Andy and Darcy’s Blog

So this is my first post in a long, long time. As Darcy says just as I was writing this post, “You mean you’re going to post to _my_ blog?”. Yes I know I have been rather silent, and there is really no good reason for that. I have seen a lot of things that I wanted to blog about, I just had no drive to do so. Well I guess this morning I did.

Just in case you didn’t know, I really like the RSS feed reader program, Google Reader. I toyed around with other ways and programs of viewing RSS feeds. I tried Firefox’s built in method and I found it really rather poor, it seems like an afterthought rather than a valid feature. I also tried Safari’s built in reader, which was far better than Firefox but still had the problem that you had to be at the same computer when you viewed your RSS feeds. This is not the case in my situation. Since most of the day I’m work which is on a PC so thats not really an option.

Thats when I finally found Google Reader. It seems to solve most of my woes about reading RSS feeds. It isn’t a local program on your computer, which means no “trying to keep in sync” with multiple computers. It has a smart and intuitive interface that updates when it has content, it doesn’t wait for you to refresh it (Read Web 2.0). Reading feeds through Google Reader has almost become an obsession. I get so many new items a day (150+) that if I don’t keep up, I can’t imagine how I would catch up. But I digress….

The main reason that got me wanting to post is to tell you all about a wonderful blog that I found and added to my Google Reader about 3 months back. It is called Amazon Daily. Yes it is that Amazon. Basically it is a blog from editors all over Amazon where they post their favorite things, with surprisingly low amount of “buy this now from Amazon” chaff put in. It has given me ideas of books I want to read as well as good recipes and funny things on the web. I highly recommend it.

That brings me to the “drive to blog” I was speaking of earlier. While perusing Amazon Daily I found this (it’s about 3 mins long, don’t worry it’s worth it):

For a child of the 80′s this brings back many memories. Sitting around in PJs on Saturday morning watching cartoons and in between each of those shows many commercials just like the ones above with toys that I just had to have and annoyed my mother incessantly about getting. The post also led me to another cool video on the same topic only a decade earlier. If you do watch this (and I suggest you do), I think that today a “Bing Bang Boing” would be awesome. I now know how we can use the surplus ball bearings left over from E-Week.

I hope you enjoyed this post, and I will try hard to bring you more posts in the future. Not going to promise anything, but hopefully it will be less than like 2 months before my next post.