News You Can Bruise for 2006 April 18

Tue Apr 18 2006 09:10 Beautiful Soup Poll: Would people rather that Beautiful Soup automatically converted documents to UTF-8 (including modifying the declarations and META tags)? Or would they rather have Beautiful Soup leave the encoding alone, but detect it and automatically convert specific strings to UTF-8 on command?

(1) Tue Apr 18 2006 13:33 Less Cat, Less Girl: I finally did a Cat and Girl comic using Kevan's constraints. It's not that good, but fortunately quality was not one of the constraints. The constraints were:

• The first line of dialogue should be taken from a recent entry in a weblog you've read today. This was a very difficult constraint because it was so wide-ranging. In the end I just picked a recent sentence from Kevan's weblog.
• The strip should contain a complete recipe (simplified as much as you like, but enough that someone could reasonably prepare it from those instructions).
• Neither Cat nor Girl should appear visibly in the comic.

(31) Tue Apr 18 2006 20:50:

Sumana

We see love between others thousands of times but only participate in it a few times. Can we hope to find a new kind of love? How would we know it if we did? The best we can do is to explore the deeps of one great love, always finding new aspects of it.

Five years ago I stumbled upon a vast love which my lamp and map have still not charted. This is where I want to live, Sumana, among the crystals, the faraway noise of an underground city, the glimmering lights in the ceiling, with you. Marry me, Sumana.