Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

so I should have posted this yesterday, but anyway:

You’re 70% Irish

You’re very Irish, and most likely from Ireland. (And if you’re not, you should be!)

(actually I am 25% Irish)

You Are Guinness

You know beer well, and you’ll only drink the best beers in the world. Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them. When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all – especially about subjects you don’t know well. But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.

I love Guinness, mmmm Guinness.

You Are Emerald Green

Deep and mysterious, it often seems like no one truly gets you. Inside, you are very emotional and moody – though you don’t let it show. People usually have a strong reaction to you… profound love or deep hate. But you can even get those who hate you to come around. There’s something naturally harmonious about you.

Recently I realized that not everyone uses or is even aware of syndication feeds for websites/blogs so I thought I would write about them and why they are a good thing. Most blogs and websites that have regular updates have what are called syndication feeds. The term RSS, meaning Really Simple Syndication, is often used to refer to these feeds. Since there are many existing articles defining them in great depth I will link to two of them here:
Wikipedia RSS entry
XML.com’s What Is RSS

Take a moment to look these over if you are unsure as to what syndication is. Now let me tell you why I find it so useful. The other day a friend of mine was tediously plodding through every blog on his list to see if any updates had been posted, just like I used to do. Using something called a feed-reader or news-reader you can eliminate wasted time by only visiting sites that have been updated, or even by reading the updated articles right in your reader. Here’s how it works, you put the address to a websites feed into the reader, for example this websites feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/christophertaverna, then the reader takes the information and displays it for you to see. You can then mark the site as read and the next time something is posted you will see it in your reader. There are many readers out there, some are web based and some are clients you install on your computer. I am a big fan of web based tools, since then it doesn’t matter what computer I am at, I still have access to all of my stuff. The 2 web-based readers I have used are Google Reader and Protopage. I used Google Reader until I found out about Protopage. Both are good readers, but Protopage does more so that is why I use that daily.
From a time management standpoint syndication allows me to track many more websites than I would be able to if I had to click to every one of them every day. Give it a try and see how syndication can work for you.

So I took the day off today. I needed to catch up on some mundane things like laundry. Plus a day to myself is always a nice break. It also gives me some time to post here.

Why do weather reporters feel the need to give us ‘Winter Weather Advisories’? It’s winter, I expect it to be cold and snowy. Just tell me how cold and how much snow. Don’t give all these alerts telling me to expect winter weather. Give me an alert if it is going to be so cold that I will get frostbite just by going outside. Give me an alert if there is a blizzard. But don’t give me an alert to say the temps will be in the 20′s and we will get 3-6 inches of snow. It’s March in Fredonia. I expect it to be in the 20′s and to get snow. My favorite alert came in on my weather toolbar in my browser. It told me there was a severe weather alert in Fredonia, NY. So I checked it out and this is what it told me:

A GENERAL SNOWFALL EXPECTED TODAY.

Well thanks for that helpful alert National Weather Service. I don’t know what I would have done without the knowledge that a general snowfall is expected for today. I hope this doesn’t carry over into the other seasons, where I’ll get spring weather alerts like “It’s rainy out today” or summer alerts like “Boy it’s a hot one out there today”. It’s called seasonal weather for a reason. Tell me when the weather is unseasonable. Is it going to snow in June? Then alert me. Should I expect all the roads to be closed today because we are expecting 3-6 inches in an hour? Alert me. But 3-6 inches all day is seasonal weather as far as I’m concerned. It does not warrant a special alert. Just put it in the forecast and leave the alerts for the real emergencies.