News You Can Bruise for 2011 May

Recently a video made the rounds of a penguin being tickled and making a cute noise, and it reminded me of the time in 2004 when Sumana and I visited the San Francisco zoo and witnessed a penguin making a cute noise when tickled. An even cuter noise, in fact, than the penguin in that video. More of a chuckling noise, I'd say. I bring this up this not to brag, but to tell the world that even cuter penguin videos are possible. However I don't suggest that we harass penguins like paparazzi and demand that they make cute noises; just let it happen, man.

There are asteroids named after dinosaurs. Even worse: there's one called Brontosaurus.

"We don't know which squid god is responsible."

(First in the series.)

Seen when walking around Astoria.

I can only hope that some future Werner Herzog puts this in his movie.

This feature went by the wayside, along with NYCB posting in general, because I get on the subway, and go to work, and get on the subway to go back home, and then I'm tired. Just like a real job!

Suffice to say that I'm gradually switching from implementing new features to improving the code that's already written, and we'll launch a semi-public beta in the next couple weeks.

A couple miscellaneous things learned from the week I spent writing web service clients:

• Tumblr's web service supports OAuth, but they don't really mention this anywhere except in the post announcing it. Be aware!
• URLs are awesome. A URL is a unique identifier that has meaning to the outside world. Don't send me an object's primary key; send me its URL. I'm just soapboxing here, really.