Just a regular guy 

Dan Rather was on a reporters panel on the Chris Matthews Show. Nice to see him chipping in as a workaday observer of the scene, though it did seem to me that Matthews cut him a little extra respectslack, not interrupting him as much as he cuts in on almost anybody else.

No podcast. This is Matthew's broadcast show syndicated on NBC affiliate stations, not Hardball, the MSNBC program. Maybe he produces this show and site himself. Get those MP3 files up there, Chris, buddy.

My Dear Technorati, 

Good thinking to have RSS feeds available for each watchlist search. Now, how about letting me grab an OPML file that scoops up all my watchlist feeds? Thank you for your attention.

Love,

Amy

P.S. Oh! And make it dynamic so the OPML includes watches I add, and it nukes watches I've abandoned.

Google Spreadsheets works for me 

I like it. (Or since it's plural, do you say "them?") I keep my work time with it now. No more e-mailing an Excel file to myself (when I remember to do it) to keep track of time spent at home and work. Spreadsheets is in labs status, a name contrived for two reasons I can think of:

1) Greek alphabet inflation

2) "You were warned; can't blame us if you lose your data."

They haven't lost my data so far. The sheets autosave. The site has been unavailable for minutes (not hours) at a time a few times over the past three weeks I've been using it, and shifts into offline mode, which doesn't mean anything, except that you still can see the last-saved version of the sheet.

I'm not using its more interesting aspect -- the sharing features. You can invite people to view or edit a sheet, and chat about it in real time on the sheet page.

I can see how this might be used for remote teams. Imagine a sales staff on a conference call. The manager shows quarter-to-date sales and does some bludgeoning what-ifs for all to see. "Now if I change this cell in the projection column, in the vain hope that Charlie can get to 350k, as you can see we'd all be sitting pretty." I know, I know, there are meeting tools like Live Meeting (formerly Placeware) and WebX that accomplish the same thing with shared desktops, but now anybody can do it -- 3-person company, Girl Scout troop, grassroots fundraising organization.

The Coroner may have a point after all. This does reduce my reliance on Office. Word, though. In my shop that's not going away anytime soon.

What do you still use Office for? Post a comment.

Poll widget pipe dream 

I would like a poll widget that splits the difference between a little one-question survey with instant results and the more robust analysis packages like phpESP or the expensive and beautiful... can't think of the name of the package I have in mind: from Canada, Java-based, has a dot.org demonstration site.

It would allow for one or two sorting variables exposed to users so that something like this would be possible: users answer the question, say it's "Do you own Carole King's Tapestry album?" and report their ages. The overall results are reported to the user along with the crosstabbed results.

Can't help myself 

Guess what was on my todo/todon't list for the weekend? "Avoid blogging."