Rui CarmoFinally, after a couple of weekends of feet-wrenching torture-by-random-walking, the Xmas shopping (little as it is) has been declared officially done. Being of a somewhat spartan nature, I have always been hard pressed to buy presents for anyone (I am, in fact, infamously bad at doing so), and this year the budget is pretty tight, but still we’ve managed to cover all the bases.
(I suppose I could go on at length about the consumerist void that the season has turned into since I was a kid, but I have a feeling that’s always been in the sidelines, even when I was too preoccupied with spraying instant snow on my parents’ couch, so I won’t bore you.)
So, while my MacBook churns away at doing an sudo port upgrade outdated (providing me with a much-needed blast of hot air in this chill weather, although I could do without the 747-like noise), I have been using Fusion and Windows XP to upgrade my E90 to the latest firmware.
I’ve decided to spend a while carrying it about again, so as to not let my BlackBerry get in the way of the upcoming Xmas season (plus my overcoat has hulking big pockets, the kind where some hardbacks fit comfortably).
And I’ve also decided that this year I wouldn’t do my usual pre-Xmas phone recommendations. This on the grounds that, on the whole, there isn’t anything that I can really recommend wholeheartedly – the iPhone is still mired in controversy, SonyEricsson has done little to recommend them besides the W910i (which is pretty nice, but not enough of a leap forward) and Nokia, despite their cornucopia of N95-like behemoths, hasn’t really impressed me since the 6120c, which is still my all-around favorite1.
As to news and suchlike trivia, my Google Reader migration came at a fortuitous time, what with their having recently enabled ‘friend sharing’ via the Google Talk buddy lists. The social networking pundits are having fits, of course, but to me it is uncannily like Rael Dornfest’s Peerkat, which was way ahead of its time.
Although only a couple of my friends and colleagues use Google Reader, I expect that the “social” (if you must call it that way – I prefer “collaborative” myself) aspect of it will make it easier to find interesting news out there, and contribute somewhat to alleviate the lack of Bayesian filtering.
But more on my Google Reader setup later, when it stabilizes. I’m currently reviewing a bunch of articles around the site and even considering pruning off a few bits of it, mostly because although Yaki is coping pretty well with the 4700-odd pages that comprise it, some of that information is a bit on the dated side and has limited historical value (even for me).
So expect some breakage for a little while.
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1 Maybe its cousin the E51, but I’m unlikely to see one for a while yet.