Babe Ruth: “I have only one superstition. I touch all the bases when I hit a home run.” [Quotes of the Day]

Just what every Noir fan needs: Noir soap. “A true Noir fan won’t want to miss out on these cute, super-deformed versions of the main characters encased in glycerin soap!” So I can now clean myself with…? uh, nevermind.

Are Kouga and Taz related?

It’s that time of year again, when a bunch of the current anime shows finish up. I finished up two of them sunday night, DNAngel and Last Exile. DNAngel turned out to be a surprising show. I’d heard of the manga before, but never really read any. The show started off a bit unsteadily, but I really felt things smoothed out a lot by the end. The last two story arcs worked out quite well. I think my one complaint is that it was just a one season show. I got the feeling there was a bit more story that they could have worked with.

Last Exile is definitely in my top ten list for this year. It was one of the tightest shows I’ve seen in a while. Everything just clicked together perfectly. Story, animation, and music were all amazing. Gonzo really kicked some serious ass this time around. And the amazing part? It’s coming out on DVD over here next month. One nice thing about this series is that the world still feels open. I’d actually be really curious to read a prequel to the whole thing. To find out just how things got to the point they were at when the series started. There was a lot we weren’t told about that, which is fine, but I have a feeling it could make an interesting series or movie.

Seen over on The Shifted Librarian, a site with some of the coolest pictures of carved pumpkins from the folks over at ExtremePumpkins.com. Some of them are genius.

(Here’s the first in some semi-random thoughts that have been running around in my head since BloggerCon.)

The blogging world has many different levels of technical expertise. You’ve got bloggers who
are programmers, teachers, lawyers, writers, kids and doctors. The only thing they really
have in common is that they feel like writing things and just throwing them out to the
world to read. Unfortunately, the tools aren’t always the easiest for people to work with. I
was talking to Jenny Levine during the sunday’s aggregator session and showed her I was
using NetNewsWire and she mentioned that her mom (I think) had tried to use it and had a
hard time with it. At first I was a bit confused by this. I’ve been using NNW for a while and
find it quite easy and intuitive. But then again, I know how all this stuff works. I know
what a news feed is, I know what to look for to find it. For people who don’t use this stuff as
much a lot of this may be a mystery.

I think one big issue is that blogging comes from from the technical world. As a result,
many of the tools are functional but not necessarily user friendly. I’ve found that I am
much more willing to deal with slightly kludgy ways of doing things when a technology still
isn’t that mainstream. Take RSS for instance. If a person who is new to blogging sees a
page with the orange xml icon they’re not going to have any idea what it is. If they click on
it, they may or may not see something useful depending on the browser they are using.
Some aggregators require you to put in the url to the RSS feed, some will look for a link to
the feed in the home page if a web site’s URL is used. Radio offers a mechanism to
subscribe to feeds that have the little xml coffee cup icon. Less technically savvy people
tend to get confused when having all these options. I actually like the way Radio handles it
a lot. And I think it wouldn’t be difficult to code support for something like that into most
aggregators, if you can get the various developers to agree that this is a good idea (and
that’s a whole other topic for later). For me I think that a lot of these tools are quite good,
but I do realize that they aren’t always that obvious to other people who aren’t as into
computers as I am.

I’ll give one more quick example. Radio Userland. For the beginner, it isn’t too hard to set up. You run the program, register, and you’ve got your own blog that is hosted at Userland. The problem comes when you decide you want to personalize your page more. I think Radio’s biggest weakness is how it handles blog templates. You end up needing to work on a number of different files to change your home page. There’s the main template, that is used for everything but the home page. Then there’s the Home page template. Then within each of those templates you have day templates. And then there are item templates which format the individual posts. Radio is quite powerful, at its heart is a pretty neat CMS system. But I think it is just too much for most people. Most would get a lot more out of something more simple.

One thing I’m always afraid to do is underestimate users. I’ve been a sysadmin and done user support for ages and they constantly surprise me. So I’m also wondering: Is this really a big deal? Are things good enough as they are?

Btw, if anyone wants a copy of the music that was playing on Friday night at the Hong Kong let me know. My mixes are down at the moment, but I can make them available fairly easily.

I’ve been writing a bunch of random thoughts in my outliner about stuff that’s been percolating since BloggerCon. There were so many very smart people there and so many ideas flowing around it was almost overwhelming at times. As a result it’s taken me a few days to get some of my thoughts in order. The first post will be showing up in about an hour and is some random thoughts about blogging tools in general. Then I’ll have another one about passion and egos (that hopefully won’t ruffle any feathers).

Disclaimer. I’m writing a lot of this standpoint from someone who is a fairly technical person, but not really a programmer. I’m fairly unix/OS X-centric these days, so while I’m aware of some of the blogging tools for windows I’m not THAT familiar with them. Oh, and I’m lazy, so I like blog tools that let me be lazy.