of work is finally coming to fruition and beta.blogger.com has just launched (details) with this being the first public post ever made on the new system!

Excuse me while I go celebrate =)

blog this: TIME Magazine -- Numbers -- Aug. 7, 2006

TIME Magazine Archive Article -- Numbers -- Aug. 7, 2006:

36% Percentage of Americans surveyed last year who said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003

50% Percentage of Americans surveyed this year who say that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003

blog this: Henry Jenkins on the future of TV

I think Henry Jenkins makes a good point about the evolution of TV (and why it's easy to mis-imagine the future)

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Catching Up: The Future of Television: "We picked up the July 17 issue of Newsweek, belatedly, and read an interesting article discussing what current network media consumption. The opening paragraphs, though, really annoyed me:

A guy--let's call him Brad--longed for the company of his wife, so he took his iPod to bed. Confiding in an NBC researcher, Brad tells how he inserted his earplugs, nestled down beside his bride and got lost in an episode of 'The Office' or another of his favorite TV shows downloaded from the iTunes store. His wife, meanwhile, was riveted by her favorite show playing on the bedroom TV. Yet another intimacy-challenged couple dialed up the heat on their relationship during the college basketball playoffs, say researchers for Verizon, the cellular-service giant. No fan of hoops, the wife snuggled up to her basketball-craving husband on the living-room couch, unfolded her cell phone and watched video clips streaming from Verizon's VCast service while he tuned in the game on CBS. 'She thought it would be a good way to spend time together,' says Ryan Hughes, Verizon's chief media programmer.

There's a kind of outrage here that people might be sitting side by side in bed and consuming different media content. Now, substitute books or magazines for television content and see if you feel this same level of shock and awe. I think we'd think it a little odd if the couple always coordinated the books they took to bed with them. As my wife points out, in the old days, the wife would have been banished from the room while her husband watched the big game, so, yes, there is some element of togetherness, snuggling down physically together, even if you are in different mental spaces. In any case, other research on television suggests that while homes may have multiple televisions, only one set is on during prime time in most households because we still prefer to watch television content socially rather than individually and the shows that do best are those that give us content we can talk about with others."

remixed cover

I really like DJ Z-Trip's remix of Run Run Run's cover of Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You". Check it out at So Much Silence.

emotional eye candy

Penny Arcade got me revisiting the we feel fine project which, in turn, led me to the awesome website of co-creator Jonathan Harris. Now I'm just itching to get artistic again -- perhaps I should start by putting my old "eyes" piece back online, for those of you who still remember it....

crazy

Many of you have probably heard the new Gnarls Barkley song "Crazy," but also worth checking out is Ray Lamontagne's cover which can currently be found here

watch a talk

I've been lucky to see a number of interesting talks and I figured I might as well point out a few they you can be lucky enough to see too:


How to survive a Robot Uprising -- hearing him talk was actually funnier than reading the book.

DNA and the Brain -- A talk about autism by James Watson of Watson & Crick.

An Inconvenient Truth -- Al Gore's talk about global warming (you'll have to go to a theater to see this one)

Does all this linking to Google video make me a company shill?

emusic traps me again

I was all set to cancel my eMusic account because I felt I had grabbed all of the music they had that I wanted. But there in my "your new arrivals" they had 3 albums I wanted. So now, (The Tourniquet, Get Behind Me Satan, and White Blood Cells later), I can't help but continue my subscription and hope that the quality new music keeps rolling in.

(And they now have the entire Stereophonics catalogue! That's at least another 3 months worth of downloads.)

yahoogle

An interesting blog post on the evolution of Yahoo & Google's front pages - Maeda's SIMPLICITY: Yahoogle!

al gore on snl

Last night's skit with Al Gore on SNL was, I must say, quite awesome. Thanks to Adam for the pointer.