Poker, the Stove-and-Pot Team, and my FeedBurner angst

I sat down on the couch the other night, had the TV on, turned lappy on, and logged into Full Tilt for a little online poker. About 20 minutes or so into the tournament, I hear some splattering and general destruction coming from the kitchen area. Turns out I was boiling something on the stove. It also turns out that I forgot I was boiling something on the stove.

I quickly jumped up from the couch mid-hand of the tournament, unplugged the power source from lappy, ran with lappy in-hand to the kitchen, threw my glasses onto the counter, and set lappy next to the stove. I proceeded to the drawer, grabbed two potholders, moved the pot off the burner it was on, turned the burner off, put the potholders down, played my hand in the tournament online, and proceeded to clean up the mess that the Stove-and-Pot Team had created. Crisis averted.

I ended up winning the tournament, and my food was thoroughly cooked.


Topic change:

I’m frustrated with FeedBurner. I don’t understand how such a simple concept of tracking RSS feeds can be so challenging of a task for a company such as Google. I understand there’s various avenues RSS feeds can take and the magic that needs to happen to come up with a final “subscriber” number… but really… why the issues?

What I don’t understand is why there is a departure between the quantity of “subscribers” in FeedBurner and the quantity of “followers” from Google. Seems to me that feed aggregators still ping an RSS feed, including Google Reader, even if you’re “following” a blog. Yet, the quantity reflected in FeedBurner “subscribers” is nothing close to the Google “followers”.

Needless to say, every time I think about FeedBurner, I want to fix the issue; every time I try to research and fix the issue, I get upset at FeedBurner.

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