I've made stabs at using various RSS applications before, but couldn't really find a free reader that I liked, so I dropped the search and relied on endlessly refreshing my browser tabs.

But Catherine's enthusiasm for Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature has rekindled my interest in RSS, and thanks to the commenters at kevin rose dot com, I've finally found one I like: FeedReader. It's open source, it's free, and it works under any version of Windows. It's worth going into the settings -- by default, sites open within FeedReader instead of your browser, which is kind of a drag. But once you get that ironed out, the app will happily check all your favorite blogs every X minutes and pop up unobtrusive notification windows whenever one of them is updated. You can set the app to start up when your system does and live in your system tray. Overall, a pretty efficient way to be inefficient at work. Hopefully future releases will include a little more customization, and better integration with Firefox -- but for now, I'm pretty satisfied.

Now I just need to bug my friends who don't use RSS to update their sites (for those of you that are interested and use blogspot, you can read here how to add an Atom feed, which most RSS clients can use -- to support those that can't, you can also check out FeedBurner).

while i'm blabbing on about what to buy people for christmas, susan is keeping us up-to-date and informed on the election going-ons in the ukraine. she really knows her stuff, having actually, you know, been there as an election observer. check it out.

i'm going all martha stewart this year. my christmas will be easy, elegant (but casually so), and everything, absolutely everything, will be planned and done with weeks and weeks in advance. coworkers will get baked goods. friends will get baked goods or little italian tidbits - amaretto cookies, jars of pesto, illy espresso, olive oil. yum. and best of all, i'll do it all online. moo ha ha ha. i'm never leaving the house. i refuse to drive to tyson's mall or target. i'm going to be the most misanthropic, anal jolly christmas person ever. ho ho ho.

but there are five people for whom, every year, i never know what to buy. of course it follows that they are the five most important people in my life. tommy, brother, sister, mother, father. so here is a thread for people to suggest what to get them. matters not if you don't know them. i'll help you out. general suggestions would be great.

-by now, you might know tommy's personality and likes fairly well. technology and nerd stuff, basically. gadgets. he needs new clothes, as always, but that's boring. video games. he likes italy as much as i do, and is an excellent cook. likes to drink. up on new music. would like to be better than he is at golf (though i can't afford a set of clubs for him). tom, feel free to chime in. you need to drop hints, boy.

-my sister is going to be 17 the day after christmas. good god. i know she reads this blog, so you can drop hints too, marggie. or tell me outright. she knows her music stuff. leans towards emo-ish punkish tastes. plays bass clarinet in high school band. learning spanish. LOVES interior decorating stuff and is quite good at it. she can tell the difference between god knows what sorts of flooring and architectural styles of windows. good fashion sense, too. maybe would enjoy a cheapish digital camera?

-my brother is...god. how old is he? he can't be 22, really, can he? a senior at uva, majoring in chemical engineering. enjoys historical stuff about wars, politics, etc. reads tons, mostly nonfiction, biographies, warfare, etc. also excellent musical tastes. loves banana republic clothing. i got him a bottle of whiskey from scotland once, and he seemed to enjoy that. cigars? (dad, don't kill me, i know i've been corrupting him since he was a wee lad.) actually my mom would kill me if he opened cigars from me on christmas morning, so that one may be out.

now, my parents. they're even harder, if possible, than tommy and the siblings, because they have been around quite a bit longer and therefore basically own everything they want. not calling you old, guys, just stating the truth. so you can't really get them anything they actually NEED. in which case i would buy them some sort of service thing; but they don't really like frilly service-y stuff, like spa stuff, or cooking classes, and they don't really travel, so getting them a weekend somewhere wouldn't work. they need a new tv; maybe i can get my siblings to chip in. or a gift certificate to a nice restaurant. except my mom can't really eat sugar or gluten, so it would have to be a very special restaurant that, like, didn't serve bread. man, parents are hard. what have you bought your parents in christmases past?

A quick bit stolen from Gizmodo: Amazon's Japanese branch has launched a new service that lets camera-phone users take snapshots of bar codes and get back the Amazon listing for the product. That's kind of cool... but tie it in to Froogle and you'd have a pretty awesome application (and a new threat to brick & mortar stores).