Umamiblog

A couple of things have been happening lately I’ve wanted to blog about. I thought I’d combine the lot of them for good-measure.

My most important value in life?
We have a stock-standard normal old land phone line at home. The only reason we have one is the historical legacy of Telecom forcing you to have a landline if you wanted to get DSL/broadband. S and I both live from our cellphones so we almost never use it and only two people ever call us on it, S’s parents, and telemarketers.

I have a habit of saying “thanks for calling, I’m hanging up now” to any telemarketer but I’ve been putting up with a few calls lately to listen to the odd survey and how they’re conducted (there is an ulterior motive). Last week the New Zealand Chamber Music Society called and from what I gathered they’re trying to work out why no one cares about chamber music and consequently why no one (except themselves) ever goes to their concerts.

Now for whatever reason they thought relevant, they asked me a number of questions about my values. Such as:

• How important is world peace to you?
• How important is it for people to like you?
• How important is it to you that you reach your potential in life?

Uh, quite important… but it doesn’t mean I’m going to spend any of my over-taxed dollars to watch chamber music. I felt like saying “Go fish!” as they were asking the questions. Maybe they need to read Seth’s “I’d ignore him too” post.

Why don’t they advertise this?
Air New Zealand’s grabaseat promotion/feature is pretty cool. They update it daily with some very low fares to and from domestic and internation destinations – today I could have booked a ticket to Taupo for $39.

Their offers are always getting emailed around the office and it stuck out to me as a sitter for an RSS feed, it’s incrementally updating content! It is in Flash, I thought to myself, so it wouldn’t be that easy to scrape the page for that days offers to mash into an RSS feed. Hmmm, I wonder if the Flash app imports the offers as plain text or XML from somewhere. I pondered deeply.

I ‘Right click…View Source’ to see this staring back at me: <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml”…blah blah>. Cool! Why didn’t I see the wee orange logo in the address bar? Why don’t they advertise they have an RSS feed for this!?

Direct link if this would be helpful for you and you didn’t know about it (like me).

Somehow this code feels more comfortable that the other one…
There has been lots of debate (and locally even) about the Blogging Code of Conduct brought on as a direct result of the attacks on Kathy Sierra. And yet the Blogging Anti-Code of Conduct seems more honest.

Resistance is futile!
I wanted to start a new Word document today. I almost got as far as opening up MS Word only to find myself closing it and going to Google Docs instead.

Scary. So Google now knows what I search for, who reads my blog, what blogs I read, what I post on my blog, who emails me (and what I email them), what my calendar appointments are, who I chat to online, whats on my computer, and now what documents I work on.

Far out, they must have a better idea of who John Lewis is than I do. Heh, and I used to be scared of Microsoft…