I've never been an avid news reader but with the advent of blogging all this change and like many others I started a quest just the right RSS Newsreader. For the uninitiated RSS is a simple XML based technology by which content (normally text but not limited to) is published in a machine readable format. For more information on RSS check out Wikipedia's RSS page. News readers are the programs that automatically poll RSS files to retrieve their content to facilitate the delivery of information to the user. The primary advantage of RSS is that it is an information pushing technology which means that information is sent to the user not waiting for the user to fetch the information himself.

Newsgator - Newsgator was my first RSS love and I've been loyal to it since the times when RSS was as popular as my mom. The one and only reason I use Newsgator is its formidable integration with Outlook which makes reading news as easy as reading e-mail, with the additional advantage of not giving any clue to your manager that you're reading blogs at work. I tried the web version of Newsgator a couple of times but it was too slow for my tastes.

Pluck - Pluck is my weapon of choice at home where I prefer using a web based internet reader. This was one of the first web based readers I tried and since then I didn't feel the need to change. The advantage pluck has over other readers is its extensions that integrate with IE or Firefox thus making it much faster than other web readers with the additional functionality browser components can provide. Recently I was about to ditch pluck because of some very annoying problems with the Firefox extension but as soon as I tried the new Windows version (Pluck 2.0) I reconsidered. This is the only reason I still use IE but it's a damn good reason.

Google Reader - Google Reader was the contender against pluck when I was looking for an alternative but the functionality of Google's solution wasn't anywhere near that offered by Pluck.

FeedLounge - I've read about FeedLounge in Rand's Information Report and the screen shots on the main site look pretty promising. I think it might appeal for people who're still looking for a good reader.

Digg - For me, digg is a crossbreed between a content aggregator and social bookmarking application, and even if it isn't a news reader per se it still fits in the category of news delivery. You can use digg in two ways; say you found a really cool technology related article and you want others to know about it, all you've got to do is digg the article by submitting the article's URL to digg. Other people then go digging for news and see the article that you posted, if they like it then they digg it too to increase its rating. If on the other hand you want to know what are the hottest tech articles at the moment just go into the digg main page and check out the articles with the highest hits. Really Nifty!

Standalone readers - I'm not a big fan of standalone readers like Feeddemon and co. as I already have enough applications running simultaneously. Standalone readers might appeal for dedicated news lovers without serious levels of NADD.

Do you think that the news reader you use is better than these? Go ahead and post your comments.

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This morning we woke at 6.30 and after packing we were the first people for breakfast at 7.30. Being such early risers we had some spare time to kill so we toured the streets of Banos again. Being a Sunday we noticed that the streets were more crowded, the people better dressed, the food stalls had different food (guinea pigs) and there were more beggars. We played our part to help the needy and gave some sweets to the scruffy children who came pleading to clean our shoes, but I'm sure preferred money instead.

At 10 we left the room and went to the bus station to catch a bus for Latacunga. This was the first and only time we had a problem finding a bus throughout the whole trip because there weren't any direct buses to Latacunga and the buses to Quito weren't going to pass from Latacunga, so to avoid waiting at the bus station we caught a bus to Ambato. Catching the bus to Latacunga from Ambato was a piece of cake because as soon as we dropped off the bus we found a bus 'salesman' calling Latacunga and all we needed to do was hop in his bus.

Click image to download Latacunga video

Window view from Hotel Rodelu

Not having anywhere to go or anything to do we spent the rest of the evening watching Animal Planet and slept early.

There's no use hiding it, we've become slaves to reality TV and yesterday we were presented with the TV moment of the month. In the Italian program La Talpa a new candidate was introduced to the group. The other participants already had an inkling on this possibility so they spent a whole week grumbling how unfair it is that somebody joins the game in the middle of the program when they've been there for these past weeks.

The big moment came when Bambola Ramona (real name: Ramona Chorleau), a Romanian blond with a HUGE breast and who auto proclaims herself babe (or literally doll – Bambola) made her appearance in Kenya. The expression on all the male competitors was the sublime definition of the word 'astounded', you could literally see their jaw drop in awe. Needless to say nobody (at least not the males) said another word about voting her out. Looks may not be the most important thing in a person but they sure are the first to strike an impact.

Google had just released Google Reader, an RSS reader developed in the now famous Google AJAX style when I started writing this article, but did the world really need another RSS reader (check out the exhaustive list at the RSS Compendium)? I haven't had the time to review Google Reader in depth, though I have to say that the interface looks clean and very functional. There were some people who claimed that it was buggy and slow. Google slow? I thought that these two words were incompatible, but then Google spoiled us by being fast and efficient.

Apart from Google Reader, Google also released Google Talk (an IM client), Google Desktop 2 and Google Blog Search. All these four tools are all well established technologies, it seems that Google is just improving on the ideas everybody likes and adding the Google touch of class (and AJAX). Would you bet against a Flickr like tool in the pipeline? We'll wait and see.

Another thing, did you notice how so many people complain about popup ads or banners or other foul looking adverts on pages yet nobody ever says anything about Google ads that are littering every page on the web. Google does this advertising so unobtrusively that it seems not to matter to anyone. Mind you not that anyone is going to pay heed to the ads when the can get to 2Gb of free e-mail or a faster news reader or a super compatible IM client. I think Google is managing to thread the fine line of a win-win situation by generating loads of revenue from ads and at the same time delivering excellent value quality software to its fans.

On Saturday I exported the first hour of video on tape with a whole series of problems between the video camera and premier pro. Every 10-20 minutes either the camera or premier kept stopping abruptly for no apparent reason. Premier behaves really strange when exporting to tape sometimes, and the solution to the problem was a restart of the application with the camera switched off, for whatever it's worth.

On Sunday I bothered to sit down in front of the TV and watch the whole first rough cut of the video. I was hesitant to 'waste' an hour watching the video but I must say this was a very important step that paid its worth. While watching the video I made notes on what clips need to be trimmed, sequences reordered, voice overs, bad sound, good sound etc. For the 1 and a half hour spent watching the video I spent only 2-3 hours the following two days making the necessary modifications.

The trick at this stage was to leave the music clip selection process for later on, until I could find the time to choose the music clips as the soundtrack. I created two dummy offline clips of 1 minute each, one for music and the other for voice overs and whereever there was the need for music I inserted the dummy clip. Now all I've got to do in the newly edited timeline is to go through the offline clips and replace them with actual songs. Pretty nifty eh.

In 11 days time I should be leaving for New York for this software testing conference and since I'm going to be alone I haven't got the benefit of a ready made plan by her highness (who has been sick with a for the last three days). I'm faintly trying to discover the possibilities of cramming activities as much as possible in the very tight conference schedule. Just for starters I thought about food - well this Google earth's snapshot of the dining sports in the area. And they say an image says a thousand words.

Manhattan dining places

The people at the tripadvisor forums had some useful suggestions on what to do in Manhattan, but if anybody has any other suggestions I'd be more than glad to hear them. I might even be able to watch the NY Rangers play against the Montreal Canadians at the Madison Square Garden which should be a real blast.

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Thanks to the jet lag we woke up at 6am and went for the desayuno (breakfast) at 7.00. At this early hour the hotel personnel were still arriving so naturally everything was closed. We waited in the garden under the umbrella to avoid the trickling rain and went in at 7.30 for the buffet breakfast. The continental breakfast had the usual stuff, bread, cereal, hams, cheese, fruit, tea and coffee but no sweets. The musli cereal with toasted nuts was the best musli I've ever tasted, and it was a joy savouring it with the strong Ecuadorian coffee.

Click image to download video

This morning we were undecided whether to go horse riding or go cycling to the waterfalls. After weighing our options at the breakfast table we decided to go for a 4 hour horse riding tour keeping an option open to go cycling in the afternoon. Since we had enough time before the tour we walked to the bus station and visited the suspension bridge over the Pastaza River. This was a prelude to the waterfalls that we had to visit in the afternoon but it was a good way to spend some time. On our return to the tour operator we brought some snacks from the Banos supermarket.

The horse riding experience was one of the funnies we've done till now. We've only been horse riding twice and the 'poco esperienza' didn't mean much to our guide, giving him the leeway to choose an arduous mountain decent. We didn't realise that horse riding turns your feet into jelly almost instantly, and after the first hour we were already feeling tennis balls between our legs. When watching others horse ride it seems like an effortless activity but you end up using muscles you never knew existed which make them ache like hell.

The guide took us up a mountain near Luna Runtun from where we could see the whole of Banos underneath. The scenery around was lovely and well worth the muscle pain ointment we had to rub. My horse must have had something against my darling's horse as he kept trying to bite him each time he tried to surpass. To despise him even further he kept constantly farting in the other's face throughout the whole trip.

As we've learned from Malaysia the descent was much worse than the ascent. It wasn't like smoking the pipe on a rocking chair going through the steep narrow passages on a rocky terrain with two horses fighting for the lead. Despite their antagonism the whole merit still goes to the horses that knew each and every step and made it safely to the village. There might as well have been a baby on the horse as they did all the hard work, with a little spanking guidance on the back by our guide.

After the tour we had a small break in our room and saw part of the game between Real Madrid and Celta Vigo. At around 3 we left in search for a tour to Pailon del Diablo and after walking just a few meters away from the hotel an open bus scoped us up for the waterfall tour. The bus salesmen are effective after all, and it's a refreshing change to have a bus chase you instead of the other way round. In Banos you can hail buses in the same way you hail a taxi.

The tourist bus was really folkloristic without any doors, painted in bright yellow, red and blue. There were a group of German girls riding on the roof and each time we passed through a tunnel they got showered with water dripping from the ceiling.

On this tour I made myself the laughing stock of the whole holiday. The bus stopped us to go and watch a waterfall and while going down the high bus step I fell to the ground curling on my back like a dying capsized turtle. Needless to say all the bus burst out laughing and they kept laughing each time they looked at me.

During the tour we saw some spectacular waterfalls and rode on a rudimentary cable car ride that defied every possible safety regulation. When we arrived at the final waterfall, the Pailon Del Diabolo, the bus driver granted us an hour to walk down to the waterfall and experience its force. While descending we noticed that everyone returning back had his hair soaked wet, so we were wondering whether it was sweat or rain. As we arrived at the base of the water we found the answer. It was the water rush the waterfall unleashes which is guaranteed to soak you in few minutes.

After the tour we went for a pizza and fettucine at the restaurant 'Pizza Napoletana', which was an empty restaurant but had good food.

At school I used to find all types of excuses not to do my homework and the same is happening with my video editing. Today I overshot my morning coffee break with 1hr surfing blog explosion to get enough credits for another blog battle.

Since last Monday I've been trimming the pre selected clips to remove any extra footage. This is a butcher's knife trim that is serving as a weed killer. I'm planning to trim around 50% - 70% of the original 7 hour footage.

To make this process faster I'm not trimming audio for the time being. I'm still listening to the original audio in the tracks and if I think the audio only should be retained I'm copying the audio section in the second muted audio track. Sometimes especially when editing noisy tracks (such as boat rides) turning down the audio helped me judge the better visual scenes.

If this is your first episode of this journey then take a minute to read this note.

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Just before landing in Quito airport there's one thing that's guaranteed to cross your mind – the catastrophic consequence an airline crash will have near the airport. The Quiport like the rest of Quito lies in a valley but unlike any other airport we've been to it's strangely surrounded by buildings. Inside the architecture is modern and I must admit that I awaited much worse. At 8am everything was working as it should and we passed through immigration with no hassles or incredulous looks at the passport, although I doubt it came out of familiarity with our country. After collecting our luggage we took a taxi to the bus station 'Terminale Terrestre'.

The taxi driver dropped us in front of a stairs leading to a square where we should have found the ticket offices but instead we somehow ended up in a telephone cabin office instead. After putting some of last month's Spanish lessons to use we managed to find the ticket office and the bus to Banos. The trip promised to be culturally rich from the start my Madam pointed at a policeman pissing on the front of a bus. The bus to Banos, probably free of piss, was relatively modern but the people inside gave just the perfect retro touch to remind us that we were in Ecuador.

The characters on this bus became imprinted in memory and will probably remain there for a long time, at least until I continue hearing 'A Banos', 'A Banos' reverberating in my mind. This was the call the bus attendant or as I preferred referring to him, the bus sales man, was calling out at each stop. No matter were we stopped, be it to let people off or to wait in the traffic, the attendant called out at the top of his voice to load more passengers. His tactics were fruitful because the bus kept replenishing itself with people. Then there was the bus driver who must have been under an accumulated adrenaline rush out of watching Fast and Furious, because we were close to smash against other vehicles throughout the whole 3½ hour trip. Lastly there were the bus vendors 'vendedores' who came on the bus handing over things like 'medical tea' or 'special ball pens' trying to convince us in very fast Spanish why we couldn't live without their goods. At least we made a deal with the best one of the bunch who was a traditional musician that played his flute and guitar on the bus and sold us 2 CD's with traditional Ecuadorian songs for $5. (Click on image to download video)

When we arrived in Banos after passing through Latacunga and Ambato we caught a taxi ($1) from the bus station to Hotel Palace for practical reasons rather than because of the distance. Hotel Palace is one of the higher end hotels along with the Sangay Hotel listed in Lonely Planet but this hotel offered a better price and a better e-mail response than the latter.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the streets of Banos trying to take some representative photos of the village. While returning back to the hotel we came across a local artisan who made Salasacan weavings. When the lady saw us staring at her work displayed on the veranda she welcomed us inside for a better view. We tried to understand as much as possible from her explanation in Spanish but the only things we understood were that the wool used was sheep wool and it is naturally dyed and water resistant. Her best piece took her 3 weeks to complete and was selling at $35. We left the house with a piece depicting two blue footed boobies but this also allowed us to take some photos of her art without feeling guilty. After the walking tour we went to eat at a Mexican Restaurant called Panco Villa. The food was good, but the place was empty. We had cheese nachos, chicken and beef hard tacos and natural (thick) juice all for $12.

Since I clicked on LifeHacks I developed another habit, avoiding work by browsing productivity websites. It feels strange knowing that you're procrastinating by learning how you not to. This is exactly what John Perry suggests in his multilinked essay Structured Procrastination.

If this is your first episode of this journey then take a minute to read this note.

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With a country the size of a freckle you can't blame us that we like to go on holiday abroad, this time it was Ecuador and the Galapagos islands after the initial plans to go to New Zealand changed because of the weather at this time of the year. With the last few weeks being abnormally prone to airline accidents (Greece, Peru, Indonesia, Palermo) we listened carefully to the flight attendant safety instructions, hoping we wouldn't need to open the door next to us.

The first flight on our route to Quito was an 8am flight to Amsterdam. To keep myself busy on the flight I opted for the non-fiction classic inspired by the Galapagos 'The origin of the species' by Charles Darwin, and the strategy/RPG game Fire Emblem.

After arriving at Schiphol Airport it doesn't take long to get a glimpse of the relaxed attitude of the Dutch. Stepping out of the airport for a fag there's a square pond where people can sit and relax watching the giant TV screen across the street. I must admit that I liked the idea of watching MTV in the sun after a three hour flight.

This post will not interest the one or two regular readers because I doubt whether they're familiar with Italian TV.

Probably the commodity we missed most in Ecuador was TV and it shows because we're daily overdosing with the box. This winter season the stations brought some great shows to the extent that we can kiss our social lives goodbye and spend a whole week watching different shows, most of them on the Italian state channel RAI Due. I think their investment will pay off as we're spending more and more time watching RAI instead of the usually superior Mediaset channels.

Wednesday is Isola dei famosi (Celebrity Survivor) week, a program that has stirred some commotion in the news this week after the controversial wife, Loredana Lecciso, of famous singer Albano Carisi released a interview on magazine Gente stating that she's planning to separate from her husband. Great timing Loredana what better time to leave your husband then when he's starring on Celebrity Survivor. I'm sure that the hype was a conspiracy to increase the audience against La Talpa the Mediaset reality rival. Having said that, I must admit that I still end up watching these shows with all their scoops and sensationalisms.

While ranting about TV, I cannot help not to mention the Monday dose of Desperate Housewives. I've only watched 4 middle episodes from season one but I dare say that this is the best serial since Scrubs. It even has the pleasure to have helped me understand myself better too. I adore dark humour and I dig a narrator in films.

Yesterday I was reading National Geographic's Africa Special and there was an interesting article on how Africa being the first continent to host homo sapiens is now the poorest continent of the seven. According to the author in this case the difficulty in agrictultural development and the geography of the black continent played an important role in undermining its development and progress.

This morning I was reading Lindsey Vereen's Editorial in October's STP Magazine and he wrote an insight about what it entails to be the first in a market. Diners Club was the first card accepted by multiple vendors but since its debut in 1950 it now retains only 1 percent of the credit card market. Some of the difficulties pioneers face are the difficulty to identify what the market wants, and being vulnerable to potential competitors who can take advantage of the road you've paved for them.

Being a pioneer isn't a guarantee to ongoing success and web search technology and the British football team are another two proofs, but sometimes it pays to be first. In software litigation on the intellectual property of code you might gain the better hand in court if the code forensic analysts manage to find the original spark in your source code.

Don't click on this link, Motherload, if you don't want to get infected with this contagious game.

If anyone is going to attend the software test and performance conference in NY next month send me a mail. My company is poor enough to send me alone and I wouldn't mind knowing somebody before the conference.

In the mean time these links are going to be useful for the rest of the week.
Pavel's Online Presence - Pavel's software engineering oriented blog
Testing Reflections - The title says it all

Today I have finished the capturing and renaming phase after a whole week working after hours. I've discarded all the completly useless clips and each time saved between 1-3GB of disk space when copying the clips to a new location from Premier's Project Manager.

After completing this phase I've basically watched at all the video and am now ready to start the actual editing phase. My only doubt at this point is whether the step just completed was really necessary and whether starting to edit immediately would have saved time. For starters though I found the clip renaming useful when this afternoon my movie star wanted to watch some specific clips and unlike usual I was able to please her immediately. Apart from this I am also feeling a sense of achievement after completing this phase, something I wouldn't dream of thinking about if I were to have started editing directly.

Anyone who works with the internet or at least can imagine how that can be MUST click this link below. This is a really really great video clip - nothing to do with yesterday's humour.

When the internet goes down

I thought I'd post some pics after the boring video stuff. By the way, if there is somebody who wants to offer me a job out of this country I'd be estatic to hear from you.

From the project created yesterday I imported batches of the captured clips into a timeline and started watching the clips chronologically. Every 5 / 10 clips or sequence of events, I deleted the completely unusable clips from the timeline and renamed each valid clip. The discarded clips were absolute disaster clips or backup replicas that could be deleted.

The naming convention used for the retained clips was Location/Time Sequential Order - Description.avi e.g. "Pre 01 - Airport queue out pan.avi", or "Banos 05 - Waterfall water closeup.avi", or "Banos 05 - Duck sound effect.avi". This naming convention retains the chronological sequence of events for each particular place using the reference number after the location and describes the scene. A proper description of the contents of the scene will help determine why the scene was taken and retained, a sort of self documenting procedure especially useful for scenes with the same content. In the Tanzania video I had scenes named zebra 01, zebra 02, etc. but this wasn't very helpful when trying to locate specific scenes during the later editing stages.

I timed myself during each 30 minutes of the tape. The total time taken to edit the first 30 minutes that I had previously watched the previous day was approx 2hr (excluding yesterday's 45 minutes). The second 30 minutes that I only watched once during this phase took only 1hr 20mins. I arrived at the conclusion that I can safely proceed without watching the video capture stage thus saving about 1hr for each tape. There was no additional benefit in either time or ease/quality of clips selection to warrant the need of watching the capture stage.

I created a new temporary Premier Pro project to store the uncut version of the first tape referenced EC001. I captured the whole tape using automatic scene detection and named the files EC_TP1_A, EC_TP1_B ... changing the last letter each time a blank tape section error was detected. Despite not having rewound the tape at any time during the shooting stage I still got the blank tape section errors about 5 times.

I purposely watched 30 minutes of the first tape without touching any settings to determine whether this will help me during the first scene selection, tomorrow. The rest of the 30 minutes where extracted while I was taking a long coffee break.

The total size of the first 1 hour tape 13.1GB of .avi files.

Out of the 160GB hard disk I purchased for the Tanzania video, I've remained with a very fragmented 131GB. I defragmented the hardisk using the standard Microsoft tool that comes with XP overnight.

In the following weeks I'll be documenting the Ecuador video editing phases that I'll be working on each night. This is my third travel video and this process is still in experimental stage so if you're looking for professional well proven advice, I don't think this is the best place. This will be like the lab documentation we used to do in Form 1 during the science class.

Yesterday we arrived back from Ecuador after two full days of traveling from Quito to Mexico City to Frankfurt to home. The return trip was less than pleasurable as my madam got very sick on the longest leg of the trip. The tablets locked in my backpack did the trick on our arrival, but don't tell the poor soul that spend the whole night waking up of her seat to let her pass to the bathroom.

Today was supposed to be recovery day and it ended up being cleaning day after my brothers locked the three black demons in my room without a place were to shit. I can tell you the result wasn't pleasing at all. Things are looking, and smelling, slightly better though I doubt the marble will regain it's gloss anytime soon.

Tomorrow we're back to work hopefully not for a very long time if the next project in line turns fruitful. In the mean time I'm catching up with some soccer news which I surprisingly missed while on holiday, I think I'm going to get soccer fever sometime soon.