The Oregonian is our local wrap here in Portland, and every day one can see it dying a slow, not so sad death.  You can tell by the headlines, which are relevant to no one.  This morning, for example, the banner...well, everything above the fold...is the release of a new Grand Theft Auto video game.

This is news in a local paper?  There are a million people in Portland and the surrounding area, and The Oregonian could find nothing interesting to write about?  Yesterday the headline was about the Pittsburgh Steelers, or the NFL draft, or something pointless outside Oregon.  Here in Portland, where there is no football team, where a football team isn't wanted, and where sports is the last thing on almost everyone's mind, the banner is given to the NFL.  Nothing new here.  Every morning brings news of some sports feat, but with the new GTA, they no longer hide the fact that they simply publish whatever press releases are sent their way as news.  This is the noble profession of journalism.

The sports news everyday on the front page is the most aggravating.  Those who read this blog know I'm a sports fan, but sports belongs on the back page; it's a pastime, not news.  The Oregonian seems satisfied to print the most pointless sports, even to sports fans, on the front page.  Brandon Roy, for instance, scored some points in the NBA All-Star game and was celebrated with a banner.  Why is this special?  He could have twirled a triple double and I'm not sure it would be front page news.

Another indicator of hard times is a willingness to give the paper away.  I saw someone at the transit center last week giving away "three weeks free."  I didn't know time wasn't free, but I think what they meant was three weeks of The Oregonian for free.  He seemed puzzled when I wasn't interested.

Last Sunday I was at an event at the Expo center.  The Oregonian had a table and was selling delivery for 25% off, or something like that.  Again I said no.  The sales rep asked me why I didn't want the paper, and I asked her if she reads it.  Her uncomfortable laugh seemed to tell me she, and perhaps other employees, know the paper sucks.

It'll be gone soon.  Not that it will stop publication, but it's certainly waning in relevance, and what future is there for a paper that thinks a new video game is the most important news to citizens of Portland?

I had a Facebook account, and deactivated it when they started their Beacon nonsense a few months back.  I never made much use of it because it just added yet another social network tool for me to check every day.  I reactivated that account to see if I could make use of it as I desperately try to break free of email.

Reactivating Facebook is a bit spooky.  Everything is as I left it, sort of frozen in time.  It looked neglected, but I figured I can take care of that later.  The first thing I want is an RSS feed.  I don't want to have to check every communication system and device only to find nothing is new; instead I want new stuff to find me.  Which is why I use RSS and why I want all my information in an RSS stream I can get in my reader.  A single source of information.  And I want to publish to various tools remotely from my RSS reader, so I also hope to find an XMLRPC or Atom interface.  Not on Facebook, though.  In fact, not on any social network tool I use.

OK, so the shiny progressive Facebook is not up to the technology available.  They do use RSS, to be fair here, but it's a feed consumed by a widget on a Facebook page.  Maybe I missed it, but feeds should be obvious, and plentiful.  But I could at least update my friends list.  They have this nifty feature that lets you 'find friends' in your email contacts.  You just enter your email address and password (not a bright thing to do if you still cling to the illusion of privacy) and it prowls your address book looking for other Facebook users.  I don't mind providing my email address and letting it snoop, so off it went and in a matter of seconds I discovered, of the 300+ people in my email list, exactly 20 have Facebook accounts, of whom 10 I know well enough to invite, half of those being professional contacts.  Three hundred addresses and I can communicate with 5 of them using Facebook.

In the end I only wound up feeling depressed and lonely.  The Facebook account is deactivated again.

If you don't follow Ted Leonsis, you should.  Ted owns the Washington Capitals, and, if his character is really in what he writes, is one of the game's true gentlemen.  Ted's blog is updated often, and is always a pleasure to read, mostly because he's not ashamed to let his love of the game, or the Caps, show through.  But you won't find a negative word or personal attack on anyone or any team.  He doesn't write that way.  Leonsis understands that even if you are not a Caps fan, you are still a fan of the game, and what a magnificent game it is when fans can engage in a bit of competition along with their teams.  As a long time, old time, Flyers fan, this all makes for an interesting week as the Flyers and Caps square off in a first round playoff matchup.

Ted's all over it of course.  And with usual insight, he quickly cuts to the nature of Flyers hockey, or at least how it's presented and marketed:  "Orange!!!!!!!!!!; show fight clips; Vengeance is ours!; show fight clips; Orange!!!;— show fight clips; make fun of Caps fans; show old fight clips; Orange!!; show more fight clips; Orange!; show greatest hits clips; show fight clips.Orange! Show fight clips.Vengeance is ours!; show more fight clips."  Sad that this hasn't changed since 1973.  The Flyers, or at least their front office, still want to be the Broad Street Bullies.  The more distant they get from that legacy, the more they seem to embrace it.  Fortunately they've moved past it on the ice.  Mike Richards showed us that last night, and to someone like Ted Leonsis, well, that's gotta hurt.  Richards scored on a penalty shot, and the Flyers are up 2-1 in the series.  They'll win, I hope, but here's one case where it would be nice to see both teams earn the prize.  If for nothing else, just to read what my fellow hockey fan Leonsis would write about it.

Go Flyers!  And much respect to the Caps.

Most of what I read online I read in RSS feeds.  It's easy to accumulate feeds, too many feeds maybe, but there is no shortage of information in them.  Finding information relevant to my interest is the challenge.

Lately we have seen a number of websites claiming to organize and filter web feeds.  Yahoo Pipes may be the well known option, with sites like Feed Rinse offering flexibility and functionality.  The list is fair, ReadWriteWeb offers a good summary, but in the end, as good as tools like Feed Rinse are, they still require an unacceptable amount of manual manipulation to get them to work.  I have to construct keyword based filters to sift information out of a collection of feeds, which doesn't really help if I don't have a clear understanding of what those keywords should be.

Think of it this way.  Each keyword is a white dot on a black page.  Let's say that keyword is Flyers, as in Philadelphia Flyers hockey.  I set up my filter for Flyers, and all pages with Flyers get through.  But surrounding the keyword, our white dot, is a whole spectrum of gray containing ancillary keywords of associated interest.  Names of Flyers players or coaches, for example, may be in an article not naming the team specifically.  It feels like these filtering tools still put the burden on me to cope with associated information by laboriously constructing filters to accommodate it.

It's a dicey proposition.  Will these RSS filter sites be able to figure out an article on Eric Lindros' may be of interest to me because he once played hockey for a team I like?  We'll have to wait and see, but until then, I'll just skip over what's not relevant.  It's still quicker that way.

I've been spending time with Jaxer, Aptana's JavaScript server.  I'm impressed.  I thought for a while that we'd see server side JavaScript eventually, especially given the popularity of Ajax, but it took until last month for a reasonable, implementation ready product to arrive.  And, thankfully, it works well.

Server side JavaScript is not new.  I used JavaScript...well...Microsoft's bastardized version called JScript, to build ASP pages in 2000 and 2001.  JScript's flexibility and extensibility made sense, but I never understood why it wasn't popular; why VBScript was the defacto standard for ASP.

After the demise of ASP, not willing to invest further in Microsoft technologies, PHP was really the only practical option, even with it's quirks and flaws.  But with Jaxer, the best of all worlds are available.  I can write all my scripting in a single language, use available, mature Ajax libraries, and reuse client side code on the server.  My first real project will be a gallery demo to see if I can replace my PHP galleries with Jaxer.

Some of the first new work in about a year.  I finished this last Fall, but never got around to having it scanned until recently.  This is part of the continuing vacuum tube project I started about 2 years ago or so.  You can see more on the still life gallery page.

The 3B28 is a xenon filled half wave rectifier.  The xenon offers distinct advantages over other gas tubes such as mercury vapor tubes, which makes the 3B28 better suited for radio and audio applications.  Plus they're big, and look cool.  Sort of like a barrel in a bottle.