Surprised that this was not forwarded to me.

By curious circumstance, I’ve finally tried both the Gilette Fusion and the Schick Quattro over the past two months. As much as I hate shelling out $2 per cartridge to Gillette, the Fusion has the Quattro beat hands down. The Quattro clogs all the time and the cartridge goes flying off the handle when I tap it against the sink to unclog it. Feels chintzy.

I just came across this on the del.icio.us hotlist. It’s well-timed for me (although it’s pretty silly) because I’ve been impressed with how essential of a “newspaper” my RSS reader has become.

Back in November, I tried Google Reader for the third time since its inception, having heard much buzz about its feature set and organization capabilities. I’m finally hooked on RSS - it only took 4 years. Since then, I’ve produced a few converts and come to rely on it as much as I rely on email. It’s also led to a few scattered observations that I’ll share here, in an attempt to re-boot this blog:

• Best tip I’ve received, and I’ll pass it on here: categorize your feeds by read priority, not subject.
• If a blog starts to annoy you, unsubscribe. I never realized how much time I wasted reading lifehacker until I threw it into google reader. Boing Boing’s post volume is similarly daunting, but I will make the effort there.
• A good RSS reader is the best online news consumption experience I’ve ever had - uncluttered and completely customized. It’s very close to a magazine or newspaper experience.
• It’s not worth adding partial RSS Feeds. Give me a full feed with ads, please.
• Speaking of ads, RSS feed ads from feedburner and pheedo are significantly less annoying and more visible than most online advertising. Too bad it’s not producing a lot of cash yet.
• If a site you like doesn’t have a feed, make one using dapper.net. Here’s an example of one I created for Iowa Highway Road Conditions. Similarly, you can use Yahoo Pipes to filter feeds (for instance, I may run BoingBoing through pipes to eliminate any post that contains the word “steampunk”).
• Del.icio.us user feeds and link-list feeds like waxy.org’s are great ways to watch memes unfold - one of the interesting/powerful things about a reader is watching an idea go from a post to a del.icio.us notation to a response on another blog.
• I’m starting to use Reader to keep track of ebay searches and woot deals as well.

And now I ask my three mistreated and abandoned readers - how else are you using your reader?