Here’s some more geeky webby goodness I’ve uncovered in the last few days.
Blogger users can easily create RSS feeds for their site using Rss-ify. It’s really cool. All you do is put some tags in your entry templates, generate a URL, and watch the fun.
(hat tip to Juan Cole, who is the first blogger I read to use this nifty application.)
For anyone wondering, I use NetNewswire Lite on my iBook (still in a coma, but hopefully coming back from the logic-board doctors at Apple this week), and AmphetaDesk on my Linux machine, though I’m giving Pears a try today.
Remember a few days ago when I was so excited to learn the magic use of the TITLE tag? Several readers e-mailed to let me know that I can build symbols using unicode, like < or > to show off my HTML . . . uh . . . “skills” . . . I guess . . . in a less-lame way.
<a href="http://www.homestarruner.com" title="seriously.">like this!</a>.
Many people ask me why I don’t use target="_blank" in my links. So many, in fact, that I really should add it to the FAQ. The answer is, “because it’s just as easy to right-click (or ctl-click, if you’re a machead) to open links in new windows, most browswers can be set to open links in background tabs or windows anyway, and I’m too lazy to type it into every link.”
The follow-up, of course, is, “Well, then why don’t you just put make "_blank" the base link?”
To which I reply, “Because I don’t want to. So there. Nyahh.”
Now, I am off to have left-over soup, and a slice of just-baked potato bread for lunch. \m/

Last night, I made “The Chicken Soup”, from the Whole Foods Market Cookbook. It took just under five hours from the beginning to the eating, but it was totally worth it.
I made the stock, prepared all the spices and vegetables, and even added some egg noodles, at the urging of my wife. The entire house smelled like . . . well, it just smelled like warmth, and love, and home, if that makes any sense. The time spent in the kitchen was sort of meditative, as I carefully washed and cut parsnips, carrots, onions and sweet potatoes. I was delighted as the windows fogged up when I was dicing dill and parsley. It was just me and the stove, turning three quarts of water into a meal.
I’d talked about my plans for this meal for days, and inadvertently built it into an Event&#153: Nolan cleaned and set the dining room table with great care. He carefully folded paper napkins and ensured that each of us had a spot-free soup spoon. Ryan put one of my Esquivel CDs on, and lit candles. Fortunately, they stopped short of donning clip-on ties . . . though I suspect the notion crossed their minds, for comic-relief if nothing else.
Because of this grand build-up, I was a tiny bit incredibly nervous when everything was done, and it was time to serve. The entire family was seated, and I carefully ladled out bowlfulls for each of us. I took tight, tense breaths as I sat down. Four steaming bowls of soup now sat on the table, and my judgment was at hand.
Before we could take up our spoons, Nolan held his apple juice up and said, “A toast to Wil, for making soup from scratch!”
“Cheers!” Ryan said with a smile as we clinked glasses.
“I hope it doesn’t suck,” I said, recalling the eggplant pilaf I made last week. I thought it was fantastic (and ate it for lunch over the next two days) but it failed to excite Anne and the kids, who ended up eating hastily-prepared grilled cheese sandwiches that night.
“It smells so good,” Ryan said, “Can I eat now?”
“Yes,” I said. I felt like I was on an all-in stone bluff in late position, hoping for a fold, dreading a call.
Ryan lifted his spoon to his mouth, blew gently across it, and ate.
I looked across the table to Nolan, who was taking his spoon from his mouth. Anne hadn’t picked up her spoon, yet. She was watching them almost as intently as I was.
Ryan swallowed, and was the first to speak.
“Oh my god, Wil! This is the best soup EVER!”
He removed any doubts that he was just being polite when he immediately dug in for another spoonful.
“What do you think, Nolan?” I asked.
“Normally, I hate cooked vegetables,” he said, “. . . but whatever you did to them here made them really good!”
“That’s awesome, you guys,” I said, “I’m so glad you like it!” I felt like a kid again, showing off an “A” on a project to my parents, and I hadn’t even tasted it yet!
I looked at Anne, and she smiled and gave me the thumbs up. “This is really good, Wil,” she said.
That’s all I needed to hear. I took my first bite . . . and it was heavenly. The last-minute decision to toss in a bit of cayenne paid off. It balanced the sweetness of the parsnips and yams brilliantly, and the fragrance of freshly-chopped dill filled every bite.
Though I love to cook, I’m not particularly good at it, and there was a very good chance that I’d screw this up. I know that to make a meal that the family enjoys is a very small thing, and people do it every day . . . but the whole reason I wanted to write about this is what Ryan said to me when we were washing dishes after dinner:
“You know, Wil,” he said, “tonight,you did something nobody else has ever done.”
“What’s that?”
“Not only did you get Nolan to eat cooked vegetables . . . ” he turned off the water and faced me. “But you got him to go back for seconds. High-five, Wil. Seriously.”
We laughed together, effortlessly, like a happy parent and child, and turned the water back on.
“Nolan and Mom are going to watch TV. Do you want to read when we’re done with these?” he asked. I’ve been reading The Two Towers and he is about to finish ‘salem’s Lot. For the past week, we’ve been sitting outside or next to our fireplace, depending on the weather and time of day, and reading together.
“Yes,” I said, “Yes, I do.”
These are the moments that I cherish. These are the memories I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

Okay. Political stories and rants are officially back “on the table.”
Last night on 60 Minutes, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill described George W. Bush as “a blind man in a roomful of deaf people” during Cabinet meetings, and revealed that within days of his inauguration, Mr. Bush planned to use U.S. troops to invade Iraq.
Of course, this means that, three years after he was sworn in, when Mr. Bush told us that Iraq was “a grave and gathering danger” (either because of those non-existent WMDs, or the equally non-existent ties to terrorists) he was doing nothing more than trying to fool We, The People, into going along with his inauguration-day plans to have his war on Iraq.
That information should enrage all Americans. The fact is, the Bush administration played us for suckers. In the aftermath of 9/11, when he could have actually been “a uniter, not a divider,” George W. Bush took our grief, outrage, and fear and exploited it.
And now, as the lies for war unravel, George W. Bush — the “compassionate conservative” — shows us where his priorities truly lie.
It took 74 days for the Bush Administration to begin an investigation into the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity to Robert Novak. It’s very clear that the purpose of the leak was to intimidate former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and send a warning to anyone else who would dare speak the truth about the Bush Administration’s lies.
For those readers who aren’t familiar with her, Valerie Plame’s extremely undercover work for the CIA focused on tracking down weapons of mass destruction, and ensuring that they didn’t find their way into the hands of terrorists.
Gosh, that sure sounds familiar . . . isn’t tracking down weapons of mass destruction, and ensuring that they don’t find their way into the hands of terrorists the reason over 500 American soldiers and countless Iraqi civillians have lost their lives in the last 10 months? (They’ve changed the reason for invading Iraq so many times, I’ve lost track. If it’s a different reason today, if we’re back to “liberating the Iraqi people,” or “He took a shot at my daddy,” just wait. I’m sure they’ll return to “WMDs and Terrorists!” soon enough.)
See, whoever blew Ms. Plame’s cover actually increased the danger to Americans from terrorists with WMDs. Thank god we have that color-coded alert system to keep us distracted safe! Good thing we all know to watch out for dangerous people reading The Old Farmer’s Almanac, and six year-old girls boarding airplanes!
But here’s the thing that just boggles me, and actually moved me to write tonight: The Bush administration waited 74 days before they started an investigation into who blew Ms. Plame’s cover, putting her, all her assets, and all of us at risk.
Seventy-four days. When National Security is at stake.
How many days did it take for the Bush administration to call for an investigation into Paul O’Neill?
One. One day after he was on 60 Minutes. One day is all it took for what can be called a punitive investigation, at best, when all that’s really at stake is the rapidly vanishing ability of the Bush White house to lie to us and get away with it.
So the question sweeping the nation is: Does Mr. Bush care more about protecting Americans from terrorism and ensuring our safety, or protecting himself from criticism, and ensuring his reelection?
Well, I think that’s asked and answered, and I’m counting down to November.
(We’re still having some upgrade issues. Hopefully, comments will return by the end of the week)
UPDATE: Until comments are up and running again, I thought I would share some e-mails that I’ve read regarding this post:

I forgot to mention this earlier: I think that the newest Strongbad e-mail is the funniest since Dragon, or maybe Monster Truck.

Back in the old days, when ASCII Pr0n was teh hot, and the only way to use a graphic browser was to go to the computer lab at a college and look at weather maps with NCSA Mosaic, I had a script in my .cshrc that would run fortune, and pipe the output to my .plan and .sig files. Okay, it’s not writing cron jobs to ncftpget the latest mozilla nightly, untar it, compile it, and launch the browser to Fark so it’s the first thing I see in the morning, (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but it was enough to impress my friends in 1991.
I think the last time I used fortune was over five years ago, but I just discovered this:

[wil@marvin wil]$ /usr/games/fortune -m Wheaton
(cookie)
%
"I figured there was this holocaust, right, and the only ones left alive were Donna Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, and the Cleavers."
-- Wil Wheaton explains why everyone in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" is so nice
%

Dude. I’m in a Unix fortune. Seriously. \m/
(Thanks to Joe, who e-mailed this information to me, causing Yet Another Epic Geekout&#153 that my wife doesn’t understand.)
More geeky stuff and an honest-to-goodness weblog entry coming up later on . . . but now I’m going to go spend the next several hours in the kitchen making soup . . . from scratch . . . for tonight’s dinner.