Take Outs: The Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What is "Take Outs?" and why do you publish it?
A. It's a more or less daily dump of the blog posting I found interesting in the last "day" or so. It started out and it still is mostly for my benefit. When I see something I like, I note it, then compile (or compost, take your pick) them into a single posting. They are stuff I've taken out of reading other peoples blogs, feed and web content. Since I suspect that other people may not want to wade through all the feeds I do (about 1,500), I decided to publish "take outs" for public consumption.
Q. What's with the counts?
A. That's how many postings I've referenced per category. At the current time, there are five categories: Blogging, which is stuff about Atom, Blogging, or RSS; Dev(evelopment), which covers any programming or system development topic; Otherwise, which is everything else; SQL, which covers anything related to Data, Database use and programming and WILY, which covers anything related to Whidbey (.NET 2, Indigo, Longhorn and Yukon)
Q. You used to different categories. Bring them back.
A. I probably will. Right now, I'm using RSS Bandit which allows me to categories into to five channels. I'm going to write a different program that takes an RSS Bandit flagged items file, feeds it into SQL Server and lets me assign a wider range of categories to it. There's some other evil things I want do to with that database too.
Q. How do you select the line of (whatever)?
A. Anything that makes me blow milk (or beer) out of nose automatically wins. Anything that makes me laugh usually gets picked too. If nothing does that, the best truism I read that night takes it by default.
Q. How do you pick the posting of the (whatever)?
A. That's usually going to be either the one posting I think everybody should read or its the best written posting. I'll let you decide which is which.
Q. Don't you know how to use a spell checker? Do you always write so poorly?
A. Yes, I do. No, sometimes I have an editor. You should try relaxing, too.
Q. Hey, what's all this stuff about food and beer and writing? I thought this was a technical blog?
A. If you get that worked up about it, might I suggest that a cold beer, warm meal and good book is precisely what you need?
Q. Oh, I get it... Take Outs is because your Blog is named "Enjoy Every Sandwich," so it's a Take Out sandwich right?
A. (Rolls eyes) If you must, then yes, you can think of "take outs" as being a blogmeat sandwich on wry piled high with cheese.
Q. I really like "Take Outs." Is there a T-Shirt or something?
A. Not yet. We're talking about one on the Orkut community though.
Q. Do you really think anybody reads this stuff?
A. You just did.
Last updated: 1 March 2004