Hamster!
I bought a hamster. It seems like a bit of an impulse buy, especially since my sister was around when it happened, but I like hamsters and have been sort of wanting to get one for a while. I had intended to name it after a philosopher, since I’m a dork, but, since it’s a Russian something-or-other breed of hamster, I thought I should use the name of a Russian philospher. The only problem there is that I couldn’t think of any, but Dostoevsky says that all Russians are philosophers, so I just gave it a generic Russian name of Boris. There are some pictures up at http://photos.gophernet.org/.
I bought all the hamster accessories, as well, including the wheel, the water bottle with a floating duck level indicator, a car—since one in the pet store had four or five hamsters crammed into it, sleeping, and it looked adorable— some overpriced sticks, and some hamster food that looks like it was made by hippies. For some reason the person at the pet store who grabbed the hamster put on a thick leather glove to do so. He did warn that this particular breed of hamster is bitey, and it has bitten me in the process of wandering around and choosing random objects to chew, but even while it’s trying to devour my finger, it lacks the size and strength to break the skin. Maybe Petsmart just has a single pet handling policy, and they don’t care to draw a line for which pets don’t get the falcon glove.
In other news, I added an RSS feed to the site as /0/rss.xml. It appears to be completely useless, since RSS readers (aggregators? I know what aggregate means, but the Web keeps taking my favorite words and assigning them bizarre new meanings.) expect RSS files to come across with some sort of RSS or XML MIME type, and there’s not a one-to-one mapping between the more basic gopher filetype system and MIME. Enjoy!