Brian Levay: November 2006 Archives

It was another perfect day for football. The temperature was just about 50 degrees with a slight breeze blowing through the stadium and the Falcons were in town visiting the Ravens. It was an ugly first half of football for the Ravens and the entire row of Falcon VIP's sitting behind us were sure letting us know. To them Vick is the second coming. To the rest of us football loving fantasy players we knew the real Vick wasn't far away.

And in the second half the real Michael Vick showed up along with the real Ravens. Luckily the drunk guys in our section took care of letting the Falcon VIP's know who the ruler of this field was. Way to go Ravens! 8-2 and playoff bound!

I've been struggling with what to call my wife's addiction to the Food Network. To call it anything less than an addiction would be an understatement because changing the channel while the Food Network is on in our house is a sin. We have now gotten to the point where Food Network repeats are becoming a part of our TV viewing repertoire.

After reading Eric's Thoughts on High-Profile Cooking I now have the proper phrase needed to describe this addiction: Food-Porn. In the medical profession when something is labeled it usually has a treatment. I'm not sure there is a treatment for this one.

Note: The one bright-side to this whole thing is that we have had some fabulous meals, snacks, and drinks! Except for dinner tonight which was Hamburger Helper and Scrambled Eggs....ever see that on the Food Network?

After years of using RSS Bandit, like Dave, I'm finally ready to move on. The RSS Bandit team got off to a great start, but the innovation going into the tool over the last year has been pretty much at zero.

As much as I would like to switch to a web based aggregator, there are several intranet feeds that I monitor that having two tools wouldn't make sense for me. I settled on FeedDemon. It doesn't meet the free requirement, but at 30 bucks it is still well below my price point.

Early impressions with FeedDemon are excellent. The UI is pleasing and intuitive and it is very fast during feed updates. It has crashed a couple times when my laptop returns from hibernation, but version 2 is still in beta so I can live with a bug or two for the short term (and I sent the error into tech support and they responded in less than 2 hours...a fix is on the way).