I wrote a while back about how Rojo’s upgrade was a disaster and that it had led me to look for alternatives.

Bloglines didn’t have the same feeling of a polished interface that Rojo has tempted me with but unlike Rojo but it has been happily consuming the feeds of all my sites and presenting them without fuss or issue since I started using it a few weeks ago.

Whether it’s a meeting for a specific time or remembering to stop the tea brewing in 7 minutes time (lovely tea from Adagio Teas that deserves it’s own blog post) events often whiz by without me noticing. I’m not great at time based background threading… but a computer is.

Sure I fire up Outlook (which I don’t use any more), iCal (Only open when I need it) or Google Calendar, create a new event, choose the type, choose which day and time it occurs at and mentally do the math in my head for 7 minutes from now taking the seconds into consideration…. but that’s distracting enough I think “No, I’ll just remember” and I don’t.

There are a few great apps in there and all come with source – the ones I checked out were in C# :)

Some of my favorites are:

Last night I booked some flights with your web site and must say I’m rather disappointed with the experience. We needed to book two return flights with one going out on a different day but both returning on the same flight, and ideally next to each other.

It is a little disappointing that to book two different flights that you have to book each one separately despite obviously being possible on the phone or with non-airline sites such as Amazon. To avoid booking one and finding the other not available and being left with useless tickets we decided to book each using a different computer so that we could try and make sure it went through at the same time.

ASP.NET’s GridView is a useful control and one of it’s best features is it’s ability to generate the columns automatically from the data source given.

The problem however is that these generated columns are not exposed as part of the Columns collection or indeed available at all so you can’t hide or manipulate the selected columns.

The stream of spam, scams and phishing attempts increases day after day. Reporting phishing and spam inside Gmail is all well and good but it doesn’t help anyone outside GoogleMail nor solves the issue at heart.

I can only assume the recent increase in scamming and phishing is because either:

Rojo has been my favorite on-line reader for a while despite the annoyances and quirks but this weekends ‘upgrade’ got me wondering how incompetent the team behind it is and what exactly Six Apart have purchased.

There were a couple of problems before the upgrade – the one most users would have seen is the crazy unread counts which are almost always wrong – but you can learn to live with that.

I enjoyed the original LEGO Star Wars back on the PlayStation 2 some time ago. The co-operative play element, the LEGO world combined with the Star Wars world (obviously) and a healthy dose of comedy slapstick that surprised me giving LucasArt’s strict control of the Star Wars universe. But then they let Spaced burn a pile of Star Wars merchandise to official music so maybe they’re not all humorless droids.

The original game covered Episodes I-III and so when Steve reminded me LEGO Star Wars II was coming out and would be covering Episodes IV-VI (A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) I knew I had to have it. The only question was which format and in the end I bit the bullet and went with the 360 version at £29.99 – a whopping 50% more than the PC version. Thanks Microsoft.

I was wondering whether Apple Software Update might search for and upgrade the various Boot Camp supplied tools and possibly drivers.

I did a little digging and couldn’t find the answer but did spot that the Software Update sends a few interesting machine details to Apple’s web server….

Today’s Apple Showtime event showed some great products, and some disappointing ones.

The tiny new iPod Shuffle G2, the fantastic looking iPod Nano G2 with the return of the iPod Mini aluminum casing and 24 hour battery life and 8GB flash option weren’t to be sniffed at.