If Only $H = $US!

I’ve been a member of HubDub for 3 weeks as of today, and for someone who just sort of plays it very casually, I’m kicking some serious ass.  My overall rank, which is based on your quarterly gain, is 233.  And while I don’t know how many members there are overall, I’m certain its well over 5,000 by now.  That puts me in the top 5%.  They also break down your ranking by category, and when it comes to sports, I’m ranked in the top 3% at 138.  However, my sports ranking is really only that high on account of a few long shot wagers that really paid off for me.  And while its cool to be ranked high, I can’t see ever being ranked in the top 20 – their quarterly gains go from $30,000 on up to almost $300,000!  That’s incredible, but who has that kind of time?

Feed Me!

RSS feeds epitomize what the internet is really all about – content you want, delivered on your terms.  Its quite obviously different from most other media that’s existed in the past, and has actually influenced older delivery systems, the most obvious of which is cable and satellite TV distribution.  TiVo and/or DVR has changed the way most people consume televised media, though without the internet as a competitive device, its hard to say how much longer such a device would have taken to come to realization, if it came at all.

I’m an avid subscriber to RSS – I have nearly 20 feeds that I subscribe to, which has made it somewhat cumbersome to keep things neatly organized in a way that makes sense and doesn’t require substantial effort.  I use Windows Live Mail Desktop as my email client, both at work and at home, which has feed reading capabilities.  However Microsoft doesn’t allow for any way to synchronize my subscriptions across machines.  Rather, I’m forced to subscribe to my feeds manually in both locations, and even more cumbersome, I have to deal with the fact that even though my work PC knows I’ve read a particular feed, my home PC won’t know, and I have to “mark as read” with great frequency.  That’s irritating.

So, I went in search of a solution, and came across FeedDemon, which is a free program that is both an RSS reader, as well as  an optional (and also free) account-based manager.  That is, if you create a free account, your RSS stuff is synchronized – even marking read and unread feeds appropriately anywhere you use the program.  That’s exactly what I wanted!  But wait – there’s more!  I also subscribe to RSS feeds of my favorite podcasts, so that I get notified when a new podcast is up.  FeedDemon allows you to optionally automatically download new podcasts!  That takes all the ‘leg work’ out of it, and makes RSS work as it was intended – providing content on my terms.

Settling on a Blog

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to seamlessly and effortlessly integrate my blogging between both MySpace and Facebook, which is no easy task, thanks to how much MySpace sucks when it comes to open applications everything.

What I’ve decided to do is to first write my blogs here, then copy them over to MySpace, as the underlying architecture here is far superior.  Porting this content to Facebook is much easier, as I can use the Flog Blog application to syndicate this to my profile page.  Neat and easy.