In honor of my light to non-existent posting lately, here's a live one by the best band in America.

I'm not sure how, but I came across this video tour of the famously unpopular Microsoft Bob.

Now that I have fallen under the spell of Google Reader, I've been spending some time organizing my news feeds and other reading.  As a part of that process, I have set up my local news, which I used to access via My Yahoo, in a dedicated Google Reader folder.  I suspect I am but one of many who are migrating our news from yesterday's paper to today's web site to tomorrow's news reader.  In fact, I believe with the growing use of feed readers and mobile content, the news-related web sites we visit today will eventually become primarily billboards for the various RSS feeds available there.  The biggest reason this hasn't already happened is that content producers and advertisers haven't figured out how to sell and serve advertising in feeds.  When that happens, and it is inevitable, we'll see an accelerated migration towards RSS distribution- both paid and ad-supported.

As a part of my migration to RSS, I have looked at a lot of local news feeds.  Some are good.  Some are horrible.  And many are somewhere in between.

Here's the current state and status of Houston English language news feeds.  As they change, so will this page.  Maybe we can generate some discussion here that will be helpful to readers and content producers alike.  Discussion that will hopefully lead to better feeds.

This survey is limited solely to English language news feeds offered by local news providers.  If there is a feed I haven't covered, let me know in the Comments and I'll add it.

Newspapers

Let's start with the best.  The Houston Chronicle currently offers 170 RSS feeds, covering categories from news to business to sports to neighborhood sports.  I subscribe to the following Chronicle feeds: Top Headlines, Houston & Texas, Business, Bellaire/West U/River Oaks (I wish they wouldn't lump us working folks in Bellaire with the yuppies and rich people, but at least a neighborhood news feed is available), Sports and Entertainment.  I also subscribe to Dwight Silverman's and Jeff Balke's Chronicle blogs, but not as a part of my news folder.  Like almost all papers, the Chronicle does not use full feeds, undoubtedly because it wants to draw readers back to its site where the ads reside.  It does give you enough of a summary to allow you to make a reasonably informed decision about reading more (via a click-through to the Chronicle site) or moving on.  While it would be a lot better if the Chronicle provided full feeds, even with ads, the summaries are pretty good.  Plus the feeds allow you to click past the Chronicle's online front page, which leaves much to be desired.

Speaking of horrible web design, there's the Houston Press.  I used to read the Press online every week until they destroyed their web site with a redesign a few years ago.  Sadly, their RSS feeds don't really help (I had to dissect an RSS feed just to find that page, and all of those feeds are outdated).   The Press web site promotes individual feeds for a lot of the collateral (at least to me) content and a default feed which seems to lump all the content into one feed, with marginally helpful summaries consisting of the first 50 or so words of the article.  The combined feed contains way too much stuff I am not interested in.  By reverse engineering the default feed URL I was able to decipher the feed URL for the featured stories, again with a first 50 words or so partial feed.  The Press's featured stories are generally interesting, but they are wrapped up in bad web design and served in unsatisfactory feeds.  The Press should either use full feeds (the best answer) or at least specially written summaries (the least that I'd find acceptable).  Until today, I didn't subscribe to any Press feeds because I couldn't find them.  I have now subscribed to the featured news feed, but the short feeds and non-summaries are not likely to draw me to the site very often.

The Houston Business Journal has a feed that, like the Chronicle feeds, is a partial feed with short but reasonably descriptive summaries.  You can also find feeds to its sister publications in other cities as well as regional feeds and industry-specific national feeds.  I subscribe to the HBJ feed and to the commercial real estate industry feed.  Again, I look forward to the day full feeds are the rule and not the rare exception for news-related feeds, but as things go today, the HBJ's feeds are reasonably good.  (Disclaimer:  I have written articles for the HBJ and some of its sister publications in the past and will probably do so in the future).

TV Stations

Channel 2 (NBC) offers 11 feeds.  No full feeds, of course, but the feeds do contain generally descriptive summaries.  Even this one sentence summary- "A party boat slams into the Kemah Boardwalk, KPRC Local 2 reports," is more useful that merely stuffing the first few words of an article into a partial feed.  On the other hand, you have to look closely (left hand column under "Site Tools") to find the RSS feed on Channel 2's less than stellar web site.  Unlike blogs, where the RSS feed should always be obvious and near the top of the page, many TV stations aren't sure what they really think about feeds, so they are displayed with less gusto.  I subscribe to the main Channel 2 feed, but none of the others.

Channel 11 (CBS) has a web site that makes Channel 2's look like Earl's page (the best blog template I've ever seen), but at least it has its RSS feed icon above the fold and somewhat prominently displayed.  Channel 11 offers 23 feeds.  Like Channel 2, there are no full feeds, but there are generally descriptive summaries.  Unfortunately, some of those 23 feeds are stale.  The latest post in the movies feed, for example, is from August 27, 2007.  Same for the music feed.  I subscribe to the Channel 11 Top Stories feed, but none of the others.

Channel 13 (ABC) has its feeds link at the bottom of its web page, where you find 32 available feeds.  A few of the feeds have either older content or none at all.  A lot of the TV stations' sub-feeds seem thrown together.  They could all do with less quantity and more quality.  Like its competitors, Channel 13 uses partial feeds with summaries.  Channel 13's summaries seem shorter than the others, but maybe that's because they don't have periods at the end.  I subscribe to the Channel 13 Top Stories feed, but none of the others.

If Channel 26 (FOX) has RSS feeds, it's not very proud of them.  No mention of them at all on the front web page.  A search for RSS leads to something called myFOXhouston news which promises, but does not seem to deliver, RSS feeds.  The first rule of anything is that if you make it hard, people won't do it.  They did, and so I didn't.  I don't subscribe to any Channel 26 feeds, in part because I couldn't find any.

Channel 39 (CW) has no RSS feeds.

Channel 51 committed the unpardonable sin of auto-starting a video (with loud audio and no pause or mute button) when you visit its web site, so I was tempted to click away and leave it at that, but a desire for completeness led me to a brief but unsuccessful search for RSS feeds.  I thought Channel 51 was a news station, but it's not- at least not anymore.

Radio Stations 

I couldn't find any RSS news feeds by any of the Houston radio stations.  Some of them have podcasts.  Here's the rundown, though I don't subscribe to any of these at the moment.

610 KILT has no RSS news feeds, but it does have RSS feeds for some podcasts.  I couldn't find a page with a list of the RSS feeds, but through the magic of Google, here are some of them.

KIKK 650 has no RSS feeds and no local podcasts.  It does have links to some CBS podcasts.

700 KSEV has no RSS feeds and no podcasts.

740 KTRH has no RSS feeds, but a lot of podcasts.

790 KMBE has no RSS news feeds, but it does have some podcasts.

950 KPRC has no RSS news feeds, but it does have some podcasts.

1070 KNTH has no RSS news feeds, but it does have some podcasts.

1430 KCOH has no RSS news feeds and no podcasts.  They should podcast Ralph Cooper's show.  He's the best sports guy in Houston, and has been for a long time.

1590 KMIC (Radio Disney) has a podcast (my kids would call me an even bigger nerd if I didn't mention their favorite station).

Conclusion (1/28/08)

Thanks to the Chronicle, Houston is in pretty good shape RSS-wise.  We need full feeds and better summaries for the partial feeds.  The TV stations are behind the newspaper, as you would expect, and ahead of the radio stations, as you would also expect.

What do you think of the local new feeds?

I need some help.

I have been using a Blackberry 7130e for the past 2 years.  It's been a good phone, but it's getting a little long in the tooth.  It does media only slightly better than 2 cans and some string.  I need a new phone.  Fortunately, I am out of contract with Verizon, my current provider, so I am free to pick any phone and any provider I want.  Sort of.

There are issues to be dealt with...

Like most big companies, my firm uses Microsoft Exchange Servers and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers.  Like many big companies, my firm does not use IMAP, I assume because the decision makers do not believe it is secure enough.  Which means that, as much as I dig my wife's iPhone, if I ponied up and bought one, I could not access my work email, contacts, etc. with it.  This is a problem.  Ideally, I want to carry one device to get all my mail and to serve as my phone.  Carrying a phone and a separate Blackberry for work is inefficient and is not my preference.

Plus, as much as I like the iPhone, it is not without other drawbacks.  It's not 3G compatible, the camera does not have a flash, there is no voice dialing and some of its features require a Wi-Fi connection.  And, as I have said before, I don't want to be tied to iTunes to synch my data or to manage my music.

As I mentioned the other day, in an effort to keep me as a customer, Verizon sent me a Blackberry Pearl 8130 for $50.  I thought, incorrectly, that no contract extension was required.  I learned today that a 2 year extension is required, but that I can return the new phone and be free of the contract extension.  The fact is, however, that I really like the 8130.  It's fast, it has a camera with a flash, it does voice dialing, works with Google maps (with GPS), and it is set up to receive my work and my personal email seamlessly.  In fact, I would strongly consider extending my Verizon contract, keeping the 8130 and waiting for the Blackberry 9000 to hopefully rock my world, but for one little complication...

After I activated my old phone, but before I got the 8130, my firm decided that everyone's Blackberry should have a forced password on it.  This means that after 30 minutes of inactivity, my phone locks, and I have to enter a password on that little Suretype keyboard before I can access my email, contacts, camera and other applications.  This is not a huge problem for most people at my firm, because they do not use their firm-issued Blackberries as their phones.  On the other hand, I use my Kent-purchased Blackberry as my phone, for my personal email, etc.  Plus, I do a lot of calls while driving, and having to enter that password every 30 minutes is, practically and psychologically, unappealing.  In sum, the password thing is close to a deal stopper for me as far as the phone and personal stuff goes.

So I see my choices as:

1. Getting an iPhone for my personal stuff and carrying a firm-issued, password enforced and likely rarely used Blackberry for my work stuff.  This seems really inefficient and unnecessary to me.  I don't want to lug two devices around.  On the other hand, I would be able to quench my iPhone-lust.  But if I can't get my work contacts, calendar and email on it, it's not really serving its intended purpose.

2. Keeping the 8130 and living with the forced password.  I can't adequately describe how intrusive I find the password thing.  I wish I could learn to live with it, but I don't think I can.  On the other hand, if I could somehow come to terms with it, I could be happy with the 8130, and potentially thrilled with a subsequent 9000.

3. Returning the 8130, reactivating my old 7130e and waiting to see how the 9000 shakes out.  Unfortunately, because of account deletions and creations with the new phone, even if I go back to my old phone, I will have the forced password problem.  The only way this makes sense is if the iPhone will be able to pull email from Blackberry Enterprise servers within the foreseeable future.  And nothing I have read gives me any reason to believe that's going to happen.

I end up caught between two less than satisfactory choices.  One, if I want an iPhone, I have to lug two devices around.  Two, if I want to have one device for everything, I have to live with a forced password.  Honestly, I find neither choice acceptable.

What should I do?

Four of my favorite bloggers,  MG Siegler of ParisLemon, Steven Hodson of WinExtra, Frederic Lardinois of The Last Podcast and Louis Gray, have combined to create and moderate the aptly named Elite Tech News,  a custom Reddit for tech-related news.

Here's the URL, and here's the feed.

Highly recommended.

Randy Morin with a lesson on how not to treat your customers.  Reminds me of the time I got completely blown out by this hag at the airport because I tried to pay for a water bottle at the wrong cash register.

MG Seigler brings truth to the Continental free not-Wi-Fi story.  Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger and the Blackberry network?  Obviously, Yahoo is paying Continental some money to force people to its network, at the expense of everything we really need.  This is bad news getting spun as good news.

Stereogum points to some new Sun Kil Moon.  Here's where you can listen to it.  Glen Tipton was my favorite song of 2007.  On the retro hand, Stereogum also has some vintage Hall and Oats, complete with bad hair and intermittent lip synching.

After all the (very tasty) deer I ate this past week, it was troubling to learn that vegetarians are healthier, smarter and richer.  Maybe, but that deer was a vegetarian and he got eaten.  That's not so smart now, is it?

So 80 people go to Chuck E Cheese, get in a brawl and end up getting pepper sprayed.  The next day it almost happens again.

I really enjoy Survivor and the Amazing Race.  But a show about Michael Vick's dogs is absurd.  I wonder if they go visit him now that he's in the pound?  I hope I don't accidentally record every episode and watch it.

Here are some cool photos of a diamond rush ghost town in Namibia.  Here's more about the town's history.

Thomas Hawk on Barack Obama, Dave Winer and pot.  We have a good friend who is very interested in politics.  She's always putting signs for all the wrong people in her yard.  I told my kids they don't have to study up on elections- that all they have to do is drive by Sharon's house, write down every name on the signs there, and vote for the other person.  I'm pretty sure that I would take the same approach with signs in Dave's yard.  Or on his blog.

Here's reason number 112 why I say no when my kids ask if they can play with their turtle.  Reason number 1 is because if he bites you, he won't let go until it thunders.

Good advice for living a happy life.

It was bad enough when he didn't see the first one coming.  Then there was the second one.

PDFTextOnline converts PDF files to text, for free.  Oh yeah, and online.  Text...PDF.  It didn't work all that well for me based on a couple of test documents, but it's a cool idea.

I've mentioned more than once that young people who play behind the Facebook walls should proceed (and post) with caution, since things said in the faux-safety of that place of a thousand friends can come back to haunt you.  Here's an object lesson on that topic.

Meet Lucas Caparelli, until recently a running back for my alma mater, Wake Forest.  Lucas is described by college sports site Scout as having break away speed and vision. "Gritty player that just loves to compete. Athleticism and competitive drive could carry him far at the next level."  The Deacons were thrilled to sign Lucas, who was also recruited by Maryland, Pitt, Virginia and Virginia Tech, among others.

Lucas arrived at Wake Forest at the beginning of the golden era of WFU football under the guidance of wonder-coach Jim Grobe.  The Demon Deacons won the Atlantic Coast Conference and played in the Orange Bowl last year and won nine games including the Meineke Car Care Bowl this year.  Things are good for WFU football (they are not so good for WFU basketball, but that's a topic for another day).

Lucas has, or had, a Facebook page.  At some point, he apparently wrote on his Facebook page, that he was going to "blow up the campus."  He also wrote, according to published reports, a post in Facebook's trademark third person saying "for those left standing he will have an Uzi locked and loaded in his bag."  After another student saw the Facebook posting and, quite correctly, notified authorities, Lucas got a visit from the police.  While the police did not find any weapons in his bags or dorm room, Lucas has been dismissed from the football team and suspended, at least for now, from the university.

Here's a lengthy discussion about the matter, including some current WFU students, at ACCBoards.Com.  Here's a related post on the Old Gold & Blog, a Wake Forest sports blog.

One of the local television stations spoke with Caparelli (here's a video with portions of that conversation).  He admitted he did a stupid thing.  He apologized, and said he "never thought it was going to snowball into this."  But that's the thing.  In this post 9-11, post Virginia Tech world, no right-thinking school, employer or friend (the real or Facebook kind) can afford to take chances.  Threatening things written must be taken at face value, regardless of the intent or state of mind of the writer.  There are no do-overs anymore.  Thanks to technology, easy capital and cheap storage, things that may be intended as one-off rants, jokes or juvenile nonsense are captured, archived, indexed and, often, distributed.

College kids behaving stupidly is nothing new.  When I was at Wake Forest, a guy drunkenly told me he was going to kill me because a few of us intercepted his pizza delivery, paid for it and ate it (that was our "on demand" hack of the Domino's delivery system).  I didn't really think he was going to kill me, but his words when spoken sounded as serious as they were slurred.  Imagine how they would have looked in writing.  During that same period, we used to joke that phones should have breathalyzers on them so we couldn't come home after too many beers, call our girlfriends (or prospective girlfriends) and mumble out what we heard as suave and the girls heard as stupid.  Thank goodness the internet didn't exist back then.

By all accounts, it doesn't look like Caparelli planned to commit any actual acts of violence.  It may very well have been a stupid joke, a poorly thought-out response to some dissatisfaction with school, or just misguided late night ramblings.  But regardless of his true intent, this event will likely affect him for the rest of his life, to one degree or another.  Hopefully, he'll learn from it.  If Jim Grobe recruited him, chances are he's a good kid.  But his life just got harder than it would have otherwise been.

In a few years when he applies for a job, this unfortunate event will almost certainly come up, particularly if his prospective employer does a background check.  And if somehow it doesn't, he'll have to choose between disclosing it and risking the reaction or living in fear of Google.

The obvious moral of this story is to write every post as if everyone you ever know will see it.

Because the chances are pretty good that they will.

Cassidy received an award tonight for reading all 20 books in the Texas Bluebonnet book program, and writing a summary for each one.

She also got to pick one of her summaries to read at the presentation.

Cassidy reading her summary of
Hubert Invents the Wheel.

Technorati Tags: books

Lifehack has 7 Habits to Win in Office Politics. I'm a little bothered by the "win" in that title. How about to manage office politics? Anyway, habit number 6 - seek to understand before seeking to be understood - is also one of traits of the best negotiators. And probably the best bloggers too.

Rick Mahn says bye-bye to Facebook. You know, no matter how hard people try to make it otherwise, Facebook was, is and always will be primarily for college age kids. I really agree with Rick when he says:

While some have made a pretty good case for Facebook, it doesn't change how it's viewed by business, or how useful it is for me. I'm astounded at home much time everything takes and how limited everything is. Not to mention the data-ownership question.

Facebook, like most of the social networks, is amplified cocktail chatter- everyone talking over each other and no one really listening. Net out the advertorials and you end up with a lot of really marginal content.

Today's list: TDavid on the 8 types of blogs for 2008, with a little Newsome.Org editorial:

1) Linkblog. Only marginally interesting without added content. I can find plenty of links in my feed reader.
2) Moblog. Accretive if used in moderation.
3) Podcast. Fun to do, but does anyone really listen to them?
4) Video blog. Home movies were boring in the 70's. Videos are a plus if done well and in moderation.
5) Microblog. A graffiti wall. Fun in small doses.
6) Miniblog. I don't know much about these. Why spread your content all over the seven seas when you can consolidate it in your main blog? All this data spread can actually work against personal brand building if it's unchecked.
7) Liveblog. Seems like an awful lot of work and not much bang for your buck. As soon as the event is over, you've lost the advantage over regular blog posts.
8) Regular Blog. Here comes my main point: why can't a regular blog encompass all 7 of the others?

Now that we've managed to bring wolves back from the brink of extinction, let's start shooting them. Amazing.

My wife recently joined a book club, which seems to be the soccer moms' preferred social network these days, followed somewhat closely by Bunco groups, which I thought until recently was some sort of organized crime (actually, the more I learn about those groups it may be).

Anyway, my wife joins this book club.  The first thing I noticed is that they read all these nerdy, high falutin' books like the A Thousand Splendid Suns and whatnot.  Those books are too hard for me.  I'm still at the edges of post-traumatic stress disorder over having almost read Wuthering Heights in the 11th grade.  Thank goodness for Cliff's Notes.  The second thing I noticed is that a couple of the founding members of this club keep picking books they have already read.  That sounds more like playing school than a book club.  If I was in that club, I'd call b.s. on that the first time it happened.  The second time it happened, I'd start turning furniture over.  But women are too nice to do that.  They either dutifully read the selected book, or they go all passive aggressive and start going to class unprepared.

Anyway, I'm not in a book club.  But I like to read.  Lately, I've been in a science fiction phase.  Here are some books I have read or reread lately, and enjoyed.  Other than the first one, I'm going to skip all the obvious must-reads, like Stranger in a Strange Land, Ringworld, etc.

First, and as I have mentioned before, I just reread Hyperion, followed in order by its four sequels, Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and Rise of Endymion.  These are all excellent books, and this has become my favorite sci-fi series.  I also reread another old favorite, The Eyes of Light and Darkness by Ivan Cat.  It's as good as I remember it.  I am currently reading Cat's second novel, The Burning Heart of Night.  It's not as good as the first one, but it's still to early to make a judgment.

I also recently read Robert Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold.  I bought it years ago, because it is in my favorite sub-genre: post apocalyptic, but didn't get around to reading it.  It was considered pretty controversial when it came out in the 60's.  I didn't find the racial elements to be all that interesting, and I thought it was a pretty good story with or without that element.

Lastly, I started to reread the California Voodoo Game series.  When I read these books the first time, back in the 90's, I thought they were great.  Among my all time favorite science fiction books.  I don't find them as compelling this time around, but they are still worthwhile reading.

That's my part.

Now I need some good science fiction recommendations for my next visit to the bookstore.  Can anyone help me out via the Comments?