Getting back to the Things after visiting family, bronchitis (getting better finally).
For RSS, using Outlook did not seem to work when I tried to set a feed up, but it may be that the fact that I am using Remote Desktop may have confused things. I set up accounts in both Bloglines and Google Reader and both work well. I don't find RSS that difficult, although it may take time to learn all the uses, such as following Flickr tags.