I wonder if there's any chance of something like this taking off in Sydney. Maybe there's just something so incredibly Japanese about it that it wouldn't work, but I just love the idea.
Either way, it seems Sarah Marchildon has struck a bit of a chord with her blog posting, generating all sorts of interest.
Perhaps I should buy a fancy espresso machine and add a dozen cats to the household, and set myself up as the Sydney branch of 猫の時間 (Neko no Jikan, or "Cat Time").
Some time back, I blogged about my dismay at finding no equivalent to Windows Live Writer for OS X. Well, since then I've been mainly using Blogger's web client to do my blogging, but the lack of a decent offline client has been a bit of a pain. For some reason, having to run Windows Live Writer from within a VMWare session, just grates a bit too much. So I thought I'd try out some of the Mac equivalents.
OS X lacks a clear equivalent to WLW, which is as close to a perfect product as Microsoft is ever likely to release (not inspiring for a platform some 20 years old), and free as well. From what I garnered from the web, the best commercial products for OS X are ecto and MarsEdit. I downloaded both clients this evening, and ran through the setup routines. Ecto was a bit less friendly than MarsEdit, so I'm going to give MarsEdit a go first. This post is being written with MarsEdit, if you couldn't guess.
Metablogging is essentially blogging about blogging, and probably a good sign that the author has really run out of things to say. Given that I haven't posted anything since heading off to England for a few weeks in the sun (ha!), it looks like I've reached that point already, so I hope that excuses me.
After a few abortive weeks of trying to catch up with the old Fairfax Digital team (aka Damana, Mei and Sanson), we finally managed to all be in the same place at roughly the same time (despite the best efforts of my local garage to make me miss an entire day by messing up the installation of a wheel bearing in my car, but that's besides the point).
While comparing the merits of our MacBook Pros and why using Safari instead of Camino is bad for your health, I mentioned some of the parental controls, which as the parent of an inquisitive nine year old girl, come as an absolute Godsend, and both Sanson and Damana were very impressed by it all (not that either are in a position to need parental controls on their MBPs yet), so Damana encouraged me to blog about it.
This is not that post.
Instead, it's more of a realisation that a lot of the time, I don't blog stuff because I don't think people will be interested, that it's so obvious to me that it's equally obvious to everyone else. There can be a really bad signal-to-noise ratio on the web, and I'd rather not be contributing to the noise side of the equation. However, the point was made over lunch that what is obvious to me may not be at all obvious to just one person out there, who is even now Googling for some help on the topic that you're not writing about.
So, hopefully in the next few months, I'll be picking up the slack a bit, and writing that post about OS X's parental controls. And I still have one holiday in Europe to blog about, now that I've just about finished with the photos.
