Wednesday, 9th January, 2008

Free NetNewsWire

link geek rss

Well bugger me. Newsgator have just announced that they're making the full version of NetNewsWire (currently at v3.1) completely free. I'm not entirely sure how this works with their web-based subscription syncing service, but it's an incredibly good thing.

http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NetNewsWire/Default.aspx

In Other News

work

I am stressed out about work. I kinda just want to curl up into a little ball and scream for several months. I think the stuff I'm doing/about-to-launch is going to be (a) radical, and (b) stunningly good, but I (as usual) have my doubts, and I'm not sure I'm going to be finished in time.

(That was the short version. I might elaborate and post the long version sometime)

Freedom Of Choice

america

Amiee took me into downtown Chicago a couple of days ago. Bear with me a moment while I get a couple of initial reactions out of the way first:

1. OMG it's huge

2. Forked lightning rocks

3. Idiot here remembered to take her camera, but forgot to take a memory card, so I only have a couple of pictures that I took with Amiee's camera.

(Which, to be honest, doesn't really bother me. I mean, I'm not one for taking photographs when I go to visit cities anyway. I hate being a tourist at the best of times, and besides, it's prety-much impossible to take a photo of something in a tourist destination without just replicating every single other photograph that been taken by other tourists — and why bother when you can just jump on http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanyagin/1098809530/Flickr and find all the photos you would have wanted to take yourself?)

Anyway. Whoo. Chicago. We like

We went for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory — a rather impressive restaurant with weird art-deco interiors, and astoundingly good (and huge) food (which we considered as a venue for our reception, until we discovered that they only did functions in the top-part of the restaurant, which wasn't half as cool as the bottom).

I must briefly confess that it wasn't quite what I was expecting. I imagined an actual factory — with people in white coats and chefs' hats busying themselves making cheesecakes on conveyor belts — rather than just a restaurant.

But hey. The food was spectacular, and we had a seriously hard time finishing our enormous portions.

(Actually, we didn't finish them. Because we're both quite wee)

But the thing that struck me most about the whole experience, was how big the menu was.

"Fucking enormous"

Seriously, it was about fifteen pages long, with dish after dish after dish on it. Choice after choice, unfurling into more choices as you went along. Just as you thought "Oooh, that looks tasty!", there would be something on the next page that looked even tastier.

I'm not very good in those kind of situations. I joked at the time that there should be a restaurant (actually, I think there is one) where they only do one thing and you eat whetever happens to be on the menu that day.

"Today, we are only serving sausage, egg and chips"

"Excellent"