skynet comes online :o
brilliant! hehe
yes that is a robot getting trained ready to perform his duties as a customer service rep at the East Japan Railway company.
Go here for more info!
(from Pink Tentacle via engadget)
Archive for August, 2006
solving the rss deluge 3 - touchstone
Well the hype and anticipation in my mind dissipated quite quickly - installing touchstone on my computer lasted all of 30 minutes. It is in alpha so I should not have expected so much but it is a shame nevertheless. It crashed constantly. I’ll install it on my non-production system and play with it there.
In the meantime it is back to Attensa for now..
solving the rss feed deluge 2
It has been 2 weeks since I wrote my first post on dealing with the large volumes of information coming at me through my rss feeds. I have been using Attensa to see whether this would solve my problems. Now its time to try Touchstone, one of the other products that tries to deal with attention management.
First though, how did Attensa go? There were problems initially with the beta - but I had a great response from the Attensa support team who worked with me to try and solve the problems. We got it working in the end, though not yet perfectly - it crashes outlook after several hours of having Outlook open and I cannot have it in my Exchange mailbox - but both of these will hopefully be solved in the next release, though unfortunately I do not have a timeline on when this will be 
It was very interesting to use Attensa though - I definitely read different posts as a result of using the software. I would be interested to know more about how the prioritisation worked. I still found myself jumping down to posts that I knew were there but had been placed lower down the list somewhere. It definitely was more efficient than before however. There were several negatives that can really be expected at this early point in development so hopefully will improve over time (?):
- it seems to prioritise by feed and not post which was a shame.
- rss feeds that post more often were given a higher priority even if I read every post from those that post less often
- the ability to prioritise (or otherwise) keywords manually
Anyhow, the software was easy to use once I got it set up though scrolling with the mouse wheel in the river of news view is impossible (it jumps half a page at a time). Right now if the other attention management applications are not better I would still use Attensa over other readers.
So onto some good news 
Touchstone emailed me giving me an invite to test the software. I almost missed it as for some reason gmail decided their emails were worthy of my junk folder! I am not sure why really. Certainly, nothing stood out from the emails as a reason why this would happen.
[update] touchstone rebranded to particls
adsl and bt
Now let me make something very clear - for the last 4 years if you asked me to recommend a provider I would have said go with Pipex - their customer service and pricing was always reasonable and i rarely had problems with them. I would still recommend them today for anyone looking for adsl..
So on to the point of the post.. can you believe that Pipex did not know that a line had been suspended by BT? They were all very helpful and everything but as far as they were concerned broadband should be working fine.. it wasn’t till BT were called that anyone realised the phone line itself had been suspended. It sounded to me like something that was not specific to Pipex - I wonder if this is the case?
Anyhow, obviously plugging in a phone line showed that the line was dead in any case but still.. if it had happened to me, I wouldn’t have been able to test the phone line - i dont have a landline phone!
solving the rss feed deluge
as I was saying in my previous post - 67 feeds sis too many to keep track of within individual directories. Pruning off the deadwood removes about 5 feeds though so its not solving the problem
Cue: Attensa for Outlook - it has a river of news feature which in theory prioritises your posts according to what most interests you - so I presume it learns from how you interact with the feeds over time - seemingly to the post level. Nice idea - but not working on my system as yet (the river of news window stays empty ) - hopefully their support forum can help. I am using the beta version.
Alternatively:
If I can get an invite Touchstone sounds interesting.. similar thing but also expanded to your email.. its in alpha right now.
Or maybe Newsgator Inbox for Outlook - though im not sure if there is any prioritisation as yet?
