Ben Skelton's Blog

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One of my new favorite blogs is The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Freakin' hilarious ...

Brian Meme'd Me

Brian over at West Coast Logic meme'd me a while ago — although I am not exactly sure what a meme is, I thought I would give it a go. Here are five things that people may (or may not) know about me:

• I was born and raised in the Yukon — I was born in Whitehorse, which is the capital of the Yukon, and grew up in a town called Watson Lake which has a population of 1,600 people.
   
• I have only been fired from one job in my life — During university I worked part time at a call centre for a local credit union. Although technically I quit (gave two weeks notice) they told me that I didn't need to come back and they gave me severance. Ever since that job I have a much greater appreciation for folks that work in call centres — it is NOT an easy or fun job!
   
• I get irritated by too much nice weather — If there are too many gorgeous sunny days I start to get a little cranky. I like the occasional rainy day... Must be why I live in Vancouver.
   
• I go a little crazy every evening around midnight — One of my old roommates called it "witching hour". It doesn't matter how tired I am, once midnight hits I clean, dance, listen to music, watch TV — pretty much anything but sleep. Makes 8am meetings challenging :)
   
• I can listen to the same song over and over again for hours — If I grab a new song I like I will often listen to it on repeat for a couple of hours. I have run on the treadmill for an hour with the same song playing over and over. Although I don't seem to mind it can be really annoying for anyone sharing an office with me!

Now in the spirit of this Meme theme I have to tag five people that I want to know something more about. I figure I will elect the Habañero bloggers out there:

• Kathleen
• Graham
• Jasvir
• Bob
• Brian
• Sing

JobsBlog

One of my favorite blogs is the Technical Careers @ Microsoft blog (or JobsBlog). Anyone looking for a job at Microsoft or any other high-tech company should be reading it. We have been putting a lot of effort into recruiting lately, and many familiar topics are documented and discussed in this blog.

Not only can you learn "trade secrets" from actual recruiters, but it helps to open up a process that is confusing and unfamiliar to many. Good stuff!

LAX and Truncated RSS Feeds

I’m on route to L.A. from Vancouver on United. The flight is not too full which is nice, and even better, I managed to snag a seat in an exit row. This is really important as my 17-inch PowerBook is almost impossible to use if you are not in First, Business, or in a bulkhead or exit row. I was able to get through all my email and write nice lengthy responses to everyone that I have been avoiding for the last month. I sent almost 20 detailed emails and have gotten my inbox down to 22!

After my emailing was finished I launched NetNewsWire to view all of the unread RSS feeds I have subscribed to. Unfortunately on a plane truncated feeds that link you to a Web site are a bit of a problem. I was wondering why people complain about truncated feeds – but now it makes sense. I guess my next task on the Habañero Web site will be to have the full article / post in the RSS feed.

I think I need to find a tool for creating RSS feeds. Right now I am doing it by hand, but if I am going to be putting the full article in the feeds there must be a nice easy way… Any ideas?

NetNewsWire Feature Enhancement

An email I sent to Ranchero Software regarding NetNewsWire. If you have a Mac, it is one piece of software you need. I am always a bit afraid to send in feature requests, because in the past I have sent off a few only to later discover that the feature already existed... Bad usability I guess :)

>>>

I love NetNewsWire and think it is a killer news reader. In an extremely short time it has become one of the most used applications on my Mac.

I have a feature enhancement request. Currently I subscribe to a lot of different feeds. Some of the feeds are much more important than others. I think it would help to be able to identify feeds that you don't want to include in the count on the dock icon. Perhaps "include feed in Dock notification" can be added as an option to the Get Info dialog for each feed?

For example... I have a lot of feeds I subscribe to that I want to be notified of right away when something is new, but also have a bunch of feeds that I don't really care about -- I just look at them if I have some free time. Right now my Dock icon says "42" new posts, but I don't really care about any of them. I have to go to the different feeds and "Mark All As Read" -- even though I haven't read them...

Hope this makes sense!

The Blog is Up

Well I finally set up my Blog. TypePad is pretty slick! I have only found two things frustrating so far:

1. When signing up for the TypePad service you can't easily go back to correct mistakes. For example: I noticed on the confirmation screen that I had selected a typepad.com address and not a blogs.com address. It was great that the system confirmed the details with me, but it didn't give me a nice easy way to change them. I ended up just starting the process from scratch. This is where auto-fill is a life saver.
2. I think it is a bit frustrating the the Music TypeList assumes that you want to link to Amazon. I would much rather link to iTunes -- who buys CDs anymore? I ended up creating a link list with links to iTunes, but would rather be able to include images, etc. Perhaps there is a better way to do this...