David Carrington

I’ve been playing Rohan quite a bit lately. I started the year by playing RF Online quite a lot, but switched (with many others) in order to avoid the unstable servers at the time. Waking up to test the game at it’s exact release time of 4am in the UK was a bit much, but vaguely worth it by the fact that I got first dibs on my name of choice for a healing class: Faith. Inspiration of the name was actually Faith from the game Alien Swarm, which was the main game I played last year. All three are highly recommended.

I’m enjoying Rohan, especially since a lot of the people I play with are the same one’s I played RF Online with. I’m a healing Elf woman, fairly well valued in the game to keep parties alive in times of crisis - or more typically, to take on big monsters for an hour or so. However, even a healer has limits with great big fiery dragons…

Watch as the two strongest players run away in fear, which turned out to be the right choice as they were able to come back and revive me so I could heal the whole group and get us back in action.

• A 728-ton stabilising ball
• The Phoenix lander has “convinced” scientists of ice on Mars - still not actually confirmed.
• A film about a guy that always responds “yes”, with Jim Carrey: Yes Man
• Pityriasis rosea - an oval shaped rash
• 401? 301? 501? - HTTP status codes
• Real time shadows in Blender
• Site Identification Button in Firefox on various SSL sites
• Skype phones. Especially the dual mode Netgear one.
• HTML vs XHTML
• 9 day weeks

Bryan Person heard about it from Marketing Over Coffee and thinks it’s a good idea, as do his two commenters. Bill Deys wrote about it too.

Scoble refuses to not do it:

“My link blog is for keeping what I think are the most important RSS items of the day, including mine.”

The positive side of doing it is that you’re potentially pushing your blog into more people’s RSS readers. The only negative feedback I’ve read so far consists of one of these two arguments:

• Duplicates - This is reasonable, hopefully Google Reader is now smart enough not to show an item twice. If not, it’s probably something they’re trying to do.
• “I don’t like your blog” - People saying this have a fair point. For now, their only choice is to put up with it or unsubscribe.

I’m personally going to add this to my own Shared Items (david.carrington AT gmail DOT com if that helps).

I’ve used Google Reader for ages, and I’ve been using GTalk with Nick for ages. Annoyingly, Reader flat-out refuses to let me add Nick as a friend to see his shared items in the new interface.

Since then, I’ve managed to add Scoble and Chris F. Masse, but still no Nick! Does Google not like him? Has he offended somebody?

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

1. Removing him from GTalk and re-adding
2. Deleting the whole GMail contact and re-adding

What can I try next?

Google Reader has become slightly more social lately with the addition of recommended feeds. I’ve just come across another tweak to the interface which helps a bit with the social aspect: a Shared Items improvement.

The screenshot above shows that not only did Scoble share the feed item in question, but my colleague Nick Clarke also shared it. Previously, this would have come up as two items for me to read, once in Nick’s shared items feed and again in Scoble’s feed.

This is a slight step forward to the point where items with more “shares” are promoted for reading. I don’t think there’s a current interface to accomplish this though.