Yesterday was RSS Awareness Day (Thanks for the heads up Eebs).

So, I’m doing my part by telling you that if you’re not using an RSS feed reader, then you’re losing a lot of time. RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is a web publishing standard that allows webpages to effectively communicate their content and updates to RSS Feed Readers.

For example, if you use Google’s RSS Reader to subscribe to my RSS feed, the reader will do the work of figuring what posts you’ve already read and display any new ones for you.

Most of the internet is RSS enabled (you can tell if they have some variety of the RSS icon in the URL bar at the top of your browser), which means you can create a one-stop shop for yourself to read your news, web-comics, check the latest job postings, popular blogs, etc… and save yourself a lot of time.

I like to use Google’s RSS Reader because it lets me “star” anything I find interesting to save for later, search anything I’m subscribed to if I can’t remember exactly where it was, and share an RSS feed of anything that I find interesting. I actually keep a list of the 5 most recently shared items from my feed on the right column here.

Here are a couple of handy bookmarklets that I use for sites with RSS and Google Reader (either right-click and select “Bookmark This Link” or click and drag up to your bookmark list at the top):

• Subscribe- This will allow you to subscribe to the page you’re currently viewing in Google Reader,.
• Share in Google Reader- This will allow you to share a specific item in your feed without necessarily subscribing to the site.

So get to it and stop wasting time on the internet…while you’re wasting time on the internet.

I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been distracted by dad related activities and poorly managing my time, but I’ve saved a variety of geek related tidbits to talk about.

First, check out this wonderful poster created by Scott Johnson to display many of the varied geek types. Overall I fit in about 17 of the different categories in some form or another. How many do you fit in? Let’s see how many of these archetypes I can hit in this post!

I’d like to give a shout out to my former roomate and fellow geek Mike Ringenbach for working on bringing back online text games and getting noticed for it.

Also, a very geeky thank you to Coach for giving me my new favorite shirt (see below) and for lending me one of my new favorite comic series; Star Wars Legacy. If you like Star Wars or comics you should check out Cade Skywalker’s story.

See PVP for origins

Elsewhere in geekery The Hobbit is going to be made into two movies with Peter Jackson as the producer. He won’t be directing, but let’s hope that his presence brings about the quality seen in The Lord of The Rings. Hayden and I read The Hobbit for bedtime and eventually Gabe and I will as well. By the time the movies are done the boys will likely be 5 and 8 years old. Hopefully the resulting films will be something we can enjoy together.

Duke Nukem Forever, the longest running gag in video games (10 years in development and still no release date in sight) has released its first teaser since 2001.

Is this game/genre still relevant? The entire series revolved around shooting aliens with ridiculously oversized/Freudian guns, one liners ripped from They Live and the Evil Dead movies, and paying strippers to jiggle their various money makers. Duke Nukem is an archive of the days when the average gamer was still in pimples and tighty-whities who’s only interaction with girls was paper or virtual.

Now the average gamers age is 33. Most of us have grown up, met a few girls, discovered them to be rich deep individuals to be interacted with on multiple levels. Now we have games like Portal which is not only unique, beautifully designed, hilarious and well written, but also contains an all female cast with ZERO characters cast as one-dimensional sex objects.

Duke’s been outgrown, it’s time for him to lay down and go the way of the Atari; cheaply and overused.

Since I brought up Portal I want to point out this merchandise which I know want more than anything else in the world today:

Of course, if you haven’t played Portal, then you can’t understand my affection for the Weighted Companion Cube, but you should know that it loves me and speaks to me.

I got a new girlfriend last week before we went out of town.

She’s slim, darkly complected and holds 30 GB of data.

I had to pick her up because:

• I got a $200 bonus for a job well done
• There’s no way I could do a 4 hour car trip without one anymore

Upgrading to the video iPod is great. I now have the entire Futurama library at my finger tips (Don’t worry Fox, I own all the DVDs).

I’ll never be bored again! If Brie were the kind of person to drag me along clothes shopping for hours on end I could totally stand it now!

Though this development may cut down on my precious reading time…
I’ll have to balance it. Are there any great video podcasts out there?

Now if you see me sitting by myself and laughing randomly you’ll have less to worry about.

(Side note to Erica: Hey hey, you you, read this title again)

How many times have you missed a show only to never see it rebroadcast?

Don’t feel like waiting for the dvds to come out?
Or do you just want to rewatch shows that you’ve already seen?

Checkout the TV Torrent Calendar.
It’s basically a month by month calendar of most prime-time shows with descriptions of each and links to where you can find the episodes for download.

They even have my Doctor Who straight from the U.K.!

You can also customize it to show only your favorite shows.

I will definitely be hitting this up in the fall.

If Microsoft winds up buying Yahoo!, as is being rumored in various sources, I just want to point out that I called it several years ago, which can be independently verified by asking my friends.

I’d also like to call out that I think this is a patently bad idea considering Yahoo! is actually doing pretty well against the Google goliath and Microsoft’s horrible track record with managing their online brands.

I think that TimeWarner/AOL might have a few words of advice for you.