Cthulhu fans: check out the ongoing new kids book at Penny Arcade: The Last Christmas. [Note: John is on vacation, this message was previously recorded and uploaded by little teeny computer elves.]

Every year you show up with a stack of giftcards from Rite-Aid. And every year your family roasts your chestnuts for waiting until the last minute to do your shopping. This year will be different. Matthew Baldwin has gift ideas for the lazy.

More fun with Google Suggest: Google Suggest poetry generator. [explanation] Here’s what you get with “hark” as the start word: hark the herald angels sing airlines uk map of africa animals of the rainforest cafe nero 6 minutes meeting minutes in a day of our lives wristband cancer bracelets for breast cancer symptoms of pregnancy [...]

I was reading this post by Tristan Louis the other day [via Regular Sucking Schedule]. One of the techniques Tristan describes for reducing RSS bandwidth is to make the autodiscovery version of your RSS feed be a summary feed, but then provide a full feed for power users which they have to find manually. This [...]

While checking my stats one day, I discovered that halfway through the month I had already sent out over 60 megs of data, just over RSS. Since I only have about 10 subscribers to my feed, this looked suspicious. Here’s what I did to fix it. First, I turned on gzip encoding. It’s under Options->Reading. [...]

You know, I’ve often thought of writing some software to do this. [thanks for the tip, Steve!]

If you’ve been trying to syndicate my site recently and it failed for some stupid reason, fear not. I just fixed the problem, so syndicate away. If you’re still having problems, most likely it’s because you’re trying to use my RSS 0.9x feed, which I’m in the middle of hacking away at. (My secret stats [...]

They were really good; here are my final notes: It’s probably good with parsely too. Next time I make it, I’m going to brown the mushrooms more. I think they’d have a better texture. It’s hard to make the pretty diagonal pattern mentioned in the recipe. I found three slices on the bottom with one [...]

Penny encased in ice, St. Paul Winter Carnival, February 2004

A while ago I was reading Noah’s grumpy post* about Christmas, and it reminded me of something… but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then while doing some research on joy I came upon a passage about Christmas in a book of essays by C.S. Lewis. With some judicious googling, I found a [...]