Required Read… er, Listening

If you do nothing else this week, go listen to these two podcasts:

• CBC’s Spark podcast Episode #35 - Mainly for Nora Young’s interview with podcaster, writer, musician et al Derek K. Miller of Penmachine; there is other interesting content as well, but do not miss this interview.  There’s a full version of the interview on Spark’s site.
• QN Podcast Episode “Gin, Television, and Social Suplus” from April 30th, 2008 - Sage Tyrtle reads a stop-you-in-your-tracks essay written by Clay Shirky of Here Comes Everybody.

Oh, and if you still happen to have an hour left over, go listen to the DicksnJanes podcast episode #149 wherein K, I and some friends and acquaintances from podcasting help The Scarborough Dude celebrate his 60th birthday this past weekend.  Happy birthday, Dude!

And while you’re at it why not go read Bob Goyetche’s excellent rant over the morphing/rebranding of Podshow into Mevio (WTF???  Just what kind of drugs were they on when they came up with that name?) - the comments are particularly worth reading.

Unexpected

You know how we’ve become accustomed, in North America at least (where working in a retail service position is generally viewed as something you do until you get a real job — more about this below), to being served at “big box” stores by mindless drones with no real product knowledge or experience…

And yet… the unexpected sometimes happens. Twice now we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the knowledge and hands-on experience of the staff of the Michaels® crafts store in Waterloo.

Once was when K (aside: the link is to her new blog “42.1“; wabi sabi has been retired from active blogging duty, although it’s still on-line if you’re looking for her earlier knitting posts — she’s consolidated her on-line knitting presence at the shownotes blog of her Purl Diving podcast) and I were shopping for a stamp-pad to make Christmas cards. To make a long story short, the woman working there had been doing stamping for a good decade or two and provided us with very helpful guidance on which brand and type of stamp-pad would work best for the cards we were using — a heavy, textured stock in a dark red. She explained the pros and cons of the different ones they carry and said which one she preferred, and why — longevity, quality of the impression and so on.

Then, today, K was in search of some Japanese seed beads, size 6 and 8, which are on the requirements list for a beaded knitting workshop she’s attending next weekend. First, we tried the specialty bead store in Waterloo — no luck. They did have some seed beads, but much smaller than the sizes K needs.

The clerk was pleasant enough, but wasn’t experienced enough to suggest alternatives they might have other than to point out the section where there might be something that would work. Now, they do have a lot of beads… which is admittedly A Good Thing for a bead store, but makes finding just the right one a bit like the proverbial needle in a haystack endeavour.

The best she could suggest was to call back Monday and speak to the owner, who knows about beads and might be able to help. Riiight.

So, off to Michaels… but K didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything remotely like what she needed at a big box store. Still, it turned out they had some seed beads, and what’s more — they had, once again, a staff member who actually knew about beads and beading. She was able to at least find us some that should be suitable for one of the projects on the agenda for the workshop.

On top of that, she recommended a couple of bead stores in the area — well, actually, three, including the one in Waterloo that we had just come from, which we mentioned — that might be able to help us out with the other, slightly smaller size bead. We will likely try out at least one of them to see if anything suitable can be found in time.

Now, perhaps the store management at Michaels might not be too keen about staff referring customers to a competitor (albeit a small one), but in this case, we did buy some beads from them, and based on our experiences there with staff that actually know something about the products they sell, we’ll definitely be back for other purchases. In my mind, that’s a pretty good payoff for them.

Now, of course, Your Mileage May Vary and I can’t say that every Michaels will have the same quality of staff, but it’s at least encouraging to know that big box does not always equal the death of decent service.

Oh, and about the earlier observation about service jobs being looked down upon in North America (and with some justification… can you say “D’ya want fries with that?”), it’s in contrast with what we experienced when we lived in France for several years (and had the opportunity to travel a bit throughout Europe, as well). There, service jobs, at least the ones where you don’t ask “Voulez-vous des frites avec ça ?“, are still respected and reasonably well compensated. As a result, you get people doing these jobs who enjoy it, who are knowledgeable about the field and are proud to serve you professionally.

Miss that, a lot. Ah, well — small finds like the staff at Michaels keep the flame alive…

Elf of a good time

Thanks to Walt Jaschek of the Walt Now blog, K and I had an elf of a good time making this:

If you’d like to go elf yourself, you can visit the Elf Yourself website — enjoy!

What’s a month between friends…

OK, so Ted’s nudged me. I haven’t posted in a while… almost a month.

And it’s not for lack of things I’ve been thinking about posting. There just doesn’t seem to be “enough days in an hour” to get to it as the act of expressing myself is something I take quite seriously.

Words and language — IMNSHO — are powerful things and need to be given appropriate attention and care. Which, for a someone like me with a strong perfectionist streak, means agonizing over every word, phrase and punctuation mark. I find it difficult to let anything I write out into public view that’s not well crafted. And craftsmanship takes time.

Life, since starting my new job (going very well, thanks… great company, great group of people and starting to feel like I’m now starting to make a real contribution), has been busy… not that I’m complaining, mind you.

It’s just made it more challenging to keep up with everything, blogging included.

Now, time to sign off for tonight — more soon. Really. No, really…

Women are from Venus; Men are from Duh.

Oops. Mea gobble, mea gobble, mea maxima gobble (to paraphrase from the Latin “mea culpa“).

We went to the weekly Saturday morning farmers’ market in town and picked up a bunch of the first “local” asparagus — it was from a farm in South Western Ontario somewhere down near Lake Erie, which isn’t strictly local to where we live, but does fall within (or at least within a country mile or so… ) the 100 mile (~160 km) criteria (as in “The Hundred Mile Diet“) we’ve been trying to stick to as often as possible when shopping these days.

We also bought some organic shiitake mushrooms from Greenfields Farm, which has a stall at the farmers’ market. For dinner, K combined them into this:

A lovely sauté of the local asparagus, first of the season, with the organic shiitake mushrooms. It was delicious…

Now to the oops part (yes, I know it’s hard for you to believe that I’m not perfect… ) — I was cleaning up in the kitchen (which is my usual role in the process of doing dinner, well, apart from eating it that is) afterwards and eventually got to the pot that K had blanched (or parboiled or something like that…) the asparagus in prior to adding it to the sauté. The water that the asparagus had been cooked in was still in the pot; nothing unusual about that, I thought.

So I emptied the pot down the drain before loading it into the dishwasher.

And a little while later, when K comes into the kitchen after I’m pretty much done cleaning up, she looks at the pot-less stove top and cries out “Where’s my asparagus broth?!?!?“.

She explained that she had planned on using the broth as an ingredient for other dinners later in the week. But she had forgotten to mention this to me, and I didn’t even think about asking whether she wanted to keep the cooking water before I pitched it out.

Well, I really felt bad about it — I’m sure that the broth would have been put to good use in livening up the taste of another dish.

You can be sure, though, that from now on, I’ll be asking before I dispose of just about anything when I’m cleaning up in the kitchen.

And that’s why I’ve concluded that women are from Venus and men are from Duh…

The Good, The Bad and The Miscellaneous

The Good

Yesterday evening, we (me and my wife, K, that is) were in The Big Smoke for a book launch party that K had been invited to. She’s known Amy, the book’s author (she’s also Editor/Publisher of the on-line knitting magazine knitty.com), for some time so to show support we schlepped into town to help her celebrate.

The book’s title, No Sheep For You, alludes to Amy’s allergy to wool and fabrics made from it — as a knitter, this has a somewhat limiting effect… The book is filled with information about substituting alternative fibres in hand knit garments — the characteristics of each type of fibre and the yarns made from them mean that it’s not always a straightforward substitution as adjustments need to be made to accommodate the differences in order to make a satisfactory finished garment.

The book has actually been out for a while now, but Amy wanted to have the launch party outside of Lettuce Knit, a local yarn shop that she frequents and which holds weekly “stitch ‘n bitch” knitting get-togethers. Weather was therefore a determining factor, and it’s finally becoming seasonable enough in these parts that she was able to schedule the party with reasonable confidence that there wouldn’t be snow…

It was a great party, and Amy deserves lots of congratulations (and success) for all her hard work in putting together the book and knitty.com — here’s a picture of the get-together, with arrows to point out K and Amy:

During the party, I did wander off while everyone knitted and chatted, exploring old familiar stomping grounds: Kensington Market, Spadina Ave (including walking by the El Mo, where I had seen George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers perform an amazing set many moons ago), up through the campus of the ol’ Alma Mater and on into Yorkville.

Which leads to…

The Bad

Walking back to Amy’s book launch party from Yorkville, I passed along Cumberland St, where there are a number of chi-chi re$taurant$ and boutique$. Now Cumberland is a no parking zone, but I came across a Mercedes-Benz AMG SL55 AMG folding-roof convertible (I can tell you exactly what kind of car it was because it had the “V8 Kompressor” logo on the side of the front fender — I am an admitted, life-long gear-head, and didn’t need to look at the trunk lid for the model badge to identify it) parked at the curb in front of one of those aforementioned restos. It had a handicapped-parking permit on the dashboard.

Now, I’m willing to entertain the possibility that the owner/driver, or perhaps their passenger, were legitimately entitled to be issued the permit by the authorities — but it certainly made me go “hmmm…” and wonder if there had been some monetary influence involved in getting the necessary medical certificate required to obtain said permit.

Then, a short distance down the street: another fancy-schmancy car parked in the no parking zone, also with a handicapped permit. If memory serves me correctly, this one was a Bimmer, a 6-series if I’m not mistaken — I wasn’t paying as much attention at this point (being distracted by my thinking about the possibility that fraudulently obtained permits were being used to abuse a privilege that should be reserved for those who truly need it), so I can’t say with authority whether it was the vanilla version or the M6 überwagen with the V10, or even whether it was a coupé or cabriolet.

So, while it’s possible that both of these were legitimate applications of the handicapped parking privilege, the circumstances — two very expen$ive cars parked in front of expen$ive restos on an up-scale street in a trendy neighbourhood…. well, let’s say that I’m leaning heavily towards believing that everything was not exactly on the up-and-up.

The Miscellaneous

There were a couple of other items from yesterday’s foray into T.O. that were interesting (well, at least to me — Your Mileage May Vary) that I will mention here:

While driving in to the city, we came across a pixelboard displaying the following news item:

Which was immediately followed by:

An unfortuitous (or perhaps intentional ) — but amusing — juxtaposition…

The other miscellany: while walking along Yorkville Ave, I noted on the hoarding in front of a construction project a sign reading something like “Funding provided by BNP Paribas (Canada)“.

Why did this seemingly mundane sign catch my eye? Well, BNP Paribas is a French bank that I am familiar with from my time living/working in France — but I had no idea that they had a presence in Canada.

Certainly not an earth-shattering observation, just one of those connectedness things that strikes you at odd occasions and in odd places.

Are you going to the fair?

Job fair, that is.

That’s what I did last Saturday. The first one I’ve ever been to. More about how it turned out below, but first some general observations and thoughts about job fairs and how they fit into the job search landscape.

I think that there are probably three broad categories:

1. Job fairs targeted at soon-to-be or recent post-secondary graduates;
2. Industry specific job fairs; and
3. Single-company job fairs.

The first type can be single-company or multi-company, and are often run on-campus in cooperation with the school’s administration. The second type is a strictly multi-company affair — since I’ve classed single-company job fairs as a separate case.

Now, since I haven’t attended any of the first two types, I can’t speak with authority about them — so take anything I may say about them with an appropriately sized grain of salt.

In any case, I’m far enough past graduation that the first type isn’t applicable to my current job search. I’m sure there were some on campus back when I graduated, but I didn’t attend any — my degree was in aerospace engineering, and I was fortunate in joining The deHavilland Aircraft of Canada Ltd (yes, I know it looks a bit odd, but I assure you that was the company’s name, including the initial “The”; originally a subsidiary of a British aircraft manufacturer, the company was eventually bought from the Canadian government by Boeing and then sold a couple of years later to Bombardier Aerospace) straight out of school as they were recruiting new engineers in the aerodynamics department for the development of the Dash 8 commuter airliner. I still have many good memories of my time there and feel a sense of pride at my contributions to the design every time I see one flying overhead.

As for the second type, my impression is that they are probably useful for bringing together employers seeking very specific skills — typically either in highly technical fields or in skilled trades — and those who have those skills to offer. I suspect that they are more likely to be organized when there is a shortage of the required skills; when there’s a glut, there would be little incentive for a bunch of competing companies to get together to woo prospective employees.

Which leads to the third type, and which was the kind I attended last Saturday. It would seem that a company conducting a job fair to fill a bunch of their job requirements flies in the face of the current conventional wisdom of recruiting, which seems to be: do as much as possible to take the “human” out of “human resources”.

It’s true that the organizing and execution of the job fair took a lot of effort — and cost, I expect — on the company’s part and particularly on the part of the employees who participated (more about which later). Using the internet to recruit candidates, then screening them with software designed to match keywords found in a candidate’s résumé with keywords provided by the hiring manager, would seem to require much less effort — I can’t comment on the cost aspect, since there is obviously some cost associated with the systems and software required to do this and I don’t know how it compares with the cost of running a job fair (although I’m sure the software vendor’s marketing team has a well-cooked set of figures to prove how much money it will save…)

But maybe the reason it requires more effort is that it actually produces better results. Now, I’ve had some feedback from a number of sources that suggest to me this is true. Specifically, I’ll use RIM (Research In Motion, maker of the now ubiquitous BlackBerry) as a sort of “case study” for this — I’ve applied to RIM for a number of positions through their internet recruiting system.

And apparently, I have impressive qualifications, at least according to the canned rejection e-mails I keep getting back. Now don’t take that as sour grapes on my part, there’s more to the story. I do have some inside contacts at RIM: my brother-in-law works there, and so does a friend from university — they have both told me that the recruiting system seems to work against the hiring managers seeing the best candidates.

I’ve had this corroborated by the outplacement consultant I was provided with, who has spoken to a number of RIM’s managers and has heard the same thing from them. There are also lots of stories about people who’ve submitted applications and heard nothing back at all from RIM… until they get a call months, even years, afterwards asking them to come for an interview.

Perhaps RIM is a bit of an anomaly — they’re considered such a desirable place to work that they get a huge volume of applications and perhaps this significantly exacerbates the inherent limitations in the system. And having been a software developer, I can assure you that even an expertly developed system will not be able to identify suitable candidates as well as an experienced human resources professional.

But even so, I think it still serves as a pretty good indicator of the downside of taking the human out of human resources. It’s hard enough getting a hiring manager’s requirements stated clearly enough for a skilled and experienced human being to put them into a coherent job description (having had to write requirements as a hiring manager myself, I can say this with some confidence), but identifying good candidates that fit the requirement is tougher still and requires a level of judgement that only comes with experience — something much better dealt with in wetware, not software.

So, on to the actual job fair. I spotted an ad in the local paper for the job fair, which was being held at the company’s site in Cambridge, not far from here. I knew of the company, but the positions I had seen advertised previously were for skills outside my area of competence — they build communications components and systems for satellites, and the jobs I had seen before were mainly for electronics, RF and microwave engineers or for production workers and skilled trades (e.g. machinists).

But for the job fair, they were recruiting for a variety of positions, including some that matched my profile — a job that requires project management experience coupled with strong inter-personal/relationship building skills, for example. I decided that it was worth investing the time to prepare for and attend their job fair.

As noted, it was run on Saturday — presumably to allow people who are employed to attend, in addition to those who are (like myself) between jobs. There were a lot of their employees involved: from directing people in the parking lot and the lineup (and it was quite a lineup), to registering candidates as they entered (due to security and confidentiality restrictions that the facility operates under, everyone had to be signed in and out, and all cell-phones and cameras had to be left at the registration table — neatly tucked into a zippy-bag and labelled with your name for retrieval on exit), then directing people inside to various interviewing areas; not to mention the considerable effort spent in actually interviewing candidates.

While I’m sure that the employees would be compensated in some fashion for working on Saturday, with time-off in lieu perhaps, it was still impressive to observe the dedication and energy being shown by everyone — my impression was that they were putting in a lot of effort not because they were forced to, but because it was the best way to make the organization be successful.

I gathered from one of the staff that the company had put on a job fair the year before (perhaps they do it annually; I’m not sure about that, but they definitely had one last year as she talked about how hot it had been and having to take water out to the people standing in line. Not a problem this year; it was cold and there was plenty of water available in the form of rain) — I take this as an encouraging sign that their business continues to grow.

Once through the registration process, where things like name and address were noted, and the position you were interested in was marked on the top of your résumé, people were seated in the lobby until being called into one of the interviewing areas — which one depended on the type of job and skills required. After a short wait, I was ushered into a conference room with probably close to a dozen people — all HR personnel, I believe — performing preliminary interviews; a sort of triage to determine whether or not to send a candidate on for more in-depth interviewing with a manager.

I had a nice conversation with a young woman from HR, and found out that she had only been with the company for 6 weeks — I commented that they had really thrown her into the deep end right away. She asked a few questions and concluded that I should see one of the managers — she consulted her list of people conducting interviews and put the names of three of them on the top of my résumé, indicating that any of those three would be in a position to evaluate my suitability for the position; I would see whichever of them was available first.

When she was done with the interview, she gave me her business card and asked me to follow up with her after my interview with one of the managers, to let her know how it went.  One of the benefits, I think, of putting the human back into human resources — with most companies, when you submit an application through their faceless internet portal, it’s generally just “radio-silence” (other than, perhaps, an automated e-mail cheerfully informing you that your application had been received) unless you get contacted for an interview.

After another brief wait while they assembled a group, we were taken in to the cafeteria where the secondary interviews were taking place.  I waited there a bit longer this time, sitting through a presentation about the company, its history, products, business philosophy, corporate culture, employee benefits and so on…  actually, I saw the presentation quite a few times while waiting, and noted a small grammatical error on slide 15 (in describing the function of the recreation club they used “who’s mandate is…” instead of “whose mandate is…” — I pointed this out to my interviewer so that it could be corrected, and he noted that I certainly demonstrated good attention to detail).

The interview took about 15-20 minutes, I think.  The interviewer was a manager from the production engineering department, and was not the hiring manager for the position I was interested in — nonetheless, he was familiar with the main requirements of the position, so I expect that as part of the preparation for the job fair the managers who participated were briefed on all the positions being recruited for so that they could at least decide if a candidate was suitable enough to be passed on to the hiring manager later for an in-depth interview.

The discussion was very thorough, and I think we quickly established a good rapport.  At the conclusion of the interview, he said he would forward my résumé to the director of the department that was recruiting the position, and he expected I would be contacted soon to set up a formal interview.

Based on the experience with the job fair and the people I met, my impression of the company was that it is a very strong, dynamic organization; that the people who work there are dedicated, committed and truly enjoy being part of a successful team.  I tend to be somewhat cynical about “mission statements” and “corporate values”, but the ones stated in the presentation were: a) very much in evidence; and b) actually very much in line with my own beliefs about what makes a business strong, sustainable and a good corporate citizen.

So, my first experience with a job fair was exceptionally positive; however, I don’t expect that this would be the case with all companies running a job fair, so take that into account as well.

Also, I’ve gone from knowing almost nothing about the company, other than its name and where its products are used, to knowing a fair bit about them and being very impressed with the organization:  according to the information presented, their market share for some of their products is greater than the combined total of all the other suppliers in the marketplace (granted, satellite communications components are not exactly a high-volume business…  but it’s still a worthy accomplishment).  Beyond the commercial success, I can see that it would be a very good environment to work in.

Oh, and did I mention the lineup?  The job fair was scheduled to run from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm; I wasn’t able to arrive until right at 9 am (K was going to Toronto that morning to help her friend Karen, who’s opened a knitting store in New Hamburg called Shall We Knit?, with a booth at the DKC Knitter’s Frolic knitting show and I had to get her to the meeting point for Karen to pick her up before I went to the job fair) and the lineup was already half the length of the building.

The lineup moved slowly, and the time that was marked on my résumé at the registration desk was 10:42 am.  Fortunately I was able to strike up a conversation with the woman behind me in the line, as it turned out she is also from the city where I live so we had something in common; the conversation helped pass the time and distract from the miserable weather that day.

By the time I left, it was about 12:20 pm, and I think that the lineup was even longer than when I had arrived at 9 am.  When I later spoke to the woman from HR who had asked me to follow up, she said that they had been a bit surprised at the number of people who had showed up for the job fair; there were a lot more than they had expected.  A sign of the economic times, I suspect.

She told me she was forwarding my résumé to the hiring manager for the position, but that they were travelling on business this week, so it would probably be the end of the week or more likely next week before I would hear from them.

Based on my very positive impressions of the company from the effort that they put into their job fair, and also the obvious quality and dedication of the people I met during my time there, I have to say I would be very pleased to become a part of their organization; one that has the Unconventional Wisdom to put the human back in human resources — they evidently see enough value in return for the significant effort it takes.

RSS and Bloglines De-geeked

I received a request from our friend Ted (a.k.a. Knitterguy) for a de-geeked explanation of RSS and Bloglines; seems he’s been tapped to do a presentation to a local group about blogging technology and he’s interested in my perspective on it.

This is because he knows that I’ve learned a fair bit about RSS and other blogging/podcasting publication technologies in the process of getting K’s podcasts (her knitting podcast Purl Diving and her movie podcast Cinéfolle) up and running, and also because I’m pretty good at translating technical topics into something understandable by a person who doesn’t have tape on the bridge of their glasses, which may be helpful to him in presenting it to a non-technical audience.

The simple answer is that RSS is a bit like the “crawlers” at the bottom of the screen on TV news channels like CBC Newsworld.  Except, with RSS you get to pick and choose what kind of items show up in your crawler.

And Bloglines is an example of one of the ways you do the choosing.  It’s an on-line service (free, no less…) where you can set up a personal page of all the “content” that you want to scan regularly for new items.  I put content in quotes to indicate that there is a wide range of things in addition to blogs that you can subscribe to using Bloglines, or more generally any of the tools that work with RSS — typically called aggregators or feed-readers (again, leaning on newsroom jargon as in: getting a feed from a wire-service).

Content can include news feeds from, yes, those same TV news networks — which makes the crawler analogy very apt.  It can also be used in the automatic distribution of digital media — audio or video — in the form of podcasts or videocasts.  And of course, it works with regular plain old text based blogs too.

As for what “is” RSS, well, the acronym itself is disputed — the most common interpretation is that it stands for Really Simple Syndication.  If you want the history, check out the Wikipedia entry on RSS.  Note that RSS is really just a standard (or more correctly, several versions of a standard — see the Wikipedia entry for the gory details) that allows content providers and content consumers to get together more easily.

In addition to RSS, there’s another widely supported feed standard (joke: the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from) that also enables this bringing together of producer and consumer — it’s called Atom, and is often provided in parallel with an RSS feed on a provider’s site.  Kind of like being able to get a particular news channel via either cable or satellite…

So the RSS (or equally, Atom) standard is a way for a content producer/provider to announce, in a “machine readable” fashion, that they have some new content available.  Now for the non-geek, machine readable just means that as long as the provider adheres to the standard and puts the right things (as defined in the standard) about the content in the feed, then a program (run on a machine, i.e. a computer) can read the feed and decode the information according to the standard.  In fact, the technology behind the feed standards is something called XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which is designed to be easily machine readable but is also fairly readable to humans too — provided you have lots of patience.

Computers are generally much better at boring, repetitive tasks than humans, so that’s how they get stuck with the job of keeping you up to date on what’s new, rather than you having to either pore over the XML in the feed or having to browse to all of your favourite destinations on the ‘net just to see if there’s anything new there to read (which there often isn’t…).

On the side of creating the XML for the feed, that can also either be done by a human or by a computer.  There are some sites that do still “hand code” the XML for their feed (often just as a geeky point of honour, but sometimes because they want to “fine tune” the details), but the majority either use stand-alone feed creation software or the content management platform (er, that’s just a fancy term for a blogging service…  Blogger, TypePad, WordPress — that sort of thing; although it can also apply to other types of web site management systems) provides a feed “automagically” (i.e. the computer hosting the blog, or other content source, does it automatically — as if by magic — whenever the content is updated).

Now, let say you’ve found a site (blog, news service, whatever…) that you want to keep tabs on for new content.  And it’s got some sort of a link for a feed — RSS or Atom or both — that will let you know when there’s something new.  This is where Bloglines, and other feed-readers or aggregators come in.  You subscribe to the feed using the chosen program or on-line service by entering into it the URL for the feed, or in some cases just by clicking on, or “dragging and dropping”, the link to the feed.

Depending on the reader, you’ll have some options that control how frequently it checks for updates on the feed — for Bloglines, the check for updates occurs once an hour; for an aggregator program running on your PC, you should normally be able to specify the interval or even set it to check only on demand.  In either case, at the appointed time the service/program will check the feeds you’re subscribed to to see if there are any items that are “new” — and new is generally defined as “since the last time the feed was checked”, although there can be hiccups in the process resulting in old items appearing again or new items not appearing at all.  Still, it generally works pretty well.

The way that a particular program or service will present the items to you varies — you may need to evaluate several to find one that suits your needs or preferences.  In any case, what they all do, fundamentally, is show you when there is something new at each of the sites you’re subscribed to.  Most provide a lot more info than that, but the main function is to relieve you of having to check sites manually for new content.

You can even subscribe to feeds in many browsers now — Firefox supports them through “Live Bookmarks”, and Internet Explorer has recently added support for subscribing to feeds in Version 7.

Apart from dedicated feed-reader or aggregator programs that run on your computer (and there are lots, both for PCs and Macs, and presumably Linux too — a quick search on the web will turn them up if you want to find one for your computer), I believe there are other programs such as e-mail clients that support subscribing to feeds but I have no experience with these (so you’re on your own if you want to know more about subscribing in your e-mail program).

There you have it — RSS and Bloglines de-geeked… I hope.

Coal-fired, Steam-powered Social Networking

If you read my earlier post Unconventional Nexus, you’ll have seen me mention the old-style BBS run by my friend Don, which I described as “coal-fired, steam-powered social networking” (think of it as “Web 0.0001″).

In that post, I held off revealing the “secret handshake” needed to gain entrance to Sibyl, as the BBS is named (after the oracle Sibyl — as in the prophetess/soothsayer, not the RDBMS software).  Don read the post and left a comment, in which he gave out the “decoder ring” to access Sibyl: telnet://vatic.com:51641 (you’ll find a link under the Friends & Family rubric in the sidebar).

Now, for those of you accustomed to GUI interfaces, be warned: the link above will probably attempt to start up whatever “terminal” program your browser is configured to use by default (on a Windows PC, likely the Hyperterm program; on a Mac, it should run the aptly named Terminal program; Linux and similar OSes, um, well if you’re using these you probably know what I’m talking about…).  As an alternative to clicking the link in a browser, you can just fire up (there’s the coal-fired, steam-powered analogy again) your favourite terminal program and connect to vatic.com on port 51641.

Once connected, you’ll be asked for your name (User ID); this will be where you can register as a user.  Follow the prompts and you should be good to go.

Just don’t expect any fancy graphics, or other amenities — this is a purely character-based system, running on an old but adequate-for-the-task PC from the days when you could actually run things on 640K of memory.

There are lots of old posts in the various sections (each labelled with the name from the Pantheon of Greek gods/goddesses) that you can read; sort of a time capsule from the end of the last millennium.  There are some recent posts too, but truthfully there hasn’t been a lot of traffic since Don resurrected Sibyl; perhaps this post will change that as new members flood in…

So, if you’re interested in seeing How Real Men And Women Computed on one of the few remaining coal-fired, steam-powered social networks still in captivity, just drop by Sibyl and consult with the oracles.

Unconventional Nexus

I had a “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” sort of moment tonight.

It started with K and I looking at the Canadian Podcast Buffet website, where we saw a couple of new posts: “We’ve been served” and “Cease and desist letter published“.

Now Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche, the hosts of the Canadian Podcast Buffet podcast, are a couple of pretty decent guys and it would be hard to imagine them doing anything — intentionally, at least — to attract someone’s legal wrath.

So you could have scraped us off the floor, we were so shocked… then, we clicked through the link to Tod Maffin’s “cease and desist letter” that was given in the second post above.

And that’s when I started rolling on the floor laughing my… well, you get the picture, right? As soon as I saw that the “letter” was from the law firm of “Dewey Cheatem and Howe“, well, I knew that it was all a gag — just a little late for April Fool’s Day.

Oh, and the unconventional nexus? That’s what happened when I clicked on the comments for the first post above and discovered one had been left by a certain Sonia Brock.

And I said “Holy crap!”(or something vaguely like that… ) and continued on to say to K, “I wonder if that’s the same Sonia Brock that I know from Don’s Sibyl BBS and EMCC ‘New Years’ get-togethers (the explanation of which I will defer to ynoT, er, I mean Tony B.)?”

Sure enough, it’s her. And she’s podcasting. And she’s listed on the CanadaPodcasts.ca podcast directory, where K has her Purl Diving podcast listed too. Cue up the spooky theme music from The Twilight Zone…

Now, I haven’t seen Sonia in quite some time — I haven’t attended any of the EMCC get-togethers for a while, due to a variety of circumstances. I wonder, though, if she might decide to attend Podcasters Across Borders in June, which K and I will be attending.

Anyway, it was definitely an unconventional nexus.

BTW the Sibyl BBS is again operating (having been recently resurrected by Don, my old friend and classmate from our days at U of T in Engineering Science), although I won’t divulge the details of how to find it unless Don is interested in opening it up to new members… let’s just say that it’s the coal-fired, steam-powered version of Social Networking circa late last millennium.