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I like to read news on a lot of different topics. Politics, gadgets, local news, sports, etc. RSS and Atom feeds are a great way to keep up with things, but I'm always on the hunt for a newsreader that fits into my processes, rather than forcing me to change my habits to work with it.

I've found one - Brief. Brief is a Firefox extension that makes reading feeds as easy as reading usenet posts using a good news reader. If you don't know what usenet is, well, go to Wikipedia.

What Brief does is pull together all your feeds in the sidebar, give you quick access to unread items, and allows you to quickly mark them as read or actually go to the page and read it.

I know, it sounds simple, but it's really a great tool for keeping up with a variety of feeds.

Let's face it, POP sucks. That's why I'm glad Google finally decided to add IMAP to it's free email service. But I have one question - why, two days after the announcement, don't I have the option to enable it yet?

This last Sunday, the Oakland Tribune (and several other Ang owned newspapers) had an article about Doulas - Mother's helper, Doulas make birth better for some Bay Area moms. My wife was part of the article, and her picture was on the front page of the Oakland Tribune. I'm really proud of her.

They aren't working yet, give me just a bit to work it out.

On News Year's Eve, my wife and I went to the Berkeley Zen Center. There's a tradition in Buddhism to ring the bell 108 times running up to midnight. Some say each ring represents a path to enlightentment, others say each one represents a worldly desire, and that desire is driven away by the bell. Whatever the meaning, it's a lovely way to spend New Year's Eve.

One of the reason we invaded Iraq, according to the Bush administration, was because the UN weapons inspectors were not allowed full access to prove that WMDs were not being developed. Now, according to US News, we won't be giving UN inspectors unrestricted access to investigate allegations of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo. Because of this, the UN inspectors refuse to visit.

Once more the Bush administration shows its hypocrisy. We can demand that other countries allow the inspectors unrestricted access, but we have the right to refuse the same.

Three more years of this, folks. Brace yourselves.

Although you probably can't tell it from this blog, I write for a living. Every writer though, professional or not, has certain issues that trip them up. This is especially true of things you don't use a lot.

For me, the majority of my writing is for online documentation. Online documentation should be composed of simple sentences. People scan and skim online help, they don't read it, so complex sentences cause people to miss valuable information.

Because of that, I rarely use semicolons or colons. I'm out of practice. Today I'm writing a document analysing the structure of the online help documents at salesforce.com. I had a long sentence that I thought was perfect for a semicolon.

Most tables are part of the body content; the exceptions, in our case, are access and edition tables, which are closely associated with headings.

I wasn't sure, though. So, I typed "semicolon usage" into Google and shazam! up came Semicolon Usage which reassured me that I was using the semicolon properly.

Granted, I could have used my handbook, but I'm sitting at a great little cafe in Berkeley called Le Bateau Ivre (the drunken boat), and it's a ten minute bike ride back to my handbook. I'd rather rewrite the sentence than do that, but thanks to some kind soul and Northwest Vista College, I don't have to do that.

Although my blog gets hardly any visits, I'm sure one of my 5 (on a good day) readers will send me an email saying, "Nope, that's the wrong way to use a semicolon". That's what you get for posting something like this, right? I actually welcome comments like that, but if you are the one that sends that email, please tell me how to fix it, don't just tell me that it's wrong.

Greg's Digital Portfolio, by a freelance photographer, shows before and after pictures of some shots he's done. The post-processing he's done is amazing.

It's no wonder that people have unrealistic expectation about their own bodies, about a place, or object. We see a version of reality that only exists in the art director's mind.

It's not lying, but we need to remember that what you see is hardly ever what you really get.

Lifehacker writes about a very interesting ICQ robot called SmarterChild. You can send it messages that will tell the robot to give you reminders, help you with spelling, geography, give you the headlines, or tell you when Million Dollar Baby (or any other movie) is playing in your area.

The thing Lifehacker doesn't tell us is that it's ad supported. Just simple inline text ads, but ads nonetheless. They are pretty easy to ignore, but if you don't like ad supported tools, don't use SmarterChild.

Robots have been around on IRC and ICQ for some time, but this one is really easy to use, and has a lot of good functionality. Check it out and see what you think.

So, since I started my new job three weeks ago, I've been using IE. It's been a long time since I used IE, and I thought that I'd give it another chance again. Well, it still sucks. No tabs. No RSS. Spyware problems. Crappy CSS.

I'm back to Firefox.

I did find something very interesting, though, if you really need to use IE. Try the Avant browser. It uses IE for browsing, but wraps it up in a lot of extra functionality including tabs. Now, if you've never used tab browsing before, I feel for you. Tabbed browsing is the best UI addition to browsers since the back button. Try it, you'll love it.