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Feed Me Seymour!I've gotten a couple of requests lately to set up an RSS feed for my journal, so I did. Since it seems like there are multiple standards for RSS, I decided to go with RSS 2.0, which seems like a pretty reasonable format. I did decide to only include the first couple of paragraphs of each journal entry in my feed. I would still like people to come to the entry page proper on the Web, since I put stuff in the sidebar that I don't think works well in an RSS feed, and (more importantly) because I want people to trigger my page counter at the bottom of each page. I'm nosy that way. So, if the extra click offends people, I apologize. But to be fair, I've seen many other RSS feeds for journals behave in this way. If anyone more RSS-savvy than myself has any technical suggestions for making the feed better - outside of my constraints above - please feel free to drop me a line and let me know. I also wrote myself a Ruby script to automatically generate the feed from the 20 most recent entries. It's actually turned out quite well, and only took about an hour to hack up. My journal entries aren't really set up for easy parsing, so I might tweak that going forward. Nonetheless, it was pretty simple to extract the pieces I want for the feed. Ruby's such a great language. Now I just need to remember to run the script and upload the feed file whenever I post a new entry.
 After two heavily philosophical entries and a few paragraphs of technical navel-gazing above, it's time for something fun. How about some photos? The kittens are no longer kittens. Their annual check-up revealed that Roulette is nearly 10 pounds, and Blackjack is nearly 14 pounds - or they're about the size of Newton and Jefferson, respectively. (I'm sure Newton loves that fact - not.) We've also stopped feeding them in the study, and are trying to get everyone to eat together, which is slightly tricky since the big cats eat different food from the little cats (Science Diet light vs. regular). But it's working so far. It took Roulette a little while to figure it out - she's such a princess, she wants personal attention during feeding time. But, by Sunday of last weekend, it looks like it's finally working:
 Sometime around 1995 I got my cats an upright scratching post. Jefferson knew immediately what to do with it. I also learned that some cats are rope scratchers and some are rug scratchers. Jeff likes rope, Newton likes rug. (So, cat owners out there, if your cat doesn't like your rug or cardboard scratching post, try getting him something with rope.) Not long before I moved out to California, if I recall the timeframe correctly, Jefferson clawed clean through the rug. So I think I bought them a new post not long after I moved here. That was five years ago, and their post was getting a bit frazzled, especially the rug. So we were at Petco last weekend, and I was going to get a new post. Well, we saw a small cat tree (more of a "cat shrub", maybe) which turns out to fit right where the post went. So I bought that instead. It went over pretty well, as you can see:
 Yes, Jefferson has basically claimed the top shelf:
 Lastly, some photos from my neighborhood. My folks tell me that fall has come and gone in Boston, and my recollection from Madison was that the week before Halloween was prime leaf-color season. Well, it turns out that last week was the peak of the natural palette out here:
 The main road near me has a whole bunch of trees on its median which turn bright yellow every fall:
 And lastly, we noticed this tree while walking to the 7-11 last weekend (to get more half-and-half for our coffee addiction):
 That oughta hold you for a little while!
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