Friday, October 31, 2003

PERMALINK

Dark matters Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy is one of the very few works of fantasy I've read as an adult that moved and excited me the way I was moved and excited by the fantasies (Tolkien et al.) I read as a kid. I'm not sure whether I'd have loved it the same way had I first read it as a kid. I'll never know, of course. In any case, Pullman's New York Times op-ed essay today is a marvelous meditation on the way the rational mind and the imagination coexist. How can a man spend much of his career creating fantasy tales when he doesn't believe in ghosts and disembodied spirits? Here's a taste of Pullman's answer:   The rational, daylight, functional, get-about-and-do-things part of my mind welcomes the broom of reason as it sweeps away the cobwebs of spookery. But I don't write with that part of my mind, and the part that does the writing doesn't like the place cleaned up and freshly painted and brightly lit. comment [] 3:47:00 PM | permalink

Is there an aggregator in the house? I love the RSS aggregator in Radio Userland and I use it all the time. But it's on a desktop computer that is not conveniently accessible outside the Salon network. So I'm looking for an aggregator that I can install on my laptop (it's a Windows machine) to take my feeds with me wherever I go. I like the "all on one page" format of Radio rather than the multipane, RSS-headlines-like-emails-in-Outlook approach of so many popular aggregators. I found Amphetadesk, which seems to suit my needs. However as far as I can tell it's missing one critical feature of the Radio aggregator: in Radio, the aggregator presents you with a whole mess of items to read, and you can easily delete them with one click once you've read the page. Then you won't waste time the next go-round looking at stuff you've already read. This adds a huge level of efficiency to the whole process. Is there any other aggregator out there that pulls all your feeds onto a single browser page -- and lets you delete-as-you-read? comment [] 11:56:55 AM | permalink

That great group blog Boing Boing (Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder and guests) has been having hosting problems recently. You can get them for the moment at a direct IP address, here http://216.126.84.59 . comment [] 9:52:21 AM | permalink