Peter’s Soapbox

How Much Caffeine is in That Drink, Anyway?

Ever wonder how much caffeine really is in that Starbucks coffee or your Mountain Dew? Want to know which late-night pick-me-up will turn it into an all-nighter? Check out Energy Fiend to find out.

Two Nifty RSS Management Tools

So Yahoo! Pipes is not new, but I just started playing with it after I saw a brief tutorial on how to use it on Lifehacker. Very cool. It provides a very simple, totally graphical, AJAXy way to filter your RSS feeds. From the initial announcements from Yahoo!, I had no idea that this is what it was for. While I had done similar things with other services, the Pipes graphical interface simplifies things a lot, and gives you a great visual way to see exactly what the end result will contain.

Anyway, following the tutorial, I was able to merge two RSS feeds (Digg’s Technology feed and Techmeme) and then filter them out so that they don’t give me the same results from other feeds. Since I already subscribe to BoingBoing, Lifehacker, and Marc Andreesen’s blog, for example, I added filters so that Digg and Techmeme and would not show me stories from these posts, making my Google Reader a lot less cluttered with duplicates.

The second tool I found is actually new: AideRSS. AideRSS ranks your favorite blog posts according to the amount of feedback they receive. The presumption is that the more feedback, the better a post is. The result is that you can use it to dramatically reduce the amount of “clutter” in your feeds. For example, Lifehacker averages 388 posts a month. AidRSS ranks 83% (325) of these as “good,” 55% (215) as “great,” and 14% (58) as “best.” So you can easily filter out a lot of chaff from a blog.

Unfortunately, the first feed I tried to give it was my custom Pipes feed. Given that Techmeme and Digg have different structures for their comments, this was too much for AideRSS to handle. Luckily I quickly figured it out and instead flipped it so that my AideRSS feeds now drive my Pipes. Another drawback is that it really only works on blogs. I can’t use it to cut down on the amount of noise on various mailing lists or forums that I receive in RSS format, which would be very nice. Perhaps they will work on that and offer this feature in the future.

The US Dollar is Pathetic

During my entire childhood and most of my adult life, I’ve known that the Canadian Dollar was worth $0.75. Today, while vacationing with my wife in Montreal, QC, I exchanged $100 (US) for Canadian dollars (what we affectionately refer to as “Canadabucks”).

I handed the nice lady at our hotel’s front desk $100 (US), and she handed me back $100 (Canadian).

And 39¢.

I verified that this is right in line with today’s exchange rate (1 US Dollar = 1.03853 Canadian Dollar), minus a couple of bucks for a conversion fee.
How the mighty have fallen.

The Great Internet Crash of 2007

This reminds me of an article I wrote over 10 years ago where I accidentally deleted my home town. Excellent production quality. I wonder if I could fool anyone into believing this is real.

Oh who am I kidding? Of course I could…

The Internet Crash of 2007

Facebook is World of Warcraft (in disguise)

It just hit me, while I was scouring my old address book and AIM buddy list, that social networking is really a MMORPG in disguise.

For the last three nights, I’ve spent more time digging through my old contacts, address books, buddy lists, and memory than I have killing orcs, retrieving Rethban Ore, and mining Fel Iron! My wife says I’ve spent as much time grinding through my contacts as she has spent grinding for rep in Felwood.

Take today, for example. Here I am, after a full day of work, and a couple of hours of WoW, and what am I doing? More work! (Say that with a woodcutter accent.) My LinkedIn network is 80% complete. I just invited another colleague. That will put me at 85%. But wait, that’s not all! Once that’s done, I need to finish my profile. Yes, I need to quest to get my profile complete too. I need to post my resume, my interests, and my past work experience, etc. All of these things add up to a complete profile, which, I guess, is kinda like hitting 60. I’m assuming there will be more afterward, like, the LinkedIn Expansion Pack or something. Maybe the “Job Hunting Crusade?”

I have even contemplated using LinkedIn or Facebook’s built in “invite your contacts” (read “spam”) feature, to invite people who are not part of said network, to join. So far, my hatred for spam has outweighed my temptation to do this, and I have not sent an invitation to anyone who is not already a member. But I thought about it…

And don’t even get me started on my lame Facebook account, with four measly friends in it, one of whom I cannot even say “how I know” because Facebook does not have an “Other” option like LinkedIn. The more I compare these two social networking sites, the more I think of World of Warcraft versus GuildWars. “This one has henchmen!” “Oh yeah, this one lets me invite people from my Yahoo! Messenger account!” The parallels are shockingly similar…

Here are some interesting parallels. Draw your own conclusions.