Jonjographical jottings
Hmmmm, I have agreed to go into town for a few "quiet" drinks with my housemates tonight, but have just remembered that I have to get up early tomorrow morning to go to Manchester. There is a "Careers in Academia" event on, which I have booked to attend, and it starts at nine o'clock. Ouch! Still, today has been fairly boring, so it will do me good to get out of the house.

What are people's opinions on RSS feeds and the utilisation thereof? I know Barm has involved himself with them in some way in the past. My housemate Stuart was singing the praises of subscribing to various channels in a news reader and then having lots of news to read, and so I experimented with a few news reading programs. As far as I am concerned, though, the only useful thing about them is their ability to pop news up in a little balloon in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, and I could only find one program (WinRSS) that did that without you having to have a web-browser-or-e-mail-client-style program open and running. Unfortunately, said WinRSS seems a bit rubbish - it keeps popping news up even if it isn't new, and even repeats items. What is the point of that, I wonder? Anyway, my little experimentation session is now ended and I shall just look at the websites of the various places I want information from rather than fiddling with RSS thingummies.

Did anybody read Ruth Padel's scathing review of Stephen Fry's new book on poetry in the Independent the other day (Friday, I think)? She slagged him off all ends up, and was especially critical of his Greek. Perhaps Alan Davies should seize on this for Quite Interesting purposes.