Daily Archives: Friday, 31st July 2009
July 2009 Round-up
It’s been a slightly different month from recent ones, so this report should be a bit more interesting than we’ve seen in a while.
Weight
July 1: 221.8 pounds (15 stone 11.8 pounds, 100.6 kg)
July 31: 213.4 pounds (15 stone 3.4 pounds, 96.8 kg)
Difference: A quite impressive fall of 8.4 pounds (3.8 kg), which is the best I’ve done in quite a while[1]
Eating
I’ve been very good, actually. Lunch has generally been restricted to a single sandwich, I’ve stopped having toast or other snacks when I get in from work, and I’ve stopped having those very tasty, but very fattening fry-ups at the weekend.
Exercise
What with holidays, and a few days at home for other reasons, I had only 11 days when I could have walked to or from work. I actually walked to work 7 times and walked home 3 times, which is pretty good by recent standards. And during my two weeks off, I did a lot of walking in Wales! Oh, and it’s a moderate walk from the Metro station to the sea front where I saw the air show!
I’ll try to keep that up in August.
Posting
Not quite as busy as last month, but including this one, the July total will be 92, which is still quite a lot.
Stuff
I had a quite long holiday in Wales, took lots of pictures, went to the Sunderland air show and took even more pictures, and generally had a good play with my new camera. Quite a good month, overall…
[1] Ummm, years, quite likely
Weight Report – 31 July 2009
No change today, but as I’m currently lighter than I’ve been in quite a while, that’s quite acceptable.
NetNewsWhat??
Last year, I mentioned how impressed I was with the free RSS reader NetNewsWire. And just last month I said happy things about the iPhone version. I’ve liked using both of these apps – theyre simple to use, and synchronise with an online account so that if I read an article on one device[1], it’ll be marked as ready on my other toys.
But something has changed, and I’m a little dubious about it. Apparently customers have been asking for NetNewsWire and the other Newsgator products to work with Google Reader. Now I’ve looked at Google Reader, and found it to be almost, but not quite as badly laid out and unusable as the frankly awful Gmail[2], and never even considered making serious use of it. When I have wanted to use a browser to read my RSS feeds, I’d always found Newsgator’s site to work well enough. But apparently, they’ve bowed to popular demand[3] and from the end of August, Newsgator’s own synchronisation service will go away. They’re also taking away the option to sync using MobileMe. Yes, from now on, you’ll have to sync with Google Reader or not at all.
All of this requires a new application version, of course, and the email they sent out yesterday invited customers to download and install it. So it’s all ready to go, then? Well, not really. When you get to the site, you find that what’s being offered is a beta, not a final release. This may of course be the Google influence, where everything was labelled a beta for years on end, but I don’t think it’s good practice to invite all customers to install a version that may not be stable. And this new version includes adverts. Now I’m not averse to software being supported by adverts, but I am very averse to people telling me how nice the adverts are. I’m also averse to them being added to software which didn’t have them previously. Apparently we’ll have the option of paying for an ad-free version of the software, which raises an interesting question. Before NetNewsWire joined up with Newsgator, people used to have to pay for it, and lots of them did. I do hope those people will be allowed the ad-free version either at no charge or for a token upgrade fee. Come to think of it, I paid for the Windows app FeedDemon before that became free…
Some users are unhappy that certain features have been lost from NetNewsWire, as they are not supported by Google Reader. I don’t use the “clippings” feature myself, so I have no comment on this other than noting that removing features and inserting adverts at the same time is the kind of thing that’s quite likely to annoy a lot of people.
I’m currently unimpressed with what’s been done so far. We’ll see how this develops over the next month or so…
[1] It’s on the iMac, the MacBook and the iPhone…
[2] Another example of a service trying to force users to work the way it wants them to. I’ll stick to webmail that lets me organise my messages the way I want to, thanks.
[3] Or something. More cynical interpretations are possible
