A smattering of news from the world of Blue Monki fortified with vitamins and iron, suitable for vegetarians, may contain traces of nuts.
Yes the date affectionatly known as “OMG Pokemans!” is upon us and I have the following things to look forward to:
See you on the other side….
emma, omg, pokemans, pokemon
My [30 boxes] t-shirt arrived the other day :)
30boxes t-shirt Hosted on Zooomr[30 boxes] is a fantastic online calendaring app and was well worth the $20 donation for all the use I get out of it. The t-shirt was just a bonus!
Thanks 30B!!
PS: Yes I am kneeling cos I couldn’t find anything high enough to put that camera on :)
Ok I think there’s quite a bit of confusion in general about what the hell RSS is and how it can be used, so I’m going to try and clear a few things up here to make the world a better place for y’all.
History
So I’m guessing most of you (at least one of you) discovered RSS via Firefox and the BBC in the form of Live Bookmarks. These presented themselves as ‘menus’ just below the Firefox toolbar and showed lists of items from the BBC website when clicked. So at this point you might be thinking that RSS is just for clever bookmarking stuff. This is not what RSS is really supposed to be used for, it’s just one way you can use it.
So what’s RSS then?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Which is unfortunate as virtually no one knows what the hell that means (including me). So lets start from a different viewpoint:
Website have 2 main components:
So take the BBC has an example. The design is the layout of all the stories and stuff on the front page, the content is the text of those stories. RSS provides a way to get at the content of a website. Just the content, the pure text. An RSS feed is really just a file in a fixed format that gets updated by the website maintainer when the content of that website gets updated. It kind of looks like the source of a webpage really :) Lots of angle brackets and stuff.
Ok so what’s the point
Right the point is that now you can get the content of a website in a fixed format as long as you know the address for the page (RSS feed). So then some clever cloggs wrote a program that you gave a list of these sites to and it stuck all the content together and gave you a date ordered version of the stuff from these sites. And thus the RSS reader or aggregater was born!!
So now you can go round to sites that you like, grab the address of their RSS feed and give it to the RSS reader. Then you only have to look at the RSS feeder to see the new news from all of the sites rather than visiting them individually!
I’m sold, sort me out with a good RSS reader
Sure, [Google Reader] is a fantastic online RSS reader, and it’s what I use :)
So go grab a Google account if you don’t already own one, fire up Google reader and start adding your favourite sites to it!
Here’s on to get you started:
http://blog.bluemonki.net/feed/
Also if you are running [Firefox 2] (and why the hell aren’t you) you’ll see and RSS icon in the address bar. Click on it and one of the options will allow you to subscribe to that feed via Google reader! But note that not all sites have RSS feeds and they might not always appear in the address bar - they might have links on the page for example.
Enjoy your more efficient news reading :)
It was my friend Angie’s birthday last week and we all went to London for a celebratory lunch at the Tokyo Diner :)
And we ended up having a bit of a [photowalk along the Thames].
Sharon and Angie Hosted on Zooomr
Tunnel Vision Hosted on ZooomrEsther and Nic came down this weekend and we walked (well more like trudged) around the New Forest, walked the old city walls in Southampton and walked around the docks there.
Of course I [took some pictures]
Spiky Shell Thingy Hosted on Zooomr
A35 Hosted on Zooomr city walls, esther, new forest, nic, southampton, walks
Sunday the 18th of February 2007
Well ok there were only three of us, but the plan was for more (4).
The plan was to wander around the [Science museum] and go to the [GameOn] exhibition, which went off almost without a hitch apart from boB being a bit late (some things never change).
As I got there a bit early I spent some time wandering around the [Natural History museum] too which is always good fun :)
Actually getting to London from Winchester on the train is remarkably cheap, only £17.50 for a return and travel card for zones 1, 2, 4, 5, 6!!!
The [GameOn] exhibition is excellent, loads of old arcade machines to play on, something from every console and even some more modern things like 4 way Halo. All for about £8!
I took some [interesting photo's around the museum], but most of the time it was too dark :(
Train Station at Speed Hosted on Zooomr
Natural History Museum Hosted on Zooomr
Cat Kebab Hosted on Zooomr
Super Monkey Ball Hosted on Zooomr
Giant Pong!! Hosted on Zooomr
boB eating sausages and rice Hosted on ZooomrWe went to Bristol on the weekend to try and sort out a venue for our wedding reception, and completely flunked out.
Though we did eat some great food and brought some [Pieminster] pies :D <-- pies go in here
MMMm Pie Hosted on ZooomrWe also took a bit of a stroll around the waterfront and soulless new luxury apartments with my good buddy [Jon Ward].
Mooring Post Hosted on Zooomr|
I went to go and see [Metric] on Sunday (04/02/2007) at the [Zodiac] in Oxford.
What can I say? They were ace! The support was pretty good too - but I have no idea what they were called (I’ve also tried Googling it but to no avail). If you get the chance you should totally check them out! I made this nice [YouTube] video of Emily Haines stagediving :) |
 
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metric, music, oxford, youtube, zodiac
So I’m sure you’ve not managed to miss the [announcement] that Apple (in the form of Steve Jobs) thinks [DRM is a bad thing]. What’s more unclear is who’s fault it is that we’re in this mess. In the article Steve lays the blame solely on the record companies, but if you do a bit of research you’ll see that it’s [his] [fault] [too].
There’s also a beautifully crafted [article (rant) about hating macs] which my good friend [boB has already posted about], but I just couldn’t resist ‘bigging’ it up some more :)
Finally [GMail is now a PUBLIC BETA!]. It’s no longer invite only - so dump your stupid ass yahoo/hotmail account with it’s crappy 250Mb of storage and grab a decent non crappy Gmail account with nearly 3Gigglebytes of storage!
apple, boB, defective by design, drm, fairplay, gmail, macs, steve jobs
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It’s our last proper day in Aviemore today and despite all the weather forecasts promising more snow - no more snow came. Despite sounding like a bad thing, it’s actually a good thing as it’s our last chance to climb Cairn Gorm and the weather is perfect.
So once again we catch the 34 bus to the bottom of the funicular railway. The actual path is between the ranger building and the cafe/station/information (or lack there of) building. Allegedly this path is signposted - if it is they can’t bee seen by people, but there’s quite a bit of snow so maybe that buried them if they were 5cm tall. So we get to a point where we could go right or carry straight on. Right is a path but seems to head off somewhere we don’t want to go - but straight on would appear to be a ski/snowboard run. So we go straight on and discover it is actually a path (yay) and whilst I’m taking a photo of the view another walking dude on his own wanders past, says hello and attaches himself to our little party. This is excellent because this dude, Peter, actually knows where he’s going!! Pete’s one of those dudes that used to be in the service and now just does a lot of walking around hills and mountains and stuff either camping or staying in [bothies]. So we wander up countless paths/ski runs and about half way up we see a coloured post!! That’s 2 so far and we’ve been climbing/walking for about an hour. About 20 minutes later we arrive at the top of the funicular railway. This isn’t the top, the final climb is coming up, but we have a rest and Pete puts on his crampons - it’s also bloody windy. Then we’re off, following the posts which mark out a kind of path/steps/neatly arranged rocks which are all covered in ice. The wind isn’t letting up here at all, we spend a lot of time making crab like moves. And then, after a lot of time staring at the ground trying to stop my face freezing off and walking like a crab we’re there at the top!! Conveniently there’s a weather station at the top in the shape of a metal shed that we can hide behind. So there we are, at the top of a mountain having a cup of tea :) Mission Complete. It’s still pretty cold so after the tea we spend another 20-30 minutes getting down to the top of the funicular railway again where there’s a cafe and more tea (also cake). After eating cake and stuff we thought it might be nice to take the railway back down, but you can’t :@ If you don’t take it up then you can’t take it down. Which is shit. Really shit. But allegedly they’re supposed to be changing it. But until then it’s still shit. |
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Despite being tired getting down is actually really easy, big giant steps into ankle/knee deep snow allows us to make the descent in about 30 minutes - so there’s time for another cup of tea at the bottom before the bus comes.
And that’s about it for this holiday, we’ve had a fantastic time, it’s probably been the best holiday we’ve ever been on!
So tomorrow we’re off on the train, then the bus, then an EasyJet flight from Inverness airport (which has an announcement ever 5 minutes) to Bristol airport, then another bus, then finally a train ride back to Romsey :D
aviemore, cairn gorm, mountain, scotland, snow
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