Time to take care of some housecleaning tasks around here and slam up a bunch of links I've had sitting around for a bit. First up, Dangerous Monkey keeps on linking here. It's the usual deal: you keep on looking for a chance to return the link and they keep on thwarting your plans by linking to you again. Well, I'm not going to wait around this time. I'm not really sure what the Monkey's deal is, but it turns up some pretty neat stuff. For example, a stick figure Tarot deck (a third-order link, actually, by way of Changed Priorities Ahead by way of Riley Dog), and a technically simple, yet wonderful bit of election agitprop. While on the subject of that whole reciprocal linking business, I'm fortunate that Tom Ewing changed the format of his regularly-updated online presence to one that doesn't link outwards, so I can link to him both with admiration and impunity.
Closer to home, Full Waffle Jacket is featuring the best eulogy for Al Gore I've seen. Chase has also updated his own links bar to include not a thing, which readers of this page may recognize, along with the inexplicable Dancing Sausage. Dancing Sausage, in turn, introduced me (through the magic of hyperlinking) to The Good Senator, who has a wonderful "where were you when?" for the Florida Supreme Court's last, doomed, ruling. Neither of these two latter sites includes email or a comment form, so I'm reduced to sharing my "hey, that's kind of cool" sentiments with the world at large.
Chase has also been plugging this RSS thing on his site for a while. RSS is a metadata format, built on top of XML, to used in describing the content of web sites and other kinds of content feeds. Sounds like a neat concept, and providing an RSS feed of the Lab has been something I've been contemplating for a bit. Well, the recent release of RSS 1.0 inspired me to go take a look at the actual RSS spec. As it turns out, this supposedly "extensible" format contains rules such as setting a maximum of 15 items per document and also maintains, for backwards compatibility purposes, text-input functionality. In software, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons, and no one ever learns anything. I'll wait for the next bus, thank you very much.