Could you tell us what you really think? 

Randy, the RSS blogger guy, seems pretty sure OPML polling will scale.

I'm an unabashed napper, too 

Jeneane Sessum talks about the lure of the bed. Funny piece, but I believe the correct term is irre-fucking-sistable.

Later: Jeneane defends her usage. I remain unconvinced. What do you think?

Comic Chat ahead of its time 

Kosso mentions MS Comic Chat. I used to love that! Never could get many people to take the trouble to get it and play with it with me, but I loved the idea of it. I even thought about making characters to do Jane Austen character live freeform roleplaying, which now that I think of it, would be a little like a poor man's MMORPG in 1997. I guess it was ahead of its time. Was it IRC based? I don't remember.

Later: Les says you can still download it and use it.

Poor man 

My dad uses the term "poor man" in the funniest ways. Example: say there's a blond actor who's OK looking, but not a stunner. Daddy will call him a "poor man's Brad Pitt."

Corollary to people who change over time 

Dave quoted Somerset Maugham on people who don't stay the same people from one year to the next. Maugham also had something to say about the changability of people from minute to minute or from aspect to aspect. In The Moon and Sixpence the first-person narrator looked back on his life and realized that as a younger person he believed people were more "of a piece." Then he gradually gained the understanding that generally docile people could flare up and be cruel, or generally whatever people could have a surprising twist in their characters.

Maugham's work has that kind of variableness for me. Usually if I like one novel from a novelist's work, I pretty much like all of them. In his case I adore The Razor's Edge and The Moon and Sixpence but don't care much for Of Human Bondage (which he may be best known for) or The Magician.

The Razor's Edge is especially powerful for me. The idea of a person going about his business doing little bits of good in the world is a beautiful thing. George Eliot said the same thing about her heroine in Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke Casubon. Middlemarch might be my very favorite novel.

Both books have very creditable film adaptations. Get the old Razor's Edge, though, with Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney -- not the Bill Murray version. Middlemarch is a BBC miniseries. It was made a while ago but just came out on DVD last year.

About ten years ago there was a rumor that Alan Rickman was to play Charles Strickland in a new adaptation of The Moon and Sixpence. He would have been so perfect for the character, a gruff blunt monomaniac painter based on Paul Gauguin, but the project never came together. Now I've made myself want to squirrel away and read it. It's been five years or so. About time.

Cute writer 

If there's such a thing as writing in a cute way, Rex Hammock writes cute. Cutely?

He's often acute, too.

Learn when reading lists have been updated 

Get pinged when a reading list changes. Pito Salas announces the new feature of BlogBridge.

That could work with the OPML Editor's existing features, couldn't it? If my reading list was an inclusion in the instant outline associated with my coffee cup, and you were my buddy, you'd get notified, right?

Polling won't scale, Pito says. Apparently that's the conventional wisdom. Could someone explain why it's the conventional wisdom so I can understand it? I did some searches trying to learn more about it, and ran across lots of worrying about scalability with polling, and a lot of mentions of RFC3229, delta encoding.

Then that made me want to understand more about diffs and how or if it relates to the upstreaming that happens here, which still seems like magic to me.

A sure bet 

Got some work work out of the way this morning. Yes, that's the price I pay for having a flexible schedule during the week. It's so worth it to me.

In working out some search options across blogs and within categories in our CMS templates, I had to keep testing as a user. I'll give you one guess which search term will always return a result in each category of each of 14 periodicals published by the association I work for: "meeting."

Hey Richard 

amybellinger at gmail dot com

I'll e-mail you later.