Google Reader

My private life has been going on a serious downhill as of late, no thanks to assignments (all completed already thankfully) and upcoming exams and DotA wtf. No, I don’t think you’re interested on how my Japanese class went on today (it’s fine, thank you very much), or how I went with Shawn after class to Summit ‘cause I wanted to place an order on Jay Chou’s upcoming new album wtf (Ding ponteng class wtf).

I rarely do show-and-tells on tech/Internet stuffs, because I presume you readers are not in the least interested in such things, however, I’m willing to give this an exception (actually because I have nothing else of interest to blog wtf). Behold, the wonders of Google Reader.

Click on it to enlarge.

As you can tell from the image above, it acts similarly to gmail’s inbox, except that in Reader’s case, it cleverly informs me when one of the bloggers actually updated (in the above case, Chris’). Gone are the days when you have to constantly check on blogs or other favourite websites for updates (where some only occasionally do so) – and all these are thanks to the innovative functions of RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

Since I don’t use the inferior browser anymore (aka Internet Explorer), if you’re using Firefox, whenever you visit a certain site, you may have seen an orange button hovering at the end of the URL bar where you key in web addresses (that is, if the blogs/websites support RSS; managed to add one for Suet for my convenience wtf). Clicking on it will bring you to a selection of feeds/RSS managing websites – of which I trust mine upon Google Reader.

This makes it all the more convenient to see in a single comprehensive list who has updated their blog/website, and will take no more than 5 minutes to set the entire thing up. I’ll find it most useful when I’m backpacking in the coming December, where Internet access may be far worse than 56k and I simply can’t load every single blog I do read to see who updated.

Now wasn’t that boring useful?

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Like I was saying, my private life is so sad that the last movie I’ve watched is Secret wtf (as you can still see from the sidebar, that’s about a few months ago). Sigh and I’ve never even been to Sunway Pyramid 2 yet, which was supposedly nice (as all new things are, a few years later we’ll dismiss it with a yawn). Or MidValley Gardens which I’ve only learned of its existence through newspapers wtf. Or the newly opened Pavilion in KL which was supposedly more posh than Bangsar Village.

But then again I’m not much of a shopping mall-goer (except to catch a movie at a cineplex) – I rarely buy new T-shirts unless a specific item really caught my eye (bought my last tee when I was in, what, Vietnam wtf), and most of the items and assorted peripheral stuffs that I want these days are bought via lowyat.net or ebay wtf.

It’s not that I have an obsessive shopping impulse (well, maybe sometimes), but there are times when the items I want simply cannot be obtained easily in real life. Take the DiCAPac WP-400 for example – it’s a waterproof case that fits into many cameras (including mine), and it’s only about RM100 as opposed for Canon’s underwater case that costs RM700 WTF that’s the price of a new lower-end camera.

I asked my parents to go to the supposedly sole distributor shop in Ampang as they were in KL, but oh lookie it ran out of stock wtf. Rather than spend unnecessary time waiting as my Laos trip slowly beckons, I scourged ebay and found what I want exactly and ordered it from this Singaporean ebayer immediately.

Estimated time of arrival, in a week’s time.

Which is why sometimes it’s hard to tear away from the Internet.