News You Can Bruise for 2004 March 22

Recently I discovered that I'm a lot better at playing the guitar than I was when I left to work on the campaign. In the intervening time I didn't practice at all. How did this happen? Was what I was doing homomorphic to playing guitar? Did I gain generally enhanced reflexes? It's a little scary, like discovering that you're slowly turning into Spider-Man.

Went to the zoo on Saturday with Sumana and Zack. It turns out that Garrett went to a different zoo on Saturday, so just go look at his pictures. They're better than mine.

The Asian elephant is very sad because her friend had tuberculosis and was euthanized. We did see the African elephants who were happier, partly because they'd just had bales of hay stuck tucked between their tusks so that they would walk around and eat from a sort of beer hat of hay. I think when they complete the "African Savannah" habitat they should put the Elephas in with the Loxodonta and verisimillitude be damned.

The lake in the "South American Rainforest" habitat had been drained for no reason I could see, so there were no vegetarian piranha and the sole caiman was crammed into an isolation chamber along with the giant python. No turtles either, but elsewhere in the zoo they had Madagascar spider tortoises walking around on the grass, the tiniest chelonians you've ever seen.

Also, I recently found out that Zack makes candles, so I brought and gave him my now-ruined "Powerful Elvis Prayer" devotional candle for him to recycle. It's nice to be rid of it in a way that makes me feel like someone will appreciate it.

Sumana pointed me to The Everyday Low Carb Slow Cooker Cookbook. Coming soon: my Vegan Raw Food Low Carb Low Fat Organic Whole Wheat Juicer Cookbook. Subtitle: "Just stop eating."

Getting back to NewsBruiser development. I made a bunch of comment-related fixes and I just finished adding Atom syndication support. If people are going to make my life difficult by making up new syndication formats, I might as well play along. Still need to fix the longstanding timezone problem with the timestamps: I'll do that tomorrow and then cut a release.

New comment features: you can automatically shut down comments on old entries, and you can turn on comments for specific entries instead of for the whole site.

Joe says that there was a glowing review of NewsBruiser in the UK magazine Linux Format. Since they don't do aspiring weblog software authors the favor of putting their glowing reviews online, Joe is sending me the magazine and I'm gonna type it up. And as long as we're discussing Linux magazines with weird names, how about India's Linux For You?