News You Can Bruise for 2005 November 22

(2) Tue Nov 22 2005 11:19 PST PRESENTS: This is so awesome (sent to me by Ryan North himself): Chris Noessel's NewsRex takes stories off the news wire and formats them as episodes of Dinosaur Comics. Just one more step towards my proof that any form of communication can be represented as episodes of Dinosaur Comics.

(3) Tue Nov 22 2005 22:32 PST Christmas List: By Susanna demand, for the people who give me Christmas presents. You'll notice there are actually durable goods on it this year (because I don't have much income at the moment), but I would still be fine with you giving money to charity in my name.

• My CD player/tape player/radio is reaching its age of planned obsolescence and I would kind of like a new one. These probably cost about $6 now that they have to compete with iPods.
• My #$(%* crosscut shredder has basically stopped working so I would like a new one that has some kind of chance in the actuarial tables. Why do home shredders break so easily? I have not been overloading it.
• I have what looks like "mortar" written on this list and I don't know what that means. Maybe it'll come back to me. Do not buy me mortar for Christmas! I'll just end up returning it. Update: Sumana suggests that I meant "a" mortar, along with a pestle. This seems like the kind of thing I would write down on a Christmas list, though I'm not totally convinced I need one.
• Now that I'm writing a book, having space on my desk has become more important than having a big ole monitor, so I would like an LCD computer monitor. It doesn't have to be huge. Nor do you actually have to get me one, since they're a little expensive.
• And of course there is my ginormous wish list, which I went through and gave priorities to some of the items I really want as opposed to the ones I would just like to have someday. Incidentally, the Life Hacks book was cancelled (blah), but O'Reilly might put some other form to the wish list and screen scraping hacks I wrote. I just sent off an agreement to that effect. I am just trying to make this entry kind of interesting for people who don't need to buy me PRESENTS.

I am doing pretty well this year w/r/t acquiring and making awesome presents for people with not much money.

Tue Nov 22 2005 22:40 PST I Am A Platform: "atropine is a screen-scraping library built on top of BeautifulSoup"