DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

About 30 hours of development work separate MonauralJerk 0.5a3 from 0.5a2… five bugfixes, 10 miscellaneous improvements, and six new features. (See the changelog for details.)

One of the features is the RSS 2.0 syndication feed.

The other major new feature is also related to syndication: the aggregator-pinging function is now much more robust than before.

I’ll run this here for a few days to iron out any lingering bugs, and push out a public release by midweek.

Update: MonauralJerk 0.5a3 was released on March 16.

I remarked to a friend that I’m feeling old. She has a few years on me, yet was surprisingly sympathetic.

I say “surprisingly” because few things make a person feel older than having someone younger gripe about his or her age. I mean, come on.

Anyway, she gave me a fresh perspective on the matter. “You can grow old,” she said. “Or you can die young. Which one do you want?”

Well, now that you put it that way…

Although it has garnered only tepid reviews at Amazon, Robert Heinlein’s lost first novel has been discovered and published by his estate: For Us, the Living

Heinlein is one of the titans of science fiction. His work contains the earliest written imaginings of numerous subsequent “inventions,” like cellphones, waterbeds, screensavers, and the rocket backpack made famous by the James Bond movie Thunderball. Heinlein is also credited with at least one actual invention; the mechanical arms described in his novella Waldo are common in industry. And, he coined the word grok. (For more, see Science Fiction Inventions.)

The New York Times covered the discovery and posthumous publication of For Us, the Living: Heinlein’s Prophetic First Novel, Lost and Found

LA Times food columnist David Shaw shares some wonderful stories of absurdly rude restaurant patrons. My favorite:

“People steal everything,” [says Chris Schaefer, the proprietor of Zax,] “silverware, salt and pepper shakers, wine coasters, the small flashlights we hand out if you need more light to read the menu — everything. We used to have conical glass vases with tropical fish in them, hanging on the wall in our ladies’ room. Women would flush the fish and the water down the toilet and steal the vases.

This is old news, but I learned about it only recently (thanks a lot, Mike):

Toxic fumes from overheated cooking pans lined with polytetrafluoroetheylene (PTFE), commonly sold under the trade names Teflon and Silverstone, are a little known but increasingly frequent cause of sudden death in caged pet birds, said a Chicago-area veterinarian…

There are numerous caveats in the article, despite its unambiguous and fear-mongering title, Nonstick cookware emits toxic chemicals. I think there’s too little evidence about the potential harm for you to rush home to box up your nonstick skillets. Unless you have birds, I guess.