News You Can Bruise for 2003 January 1

Wed Jan 01 2003 00:08 Leonard's Predictions: In 2003, mankind will put aside its differences and band together against the common enemy: the French.[0]

I don't know how the French figure into this.

[0] I really have nothing against the French, but it's fun to make fun of them.

Wed Jan 01 2003 01:26: Via The Scene I found Charity Navigator, which runs charities' financials through a spreadsheet and comes up with a ranking which you can use to figure out where your contribution will do the most good. My ideal charity seems to be The Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development; it has zero fundraising expenses (Heifer's runs 20%) and 10% operational expenses. But like Kevan, I feel nervous when I give money to Heifer or similar charity. I feel that I should also be giving money to a charity which will prevent someone with a Kalashnikov from coming and taking away the cow I donated (possibly preventing this by including another Kalashnikov free with the cow).

Wed Jan 01 2003 01:38: Belated question for you all: what was the best NYCB entry of 2002? My contender: this funny one. If you have the time and patience, read 'em all (~1M) and let me know, or just skip the reading bit, do a search for some random word, and choose whatever comes up.

Wed Jan 01 2003 18:13: Did some NewsBruiser code cleanup, and added a MailImporter class which will take an email message and turn it into a NewsBruiser entry. It will handle attachments to the email as uploaded files. There's also a less-polished RSSImporter class which imports entries obtained through an RSS file (right now it only supports RSS 3.0). I'm making RSS the official import/export format of NewsBruiser; it works well for that and I don't want to come up with something else.