A reason not to be good friends with the IT department

I've been buddies with the current instatiation of my company IT department. It has been a good thing. Service is a hair better, I have an easier time getting upgrades (like a new flatscreen monitor) and I can more or less provide a little influence on the system and ask for some geeky things to be installed that aren't really important to the work grind.

Alas, today I finally found a reason not to be so buddy-buddy with them. I get an email and one of them installed World of Warcraft on my workstation, running under Gentoo Linux of course.

Must... resist...

Distro feel

I finally allowed the IT guys at work to replace/upate my machine to the new regime. I have a Gentoo box sitting on my desk now. It's actually been ready for a couple of weeks but I had to make them wait because I couldn't afford the interruption in the meantime. At last I got my upgrade. Most of the folks in my group are very resistant to system updates and changes... some notoriously so. I can see their point of view, I just don't share it. And knowing that I'm very amenable to updates and changes despite the glitches that always appear, the IT folk had slated me as one of the earlier guinea pigs (though not the first). I'd been waiting for this update for quite some time actually. Newer software with newer features and at last I can use my USB flash. I also like that my machine seems more responsive all around (mostly due to newer machine with more memory but I suspect some of it is due to how Gentoo builds things).

One thing that kind of surprised me this time around, though, is that the feel of the Gentoo distro is not what I expected. True, I've only used it for a few days but it almost feels like I'm really just using a generic KDE box. Here's what I mean. When I was using RedHat it somehow felt like I was using RedHat. When I was using Debian it felt like I was using Debian. My home machine has Ubuntu and it definitely feels like I'm using Ubuntu. But right now, I don't have this strong feeling that I'm using Gentoo. Not that I feel like I'm using some other distro, but more that I'm just using some generic Linux with KDE. It's just a feeling and I'm sure it's more than just splash screens and extra icons here and there. It's a bit hard to define precisely and maybe it's largely subconscious. It's probably a good thing but is that not wierd?

Readme

I'd been a Bloglines user for some time now, but the only things I used it for were for the smaller things like friend's blogs and things that didn't have a huge update frequency on the scale of, say, Digg or even Slashdot or Boingboing. For the bigger stuff that I checked daily, I went to the actual pages in sequence and at most kept a recent articles listing on my personalized Google page. I tested out readers and aggregators that ran locally on my machine but determined pretty quickly that it didn't serve my purposes because there wasn't a convenient way to sync between my home machine(s) and workstation. So Bloglines sufficed but the interface was just clumsy enough that I only used it for a "here's what's updated" list.

Then a week or so ago I found that Google Reader aggregator was updated and I started using it. I'm a huge fan of Gmail, one of the few, if not only, web apps that I prefer to use online rather than with a local program. I gave it a go and, true to form, I like the interface. I've moved just about everything I monitor to it and even deleted the overlapped items on my personal Google page. The main usage difference (other than the interface) I noticed between this and Bloglines is that with Bloglines, I would just see what was updated and click over to the actual site to read the articles. Something about the look and the missing images just made me not like to read within it. On the Goolge Reader, I am just as happy to read the full text (when available) within the reader and only click over to the site when I want to look at the whole article or when I care about the comments. It's not perfect of course, but very well done and I have now changed my viewing habits.

Of course now that everything's in more or less a single stream, I'm starting to feel my own version of the Digg effect. Up to hundreds and hundreds of new and unread items waiting for me to click through them. I'm sure I'll find a system to not get too overloaded, the layout and interface seems to allow for it a lot better than other aggregators I've tried.

One aggregator to rule them all.