i’ve updated the rss feed to make it ever so slightly more readable. i chop item descriptions off at 500 characters and previously, as jon udell noted, you could be left with a truncation that “didn’t respect” word or sentence boundaries. well, john made those comments over a year ago and i’m just now getting around to fixing it, which should give you a peak into my profound ability to procrastinate.

for now, i’ve just added a “…” at the end of a truncated post. this might be a first step towards providing two different feeds, abridged and full-length, but i’m not sure. in case you’re wondering, i didn’t start truncating my rss feed in an attempt to drive traffic to my site. honest. at the time, i thought it did improve readability a bit, but more importantly the rss 1.0 recommends that the description field should have a maximum length of 500 characters.

just in case you’re wondering. i did finish the flying pig marathon in may, i just never updated the site. mighty clever of me, no?

and i am now training for the chicago marathon in october. i’m on my own modified training schedule and my long run is already 10 miles, so maybe i’ll hit a half marathon or two before chicago. anyway, what i’m really saying is that i’m back to updating the “accidental marathonists” section of the vast wasteland. so check it out, if you’re into reading about someone who’s just a sedentary as the guy trying to pretend that he can run marathons.

i’m confused. if the cia was asking britain to drop iraq uranium claim in september 2002, why is it now accepting responsibility for uranium assertion in the state of the union speech? perhaps i’m missing something obvious.

update: so much for being overly clever with falling on the sword title. thanks technorati!

it’s nice to see dj adams back in the blogosphere after an extended hiatus. most notably known for his work with jabber, dj is one of those people who is a veritable font of fun and interesting code that inevitably makes you go, “hmmmmmm.”

kellan has discovered what everyone who has spent any substantial amount of time in the northwest discovers – that whole thing about it raining all the time – it’s a myth perpetrated on californians and other non-northwesterners. having lived in oly for 4 years, i can say with some authority that it’s a sham devised to keep the whole place to themselves.

first, i want to make it clear that i don’t actually believe what i’m going to say, it’s just that my brain is far too efficient at pattern matching and induction even if it arrives at false conclusions. and second, i want i apologize in advance for appearing as if i might be making snarky comments about someone’s death. having said that, one can’t help but imagine the types of theories one could run through the conspiracy mill with the grist that a marine who helped rescue jessica lynch killed in crash on his first weekend back from iraq:

“Holly Coupe, his fiancee, said Speer sent her a letter from Iraq that said, “The first thing I’ll do when I get back is put a ring on your finger.””

coindence or not that it’s conveniently timed with news that the army describes what went wrong for jessica lynch’s unit?

thanks in part to a link from mefi the autopsy report blog has exceeded it’s allowable bandwidth and has been taken down for today. but you should check it out tommorrow, if you’re into casual observations blunt force trauma. it reminds me of the the wonderful sense of wry understatement that you’d find around the various academic medical centers that i used to spend more than fair share of time in.