Personal Note From The Desk Of Waitman Gobble

This site is intended for my personal use only. I do not advertise it anywhere, and if you happened to land on it in your surfing adventures that's fine with me, I'm not greedy. Some search engine spider lifted the content and fed it to you in response to a query you made. Hoo-ray for us. We're here now, where it's cozy.

Back, way back, even before the Internet and the Great Connectedness and when I could afford it I used to subscribe to several newspapers simultaneously, and typically read through each one front-to-back. When I couldn't afford all the subscription dues I'd spend at least an hour a day in the library.

If anything, I'm an uneducated hack, but even more so I'm a bit of a news junkie. I built this site to organize all my favs in one place, because I simply cannot afford to visit twelve to twenty-four sites every hour or so to keep up with everything. And dig around for the meat, the guts. And there is no single source worthy - all of them are slanted one way or another. But combined, I think one gets an accurate view of the world. At least semi-accurate. I've been using this site for about two years now, and there never was any BETA or anything, or maybe it is still BETA. Whatever. It is definitely not Web 2.0. But, the important thing: Since I've started using dr.ooling.com NEWS aggregation there's hardly ever a time, rarely even, I see something that I didn't already read about.

And that is the point. The goal, the dream.

Update May 25 2009. I've moved the site to a bigger server. Bigger, better, faster, higher, yeah. I have also completely gutted and reprogrammmed the central core processing, the stuff that grabs the feeds and mashes them all together. By my calculations it is now at least 4,000% percent faster, as I have turned a 20 minute parse job into a 30 second process. I turned a process that ran the CPU at 600% capacity down to 10%. The key, I found, was to forget all about everything I knew about RSS and ATOM as they are XML feeds, and pretend I lived in this fantasy land where they were all existing in the ether as regular plain-old flat text files. Upside down text files, even. It's so simple, stupid that I'm sure somebody already has a patent on it. A patent on thought.

Also, I have created an admin section whereby I can monitor the frequency and status of feeds, and view reports. This is particularly exciting because I ran for two years with everything in text files, and no real statistics whatsoever. It was managed from the shell, mostly updated with vi.

OK. So I'm gloating. Remember, I said this was for my own personal use. So, there.

Anyhow, there are new features and new sections in different languages going up. My girlfriend prefers things in French, so I'm gonna do the French thing. That can be her personal news site -- I'm no Francophone. This is spare-time kind-of work, so there is no schedule.

I don't watch any television programming, so I have some free time.

My Bio. I went to college with the intention of becoming a Mechanical Engineer, however rather quickly discovered more fascinating subjects: I studied beer and pussy. Those kind of subjects are definitely in the fast-track program to graduation, as it only took two years to be done with their five year program. Or perhaps they were done with me. It's the kind of graduation where you don't receive a diploma, on the contrary you're better off not mentioning it to prospective employers. I am rather fascinated by art, as I've always been, and took a job in a sweat shop factory. As a shop rat I designed a big piece of metal made of two-hundred and fifty-seven components, which was essentially a wrapper around some seriously high-tech electronics equipment. Back in the early gay-nineties. At least tens of millions of people all over the world have seen my art, if not hundreds of millions - however they wouldn't think a thing about a boring old grey box. I designed those metal boxes to be bullet-proof, just in case some lunatic went haywire and disgruntled and unloaded a twelve-gauge shotgun on the thing. Actually, that was not my idea, but the lead Engineer's. You know, those people in middle-management who are always dealing with worst-case scenarios, however paranoid they may seem to be. The guy who had the final say-so. So be it. And so it is. Twenty years later and I still notice those boxes alongside the road, and on top of buildings, on occasion. So, after I reached my climax of designing a piece of art to be seen by so many people, I realized that my days were numbered. I shifted things around in the back of my mind and decided what I wanted to do next. I soon realized what I really wanted out of life, was to be surrounded by hundreds of gorgeous fashion models, and create every piece of software used by a manufacturing company. I read good things about Silicon Valley, so I moved from my roots in Ohio Manufacturing to this new-age green biz. After ten years of life compressed into one second, I had finally completed my ultimate journey and task - I am now surrounded by hundreds of gorgeous women, and I've programmed every piece of software used to manufacture the bikinis that they wear. From the e-commerce front end showroom, to the order and customer management, to inventory and production control, to shipping the products out the door. At the moment I'm spending half my time working on projects that earn income, so I can eat, and the other half goofing off on projects that do not earn income. I enjoy writing, making music, photography, and film. My current life goal is to finally figure out a way to goof off all the time, while having enough money to enjoy it. My current professional goal is to photograph Pam Grier's boobs - and perhaps it's been over-done over the years, but still I won't be satisfied until I've worked it out and made it happen. I figure that will take years and years of networking to accomplish - but we still have time. And she shall always be knock-out gorgeous.

There is nothing here you cannot get from a regular ordinary search engine, however the double-negative love philosophy used in construction was to pre-search and pre-sort and categorize. I wondered, "What if I don't know what I'm searching for..."

This is not free news. You actually have to click on a link and go to the publisher site. For some reason, some of these guys are putting their entire article into the feed, as I noticed 1,000 word articles that might be better on three or four pages suddenly appearing on my home page. I had to auto-chop it down, because I only want to read a few words before I decide to click.

The photos you see here are from flickr, and each one links to the respective photographer. For the most part I find the photos to be relevant, however occasionaly some sick twist will upload rinky-dink snapshots of their infant eating squash and peas and tag it "Obama" or something, essentially to attempt to get more views. I suppose. I don't have any idea why, really. However it seems ultra-vanity and exploitive. In these cases the photos are totally not interesting, except maybe to their family members. I just don't understand the payoff. But whatever. Enjoy.