bad day to get your car washed

I'm guessing the fast food places had long lines today, due to the all the illegals calling in sick. There are plans to repeat this "protest" on Monday, May 1st.

data point #1: The NCTCOG* says the Metroplex population is over 6.2 million.

data point #2: Dallas Police say 350,000 to 500,000 people marched downtown today.

Personally, I seriously doubt the DPD can count correctly. Regardless, I presume the majority were Mexicans, who crossed the border without bothering to complete the paperwork. No word on how many of the 350,000+ boarded trains at Union Station, for a free ride back to Mexico.

* North Central Texas Council of Governments

It's a pity nobody every bothered enforcing the Immigration Reform & Control Act of 1986, which has been on the books since the Dark Days of the Reagan Amnesty Program. It makes it illegal to hire an illegal .. maybe the double negative was interpreted as a positive?

battle of the RSS readers

Every six months or so (it seems) I nose around .. looking for a better RSS reader. I keep returning to SharpReader; certainly, there's personal taste involved. This time, I decided to pit the incumbent against the native RSS reader in Mozilla Thunderbird, and an extension to Mozilla Firefox called Wizz.

I look for a few things in any RSS reader: how easy is it to ...

0- "wipe the slate clean" (Mark All Read, either within a category, or for all blogs)?
1- import an OPML file and expect it to preserve the categories?
2- look for new items in only one category?
3- read an item without having to load the original HTML (with all the graphics)?
4- order categories one way (interest level), but items within a category another way (alphabetical)?
5- set a default interval for polling (per category, per blog, new subscriptions)?

There are more, but these are the ones that hit me in the face. Although the new stuff in Mozilla is nice, I think I'll stick with SharpReader. The devil's in the details, as usual.

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Mozilla Thunderbird:
File/New/Account/RSS News & Blogs


Thunderbird's native RSS reader needs work .. what can I say? When I imported my OPML file from SharpReader, it made no effort to preserve the sections. That was a major PITA .. the OOTB (out of the box) experience sucked. For that reason alone, it was enough to give it a solid D. Not many options to tweak, either. Next? 

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Mozilla Firefox:
Tools/Extensions/Get More/Wizz RSS News Reader 2.1.2.0


Wizz makes good use of the default icons, but doesn't aggregate the items within a section. That's probably okay if you only read a few blogs, but when you group them into sections, the UI falls apart. I give it a solid B, because the only thing I really didn't like was the inability to quickly "Scan all blogs for new items". Maybe that's buried in a menu somewhere, and I just didn't spot it. 

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SharpReader 0.9.6.0

SharpReader is compact WRT screen real estate. Clicking on an item loads the HTML if desired (the others make HTML the only way to read an item). Grudgingly, I give it an solid A- (mainly because there aren't enough options to tweak for my personal taste).

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Big wishes: that they'd all use (a) the same file to mark what items I've read, as well as (b) what feeds I'm subscribing to. Sure, I could use an online tool like Bloglines, but the issue's the same : none of them have any knowledge of the others.

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Monday (10/4/6) update: turns out there's at least one place where you can sync your RSS feeds; the only downside is that you have to use their RSS reader. Heck, it's a start. The site is blogbridge.com

over 1 million points served

I've been running the UD Agent for over 4 years on my oldest PC, and I just noticed that I bypassed one million points on/about January 21st. I'm currently at 1,082,944 points* and adding 1,070 more each day, running three instances of the UD Agent. Pity this software doesn't run on anything except MS-Windows. It's quite unobtrusive, but I wish they'd make a tweak to the way it handles proxies. One of my PCs goes that route part of the week, and the UD Agent isn't smart enough to bypass the proxy when the VPN is disabled. I have other software that is smart enough to look for alternatives when the network connection fails.

* 583,753 since joining The Team

The active projects haven't changed in awhile: United Devices Cancer Research and Human Proteome Folding. I wonder how much of the data from earlier, now completed projects (United Devices Cancer Research Project, Phase I; Smallpox Research Grid Project; United Devices Anthrax Research Project) was found to be useful?

A few years ago, I was asked to join a team; now there are 45 active members, and I've moved up to 6th place in Points, and 9th in Results. I wonder when I can expect my Certificate of Achievement in the smail (snail mail).
 

	Reference architecture	Processor	Memory	Storage	Network
100	"High-end Desktop System" (Pentium IV)	1.5 GHz	384 MB	5 GB	1.54 Mbps (T1)
and then my 3 instances in comparison:
124	AMD Duron	0.8 GHz	512 MB	10 GB	2.68 Mbps (DSL)
205	AMD Sempron 3000+	2.0 GHz	1 GB	10 GB	2.68 Mbps
220	AMD Athlon XP 3200+	2.2 GHz	2 GB	10 GB	2.68 Mbps

`cause I'm a follower

Thanks to Trish-Bob for the inspiration for this post

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Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts/events, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

Events:
- 1609 - Henry Hudson lands on Manhattan island.
- 1776 - British-American peace conference on Staten Island fails to stop nascent American Revolution.
- 1970 - The Ford Pinto is introduced.

Births:
- 1924 - Tom Landry, American football coach
- 1965 - Moby, American musician

Deaths:
- 1971 - Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, Soviet politician and leader (b. 1894)

Bonus fact:

It is usually the first day of the Coptic calendar and Ethiopian calendar (in the period AD 1900 to AD 2099).

this just in ...

CBS News reports:

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texan touched by a lobbying scandal that ensnared some of his former top aides and cost the congressman his leadership post, won't seek re-election to Congress, a Republican official said.

To say that I am shocked is an understatement. The ONLY thing I can imagine is that someone finally found the movie clip of DeLay in a compromising situation with a barnyard animal, and rather than face the possibility of this making its way to FOX "News", DeLay chose to resign.

Honestly, it would take something of that magnitude to force Hot Tub Tom (a former bug exterminator) to make such a move. I wonder if we'll ever know for sure?

Immigration 101

There weren't many cars in the movie theatre parking lot when I arrived today; I wonder if it's because a lot of people hadn't yet Sprung Forward?

The film I saw (at the Angelika) was The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada; it's a great independent film that won't get a lot of screens because it personalizes the immigration issue, and it's so much easier just treating the illegals as faceless/nameless pack animals.

Warning: this movie is not recommended for disciples of Rush Limbaugh, or any of the various Fristian sects (including Coulterites), since it requires that your minds be open to alternate viewpoints.

The Nuevo Berlin Wall

Today (after my dim sum breakfast) I moseyed over to a nearby mall to buy some shirts. Later, I noticed that all of them bear "Made In China" labels. Hoy, en el centro de compras, la única lengua que oí era Español. ¡Esto estaba en Sears - no el Fiesta Mart! And They say immigration isn't a problem. I feel sorry for the children, when it's obvious their parents make no effort to transition them to English.

I was mildly amused at the student protests that spontaneously erupted earlier this week; most of the students are Americans, born to illegals who crossed the Rio Grande a few years ago. The ones who stormed Dallas City Hall got the most local media attention, reminding me just a little of the Los Angeles Riots (before I moved here in 1993). At least they didn't set fire to anything - yet.

If Senator (and soon-to-be President) Bill Frist gets His way, the parents will be put in railcars back to Mexico, on the other side of the Nuevo Berlin Wall we're building to keep them from coming back. I just hope he misses a few, so there will be enough of them to be our cooks, gardeners, maids and carwash attendants for the foreseeable future.