She appears sweet and innocent, but I am beginning to worry about this dog’s plans for us. This morning I woke to find that she had cut the phone line. I can only assume the DSL connection is next.

Hardly a day goes by that we don’t get another reminder of how horribly Bush and his administration miscalcuated about Iraq. By bungling both the war and the reconstruction so badly, they have given islamic fundamentallists fresh & fertile soil to grow.

Plaestine is filled with anger, but it is a resource poor hell-hole. Afghanistan is strategically placed, but relatively resource poor, Saudi Arabia is rich, but while it may be corrupt, it is a functioning state. Iraq on the other hand, has an angry frustrated populace, mineral wealth and a strategic placement.

Now that I’m using an RSS reader, I am cursing everyone that publishes a truncated version of entries in their RSS feed. Its bullshit, and it isn’t going to encourage me to visit your actual site.

Of course, I’m pretty sure my RSS is truncated, since that seems to be the Movable type default (WHY?), I need to muck with my templates and fix it.

Yahoo! News – U.S. Denies Iran Report of Bin Laden’s Capture

IRNA quoted a story on Iran’s state radio Pashtun service which reported “a very reliable source” as saying bin Laden had been captured in a tribal area of Pakistan.

A senior U.S. defense official denied the report, telling Reuters it was “another piece of stray voltage that’s passing around out there.”

Call me cynical, but I just have to believe that this administration would keep Bin Ladin on ice for a while, so they can trot him out at an opportune time to influence the presidential election, just as the Regan administration cut a deal with Iranian militants to hold on to the American hostages until after Carter was gone.

I’ve been poking around a bit looking at RSS Readers/Aggregators because I want to increace the number of blog-like sources of information I read without significantly expanding the amount of time I spend on the activity. Having everything reviewable in one place, with the ability to see at a glance what’s new and what isn’t should really help towards that goal.

So far FeedDemon seems like the most featureful and polished application. It provides various filtering functionality, Outlook-like previews of unread items and a nice “newspaper” like view of all the entries in a particular grouping. It also has an easy to use clipping bin allowing the archiving of interesting entries.

Unfortunately, it lacks some other features I find desirable. There is no way, so far as I can tell, to use the outlook inbox-like listview to scan items from multiple feeds in a single window (unless you kludge something with the filter functionality). The only way to do this is with the newspaper view, but in that case, it appears to insist on doing a top-level grouping by source, so that all the new items for a given feed are clumped togeather. I’d rather have the option of merely sorting them all in reverse chronological order. The other issue is that it seems this grouping can only be done for a single “folder.”

The OpenSource .NET based Sharpreader seems to address many of these issues. It allows you to create a nested hierarchy of feeds, and by simply clicking on a given node of the hierarchy, it will roll all the feeds contained below it together and display them in chronological order, interleaving items from multiple feeds. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include the preview functionality, nor does it have the option of viewing the full content of all enties in a sort of webpage view like FeedDemon and some other products. It also doesn’t have a bin for archiving items of interest.

I’ve yet to explore the support of any of these products for posting to blogging tools. Also, if I were currently working, I’d be interested in the ability to synchronize state between two machines, so the articles I might have skimmed at work would show up as read when I read from home.

More later….