I think it's cool that the television networks have to clean up primetime TV shows because enough people complained about them. There really is some filthy content on these days.

Wow, a new version of Mydoom (Novarg) is already out, only 2 days after the first one. Update those virus definition files daily (hourly, if possible), people!

I find it unbelievable that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that Congress will "make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]", and yet some people still can justify the whole "no prayers in schools" argument. How is that sentence not clear? Furthermore, it only guarantees that Congress cannot "mak[e] [any] law respecting an establishment of religion" - there is no guarantee here about the antithesis of religion (atheism - which, ironically, actually *is* a religion with it's own factions [strong atheists, weak atheists] and the dogmatic claims that it's people believe that there is no God). If you think that Atheism is a religion, then there can be no laws that will establish this religion above any other in schools, let's say. If you think that Atheism is not a religion, then it is granted no rights by the first amendment. Either way, atheism loses. No ones rights are trampled if there is a prayer at a football game, a commencement ceremony, or an assembly. A Christian teacher should still be able to use the Bible as a classroom text despite the atheist's doctrinal agenda being constantly preached by the disbelievers. If Darwin's evolution theory can be taught, then the Bible's creation story can be taught. If the atheist can preach at school, then so can everyone else. Fair is fair.

Going back to Bill Gates, KBE, I find nothing in the Constitution forbidding him from calling himself Sir William Gates (as far as U.S. law in concerned - but British law still prohibits it). The only two references to titles of nobility are contained in Article I:

"No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state."

"No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility."

The first merely says that the U.S. cannot knight someone, and no public officer or elected official can be royalty. The second one says that Billy can't be made Emperor of Redmond, either. Clearly, neither one applies in this case. Also, since he's an American citizen, and thus not under jurisdiction of British law, they really can't tell him not to run around calling himself Sir Billy. What's their legal recourse if he does? Of course, there may be some fine print in the Knighthood EULA, so when he gets the knighthood installed he's bound by their terms whether he actually agrees to them or not (I wonder if Sir William actually reads the EULAs on other companies' software when installing...?).   =)

The Looney Tunes Back in Action "Wooden Nickel Card Battle" on the free AOL CD has a bug where if you win several times, you can't continue playing because the "You Won" screen won't go away (it covers the new game starting below it). I guess you get what you pay for (nothing, in this case)! I thought the fact that AOL gave you extra games on the CD was cool (even if you didn't install their software), but then I went to the Looney Tunes Back in Action website and saw that there are way more free games there (on the order of 20 or so) than the measley 2 on the AOL CD. Thus, the CD has now become a coaster.

I think it's cool that Bill Gates is going to be knighted, but he takes the shaft that he can't start calling himself "Sir Bill Gates" (only knighted British citizens can call themselves "Sir", plus the U.S. Constitution doesn't tolerate titles in America). Since he's a foreign knight, however, he can use the initial KBE (honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) after his name. I think it's funny that Austin Powers was correct in Goldmember for calling Steven Spielberg, "Sir Stevie" - since he also is a knight.

Read "Sekidera Komachi" (a play based on Japanese folklore) by Royall Tyler.

The "Mydoom/Novarg/Mimail.R/Shimgapi" virus is running rampant, having broken speed records for the fastest spreading email virus/worm yet.

Watched "First Wives Club" (Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, Diane Keaton) - rather ironic, but sad, that the author died a couple of weeks ago after plastic surgery, since that's such a focus in the movie

Taxes done - large refund!   =)

Oil changed and wiper blades replaced

Carmex in the EZ-on applicator - it's about time!

Am trying the new Crest Fresh Citrus Breeze Whitening Expressions toothpaste (the one with the scratch & sniff sticker on the box). Not bad.

Found out that the AOL 9.0 garbage CDs that we all get in the mail contain 'hidden' games as well. Played a few rounds of "Wooden Nickel Card Battle" (aha - yet another 'wooden nickel' thing [see my previous remarks on this]), and "Looney Tunes: Back in Action Blocks".

Found the "STOP AND GO,GO,GO, 3" cache (again - our second time [according to the a groundspeak forum, you can log it each time you find it since technically it's in a different spot each time {this is a travelling cache}]). Also found the first half of the "Parks Walk About" multicache, but since it was already 5:00 p.m., we couldn't get the last half since the park closes at five.

Quick haircut at Supercuts.

Lunch at Port of Subs, but only after we rudely discovered that Blimpie's at Virginia and California is out of business, replaced by something called Michael's Deli or something. Rude! (I even had a coupon for a free sandwich - shaft.)

After having spent two days at RSS Winterfest, I was excited to find out that Blogger now offers Atom feeds (Atom 0.3 XML feeds for news aggregation or syndication). Thus, you'll now find two different versions of XML feeds available on my site for those that wish to read my blog in a news aggregator (an RSS 0.91 version, and an Atom 0.3 version).

Registered my free .TK domain name (http://richardbarnet.tk/), thanks to the small island nation of Tokelau. "Faka fetai!"

I learned today that AmphetaDesk doesn't display certain accented characters (like the accented "e" in Beyonce's name in my previous post), whilst SharpReader and 'nntp//rss' both do. Interesting.

I also just got an email back from Jason Brome, stating that the reason Beyonce's RSS feed doesn't work is because there is apparently a blank line or some spacing before the XML declaration (there shouldn't be), and possibly a problem with the timezone qualifier 'Greenwich Mean Time' within a 'dc:date identifier' tag.

So, is it correct to say "Want a Certs?" or "Want a Cert?" (plural vs. singular)? The package is labelled "Certs Mints with Retsyn". You wouldn't say "Want a mints?", so why do people use the plural all the time? Thus, by the same logic, each individual mint must be called a Cert, not a Certs. I am enjoying an Adams-brand artificially-flavored cinnamon Cert mint with Retsyn at this very moment.

Beyoncé has a beautiful voice when she sings normally, as evidenced by her performance in Goldmember. The problem with her non-Goldmember songs starts when she lets that weird screetchy vocalizing creep in. The higher her voice goes, the worse it gets. If she would tone it down a bit and stay within her range, I think more people would appreciate her music. Also, her website's RSS feed is incorrectly formatted (neither AmphetaDesk nor SharpReader can recognize it - it's apparently supposed to be in RDF [RSS 1.0] format). Hhmmph.

Watched "High Crimes" (Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd) last night. Heard about the tragic death of Brian Edgar for the first time. Very sick people.

Read "The Gettysburg Address" by Abraham Lincoln. Funny that he said that people wouldn't remember what was said that day, and yet it's one of the most famous addresses in history. Passed the 5,300 mark on Seti@home.

I happily 'attended' the first day of RSS Winterfest 2004 yesterday. It is an awesome real-time, collaborative conference, blending a webcast, an RSS 2.0 feed, a wiki, a blog, a website, configurable up-to-the-minute site change email notifications, and an IRC channel. Truly amazing how fast and efficiently people working together on the web can create, organize, critique, and publish content. Looking forward to the rest of the conference today.

A user named Glenn in my Seti@home team is trying to pass me. I'm currently at 5276 workunits, and he's at 5256, and coming up fast. I'm still #4 in our group's rankings after all these months, but if I'm not careful he may pass me...

It's only been a few days, and already NASA has lost contact with the Mars Rover. Whoops.   =(

I purchased and am trying some of Unilever's "Take Control Light" (butter/margarine alternative) with plant sterol esters. Not only is it devoid of trans fat and very low in cholesterol, but the plant sterol esters from natural soybean extract have been proven to actually significantly reduce low-density lipid (LDL) cholesterol if at least 0.65 grams are consumed at least twice a day. (That's like a teaspoon full.) Anyway, it doesn't taste that bad (I thought it would be horrible), so I think it's a keeper!

Watched "Kate and Leopold" (Hugh Jackman, Meg Ryan) again, on DVD. I really like this movie - it's funny. We may have to make the purchase on this one.

We attended the new Wal*Mart grand opening tonight - it was a circus, of course, but all the people that were complaining about the increase in traffic were proven wrong. Traffic was no more worse than usual, despite completely full parking lots (yes, even the side lots), and we even caught a green light on the way there, and somehow snagged a front parking spot! The checkout lines slowed us down, of course, but the wait wasn't any longer than those at any of the other Wallymarts in town. Haven't tried the new "self checkout" lines yet, but we hopefully will on our next visit. The floors are funny - I don't think they're quite finished yet - kinda slippery.

I noticed with a slight sense of vindication that the "Chocolat" geocache was archived today because the owners hadn't given permission for a cache to be placed on their private property. I saw this coming months ago. It'll keep happening, I'm afraid, if people don't ask permission when placing caches. A careful read of the cache placement guidelines state that permission must be obtained for caches on both private and public land. In other words, regardless of whether it's on private property or not, one must get permission on *every* single cache, no exceptions.

The Bagel/Bagle/Beagle virus/worm (W32.Beagle.A@mm) is sure making headlines today. It's funny that the author wrote it to self-expire after a week and a half (stops working on January 28th, 2004).

I, for one, am glad that the new northwest Wal-Mart Supercenter is opening up this week. Yes, traffic might be a little hairy, but guess what - it already sucks, nothing new. Personally, I feel that the more Wal-Marts there are in town the better because then that takes the load off of some of the other stores, which cuts down on the length of the lines, which means we'll all get in and out of the store faster with less waiting to checkout. As it is now, tons of people from all over the city drive all the way down to the Damonte Ranch store or the Kietzke store simply because there aren't any good alternatives on the north side of town. The old non-Supercenters just don't cut it. The Northtowne store is a joke - it's like a circus in there. Thus, many of us Northwest residents make the drive - several times a week sometimes. This might, ironically, cut down on the amount of driving we do (and others like us), which might actually ease the traffic situation in Reno to some small degree.

Glad to see that the Nevada Appeal ran an article on geocaching.

Spent Martin Luther King, Jr. Day outside geocaching and 4x4'ing with Brad. Had a mediocre dinner afterwards at Grandma Hattie's restaurant in Carson City. Becca likes the new Popsicle Scribblers. Toll Rd sucks (for cars), but 4x4'ing with Brad was fun though. (Went up there looking for the "Washoe Valley Pot 'O Gold" cache, but the snow and mud made us rethink our strategy.) We hit the 120 caches found mark today. Woohoo!

Caches found:
"NevCachers Dump Hill Cache"
"View of the River Goodie Box"
"Dash for the Cache"
"Totem Pole"
"KR0986" (NGS benchmark)
"Sierra's Rock Skipper" (travel bug)

Videos watched:
"The Hunt for Red October" (Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin)
"The Baby Whisperer, Volume 1" (Tracy Hogg), recommended to us by Natalie Zacharczyk

Books read:
"The Living Mummy" by Ivan Turgenev

Saddened to hear that Microsoft is picking on a 17-year-old Canadian kid (Mike Rowe) simply for registering a catchy domain name (MikeRoweSoft.com).

Here's another 15-second QuickTime video clip of Jared taking a bath in the kitchen sink (4.03 MB).

I heard on a talk show a while back that if people eat their last meal 4 hours before they go to bed that they have less trouble brought on by food during the night (acid reflux, gas, sleeplessness, etc.). She said that if we eat close to bedtime our body is working so hard to digest that it is harder for many people to sleep. She also said that eating close to bedtime without giving your system proper time to digest that the food turns to fat instead of being used for energy and such. So, she suggested that a person allow 4 hours for their system to digest food before going to bed. If you go to bed at 10pm, then try to eat your last meal at 6pm.

I have a lot of trouble falling asleep at night and sleeping well, so I thought I'd try her suggestion. And the last few nights I have slept much better and been able to fall asleep pretty quickly. It's amazing to me how changing such a simple habit of eating later in the evening can change how you sleep. I sure like being able to sleep! And as soon as my little son starts sleeping through the night, I'll be in good shape. =)

With all the news about Atom 0.3, you'd think that RSS was on the way out, especially since the RSS spec is frozen at 2.02 or 2.03. I'm hoping that's not so, since it's the first widely used XML application that's simple in nature to the average person. I guess I'll find out more this week at RSS Winterfest.

Abandoning SpamBayes (Spam filtering for Outlook Express) in favor of Mailshell's 'SpamCatcher Universal' for Outlook Express.

I think it's cool that the State of Nevada Commission on Tourism officially supports geocaching (and has placed their own cache).

Drove Mira Loma Rd (not Dr) for the first time. Was disappointed to see that it currently is partially closed, so it no longer connects with Geiger Grade. Did manage to drive, however, all the way from Damonte Ranch to McCarran via Steamboat and Mira Loma. Pretty cool. The road sucks, however, and is very muddy in parts. The remnants of pavement are badly potholed, and the rest is unpaved and fairly rocky. Saw some wild horses along the roadside, the new Damonte Ranch High School, as well as discovering a clay sports complex (for shooting clay pigeons), and some popular offroad trails.

Why are some horse salt licks brown? Is there brown salt? Becky loves Adams-brand 'Chiclets' gum, and it's only $0.20 for a dozen pieces at Wally World.

Becky says "hish" for "fish" and "hun" for "sun". Cute.

So, I'm staring at the piano during Primary, and I notice that the letters of the brand label (Kawai) aren't equally spaced or aligned. It looks something like this (although not this exaggerated):

K             I

  A      A

     W

Strange.

Glad to see that someone has developed a high-tech way to seriously cut the cheese.

Dismayed to find out that Jake 2.0, an excellent television show, has been cancelled and replaced by that stupid Top Model show with Tyra Banks. What a waste of time.

Found a wonderful new 'light' version of 8th Continent Chocolate Soy Milk. Mmmm, delicious.

What's up with Windows XP always turning off the 'num lock' on the keyboard during boot up (despite BIOS setting to the contrary), as described in KB315468? Very frustrating. It's a shame that you need a Registry hack to fix it.

Books read:
"Louquier's Third Act" by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Caches found:
"Watergate"
"Quack'n Up By The Slough"
"Hidden Valley New Years 2k2"

I saw the cutest little bird the other day. Becky, Jared, and I went out to get the mail and saw this little tiny "hoppy" bird on the ground by the mail boxes. It was only a couple feet away from us. It was an olive green color with a red spot on the top of it's head. It looked like a hopping cocktail olive. Very cute! Becky thought it was great.

Well, I tried all day to download the new NBOR player (as I wanted to be one of the first people to review it), but as of late last night it still wasn't available, despite what their website said about being available in the evening. Thus, I tried early this morning, only to find out that it only works on Win2000 or XP. Thus, I'll have to wait a few more hours until I can try it from work. Hmmm.

Glad to know that the infamous condom in the soup case has been resolved and apparently both sides are happy. I was amused to find that men with moustaches earn more money and respect. (I have a hunch that this only applies to men, however, not women.)

I was saddened to learn that President Bush was booed at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s gravesite. Whether you agree with Mr. Bush or not, it wasn't about him - it was a public memorial to Dr. King. The people doing the booing were far more disrepectful to Dr. King's legacy than anything they imagined Bush trying to do. When will people just grow up?

How many iterations of the Mimail worm can there possibly be? Apparently a lot, as 'Mimail-P' is now making it's rounds, this time coupled with the 'mmdload-A' trojan. Clever, but dumb. You know, the people that write these programs are obviously fairly talented. Imagine what good they could accomplish if they would stop wasting their time trying to destroy the world, but rather give back to the Internet community at large in a positive way. It's like having a bunch of little Dr. Evils all over the world laughing that stupid laugh while frantically typing away at their computers. Yeah, baby.

I know many people find the whole Mars exploration thing interesting, but I'm afraid I really don't. Not sure why, though, as I've watched a few hundred episodes of Star Trek over the years, and generally found space to be somewhat interesting. I think I memorized the order of the planets in our solar system in third grade, but I guess I never got so interested later to get all geeky about it. I don't own a telescope, and although I've been to several planetariums, I don't recall ever visiting an observatory (I guess the outside of one whilst geocaching doesn't really count, does it?). I hope the whole Spirit Rover thingy goes well (doesn't tip over or something stupid - I can just see it spinning it's wheels in the air like a capsized turtle), but I honestly don't think we're going to find a whole lot.

Books read:
"Problem of the Organ Grinder" by Jacques Futrelle
"The Problem of Dressing Room A" by Jacques Futrelle

DVDs watched:
"Best of Friends (Vol. 4)"

Well, since Feedster turned out to lack frequent updates for my RSS 2.0 feed, I've decided to bite the bullet and maintain my own XML file for the purpose. I originally thought I'd found the perfect tool in RFE (RSS Feed Editor), but it turned out to be a little quirky and unreliable (depending upon content, it will eventually mangle the code, forcing you to start over). Thus, I kept searching.

Then I found the WebDevTips RSS Updater, which is even easier, and since it's a web tool, I can access it from anywhere (the other one was a standalone program). Of course, it only produces 0.91 RSS output, but hey, what's the difference anyway, right?!

All of this, of course, is only until the free version of Blogger starts offering built-in RSS support (which it is going to do, apparently [Blogger Pro already offers it]).

I like the Microsoft Reader (for eBooks), but don't like the Palm Reader (also for eBooks), despite it's switchable backdrops.

Books read:
"Mystery of the Fatal Cipher" by Jacques Futrelle
"Mystery of the Flaming Phantom" by Jacques Futrelle
"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" by J. K. Rowling

Movies watched:
"Babe"
"Finding Nemo" - I changed my mind on this one. At first I didn't like it, it moved too slow and seemed to be way too long, but after seeing the whole thing in one sitting and focusing more on the graphics instead of on the dialog, I found merit in the film. Plus, Becky really likes it - so I'm going to see it a million times whether I like it or not...

Here is a short 15-second QuickTime video clip of Jared in his swing (4.00 MB).

Was mildly disturbed to find out that there are some geocaching persons who actually steal caches and bury them as part of another game, called "Stash the Cache" ('All Your Cache Are Belong To Us!').

I'm happy to note that the sport of geocaching got an article in PC Magazine (pg 22, February 3, 2004 edition).

I'm trying out the new Grokker 2.0 (a new type of visual search aggregator), but don't like it so far. This actually seems a lot (perhaps only navigation-wise) like an older "who's linked to me" type of service (that I can't recall at the moment). Grokker seems a little unstable to me, and it uses Java, so that slows it down a bit. Plus the fact that it's a standalone program that has to be installed (can't use it on other computers you might be at like a regular web-based search engine). Add all that to the fact that it's *not* free, and I don't think I could recommend it at this point. We'll see after I play with it a bit more.

I'm mildly excitied to try out the new "No Boundaries or Rules" (NBOR) software tomorrow. I guess we'll see if this software is, indeed, about to revolutionize the computing world as we know it... stay tuned.

Books read:
"The Little Orphan" by Fyodor Dostoevsky (a.k.a. Theodore Dostoivsky)
"The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher" by Beatrix Potter
The Inaugural Address of Jefferson Davis

It's interesting to note that there are commonly misspellings in these eBooks. Since they are, in fact, electronically stored (as opposed to printed on paper), these misspellings should be easy to fix. I wonder why they haven't been yet...?

Enjoyed Mike's cricket video.

Saddened to hear that not much has changed in Haiti in the past decade.

Caches found:
"Dead Man's Curve"
"Another Man's Treasure"
"LIGHTEN UP!"

Books read:
"The Haunted Mind" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Prayer of Manassheh" (The Holy Bible, KJV, Apocrypha)
"Susanna" (The Holy Bible, KJV, Apocrypha)
"A Daughter of Lilith and a Daughter of Eve" by Kate Buffington Davis. My favorite quote: "...he drifts, a disappointed, aimless man, upon this little turbulent sea that lies encompassed with eternity. Out of the eternal we come; a moment we battle with the waves of time; into eternity we go again."

Movies watched:
"The Sandlot"
"Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost"
"An Ideal Husband" (Minnie Driver, Rupert Everett)

For some reason, my copy of SpamBayes stopped working (in Outlook Express), all of a sudden. I'm getting "assertion errors" in Python. Very strange.

Interesting:
8-megapixel digital cameras
Cat-6 network cable
The free Microsoft Reader with free online library books

Lisa's party

My Feedster RSS feed is now working great (and much better than my old BlogMatrix feed)! Their programming people fixed some configuration issues, and now the feed works. There are still a couple of outstanding bugs (dates not correct, links don't work, update interval not clear), but I love that it's a full-text feed, not just a scrape with a link. Thanks to fuzzygroup, feedster2003, and betsy the devine for all your help!

The companies that make Cup O' Noodles-type of food are really goofy. I'm looking, in particular, at a Maruchan Instant Lunch Roast Chicken flavor. The cooking directions on the top label state "Microwave Directions: In a separate microwavable container, bring water to a boil. Then follow steps 1, 2, and 3 above." [1. Fold back lid halfway. Fill cup to inside line with boiling water. 2. Close lid securely and let stand for 3 minutes. 3. Remove lid, stir thoroughly and enjoy from cup.] Do they honestly expect people to use a separate container for the water? Come on. Everyone just adds cold water directly into the cup and throws it in the microwave for a minute. It's supposed to be quick and easy, so why would they try to make it harder than it really is?

As an interesting side note, the name of Nissin Food's popular "Cup O' Noodles" product was officially changed in 1993 to just "Cup Noodles". Isn't that bizarre?

"Moonlight Mile" (Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon) - weird movie.

New RealPlayer 10 - glad they lost the goofy 'RealOne' name and went back to something that people actually could remember and use.

I'm always intrigued to learn trivia like the fact that most domains have DNS problems (some examples: Blogger, CBS, UNR, UNLV, Sears, Target, Macy's, Microsoft, Dell, State of Nevada, U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, Garmin, Axis, Mitsubishi, Kraft, etc.).

Unfortunately, I never could get EarthBrowser 2.0 for Mac OS X (10.3) to work from behind an authenticating proxy. Too bad, because it's got some cooler features than version 1.7 for Windows. The 'set language' dialog box never worked either. Strange. I'm looking forward, however, to the 2.0 version for Windows. Should be good.

Movies watched:
"Galaxy Quest" (with Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver)

HD-DVD format wars beginning

Heliodisplay by IO2 Technology.

Canning the dotcomments garbage - hasn't worked right for awhile. Too hard to maintain. Searching for a better commenting solution.

Feedster is proving to be difficult in implementing also, but the jury is still out on this one. It has promise.

Looking forward to RSS Winterfest on January 21 and 22.

Online children's protection laws are confusing: COPPA, COPA, CIPA, and CPPA.

Was mildly disappointed to find out that Pantone only categorizes a couple of thousand colors. With so many more colors out there, I was just surprised, that's all.

Was slightly dismayed to learn that Exchange 2000 and OWA (Outlook Web Access) isn't necessarily compatible with UTF-8 character encoding (see KB273615 and KB327760 for details). What's up with that?

Was also disappointed to learn that network passwords in Win98 are limited to 14 characters in length. Why such a low limit? XP doesn't have this restriction. A little further reading at Microsoft hints that Active Directory directory service allows for 104 character passwords, whilst NT Security Manager only allowed for 14 characters. So, if I've got a 98 machine on a 2000 network (using AD), why the continued limitation of 14 characters? Is this a backward-compatibility 'feature'?

snow never sticks to sewer covers (manhole covers) - why?

if your blogger 'drafts' don't show up in the bottom pane, its probably because you're showing items from everything, ordered by 'date posted'. Since the drafts have actually never been posted, they won't show up. Change it to 'date created' instead, and your drafts will appear.

Jared's portraits back

Jared's blessing - Brad seems to be fishing for a challenge to 200, hmmm...

Jared looks like a naked chicken when he's taking a bath or shower

Mom in the hospital for New Years - sucks - but back at home now.

Found out that Forever Living Products is still around and still making Aloe Vera juice after all these years.

Films watched:
"Chocolat"
"Behind Enemy Lines"

Subtle difference between a descant (sung) and an obbligato (played). Interesting to note that the term obbligato is actually is now commonly used to mean exactly the opposite of what it traditionally meant.

Trying to find a good RSS solution - have tried BlogMatrix, MyRSS, and RSSify so far, but none seem to be up to the task. MyRSS only seems to harvest links, whereas BlogMatrix only grabs titles, but not descriptions. RSSify thinks that links *within* the content are links *to* the content (not so). All are lame. The quest continues... Going to try Feedster next.