The Old New Thing - Dreamcatcher Edition

It seems like an eternity ago that I finally grew sick enough of the writing style of a Seattle Stranger staffer and knuckled down to learn enough XML Parse Fu to start filtering his entries from the Slog RSS feed.

At some point in the last year or so, I've found that uberprogrammer Raymond Chen has begun to meander in his daily thoughts as well. Specifically, he now deems it important that we know what he dreams about from time to time. People telling me about dreams they've had is probably one of the most annoying things you can do, shy of talking at the theatre, or sneezing without covering your mouth, or chewing food with your mouth open.

Basically if your mouth is open around me about something, you should stop that.

So back to the drawing board to write another RSS feed filter. This one parses his entries' category terms and strips out the somnambulistic sermons. Easy enough, because Raymond Chen's RSS feed schema is sparse and elegant and this is of absolutely no surprise. Now I can enjoy The Old New Thing's technical merits with minimal fluff. I really do enjoy his observations on life, the universe, and everything. His observations (particularly on conferences) are fun, just not when they're a totally fictional construct invented by his own cortex:

The Old New Thing - Dreamcatcher Edition