So I moved to Los Angeles a year and a half ago for business. Bad enough that that didn’t go well. Went horrible, in fact.

But the time has come for me to get the hell out of this city. The only positive things I can say about El Lay right now are that it’s less expensive than Silicon Valley, and you can walk to things like the post office and the grocery store. It’s a city instead of a suburb on steroids. But …

I was looking around a while for a nice RSS feed reader that would work like an IM client. That is, something lightweight that would sit in the system tray until I wanted it, would be easy to customize the console view, look great, and only show the text of the feed – I don’t need yet another browser applicati0n.

And I found it: KlipFolio.

Looks great, can be skinned, and has cool modules to do things like check weather, GMail, and ftp servers. They have their own “klip” format to encapsulate feeds. Which is good and bad – the bad is it looks more like a closed system. The good is that adding feeds through their klipfarm.com is as easy as clicking a link – and the klip modules allow you to make setting changes on a per-feed basis – awesome. They also have modules to include generic RSS feeds, so you can pretty much do what you like. No autodiscovery function – but the light weight of this more than makes up for it.

I’ve been using NetFlix about a year or so now, I guess. For those who don’t know what it is, they let you rent DVD’s – 3 at a time – as many as you can watch – for about $20/month. Usually they arrive within 48 hours of making a selection. You keep a queue on their system of movies you want to see. When you’re done watching, just shove it in the pre-paid envelope and send it back. No late fees.

Thanks to this, I’ve cut back my DirectTV to just basic cable. I don’t need to see the same movies 50 times in a month on HBO. I usually watch movies over the weekend and send them back on Monday, so I have 3 fresh movies to see by the following weekend.

It’s a great service. They keep adding new cool features – like the newest which is basically a buddy list so you can share recommendations with friends. If at the end of the month you look at your cable bill and wonder if you really got $90 worth of entertainment value, like you paid for, try NetFlix.

I must say that WordPress installed very easy. As painless as it could be. Plug-ins and themes are a bit more work than they could be – some of the newer BBS systems have that down to almost an art form.

But most open-source content systems are pretty good these days. Installation is usually a snap and the community surrounding the projects donates themes and plug-ins and you name it. And it’s all free.

If you have the smarts to drive the bus, that is.

This is one great movie. Especially if you like history-based movies. Better than “Gladiator.” A million times better than “Troy” (Brad Pitt as Hercules … puh-leaze)

Antoine Fuqua did an amazing job gathering a great cast of not-uber-well-known actors for this. They do a splendid job. The costumes, sets, and battle scenes are incredible and feel very realistic. It’s heroic without being comic.