NBC just announced that they’re canceling The West Wing after this season. That’s been one of my favorite shows on television since it started, so this is a bummer. While it’s had ups and downs with the change in writers and creative team, it’s still been a fairly strong show. According to the announcement, the decision was made before the death of John Spencer (one of the key actors in the show).

According to NBC, its ratings suffered with the move to Sunday nights… so why not move it back to Wednesday night to compete with Lost on ABC? Oh, that’s right… because the Biggest Loser is on. Lame. We lose a show that deals with political topics in an entertaining way so we can watch big people sweat.

I think it’s sad that CBS can sustain three hours a week of CSI, but NBC can’t manage to keep one of their smartest and most critically acclaimed shows going — especially when it was nearing the opportunity for a new lease on life and new perspective (the current season is in the middle of a presidential election).

I suppose it’s just another nail in the coffin of the broadcast television networks, who are getting their asses kicked by better, smarter shows on cable.

I guess there’s always “Command in Chief”.
(yes, that was a joke) 

Nick Bradbury (creator of FeedDemon) explains the way that synchronization works between FeedDemon 2.0 beta and the NewsGator online service. I’ve been using various builds of FeedDemon since the 1.6 beta began and synchronization has been a bit of an issue. At various times it hasn’t worked well, but I think mostly the issue has been a lack of understanding on how the sync should work. Nick’s post goes a long way toward helping clear some things up and it’s good to hear that they’re looking at better ways of handling read/unread state of items between NGO and FD.

It’s also worth noting that when a folder is marked for synchronization, FeedDemon no longer goes directly to your subscribed feed URLs for updates. Rather, it goes to the NGO servers to ask for updated items. On the one hand, this makes sense because it’s the easiest/fastest way for NGO and FD to stay in sync… but it also means you’re at the mercy of the NGO servers’ uptime. When they’re unavailable for any reason, and it’s happened on occasion during the beta, you’re not going to be able to update your synchronized feeds.

I’ve used FD since its original beta and been a customer since it was released… and I don’t think there’s a better news aggregator out there for people who prefer a Windows desktop application. Currently, there are just a few things I’d like to see out of 2.0 to make it ideal:

1. Allow for nested sub-folders in the new folder tree. This has been requested a few times already and Nick has mentioned that, while it won’t appear in the 2.0 release, it’s on the list for a later version. I think for those who don’t like folders, having the ability to organize using the 1.5/1.6 style UI would also be good.
2. Improve performance to where it was during 1.5… I tend to scan item headlines and use the “spacebar for next unread item” style of navigation. When cruising through a bunch of items at once (basically holding the space bar down), FD 2.0 doesn’t keep up the way it does under 1.5.
3. Make the synchronization as seamless and “behind the scenes” as possible, but I do think it’s important to give users a lot of control over how it works. This is a challenge because flexibility adds complexity… making documentation like Nick’s post available within FeedDemon would probably help with that. Having an option to force a sync and tell FD “make my local feeds reflect NGO” (and vice versa) would be nice. If the NGO servers are down and FD could be told to go directly to feed URLS instead of NGO, having this explicit “force update” option would be great when the NGO system comes back online.

That said, it’s clear that Nick and the NG team are committed to raising the bar for news aggregation… the transparency and honest desire for feedback from customers is great.

I got to be an early alpha tester on Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon 2.0 update. Nick has now made it available for wider testing via his blog (and previously the NewsGator support forum, though it wasn’t bloggable then) and it’s worth checking out.

The key things that I really dig about this update are:

• A hierarchical treeview for subscriptions. I find this much easier to navigate than the “one group/folder at a time” approach of earlier versions. It’s also easier to manage subscriptions in different groups.
• The “attention” stuff that lets you see what you’re spending the most time reading. I have far too many feeds in FeedDemon currently and it’s rare that I can keep up with all of them on a regular basis. Using some of these tools, it’ll be much easier to trim down my subscriptions to a manageable level. The reporting tools from the 1.6 beta (especially the dinosaur report) is good for this also, but there’s a distinction between “feed that updates infrequently” and “feed that has high value for me”. Some blogs update very infrequently, but when the do I want to pay attention to them.

Anyway, with the cat out of the bag, go forth and give it a shot. Nick has always been very receptive to feedback, so now’s the time to put it through its paces and report what you find. I’m still using 1.5 on my “main” machine, but I’m finding that the machine that’s been running the various 2.0 alpha builds has been getting more and more use.

Due to being in the “right place at the right time” last week at a local Circuit City, I was able to score an Xbox 360 Premium bundle. To start the games collection, I also got Project Gotham Racing 3.

Wow. This is an impressive device… not just from the gaming perspective (though the graphics for PGR3 are stunning), but also from the UI and “media” angle. It was easy to get up and running and converting my old Xbox Live account to run under the 360 took just a few minutes. The Xbox 360 can also talk to Windows XP machines on our home network to stream music and photos, so we’re considering it in place of the Tivo Home Media Option (which we like, but it has its limitations). If you’ve got a Media Center PC on your network, you can even stream video and use the 360 as an “extender” device.

Once I had it up, I spent nearly an hour and a half tinkering in the “Dashboard” before I ever put the game disc in. The Dashboard has a ton of things to explore:

• Lots of settings for customization and themes. I didn’t see a way to create custom themes, but there were lots available in the Xbox Live “Marketplace”.
• Set up your “gamer card” to include an avatar, which type of gamer you are (recreational, family, “underground”, etc), and other identity info. Again, I didn’t see a way to add your own avatar/icon, but there seemed to be plenty available through Marketplace.
• The hard drive came preloaded with one Xbox Arcade game (Hexic), a bunch of music files (most of which were from artists I’d never heard of… no surprise), and a handful of video files as well. Plenty to browse while you figure things out and it’s easy enought to delete them if/when you want to reclaim the space.
• You can rip your own music to the hard drive for listening (including listening during games, like the original Xbox), but even cooler was plugging in my Ipod and having the media page on the Dashboard instantly recognize it and provide a UI for playback — including playlists, genres, artists, etc. With that capability, I probably won’t see much need to rip discs directly to the drive. The console has 2 USB ports on the front and I get the impression pretty much any sort of USB device is fair game for media photos and music.
• Also in the Xbox Live Marketplace, you can download demos, trailers, and other things. Some for free and some require “Microsoft Points” (which you can buy through the console or apparently get preloaded cards at some retailers)… more below.
• Tinker with the music and photos using the Windows Media Connect application on an XP machine. Once it’s set up, the 360 recognizes song files, playlists, and photos and, like the Ipod, has a metadata-driven approach to navigation (artists, genres, albums, etc). This is in contrast to the Tivo’s “file system” approach to navigating music and photos on a network.

So then I put in the PGR3 disc and was blown away by the graphics and gameplay. I played PGR2 a lot on the first Xbox, but was never particularly great at it. The UI is fairly different with the new version, but there’s no question it’s a huge step forward in terms of visuals. You can pause the game and go into “Photo Mode”, which lets you fly around the track and take pictures with control over color, exposure, shutter speed, aperture, focal distance, and so on. The only downside I saw with PGR3 over the previous version was when trying to find a game on Xbox Live. With the previous version, I could tell it to search based on similar skill, range of cars, cities, tracks, type of race, and several other parameters. With this version, it seemed that I only had two criteria to choose from — type of race and the city. I’d have preferred to specify the car class (so I could use the car I’d practiced with offline) and skill range. My impression is that that the new Xbox Live system is more “skill” aware than in the past, so maybe that’s being factored in behind the scenes (didn’t help me from getting skunked, though).

Anyway, there have been just two things that I’ve come across that I don’t really care for.

Xbox Live Marketplace “Microsoft Points” for themes/icons: The idea here is that you prepay for points and can use them for things like themes, avatar, “arcade” games, and even to change your gamertag (the conversion factor for points to USD makes this change cost about $10… good enough to discourage constant changes to gamertags, but cheap enough to consider once if you hate the one you picked a couple years ago). Anyway, I was surprised to have to use points for things like themes and avatar icons. For the arcade games or things like music videos, having a micro-payments system makes perfect sense (a la Itunes). But do I really want to pay money to use an EA Sports-branded FIFA 2006 theme on my 360? A DOA4 theme? On the themes front, I also didn’t see a way to preview themes in advance of purchasing, but since I was going to shell out points to get a theme, it didn’t matter. Maybe down the road for an Arcade game or two, but not for themes and icons.

Xbox as Media Hub on multiple computers: After installing Windows Media Connect on a couple of machines in the house, I just had to choose which folder(s) on each machine were available on the network and which devices (the 360 in this case) could have access to those folders. Then in the “media” portion of the Dashboard, you connect to a machine to view the photos or listen to the music. This all looked great and definitely has the potential to replace Tivo’s Home Media Option for us (and we use the heck out of that Tivo feature)… except that the Xbox 360 UI won’t let you connect to more than one machine at a time. In our case, we have one computer that has all of our music on it (roughly 35GB)… it’s the one we run Itunes on and sync the Ipods with. However, we store all of our digital photos on a separate machine (maybe 8–10GB here). But in the 360’s Dashboard UI, you choose either “Music” or “Photos” and then you see a computer. That’s right, one. Singular. Uno. If you want to connect to another one, you have to first go to the Dashboard “System” UI and disconnect the first one, and then you go back to Photos or Music to connect to the new one. I did some Googling around to see if I was missing something somewhere, but couldn’t find any resolution. For now, that makes it enough of a pain to impact the Wife Acceptance Factor. I tried mapping a drive from the “music” computer to the “photos” computer and then making that drive available to Windows Media Connect on the “music” machine. This works, in that the 360 could then fetch photos and music from the same connection, but fetching photos in this way wasn’t very speedy (at ~4MB each). I really hope the Xbox team is working on a way to let the 360 “see” more than one machine running Media Connector on the network.

On a related note, I also found the UI for browsing photos to be inefficient. In that UI, it actually shows all directories that contain photos, even if those directories are subdirectories elsewhere. In this case, the “file system” approach to UI seems the best way to go… we organize our photos by year, then month, and then a descriptive folder name (e.g. “\2005\06\Elizabeth’s Birth”… on the 360, you’d see a browsable folder for “2005”, another folder for “06”, and a third for “Elizabeth’s Birth”. This makes it unwieldy when you have several folders named “Soccer Games” under different year\month combinations — you just see multiple folders named “Soccer Games” in the UI and can’t tell which year/month each belongs to.

Thankfully, both of these issues are software/service related… if Microsoft opts to, it can roll out updates to address these (and more). Even as it is, though, the 360 has really impressed me.

Within the last couple of weeks, I’ve started to use the del.icio.us service more and more. It’s called a “social bookmarking” service… and while brief, it’s not the best way to describe it. A (wordier) description would be “an online service that lets you bookmark sites and assign descriptive tags to those sites.” The “social” angle comes up in that your bookmarks are shared by other users of the service (they also provide some “antisocial” settings).

A tag is essentially a keyword that you define and you can use multiple tags for a single bookmark. If you’re familiar with Flickr for photos, it’s a similar service for bookmarks. Not coincidentally, both Flickr and del.icio.us have been purchased by Yahoo — Yahoo’s loving tags these days.

When I first checked it out last year, I thought it was a cool idea but I’ve got over a thousand bookmarks in Firefox. I’m fairly anal about categorizing them into folders and the thought of going through all of that to assign tags and descriptions wasn’t appealing. On the other hand, synchronizing those between machines and different browsers can be a hassle… and they’re not accessible from other machines. Enter the “del.icio.us Loader for Firefox” by Julian Bez. With this tool, you upload your Firefox bookmarks.html file, assign some tags, and run it. It will show you all the bookmarks it found in the file and let you visit each, add/remove tags, etc. I found that splitting my bookmarks.html file into multiple .html files made this process easier. It took some tweaking, but it was worth it when it came time to assign tags.

So now I can go to my del.icio.us page from anywhere (as can anyone else) and get at my bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/jdonnici

If I want to quickly get at all items that I tagged with a certain word, I just use this format: del.icio.us/jdonnici/[tag_name]. Like this or this.

If I want to see everyone’s bookmarks for a certain tag, I use this format: del.icio.us/tag/[tag_name]. Like this or this.

Tags can be concatenated together with the “+” plus sign like this: http://del.icio.us/jdonnici/dotnet+sqlserver 

Finally, I can subscribe to various del.icio.us feeds in my aggregator, including a specific tag or a specific user. This makes it easy to see the things that other people are finding interesting. There are lots of other tools that I’ve yet to tinker with, including an “Inbox” for tags and the ability to tag something as being “for” another user (presumably making it show up in their inbox). I can also go to the main site page and see both “recent” and “popular” bookmarks.

For Firefox, I’m also finding the del.icio.us Firefox toolbar extension to be invaluable. It puts a shortcut on your toolbar to your tags, as well as a shortcut that opens a tagging window for the current page you’re on. Clicking that lets you tag the page and even shows you suggested tags based on what others have used for that same page.

As I said, I’m just getting started but I do see how this could be a MUCH better way of managing bookmarks and coming back to useful content than the old bookmarks file and/or Favorites directory. It takes some work up front if you have a lot of bookmarks… and I can see how keeping your tags clean and consistent is pretty important (the site provides some tools for removing and renaming tags). But it’s free and seems very much worth the effort.

2005 is over and it was a bittersweet year… on the one hand, I got a promotion at work and our second daughter (Elizabeth) was born in June. She’s gorgeous, all smiles, and is probably the happiest baby I’ve ever seen (her big sister, Allie, was also a happy baby but knew how to get your attention when she wasn’t happy! She’s 6 and that hasn’t changed).

On the other hand, my grandmother passed away this year and that’s been very hard for me. We were very close and I’ve always felt that she’d just “always be there”. My grandfather, is doing as well as can be expected given that they were married for 59 years.

We ended the year with our annual holiday pilgrimage to northern California. It was Elizabeth’s first time flying and she did just fine. Both the girls travel well, but it’s very hectic travelling with two little little ones – especially around the holidays. Whether we make the trip next year or stay home and start our own holiday traditions remains to be seen.

In any case, I’m excited about 2006. Things are good at work, at home, and we’re all healthy. I certainly can’t ask for anything more than that.