Google Reader Update: January 2008

From your 59 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 10,620 items, starred 140 items, shared 187 items, and emailed 45 items.

Wow! In a month, I've gone crazy with Google Reader. Here are my numbers from exactly one month ago today:

From your 29 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,506 items, starred 23 items, shared 76 items, and emailed 20 items.

In thirty days, I've more than doubled my reading list and more than quadrupled the overall amount of articles that I'm reading. I've actually been pairing down the feed list over the past few days as well. I'm finding a lot of replication between sites, particularly tech sites and with my current batch of feeds, I'll sometimes come across the same article three or more times.

Parenting...

I watched a disturbing episode of Supernanny on ABC last night. I was completely out of gas last night, after returning to work after nearly two weeks off. The commercial advertising the new episode caught my eye because they mentioned the fact that this was the first show that the parents didn't call for help on, the children did; in particular, the two older daughters, ages 17 & 14.

Without going into disgustingly laborious detail, here's a quick breakdown on the important facts of the episode:

• Father worked full-time and mother had her own photography business, for which she was gone all day
  
• Besides the two older daughters, there were three boys, two of which were twins. I don't recall their exact ages, but they couldn't have been over three years old.
• Both parents leave for work while all the kids are in bed
• The two older girls attend an online, charter school
  
• The two older girls were expected to entertain the younger kids, take care of the younger kids and clean the house during the day

These two girls were nothing short of slaves for the parents. I have never seen or heard of a set of parents that were any more selfish and self-centered than these two parents. They knew that there was a problem, but they did nothing to try and fix it until the girls called in Supernanny.

What really hit home were some of the comments that Joe Frost (Supernanny) made to the father concerning his role as role model for his two daughters. This really hit home with regards to the book that I'm about a third of the way through at the moment, Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters. If you have a daughter and haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It's linked to in the right-hand column of this page under 'Books I'm Reading'. Clicking on the book cover will bring you directly to Amazon or you can click here. I'll write more about it when I finish it and get around to transcribing all the underlined passages and scribbles I've made in the margins.

I've been discussing the book in dribs and drabs with my wife. To me, the book seems very anti-feminist and against a lot of the things that would be considered norms in today's society. From my vantage point however, it all just seems to make sense. It's amazing to see the relationship between a father and daughter broken down to see all the little things that go into molding and shaping a young girl into a woman. It has caused me, someone who thought that they were involved nothing but positively in my daughters life, to rethink things that I may say or do that have been identified in the book as being a negative influence on a young girl.

Perhaps this book should wind up on this father's reading list. He may be able to save his relationship with his daughters and his daughters, before it's too late!

BestBuy.com (Best Buy) in store pickup...

A few days ago, I tried the in store pickup option offered at BestBuy.com for the first time. In a nutshell, the process is:

• add items to your cart
• choose a preferred store
• check inventory at that store
• place an order with the intent of the order being picked by an associate and ready to pickup at the customer service counter by you

I've used a similar system at CircuitCity.com in the past and it was trouble free. This is not the case after my interactions with Best Buy.

I had a handful of items that were last minute gifts for Christmas. Best Buy has a great website that has a boat load of product on it, and it just so happens that they allegedly had all the items in stock that I was looking for. I ran through the order process, selected one of the three stores that are within 20 minutes of me and submitted.

According to BestBuy.com, there were two emails that I was waiting for: an order confirmation email and a stock confirmation email. At this point, the stock confirmation email worried me. I realized that there is a retail/corporate/web database issue here and that more than likely, BestBuy.com was not running a realtime inventory database system ala WalMart. I trudged on though, thinking that the little items that I was ordering weren't on the 'Top Gifts of Christmas 2007 list'.

I used my Gmail address for the order, as I have for almost all important things lately (another post for another day), as email generally arrives to it nearly instantaneously. I wasn't disappointed this time either, as the order confirmation arrived before I even left the BestBuy.com site. However, things went differently with the second of two stock confirmation emails. The first listed two of the items as being in stock in the store; they were ready, come pick them up. The second listed two of the items as not being in stock.

Because I wanted to grab all the items in one shot, I called the 800 number from the website and cancelled my order. This was a completely pain-free operation.

Now, I'm not blasting Best BuyorBestBuy.com for this. I just think that they need to improve the process a bit. There are a few suggestions that would have made me a happier comsumer:

• Don't dish out multiple emails for the stock confirmation. After receiving the first email, my first assumption was that they were just scanning the items as they picked them and that the other items were going to be in an email to follow. This turned out to be true, but in my case, they didn't have the items in stock
• After receiving one email with all the stock statuses, there should be a cancellation option linked right from the email. If all the items are in stock, I'm alright with not including it. If even one item is not in stock, add the link.
• Fix the inventory tracking system that links with BestBuy.com. This drives me crazy with banks too, but it's nearly 2008! There is no reason that checks need 5 days to clear and there is certainly no reason that inventory updates should not be nearly real time. Walmart has been doing this for years, so there's no excuse!

Need an RSS feed?

Here's quick fix for those sites that don't have an RSS feed. There were a few sites that I check in on frequently, that don't have a feed for one reason or another. If you've been reading about how I'm hooked on Google Reader(here and here), you know that browsing outside of Reader just doesn't cut it.

Enter Feed43. Feed43 can take an html page and with a little help from you, can create an RSS feed for you. Check it out!

Google Reader Rocks...

From your 29 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,506 items, starred 23 items, shared 76 items, and emailed 20 items.

The more I use Google Reader, the more I love it. I'm now reading over 350 articles online, every day. Take that Newsday! The great part is that I'm spending less time on the computer.

Prior to reader, I would get drawn into things that, deep down inside, I had no interest in. Since most of the RSS feeds come down as a title and a blurb, I can quickly scan items to see if they're of interest to me and be a bit more discerning with what I read.

As the quote above states, I now am pulling my news from 29 sources! This is us from a handful, just over two weeks ago. I'm finding that I check twice a day, usually around lunch time and just before I go to bed. As my trend data builds, I'll grab some screen shots and share an OPML file of my feeds, in case you're interested in what I'm reading or if you'd like to use my feeds as a starting point.

Either way, Google Reader rocks and I highly recommend it.

Google Reader vs. Digg...

I've become a pretty heavy user of Google Reader the last few weeks. It's a great tool for people that spend a lot of time on the web and a reading from either an enormous amount of sites or incredibly varied sites. Prior to using Reader, I would visit a dozen or so sites daily, with Digg being the site I used for tagging stories for recall later on. I can honestly say that I have cut my total news reading & browsing time in almost half. Why not more you ask? Well, I've been exploring new things to read a result of living in Google Reader.

As I've been writing more consistently the last few weeks to this site, you may have noticed that I was posting my shared reader stories and my recent Diggs in the right-hand column. As of this morning, I've taken down the Diggs and I'm going to try an experiment this week. I'm going to try using Digg through Google reader. Why? Well, while Digg exposes some great reads, it really is controlled by a select group of 'Diggers', whose submissions always seem to make the front page. I had started to Dabble in the 'Upcoming Stories' section, but there's just too much crap there. What I've now noticed by visiting Google Reader first, is that I've now read most of the news making the front page, before even going to Digg.

Does this mean I'm going to stop visiting Digg? No. The entertainment from the comment system is too good to walk away from right now. One thing that Reader lacks right now is a social aspect, but knowing of Google, it may already be in the works.

I'll report back later on how my experiment goes, but in the meantime, I highly recommend Reader.

New York Mets Premium or Poor Gotay?

I was happy to listen to the Mets conference call tonight, regarding the signing of Luis Castillo. Like others have mentioned, the length of the contract causes you to scratch your had though. If you scour the rumor sites like I do, the word on the street was that Castillo was entertaining offers of two years and out of the blue, he signs with the Mets, for four years!

Listening to Boomer & Carton on the way into work this morning, they brought up an interesting point. They were rattling off players that the Mets have signed over the last few years and for all intents and purposes, how they overpaid for them when compared to the market conditions at the time. If I can find the examples he gave, in the interest of posting factually correct information, I'll edit this post and add them later. In my opinion, what they were saying made a lot of sense and it definitely made you wonder.

How is it that the Mets can be in the largest market in baseball, be one of the teams with the highest payroll and still not have the aura about them, where players want to be here. I think that they took significant strides towards getting there by establishing some credibility; bringing in players like Pedro, Beltran, Delgado and Glavine. However, it obviously wasn't enough to attract players without throwing them an extra year on their contract here or there. I know we're not the [insert Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox or the Cardinals], but I'd imagine the chance to play for the Mets, in New York, would be a big enough draw on its own. We've been a competitive team for the last few years and up until 'the collapse', we were doing a great job under Willie.

Anyway, prior to Castillo coming back, a part of me was pulling for Ruben Gotay to get the nod at second base. I'd love to see what the kid could do if given a full-time opportunity. With the signing of Castillo though, we probably won't be the market to see him get his shot.

Yorvit Torrealba?

Why was this ever a possibility?

I'm not quite sure what Omar was thinking with this one and I'm glad that it fell through. Let's hope it's a dead issue now. Paul LoDuca hits better and throws runners out more consistently than Torrealba. So what if he opens his mouth a little bit? God forbid someone speaks up a little bit or has an opinion.

Was he wrong to chastise his teammates for not speaking to reporters? In my opinion, this depends. If the first time he complained about it was in front of the press, he was wrong. If he did it privately first with his teammates then no, he wasn't wrong. Can you really fault him if this is the case? The press does tend to go to him and David Wright all the time. I'm not going to get into what has been discussed to death on the internet, but if the shoe fits.

Come on Omar, let's get Paulie back in uniform. Now that he's your third choice, it's probably going to be a bit more difficult, especially since you've probably insulted him now. What other catchers are out there? There's nothing wrong with a platoon of LoDuca and Castro. Our problem has not been catching, defense or offense. It's been pitching! Are you paying attention Omar?

Go give Rivera the fourth year that the Steinbrenners allegedly said no to tonight. That should solidify the pen rather quickly. It's not like you spent the dough on Posada or A-Rod...