RSS Bandit v1.1 (beta 1)

After reading Don's comments about Harvester I decided to give it a whirl. In my opinion it didn't hold up to RSS Bandit feature-wise but did have a snazzy UI. This convinced me that any future development on RSS Bandit I did would be on the Magic Library based version Torsten was working on. Torsten's v1.1 UI looks as good as the Harvester UI and has more features with more on the way now that I'm going to be working on it as well.

Over the past few days there have been two interesting entrants into the .NET Framework based RSS aggregator landscape. The first is SharpReader which generated a ton of buzz on various weblogs. The primary feature people seem to like is the ability to show related blog entries (i.e. entries that link to each other) in a threaded view somewhat like an email or newsgroup thread. This is a nice feature and something I'll definitely enable in the RssComponents library. The only issue is that Torsten and I are currently puzzled as to how SharpReader is creating a threaded listview control with off-the-shelf WinForm components. It looks like this will have to be a custom control.

The second new aggregator on the scene is the IE RSS Aggregator which implements the Über-browser where an aggregator is built into IE. This has been on my plate to get done once I've got autoupdate up and running. I dabbled with using implementing BandObjects a few weeks ago but all my experiments looked like shit so I decided to hold off until all my other RSS Bandit related features where done.

Anyway, if you are interested in trying the RSS Bandit v1.1 beta (which really should be called an alpha because there are still some exception related issues) then you should grab it from here.

A complete list of the new features in v1.1 of RSS Bandit is available on Torsten RendelMann's blog.


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The Ladder Theory

I recently stumbled on the Ladder Theory of male-female relationships. Lots of parts of it read almost word for word conversations I've had with ex-girlfriends and female friends. For those who don't have time to read the entire document I'll do a one paragraph summary.

Lemma 1: Every time you meet someone you give them a quick mental rating. Just how this is done is based on your sex, like so:

MALE

• Estimated Chance She'll Put Out Quickly - 30%
• Looks - 60%
• Other - 10%

FEMALE

• Money/Power - 50%
• Attraction - 40%
  • Physical Attraction - 50%
  • Competition (Disinterest) - 20%
  • Novelty - 20%
  • Other - 10%
• Things Women Claim To Care About But Actually Don't - 10%

A few things need clarification, the item entitled "Competition (Disinterest)" relates to the phenomenon amongst women (and men) to want what they can't have. The harder to get someone appears to be the more we tend to want them. Thus women are more attracted to men who don't seem interested in them than those who actively act like they are.

Once one has mentally rated a member of the opposite sex they are then put on a ladder. The men's ladder is typically stacked in the following manner

1. The people we really want, who may even be out of our league, are on top
2. Then come the people we like
3. Moving further down we pass the people who we would fuck if we were intoxicated and would admit to doing it later.
4. At the bottom are the people we would fuck drunk, and would lie about doing it later.

Women have a similar ladder but with an additional wrinkle. Women actually have two ladders, the real ladder described above and the friends ladder (or as Chris Rock calls it The Friend Zone) which is where guys who don't have a chance of getting laid get put. In between both ladders is the Abyss of Self Loathing and Embarassment. Guys who try to jump from the friends ladder to the real ladder often find themselves kicked off and the higher they were on the friends ladder the bigger the fall into the Abyss of Self Loathing and Embarassment.

That's about the core of the ladder theory. With that basic core a number of conclusions about male-female interactions can be drawn and observed in the wild. For instance, consider what happens when someone you are in a relationship with meets someone who is higher than you on their ladder who is also interested in them.

Related Reading: How To Become An Alpha Male

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About Blogging

Chris Anderson has a post about not understanding blogging. There three major points in Chris's post that call out to me are that first he wonders why blogging is catching on when there are other tools that can do various parts of the blog experience better, secondly he mentions the built-in reputation system of blogs and then finally he mentions that corporate blogs are valuable.

I'm not sure I'm going to address his points or not but this seems a good a time as any to reconsider why I have an online weblog and why I read them. Perhaps it'll be relevant to Chris's question and perhaps it won't.

I try not to call my K5 diary a weblog because it associates it with the current "blogging" fad. The main thing I hate about the current blogging fad is the pretentious twits who think that posting your brainfarts on the Internet makes you the member of some elite club. These are the same pretentious fucks that use words like blogosphere with a straight face. Of course, online communities have been acting this way for years, much longer than I've been online.

So why do I blog? I blog for many reasons. Like most of the real bloggers (as opposed to the pretentious fucks) I use this is an online forum to keep people who I've known in the past abreast of my thoughts and actions. This is no different from the typical random Live Journal blog or randomBlogSpotblog which account for orders of magnitude more blogs than the blogetarati (a made-up word in jest which I'm sure someone has used with a all seriousness before). To me blogging is a conversation with the internet where you get to share as much or as little of yourself as you like.

I like to share my knowledge and passion for technology with people who I've grown to know over the years on K5 like trhurler, ucblockhead, codemonkey_uk, pb, regeya (yeah, even you), jacob, aphrael, Simon Kinahan, greenrd, perdida, leviramsey, and a bunch of others. I share what's going in my life and thoughts with these people as well along with putting them up here so I can point friends and family to them. I enjoy conversations and blogs are a probably the most cost-effective way to have conversations with a wide and varied audience on topics of your choosing. It's not about the technology are lack thereof but what blogging enables me to do that keeps me at it.

Blogging doesn't give me the widest audience possible; I get more readers for my column on MSDN or for the stories I've written for K5 & Slashdot in the past. However, nothing beats my diary for conversations with friends without actually having to be at a dinner table or nursing beers in a pub.

I also like being able to Google for my thoughts.

So why do I read blogs? I read different classes of blogs for different reasons. I read the blogs of online friends who I've never met like ucblockhead(Steve) and codemonkey_uk(Thad). I read blogs for their comedic value like Bob Abooey's. I read blogs that contain insights about how technology (specifically software) affects businesses and end users such as Jon Udell's, Tim Bray and Joshua's. I don't always agree with what they write but the aforementioned blogs (Joshua, Tim and Jon) typically discuss or link to things outside my experience that I'm curious about and provide insights that would typically escape me. I read blogs of people who use the technologies I work on daily such as Kirk Allen Evans, Oleg Tkachenko and the recent posts from the users of .NET Weblogs. Then there are the weblogs that I read because most of the other technology bloggers seem to have them on their blogrolls such as Sam Ruby, Dave Winer, and Robert Scoble. I guess that's just me reinforcing the Power Law for Weblogs.

I don't read internal Microsoft blogs for a lot of reasons, the main one being that I think if you have anything to blog about you should be able to let everyone read it not just folks at your company. There are already dozens of other forums for me to hear what fellow B0rg think from mailing lists to Outlook public folders. In fact, one can't go to dinner anywhere in the Redmond area without overhearing some B0rg related conversation. I'd love to hear a reason why an internal blog makes any more sense than an internal mailing list.

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Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.