Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Torn Between Standards

I'm not interested in getting in the middle of a battle between standards.

Especially when it comes to syndication feeds like RSS or Atom, which would enable people to read titles, and portions of posts from here in feed aggregators, or to show them on their sites.

When Google updated blogger, it appears that they chose one of those standards over the other. I'm not sure that they thought too much about the choice. It sounds like their thinking more on the subject.

I'm tempted to feed this page through a third party site which would provide a third party feed for me, in addition to the one generated in the Atom format.

Monday, June 14, 2004

Watching the Office

I've heard good things about the BBC series The Office, which is a comedy disquised as a documentary.

It's set in an industrial area somewhat outside of London.

The characters are believable, and the "reality television" approach to the show gives it a unique appeal. A number of the laughs from the show come when a character stares into the camera, at a loss for words to explain to the audience what just happened. Some video clips here.

The series consists of two seasons of six episodes each. They were good enough that I had some difficulty not watching all of these in a row.

I haven't worked in an office quite like the one depicted, but I recognize some of the situations. I suspect I'll be watching these over a few times.

One of my favorite scenerios is when a trainer comes in, and tries to hold a class, while the office manager atttempts to share the wisdom of his experiences at the same time. Their ideas of teamwork clash.

Best television show I've seen in years.