December 7th, 2007

I purchased NetNewsWire back when it was not part of the NewsGator group and have been very pleased with it.

The other day I received an email stating that my premium NewsGator membership was running out soon, and by renewing I would continue to get updates for NetNewsWire.

I found this kind of strange. I’d already purchased NetNewsWire, and I expected to receive minor updates for free without further payments being necessary. I can understand having to pay for major releases but when I bought the product there was no ‘subscription required’ clause mentioned that would indicate I would have to pay $20 per year for updates.

So I replied to the email, asking for clarification. The response I got confirmed what I thought. In order to receive any kind of updates, I needed to subscribe to the premium NewsGator service for $20 (USD) a year. The reply I received talked about how the $20 also includes a syncing service and allowed me to sync any number of other NewsGator products like FeedBurner.

None of that ‘extra’ stuff meant anything to me. I use .mac to sync my feeds, I don’t use FeedBurner or any other of the NewsGator services. So basically I would be paying $20 a year to receive updates to a program I had already purchased, including minor updates.

This seems ridiculous to me and I am kind of annoyed as I purchased NetNewsWire before it moved to NewsGator, when the whole ‘Premium subscription’ bullshit didn’t exist.

So I am left with an app that I will no longer get updates for. Looks like I will be ditching NetNewsWire soon for some other alternative. One that isn’t controlled by a company that is only interested in pimping out its subscription based services.

Very disappointed.

So I’m slowly getting through my New Scientist magazines and have been meaning to post about interesting stuff. In the June 30 edition, there is a small write-up on the bottom of page 14 titled “You may want to yawn before reading this”.

It suggests that the reason why we yawn is to “boost blood flow and chill the brain”, which effectively increases attentiveness. This result was reached by conducting a study involving 44 college students who watched yawning sequences.

“Students were told to inhale and exhale in one of four ways: strictly orally; strictly nasally; orally while wearing a nose plug; or just breathe normally”.

Fifty percent of those told to breathe through their mouths yawned, while none of the people told to breathe through their nose yawned.

“Blood vessels in the nasal cavity send cool blood to the brain, so breathing through the nose or cooling the forehead cools the brain and eliminates the need to yawn”.

Brains work better when cool, so yawning is basically the bodies way of cooling the brain down.

Very cool.