Then delicious went and released a new version and this trick broke.

After a bit of fiddling, I’ve found a reasonable alternative. feed.informer will take any RSS feed and turn it into fairly plain HTML. So take your RSS feed, which might look something like this:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/andrewferrier/mtag?count=100

(the count increases the maximum number of items in the feed to 100)

Now plug it into feed.informer, and edit the options to make the result look how you want (hint: I modify the template, and set the Per-Item Template to <a href=”%URL%”>%TITLE%</a><br />, leaving the rest of the template blank - this prints one bookmark per line). You’ll also need to sign up and create a feed.informer account whilst you’re doing this (assuming you don’t already have one).

Once done, just view the ‘HTML’ version of the digest you created, and set that as your mobile homepage. Bingo.

The law of unintended consequences is a bitch.

They should clearly be banned.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I ventured a bit further up to Notting Hill this evening and found the Black and Blue. A basic but incredibly juicy steak definitely made my evening. Much better than yet another so-so Indian meal (the Bombay Bicycle Club is definitely over-rated). It’s re-affirmed my faith in moderately-budgeted expense accounts.

The pre-film trailer for Madagascar 2 looked amateurish in comparison.

WALL-E is a wonderous film. See it.

Plus, why is the price of hotel wifi in inverse proportion to its quality? Discuss. The Marriott I stayed in last week had unusable wifi (although the hotel was otherwise pretty good), whereas the Park Plaza this week (a.k.a cheap Radisson) has excellent free wifi (for IBMers). It’s got to be a strong factor for business travellers, yet most hotels clearly treat it as an afterthought.

• Attending the Sphereplay workshop - I learnt a new physical skill in about 3 hours, a concept quite novel for me! I will definitely be ordering a sphere (it’s not a ball, it’s not a ball) to keep this skill going.
• The presentations by Clay Shirky and Garrett Oliver.
• The performances of Rhett and Link - the knowingly geeky Facebook Song is pretty cool.

I’ve stuck up a few of my better photos from the conference on Flickr. I didn’t find this Gel quite as fulfilling as euroGel was, and this combined with the steep price (I pay for it myself) means I probably won’t be returning next year. It was still good fun, though.

The rest of my time in NYC was mainly spent chilling (photos to come); and doing a little shopping. I availed myself of the favourable exchange rate and willing-to-negotiate shopkeepers to buy a Canon 50mm EF lens that I’ve been hunkering after (the pictures linked to above are all taken with it). It produces nice sharp pictures and is great for portraiture.

I also managed to see both November (yet another David Mamet play; I’m addicted to his work at the moment) and Avenue Q on Broadway. The latter is wonderfully offensive and funny.

I’m back to the US in a week to attend in IBM conference in Vegas - somewhere I’ve never been. I’m looking forward to it.

So I was delighted today to find the nice (and not so cheap) Corner Steakhouse - not on the corner, but in the middle of Raunheim. Excellent steak, ironically cooked by yours truly on the hot lava stone they gave me. I’m ashamed to say it’s the first time I’ve tried that exact style of food, but it won’t be the last.

Yum.

Speakers the next day include Clay Shirky and Marissa Mayer.

Plus I get to spend the preceding week hanging out in NYC for the first time in yonks - staying on Times Square for free.

Can’t wait.

Adam Smith (and many other free-marketers since) have had a lot to say about the ingenuity of the human spirit and the market’s ability to do a better job of enriching humans than central planning. Nevertheless, I sometimes still wonder about the extent to which new ideas are sometimes missed, even in strong market arenas, because existing ones are taken for granted.

If Adam Smith could be brought into the 21st Century, with a time machine (this is where the childhood fantasy comes in), what would he think? After the initial shock had subsided, would he be pleased with the globalised world we’ve built, or would he be disappointed by general economic ignorance?

But here’s the real puzzle - if one showed him that it’s now possible to get from London to New York in 7 hours, would he be impressed with what we’ve managed to do with that capability, or disappointed? Would he think it’s cool that we can eat fruit from the other side of the planet, or think that the human race is hardly stretching itself?

I’d love to know.

• You typically get a better view and a quieter room.
• You sometimes get upgraded to a better class of room, without having to explicitly ask for it - they are often high up.

It has a disadvantage, however.