If there’s one thing that gets on my nerves when politicians start yapping, it’s the culture of compromising.

There’s a saying along the lines of “a good compromise is when both parties leave without satisfaction.” The problem with that is that you can just over-exaggerate your suggestion and then negotiate a compromise that is what you actually wanted, making you seem like you threw some bones to the party you’re compromising with. Politicians are oh so good at doing this.

Take the recent political brawl about the FRA law. Proponents want it to pass. Opponents want to reject it completely (though mostly to change a few details and vote it through when they’re in power themselves). Proponents call names and say the opponents are bad at politics since they can’t come up with a compromise.

Some things are so stupid and dangerous that you should never compromise with them — that just make them slightly less stupid and dangerous. It’s the equivalent of suggesting “give me all your money” and then calling names when you don’t want to compromise and only hand over half of your money.

Today there was an article by Carl B. Hamilton (in Swedish), frowning upon us little people for “not understanding” why the FRA law is good for us.

This is the same deal the Moderates used when they got trounced in the 2002 election — “We must have failed to reach people with our information.” That they in fact did reach people, and people didn’t like what they saw, is of course a possibility that’s impossible to accept if you’re a politician. No, clearly the people misunderstood or never received the information.

The problem with Hamilton’s article is that it doesn’t make a case at all. All he says is that “there are reasons” for the FRA law, yet never stating them. If they’re secret, just say so. Don’t assume we’re too dumb to understand them.

Might it have something to do with the fact that then-minister of defense Mikael Odenberg on the 13th of April 2007 signed an agreement with USA to exchange information for “terrorism research”? And that a large part of Russia’s internet traffic is routed through Sweden, making it a handy place for some wiretapping?

The disconnect between career politicians and normal people just keeps growing.

There’s a long rant about the FRA law coming up later.

Churchill once wrote: “If your argument is weak, shout. ” Remember that when you watch the politicians & the preachers on tv. Just sayin’. Ben Templesmith

For my feed reading needs I used Gregarius hosted on my site for nearly three years. But the downside is that I can only update feeds manually. I guess I could do a crontab that does a request for the update page, but I spent three years being too lazy to get that done.

I’ve been using Google Reader for nearly two months now to try it out, and I decided to stick with it. It’s good, it’s free, and it has great options for sharing interesting stuff with my friends that also use it (all one of them). You can find my shared items here if you’re interested. Feed also available there. The occasional shared post in Swedish, but mostly English.

Interface-wise there’s one thing that confuses me though: Google Reader treats folders (for different feeds) and tags (for individual entries) the same. But not.

I exported all my feeds from Gregarius as OPML and imported them to Google Reader with my old categories preserved. Nothing fancy — I had categories like People, Tech, Design and so on.

After importing the OPML, Google Reader picked it up just fine. The problem is when I want to tag individual entries, something I typically do with stuff I want to keep around for later.

The problem: The names of what I think of as “folders” show up as tags when I tag individual entries. And it’s making my brain melt. Google, you got tags in my folders and folders in my tags!

Another problem is that the name of the folder a feed is in is always added as a default tag for all entries from that feed. Very annoying. I have a folder named “People”, and that’s a very poor tag for the items in it.

The Dictionary application in OS X is just plain gorgeous with its typography.

This is how you make a proper unsubscribe feature for your newsletters. I click the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email, I get a page with this, and it’s done. No further action needed. First I thought it was a bit unsecure without a confirmation button, but then I spotted the resubscribe link in case you accidentally unsubscribed.

That’s good design by 37Signals.

To their credit, if that’s the right word, you can now purchase some music from the iTunes store that is unencrypted and plays anywhere. Apple calls these songs “iTunes Plus”, because it sounds so much better than calling everything else “iTunes Minus.” Mark Pilgrim

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about content outsourcing and the vanishing personal site, which is exactly the direction I was heading with Reconsidering Blogging. I would have written more there, but it felt tough enough to just accomplish that much.

While I love all these wonderful social sites like Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter and various other clever services that tend to end in -r, I am starting to feel like I spread myself thin across the internet. So many places to post stuff to, so many places that contain fragments of my thought streams. It’s hard to keep track of me.

As I wrote, I feel that I have a certain expected level of quality for things I want to post on my personal site. While I grin just as much as anyone else at lolcats, that’s not really stuff I’d like to post here.

I’ve started experimenting a bit with Tumblr — you can find me here. Just like I enjoy the 140-character format of Twitter, the Tumbler format of posting various short text snippets, quotes and images is also very appealing. That default theme doesn’t quite agree with me about what a quote is, though. I have a habit of finding interesting quotes that can span several paragraphs, so blowing up the text size like that can get confusing. But I’ll fiddle with that later.

But Tumblr is still an experiment for me. I don’t find myself wanting to post there that frequently. Twitter is still the main source for my thought streams. I’ll keep fiddling with it for a while, and if I find a format that works for me I’ll try to incorporate it into my social stream.

So here’s the crux of it: do I try to tie it all together on my personal site, or just leave it with links to the various services I use?

Let’s look at what some other people do.

Jon Tan has a front page that is not the actual blog, but contains the first sentences from the latest blog entries prominently displayed in the center column. He then uses a very condensed format of asides, with just a link to the services he uses, and then a link to a separate page titled Asides, also linked from the top of the page. The Asides page itself looks very good and readable. One column with bookmarks from Delicious, one column with tweets from Twitter, and a third column with thumbnails from Flickr and Upcoming events below those.

Great idea, might steal it.

dooce has a two-column layout with Twitter and Flickr items in the sidebar. Classic blog layout, not much else to say about it. Still looking great though.

It started with Zeldman, so it might as well end there too. He has the two-column layout with a note on where he will be speaking (hey, offline thought streams counts too), a single tweet and a list of the recent entries in the sidebar.

Time to think it over. I’ll probably think by sketching out a new layout for the site. Tends to end up that way when I think design.

Some email about making custom smileys arrives from MSN Live. I don’t even use the “official” MSN client since I refuse to use anything that shoves ads in my face in an intrusive manner.

I do use the MSN Messenger service though, so it might be prudent to just unsubscribe to their marketing spam rather than flag it spam and miss potential emails about the actual service. So I click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the mail, log in, select “I don’t want this stuff” at three different places, click submit, and… a red-colored text that says “Error 500″ appears.

I try to submit two more times. More error 500.

This is where I sigh, go back to Gmail, and click “report spam”.

Here’s some helpful hints from an email user: I can report your mail as spam with a single click. If you can’t add a one-click unsubscribe link (also, it helps if it actually works), then I can report your mail as spam with a single click. I don’t want to have to jump through hoops to do this. There’s no need for me to have to log in and navigate the site to find my account preferences.

It’s all a cost/benefit calculation. This cost me time. The benefit was that I might still want to get things like password reminders (in case I suffer from sudden brain trauma) and information about service changes.

Had this been a web shop I would most likely have clicked “report as spam” right away. I can accept having to provide a password, but after that it should opt me out instantly.

The worst offender I’ve seen here is CD-WOW. After logging in the user preferences had two places where you needed to deselect your spamming preferences — under separate tabs with nearly identical names. I only spotted one of them, and logically assumed that it would work. Then I got more marketing trash from them, got annoyed since I had already declared my preferences, and now their mails go straight to the spamcan.

This World of Goo trailer kind of makes me want a Wii. The combination of cutesy looks (somewhat Tim Burton-ish) and ominous, melancholy epic music tickles my brain in all the right spots.

The fact that the first response to “John Locke” was Lost and not Second Treatise on Civil Government or An Essay Concerning Human Understanding really shouldn’t surprise me nearly as much as it does. Minwee