My Life
My Life
Yep, I too have joined the ranks of the nice folks over at
CodeBetter.Com. Not much to say, as everyone knows why some of us have moved over there. The biggest thing I'm looking forward to is the clean, no-nonsense (except for Geoff sometimes haha), uncluttered main feed. DNJ, Asp.net and a few other large weblog communities are just SO VERY OVERWHELMINGLY full of stuff you have to wade through before you can find interesting technical stuff to read, and you see posts about the same topic a dozen times (yes, we all know enterprise library was released, can we quit blogging about it now?). We are all guilty of that, and CodeBetter.Com has a policy to not polute the main feed with personal posts and off topic posts, so I'm looking forward to it. Expect everything on the main feed of CodeBetter.com, with the exception of these initial "I'm here now" posts, to be informative and useful.
You can find my blog at
http://codebetter.com/blogs/raymond.lewallen/.
Thanks to Donny and the gang for hosting this blog of mine, I wish it could have worked out different. DNJ is still and will remain one of the top 3 feeds I subscribe to, and I hope they get their issues worked out soon.
Currently Playing: Wild West Show - Big & Rich
This page has been moved to
CodeBetter.Com. Please update your links accordingly. The new post URL is:
http://codebetter.com/blogs/raymond.lewallen/archive/2005/01/21/46950.aspx.
Didn't think it would really go this far, but my post of my
Superbowl Predictions has gotten 128 comments in the last 8 days and is getting more by the hour. I figured a few of the dotnetjunkies readers would comment and there would be 4 or 5 predictions, but google has kept that from happening. If you go to
google and type in
Superbowl Predictions, my blog entry comes up first on the list. How far will it go? Its certainly going to keep growing as the big game gets closer. If you want to see some funny banter, and perhaps comment yourself,
take a look. Beware, there is a certain degree of profanity and name-calling going on there. Would it be an NFL discussion otherwise?
I follow 163 feeds these days, and if I don't go in and check them at least 4 or 5 times a day, it gets to be overwhelming trying to keep up with them. There are just too many good and interesting posts floating around. Holidays are especially bad. I like to spend time with my family and daughter and don't check my feeds during weekends or vacation periods. I always come back from 3 day weekends with 250 posts to catch up on, and actually read a decent portion of them. It takes a good two hours to catch up once I follow everybody's links and post comments and whatnot, while still marking many of them as read even when not reading them (I hate having unread posts. Those bold posts hanging around bug the crap out of me!!)
Anyways, Happy New Year to all and good luck catching up on your posts over the holidays, its a lot of work! Thankfully, the holidays also keep many of us from posting very much anyways, so I won't be posting again until next week sometime, to save you the hassle of having to do a Mark All As Read on my blog, if you subscribe.
Click here for the NEW 2005 Preseason Superbowl Prediction!
Patriots over Philadelphia
Final score 35 - 17
What's your prediction?
Yes, all of last years comments have been removed. Nothing I could do about that, sorry.
I've been using the same rss reader for quite awhile now called
RssReader. I've enjoyed using this reader, but now I would like to change to a new reader. I've looked at
SharpReader and
OMEA Reader. I've downloaded and installed both and compared all three that I now have and have decided I would like to use OMEA Reader.
First, RssReader doesn't export feed subscriptions into OPML format, only XML. OMEA only imports feed subscriptions that are in OPML format. So I went out and I found a converter for XML to OPML. I did that to my XML feed subscription file I exported from RssReader, but OMEA complains the file is corrupt. I went in and exported the 2 feeds I added to OMEA to compare the OPML files, and of course they are different, way different. The program I downloaded doesn't appear to be up-to-date with its OPML formatting. Holy cow, I have over 165 feeds that I subscribe too, and I certainly don't want to go and subscribe to each feed one by one.
But hey, I have over 1500 blog posts saved on my hard drive via RssReader. If I switch to another reader, the new reader isn't going to download all the feed posts dating back to the beginning of the blog. So far, its seems OMEA only pulls the last 35 posts for dotnetjunkies, which is not the readers fault, that just happens to be the number of posts kept in the aggregation file. I continuously use the filter and search functions of RssReader to find old posts I want to go back and refer to. Without being able to move all those historical posts to a new reader, I have to keep the old reader so I have access to the historical posts, many of which are well over a year old. So now I will be stuck using 2 readers, and I really would like to switch to OMEA, but at what cost?
Has anyone else changed your reader after using a particular reader for an extended period of time? What did you do about all those historical posts you have saved? Does anyone know of an XML-OPML converter that actually works? Any suggestions? Comments? Are there other news readers out there, for free, that you prefer? What is everybody using and doing about these issues? I've almost decided on just sticking with RssReader for the single reason of the historical posts.
Eric talks about burnout on
this blog post, and I hope to see quite a few more comments about it. No doubt, burnout hits each and every developer at one point or another. Its tough to deal with. We all do so much reading, writing, typing, reviewing, discussing etc that its easy to get burned out on it. Being a developer is very hard on a person's mental state over a period of time, it you have to get away from it. I would love to see some more comments on how people deal with avoiding and recovering from burnout. I've only had to seriously recover once, and it involved dropping an ongoing contract of 3 years, and lots of alcohol. This, my friends, is not the way to recover from burnout. How do I avoid it these days? I play with my daughter, I play my guitars, and I play
Enemy Territory online with my friends. You'll notice the word
play in each of those. Do something you enjoy every day that doesn't involve work. I enjoy my work, yes, but you have to do other things you enjoy too. Make time for the other things that make you who you are.