The RSS Aggregator Hunt

So I have too many sites to keep track of. And I've stopped using my last RSS reader, Google Reader, months ago due to lack of interest.

I guess I need to get back to some reading organisation and I need a RSS reader. So I need to take a look at a bunch of software other than Google Reader. I took at look the list of aggregators in the wiki page and looked for some best rss reader articles. Most of these articles are outdated though. Looks like most people have settled!

1) Desktop based readers. There are a lot of good non web based rss software. But I opted out of this category first thing. Mainly because if I have my rss on the desktop, I'll probably not read it because I can always read it. RSSOwl is a good offline reader at any rate.

2) FeedShow : Ugh, why did I go here? Such a ugly interface. I want a shiny artistic interface! OUT!

3) Newsgator: Hmm, it has a decent interface. Has folders, etc. Thats all I care about. But something is missing...Hmm...Maybe take a look at other software.

4) Bloglines: This was my first aggregator. Now that I go back and check on it, it's almost had no changes it feels like. Same interface for 2/3 years? Even with Ajax,etc coming in? Bye bloglines. 

5) Tiny Tiny RSS: Again, felt too outlook-ish. I don't like outlooks interface, regardless of how convienient it is. Turned me off.

6) Live.com: I started looking at their personalized homepage thing. Hey, I can have everything on one page! Had some high hopes on this one. But all that showed up on Opera was the header and the footer fused together and a lot of warnings about how ill lose my customisations if I navigate away.

7) Netvibes: This is another start page. I can check my mail and my rss and my chat, everything here! And what's more, it looks great! The only hang up is that it doesn't seem like a good idea if you have a lot of feeds. For me, its ok because I don't plan to follow too many feeds. And pages can help organise the rss. 

So that's that! I'll go and customise my page now!

Dark Blight

When I first watched the Dark Knight, I kind of agreed that it was a good movie. Better than most of the Juno/21/most of the crap that's been coming out off late. But when Dark Knight hit #1 in IMDB, over Godfather, I couldn't believe. Surely, the movie isn't THAT good.
Ofcourse it isn't. I guess people of this time have been afflicted with stupidity syndrome. It's true. If you think about it, there has been no major technological/scientific breakthrough the last decade. Not as many as the 30s or the 60s or before. Our generation is a big bunch of dumbees.
Anyway, back to Dark Knight. What do people think that made it so amazing? The story?
Here's what pisses me off now that I go back and think about it.

How many ever chances the DK gets to kill the Joker, he doesn't. Instead he allows the joker to kill others. Wow DK. Amazing sense of justice you have. Save a life to kill others. Amazing. Best not to get your hands dirty eh?

Batman falls off the building some 20 times from 20 floors. And literally walks away. Two face, a minor pain in the butt btw, falls 2 floors and dies!! What the hell. Poor two face. And whatever happens to the Joker at the end of the story?

DKs voice...That is the biggest joke ever. It's utterly ridiculous.

Cell phone sonar? Have you lost your mind? I'm sure the story writers are a bunch of morons with no education. These are the kind of people who make hacker movies in which hackers press a button to hack a giant ultra secure military database. Fools.

Just because an actor dies doesn't mean you have to watch the movie and praise it to be best the world has ever seen. Oh wait. This reminds me of the Rajkumar situation. Oh wait. It can develop into a business strategy. Kill off an actor after the movie and be sure your movie grand success.

Okay, got to agree the Joker was good. He was way more interesting than Batman. They should have named the movie Joker. Morons.

Oh and the thing about the two boats. A big murderer actually THROWS out the switch. That's plain stupid. The Milgram Experiment(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) proves that chances are people blow each other up.

Anyway, it was a good movie. But it's plain insulting to life as we know it to call it the best movie ever.

Early task review

It's hard to be productive people. One can easily get lost in the onslaught on tasks to do and end up doing too much or too less. And most of us do.

I've realized that the key to successful productivity in balance. That is properly distributing ones tasks through out the day.

The most important time is the morning or just after one wakes up. Atleast for me, I tend to to be very sleepy and very off course early in the day but I gain momentum as the day progresses. My productive time is towards the end. I used to mange my tasks at the end of the day and update them at the end. But off late I've begun doing that first thing in the day. The review cycle in GTD. This gives me something to accomplish and keep in my mind as the day passes. And I make a sort of mini day tasks list and then make another 3 level priority list which contains the 3 next actions to do in order assuming that everything is going smoothly. That way I can reduce the load on having to decide what to do, which takes a lot of time for me considering I have 150+ next actions.

For non GTDers, I suggest
GTD on wikipedia
GTD on wikisummaries

Feedreader selections

I read a lot of stuff online and so I naturally use a feed reader.

After an unfortunate accident in Bloglines, I decided to change feed readers. I tested out Google Reader, Rojo, RSSOwl and RSSBandit, and Alertbear.

Web based readers

Google Reader: Very fast. Easy to organize. Has a nice 'Trends' feature. And also feed sharing. + Tags. But for me, it lost. It looks ugly(I really think so). And it's web based. Not a problem, but I've been using web based for a while now and I want a change to an desktop application.

Bloglines: It's fast and simple to use. Not as fast as Google Reader though. But again it's ugly. Has some cool features like Playlists, which let u 'play feeds'. And lots of other stuff.

Rojo: Looks neat, but not easy to use. Has strange controls and I don't like that it shows all the articles, even the read ones and I have no idea how to turn it off.

Desktop Readers

Alertbear: Desktop application. Quite neat. But I felt that it's a bit too 'bulky'. As in it occupies too much screen space. Too much empty space in buttons etc. But the desktop widget type thing is pretty neat. I'd use this if I didn't have so many feeds.

RSSBandit: Nice looking. But this one was slow. It took so long to load, it got annoying. Also organizing was a pain. I thought this was a dream, but it turned out really tiresome to use.

RSSOwl: Quite decent looking. Easy and fast(not as fast Greader/Bloglines/Rojo). It does all the basic stuff I'll ever need. It's perfect.

Winner: RSSOwl

Yay for me!

Pirates of the Caribbean: A Brain's dead end

Knightly was a pretty little thing. Nice pair of legs I must say. Bloom was alright. He didn't Legolas this one though.

Glaringly pathetic was that something kept happening in the story and everyone seemed to be very riled up about it, although I never really could come to grasps to what was happening. And then when all seemed confusing, YET another new 'secret story BLAH' is unveiled.

"Oh! My! I really wanted to know about HIS/HER love/weapon/secret! Wow, that really builds the story and greatly impacts the course of the story!"

Battered by an insanely large number of nouns, I was forced to indulge in the comedy of the situation even though, I'm sure, the writers didn't intend it there. 3 hours of meaningless loaf. Blah.

In the end however, Sparrow comes to the rescue with his usual antics. All the time, one would sit hopefully waiting for the bitch to cover up her legs and let the slides move on the scenes with Jacky. Nothing else was really worth the torture. Not even the action.
5/10