Flock

I'm writing this post from inside Flock 1.0 beta.  I'm not sure how I feel about the whole program yet I really do like my Safari and Vienna sorta works for me.  But  after Scott Kurt's twitter kept evangelizing Flock I thought I'd give it a shot.  Here's my thoughts so far:
Hits-
+Facebook integration makes sense and has many useful features for my pokewars and messaging
+Automatically grabs log-in data, no need to fill out a separate plug-in form
Misses-
-The GUI takes up a lot of space, I'm on a 13 inch Macbook and value my screen space,
-I can't figure out how to manually refresh my RSS feeds: as a political science major I need to say on top of current events and if the RSS reader can't handle +100 feeds (Vienna can but with slowdown) then the reader is worthless to me
--Vienna reads some posts that I can't figure out how to get Flock to refresh and show,
-I can't get rid of the notifier of direct twitter messages, yes I know I have them and I read them on my phone months ago, I shouldn't need to waste my time removing them from my account so that the notice goes away,
-I can't pull up a list of my tags in the blog editor, that makes it hard to use the same tags for a topic and thus they lose any value they'd have,

Conclusion: Beta software for sure.  Until I can get my feeds refreshing and my twitter icon to stop saying I have direct messages there's no chance that Flock can replace Vienna for my rss reader and there goes a lot of the draw of learning a new web browser.  I'll give it a try again when it's out of beta maybe the issues I've outlined above will be fixed by then. 
Try it for yourself and if you can get any of my issues solved maybe I'll go back to it.

Confirmed Travel

Just going to briefly post an update. Obviously I've been busy lately. I have my travel plans confirmed for the next semester though. January I'll be in Japan for two weeks, in March I'll spend a week in Germany and Austria, and then I have a week of Mexico in June. Getting all this and moving sorted out has put me behind on my homework so I haven't had time to post updates to here. With a bit of luck I should be posting more frequently from now on though.