The Quixotic Engineer

Last weekend, as a side project, I decided to create an oracle. Like most oracles he spouts nonsense, occasionally happening upon a cogent statement by random chance and serendipity. His name is @HoroscopeBot, and he takes the auspices of Twitter to post a semi-coherent prophecy every twenty minutes.

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While I possess a startlingly wide array of methods to waste my time, one of my favorites lately has been Google Reader. It’s nice to know that I can sit down at my computer and always find something to read, be it an interesting blog, gaming news or webcomic. However, speckled among the nerdy ones are a few feeds that are quite different from my usual fare. I thought I’d take the time today to highlight some of these strange sites, with the hopes that you too might discover a new quirky feed to liven up your RSS reader with.

Google Sightseeing

Google Earth is a great toy, but like most people I played with it for a few hours before moving on to other things. The folks at Google Sightseeing, however, have been scouring the globe to bring us all sorts of landmarks and oddities. Whether it be rolling snowballs in Antarctica, hippos in Zambia or whales off the cost of Mexico, Google Sightseeing is like National Geographic done accidentally by satellite robot photographers.

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I had mentioned in an earlier post that I was mildly frustrated by the “new spam messages” counter in Gmail, mostly because I mistook it for the “new inbox messages” counter in my peripheral vision. Before my hard drive crash, I used a Firefox plug-in called Greasemonkey to hide the counter. This solution turned out to be inelegant when I realized that at work, at school, and on any computer other than my own I would still be visually assaulted by that silly counter. I decided then and there that there must be a better way.

Fortunately for me, there was. I had previously tried to go about using the remarkably versatile Gmail filters to mark all spam messages as read, but lacked an adequate description of what messages to mark. A closer look into Gmail search semantics revealed that I could use the keywords “in:spam” to refer to the all messages in my spam folder. Knowing this, I set up the following filters:

• Has the words: in:spam
• Doesn’t have: my name, my school, my work, etc.
• Do this: Mark as read

This filter simple and efficiently hides all new spam messages, while still alerting me when potential non-spam messages have been blocked. If you’re as fussy as I am when it comes to Gmail, I hope that this little trick comes in handy.

It had been in my movie backlog for ages, but I finally got around to seeing Memento this weekend (and absolutely loved it.) It’s nearly a decade old, but here’s a brief spoiler-free synopsis for the uninitiated: it’s a story told chronologically backwards about Leonard Shelby, a man with short-term memory loss trying to avenge his murdered wife. To remember who people are, where he lives and what he’s doing, he consults relevant notes and pictures in his pockets at all times, keeping the most vital information tattooed on his body.

While the character’s handicap was extreme, I felt a strong empathy with his condition. I’m a forgetful person by nature and, like Leonard, am constantly relying on external memory to function. Text files, post-it notes, e-mails and address books have become my substitute for real memory. I hardly take the time to remember anything nowadays; birthdays, telephone numbers, assignment due dates and addresses are taking up less and less of my cerebral real estate.

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Through a series of strange coincidences and necessities, I’ve been introduced to a number of really great software and web tools these past two weeks. Here’s a little bit about each one, with any luck they might fix some of your problems as well.

Google Reader

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a terribly slow adapter. However, after seeing that a good number of people were subscribed to my RSS feed via Google Reader, my curiosity was piqued and I took the time to check it out. I had previously considered switching from a browser based aggregator to web based one, but I didn’t have the motivation to do so until I began lacking things to read during my breaks at work.

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