Christmas Crashes and Other Tales

Another year, other Christmas. Technically it was even a White Christmas ... technically? Well it didn't actually snow on the day, but there was still plenty of white stuff still on the ground from earlier in the week.

A Christmas Dog Walk!

However it wasn't all tinsel, turkey and presents - with an absolutely immaculate sensing of timing our AV File Server (Audio Visual) decided to crash on Christmas morning. Well it didn't so much crash as die ... completely, utterly and irretrievably. I was adding some extra storage to it and this required a reboot. Everything was going smooth and by the numbers, until the server didn't restart after the reboot. Some fairly rapid and frenzied diagnoses later it was determined that its motherboard was completely kaput. For those in the know, not even beep codes. Ho hum.

Open heart surgrey on a mini-ITX server

 If it was mid-year you could get a replacement motherboard next day, however given it's Christmas and half the country is buried in snow, the earliest we can get a replacement here is Thursday :-(

For once I can feel fairly smug at this point as all the data was backuped before I started and anyway it sits on an external storage array - a Drobo (www.drobo.com).

The Drobo temporarilty sat on a desk

So the Drobo was moved from the rack to a temporary home on the office desk and hooked up to one of the desktop machines. This was renamed and re-IPed so, like Clark Kent emerging from a phone box, it's now masquerading as the AV server. Serenity, films, photos and music, has been restored to the household.

So the moral of this Christmas Tale? - Always backup your data!  This was just an annoying inconvenience for us, which ate a bit of time. It could have been much, much worse; the data on this server is all our digital photos (~50,000), music and various home movies. A thousand, thousand memories. I know you never think it will happen to you, but one day it will. PCs break, disks corrupt, CDs and DVDs fade. Remember, data isn't real until it exists in at least two places, so always, ALWAYS, have a backup.

So a final thought for Christmas - where does the rise of the mobile phone and the subsequent demise of the phone box leave Superman? Caught short and exposed? Don't let your data be ;-)

Merry Christmas!

Snuggle Dogs

Collies and Labradors are very different dogs. One was breed to herd sheep and is very good at it. The other was breed to swim and is also very good at it. They're also both very good at snuggling ... but they do it in very different ways.

Our Collie likes to drape herself across people. And of course being a collie she does it 100%!

Our Labrador also likes to snuggle but prefers to sit beside rather than drape.

How small can you curl?

An Illrador :-(

Thursday morning started very early for us, with Kira whining to be let out in the garden at 3am. I imagine this is a bit like being a parent. You get woken up by an unusual noise, your subconscious registers what it is and gets the feet going before the conscious mind has caught up. I was physically out the bedroom door before I was really awake. It's very unusual for Kira to make any kind of noise in the night so whatever was causing it was fairly serious. Sure enough, when let out, she emptied the contents of stomach and came back in looking a bit sorry for herself.

Now having a Labrador, she will "snack" when out for a walk if she finds something she thinks is tasty, so this happens from time to time. It's not something that causes too much worry, but I did spend the rest of the night on the sofa in case she needed to go out again. By the time the sun came out she seemed fine and was bouncy on the morning walk, chasing a ball with her normal gusto.

Unfortunately it being a week day we had to go to work but Andie came back to walk her at lunch time and again she seemed fine. I managed to get back at 4:30pm to be greeted by a depressed Labrador and some very watery vomit by the back door. When let out into the garden she added diarrhoea to the list of symptoms. At that point you start thinking about a visit to the vets. I debated this with myself for 30mins, but what swung it was not physical symptoms, it was the very depressed Labrador who followed me round the house and tried to hide under the bed. Our collie often hides under the bed. Any fireworks and all you can see is a black and white bum sticking out from the underside of the bed, but not the Labrador and yet here I was looking at a very sad black nose poking out from beneath the bed. After that she tried to sit on my feet while I sat at the desk. Definitely time to call the vets. That was 5 o'clock, by 5:20 we were in the vets and Kira was having her stomach poked and prodded. At this point she obliged by demonstrating her diarrhoea. So an anti-nausea injection, a course of anti-biotics, a recommendation of a rice & chicken diet and £62 lighter we left the vets.

Back home, some sofa time was prescribed. The seriousness of the situation was confirmed by Kira's reaction to suppertime.

This is not the normal reaction of a Labrador to the supper call.

She also seemed to be a bit chilly so she was blanketed.

A chilly Labrador

Fortunately dogs bounce back more quickly from these things than we do so by Friday evening we were back to a bouncy Labrador who was hinting that supper would be a wonderful idea.

So what was the point of this rambling? Having been down with food poisoning myself earlier in the year I struggled through 3 or 4 days before crawling into the doctor. And yet as soon as one of the animals is ill they're straight to the vets. Why? Me suffering is through choice (or stupidity), their suffering is not and we want to relieve it as quickly as possible and sod the expense - that's what credit cards are for!

Self-service Labrador

Oh-uh, it's that time of year again. Blackberry season. And what is wrong with blackberry season, I hear you ask? Well nothing as such, except a couple of years ago we thought it would be cute to teach Kira (our Labrador) to eat blackberries straight off the bush. Needless to say, with food being involved, she took to this like a duck to water...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V3paw13Pqo

Problem is we now have a Labrador that regards autumn evening walks as an entree for supper and the hedgerow as a self-service food bar. Your walking along and realise you haven't seen the Labrador for a couple of minutes. You look back,and sure enough there's a black bottom stuck out of hedge ... whistle ... obedient stampede of feet ... praise ... glance away for 2 seconds ... bottom in hedge again.

Ahhhhh, supper !

There's one under here somewhere

Bring a friend

Getting to Work

If you thought your journey to work was bad, check this out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txdv_oNq81I&feature=player_embedded

(Climber's view as an engineer goes up a 1,768ft tower)

I get goose bumps just watching it, however the major problem is:

How do you take the dogs to work ?  :-)

UPDATE: Unfortunately the video has been taken off YouTube - you can read the reason here http://www.theonlineengineer.org/TheOLEBLOG/?p=561, however if you do a search on "1768ft" or "radio tower climb" on Google you'll likely find a copy of it.

Washing Instructions

We only have three setting on our washing machine here: 40°C, the wool cycle and an incendiary 90°C. Actually it's a very nice washing machine and has a whole host of setting and dials on it, but we're simple folk here. The bedding gets washed on a very eco unfriendly and incendiary 90°C, the wollen stuff get washed on the wool setting to prevent shrinkage, and everything else gets washed on 40°C and tumbled dried*. If it doesn't survive this washing regime it's not going to survive in our household. Surprisingly, despite all the dire warnings and mulitude of symbols on the labels, virtually everything does. This includes some items that claim to be dry-clean only.

This bears out something I heard on a radio programme years ago. They were interviewing a clothing manufacturer who admitted that some of the time they put "Dry-clean only" labels on just to be on the safe side. Safe for them, but tedious and somewhat expensive for us, not to mention rather eco-unfriendly.

Perhaps we should have a "Dry-clean-ish" label and a "Dry-clean-only-and-we-really-really-do-mean-it" label.

*Not always, depends on the weather.

Freedom of Speeh

There's a lot in the press about "Pastor" Terry Jones and his desire to indulge in a good, old-fashioned, book burning. I can't help wondering how much of this furore has been caused by the rest of the world jumping in to condemn him. Don't get wrong I think he's a complete loony, but I do just wonder, what if everyone had ignored him - he'd just have been a sad, lonely, deluded old man with a small fire.

There has been some use of "Freedom Of Speech" as a defense for his actions. Freedom of speech is not a defense for burning someone else's holy book. It a defense for saying you don't agree with what's written in the book, but not for burning it. However I do worry that people might seek to restrict true freedom of speech to try and stop people like this.

I was lucky enough to be exposed to true Freedom of Speech when I was a student in London. It wasn't in the university, it wasn't in the Houses of Parliament, it wasn't in some great debating hall. It was outside our local supermarket. Every Saturday mornings, when we went shopping for our weekly groceries, there was a gentleman outside on the pavement, with a bicycle clips on his trousers and a bicycle propped against the curb. He was selling the Morning Star. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the Morning Star is a communist paper in the UK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_Star_%28UK_newspaper%29). Bear in mind, this was the height of the Thatcherite era and Conservatism in the UK ie right-wing. But here was this man, selling a left-wing paper, on the pavement outside a supermarket.

And he was doing it with a quiet, profound dignity that had an enormous effect on me then, and still does 25 years later. He wasn't pushy, he wasn't loud, he wasn't in your face, he certainly wasn't threatening to burn anything. He was just quietly selling his newspaper, and his views, with such catchphrases as "Read the paper Thatcher loves to hate", or "Read about Thatcher's crocodile tears". No one opposed him, no one tried to move him on, no one tried to shut him up. The local police when they appeared just chatted to him. He didn't believe in policies of the government and he was opposing it...peacefully and democratically. And he was there for at least the two years that I lived there.

I do not know the identity of this man - I never spoke to him, but I am deeply grateful to him for teaching me about true freedom of speech and democracy. It is people like this and their views that we must protect, despite the fact that this means we have to put up with the loonies.

I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. - Voltaire

Demon Dog !!!

And we always wondered why the postman was so afraid of our dog.

This was supposed to be a nice picture showing how devoted the collie is. Acting as an impromptu foot warmer for her mistress while she works on her computer. Doh! This is kind of effect you get when the flash on your mobile phone is a mere 5mm from the lens. Less of the red-eye, more of the satanic, hell hound eye :-)

Harvest Time

We were out walking the dogs and the farmers were hard at work getting the harvest in before the rains arrived again. The sunset made everything wonderfully spectacular.

It's moments like this that you just can't buy ...

A Collie at Work and Play

Well, you didn't this was being written by a human, did you ?

What do you mean, it's too big ?!?

Could I do this if it was too big ??

The Working Week

A colleague on a project I worked on drew this many years ago - it's still completely true !

Hygienic Insanity

Caution: Touching life may be damaging to your child's health.

We were on a local farm over the weekend and they had a section where kids (both large and small) could go and see the farm animals. Not touch, you understand, just see. It was most definitely was NOT a petting section. There were signs asking you not to touch the animals and dispensers of handwash everywhere so you could sanitize yourself immediately if you felt any countrysde had touched you. What tipped this over the edge into the realms of insanity was the fact that all the animal enclosures were double fenced so you couldn't physically get within 3 feet of any animal, and they still had handwash dispensers right there by the fence.

Please wash your hands after touching life

I realise the E.coli outbreak at Godstone's Farm (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10311808) caused a lot of heartache, but this is going over the top. What kind of children are we going to raise? If children are never exposed to germs, they never build up any resistance to them. I'm not suggesting being stupid about this, but a little bit of common sense and handwashing goes a long way. I'm not blaming the farm for this insanity - undoubtedly they are worried about being sued if anyone falls ill after a visit.

When we're out walking the dogs we get a lot of parents & children asking if they can stroke the dogs. Perhaps we should start carrying Health & Safety disclaimers and ask people to sign them before allowing them to stroke the dogs .... or not. We'll let a little sanity and dog stroking exist in our corner of the world :-)

Interestingly, you can clinically prove that children raised with pets are two things. 1) Healthier and; 2) more mentally stable than children who are not. I suspect they're they're also happier, but that one's a personal opinion. The healthier is very simply - they get exposed to more bugs through their interactions with their pets and that makes their immune systems more robust and better able to repel the nasty bugs. The mentally stable is also easy. Firstly pets give you unconditional love with no strings attached, secondly if you tell your dog a secret in strictest confidence, it will most definitely NOT go and tell every other dog in the class (sadly people are not so reliable).

Caution: NOT stroking dogs may be damaging to your child's health :-)

British Sentimentality or Responisibility?

We were watching a programme a few nights ago about Hurricane Katrina and what happened to all the pets that were left behind. People were told to leave their pets with food and water as they would only be gone for a few days. They were told they couldn't take them with them as there would be no room for them at the evacuation centres. The reality was of course that they were not allowed back for weeks and rescue operations had to be mounted by the various SPCA organisations in the vicinity to get the pets out of the abandoned homes

We were talking about this afterwards. I know that people were instructed not to take their pets with them, but I think British people would simply have ignored that. Certainly if we were told to evacuate our dogs would be going with us. The thought of leaving them behind would not even occur to us. No threat or attempt at coercion  the authorities could make would have any effect on that. Perhaps the British are overly sentimental about their pets, or perhaps we just take our responsibilities seriously. Who knows? But I can remember seeing a programme about a British Coastguard helicopter having to winch people from a flooded caravan park and a very elderly lady refusing to be winched to safety unless her dogs were taken first. The helicopter crew hadn't even argued - of course the dogs were going to. That's the British way .... and long may it continue !!

Organic Veg

A couple of months ago we got a flyer through the door advertising Abel & Cole Organic Veg. This piqued our interest so we had a dig around on the internet for organic veg suppliers who delivered to your door. We turned up two suppliers in the UK who could deliver in our area. Abel & Cole and Riverford. We did some more research, forums and the such like, and this suggested that Riverford would be the better option. Riverford use local farms to grow a lot of their produce so the veg doesn't have to travel too far before it reaches your table. Abel & Cole seem to source everything from Covent Garden so things can end up doing a lot of miles.

Ordering from Riverford could not be simpler. You just logon to their website www.riverford.co.uk and select the boxes that you would like. Boxes? Yes, Riverford base their ordering system around selections of fruit and veg that come in boxes. You simply choose the boxes that match your circumstances and each week a selection of veg arrive on your doorstep. The contents vary each week depending on what is available and what's in season. There are boxes for couples, boxes for families, boxes of fruit, boxes of without potatoes, you name it, there's a box for it ... well, in terms of vegetables anyway :-)

Small Veg box from Riverford

We've been doing this for a couple of months now and so far it has all worked very well. Every Tuesday a box of veg and a box of fruit magically appear in the back garden - the Riverford guys are great at understanding obscure instructions about where to leave your veg so it is protected from the vagaries of the British weather.

The changing contents of the boxes is a surprising benefit, you find yourself trying vegetables you've never dreamed of or even heard of before. The quality has been absolutely astounding. Everything is very fresh and wonderfully tasty. In fact that has been the biggest thing for us.

The taste. 

We've all become so used to the homogenised, standardised fair that the supermarkets serve, with guaranteed conformity and shelf life that often spans weeks, that we've forgotten what vegetables should taste like. We've pretty much stopped using gravy in our house. Previously it was used to drown the tasteless veg, now our veg tastes so good we don't need it. Jugs of gravy are being left untouched on the table as for the first time in years we taste proper, wholesome, tasty veg.

There are a few things to watch. You need to plan your use of the vegetables more carefully. These tasty delicacies may not last as long as the supermarket fare your used to. Our forefathers were well used to this and to be honest once your back in the swing of it, it's no great chore. I do wonder if this is the source of some of the complaints you see on the web about organic veg.

And watch the grapes - they just don't last in our house. Delivered on Tuesday and gone by Wednesday, normally accompanied by comments of the guilty parties denying having eaten any of them.

www.riverford.co.uk

Inside the mind of a 6 year old

• For those with no children - this is totally hysterical!
• For those who already have children past this age - this is hilarious.
• For those who have children at this age - this is not funny.
• For those who have children nearing this age - this is a warning.
• For those who have not yet had children - this is a form of birth control!

The following came from an anonymous Mother in Austin, Texas:

"Things I've learned from my Children (honest & no kidding):"

1. A king size waterbed holds enough water to fill a 3 bedroom house about 4 inches deep.
2. If you spray hair spray on a nylon duster and then run over it with roller skates / blades, they can ignite.
3. A 3-year olds voice is louder than 200 adults in a crowded restaurant.
4. If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong enough to rotate a 42 pound boy wearing Batman underwear and a Superman cape. It is strong enough, however, if tied to a paint can, to spread paint on all four walls of a large room.
5. You should not throw balls up when the ceiling fan is on, using the ceiling fan as a bat, you have to throw the ball up a few times before you get a hit. A ceiling fan can then hit a ball a long way.
6. The glass in windows (even double-pane) doesn't stop a ball hit by a ceiling fan.
7. When you hear the toilet flush and the words "uh oh," it's already too late.
8. Brake fluid mixed with Bleach makes smoke, and lots of it.
9. A six-year old can start a fire with a flint rock even though a 36-year old man says they can only do it in the movies.
10. Certain bits of Lego will pass through the digestive tract of a 4-year old.
11. Playdough and microwave should not be used in the same sentence.
12. Super glue is forever.
13. No matter how much Jelly you put in a swimming pool you still can't walk on water.
14. Pool filters do not like Jelly.
15. VCR's do not eject toasted sandwiches even though TV commercials show they do.
16. Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.
17. Marbles in petrol tanks make lots of noise when driving and very expensive to remove.
18. You probably do not want to know what that smell really is.
19. Always look in the oven before you turn it on.  Plastic toys do not like ovens.
20. The average response time for the fire brigade is about 20 minutes.
21. The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy.
22. It will, however, make cats dizzy.
23. Cats throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.
24. The mind of a 6-year old is a wonderful and amazing thing.
25. 60% of men who read this will try mixing the bleach and brake fluid.

Dog - 0, Squirrel - 1

This was sent to me by a friend in South Africa. No idea who the photographer is, but the sequence is absolutely wonderful.

Lab has baby squirrel pinned down....and...Mother sees it (from above)!

Mom takes action!

Dog gets it from Mom and baby gets away!

Mother consoles baby and...

Look at the dogs' face - he just has to be thinking ....

What the hell just happened?
Did I just get my ass kicked by a squirrel ?!?

Wildlife Walks

We were walking the dogs last night and we had a real wildlife walk :-)

They've been baling the straw in the local fields and it all looked lovely with the dark sky. However I suspect the farmers were not quite as impressed with the sky as I was.

Now, either I'm shrinking, or the bales are getting bigger. I thought things were supposed to get smaller as you got older (see the great Wagon Wheel debate here).

I'd be impressed if you can throw one of those on the back of a hay cart - I'd also be very polite to you.

In the woods the dogs suddenly started going ballistic round a pile of sticks at the based of a tree. This normally means they've got a whiff of something small and furry. You can get a fair indication of how strong the scent is by how quickly the collie's tail is wagging ... the faster it is, the fresher the scent. The collie's tail was practically falling off she was wagging it so hard. The labrador is not quite as clued up on this chasing of small animals as the collie is so she generally runs around excitedly pushing her nose in, wherever the collie is pointing, in the hopes that "something exciting" will happen. At this point we noticed a rather unusual "bird" sitting up in the tree surveying the whole scene below with the disdain of someone who knows dogs can't climb trees.

Is it a bird, is it a plane, no, it's ....

a disdainful, arboreal rat :-)

He'd obviously been in the pile of wood but had very sensible scuttled up the tree as we approached with the dogs. This is a rat with a great survival instinct and we think he'll go far. I will admit that part of our admiration for him was that he was in the middle of the woods and not in our stables. Rats in woods = good, rats in stables = bad. One the basis that he was a good rat we left him safely in his tree and took the dogs off to complete the rest of the walk.

On the homeward stretch of the walk it got even better - we saw a grass snake. A real, live, honest to God (it was in the churchyard) grass snake. No pictures I'm afraid - they can move very fast when they want to, but we got a lovely view of the two yellow diamonds just behind his head. He shot into the hedge much to the amazement of the dogs. They were not sure what to make of  non-furry thing that wriggles and decided to give it a wide berth just in case it ate dogs.

If your wondering how we're sure it was a grass snake, there's a great video on the BBC website where Simon King shows you the differences http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/species/Grass_Snake#p0085c27

Celebrating Mediocrity

This came from a discussion with a friend about how some people cannot cope with losing nowadays. They don't want to work any harder, they just want to win. The problem is some elements of the government and society are trying give people their wish and make this happen.

There's a great bit in The Incredibles film where they talk about this. They use the phrase "celebrate mediocrity" which about sums it up.

Helen: I can't believe you don't want to go to your own son's graduation.
Bob: It's not a graduation. He is moving from the 4th grade to the 5th grade.
Helen: It's a ceremony!
Bob: It's psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely exceptional... 

If you turn everyone into a winner then no one is a winner. You devalue the whole concept of winning. Perhaps the problem is we don't teach people how to compete anymore. Winning is good, but that doesn't make failing to win bad. You just have to fail with style. From another Pixar film - Toy Story - at the end Buzz Lightyear says "This isn't flying. This is falling with style!" If you fail with style then perhaps in reality you win.

Spookly enough they were kinda talking about this on the radio this morning. The A level results are out this morning and a lot of people are going to be disappointed about not getting a place at university because of the cutbacks. Someone raised the very valid point that part of this has been caused by the government trying to send everyone to university. It used to be very competitive to get a place at university, then they went through the phase when it seemed as if they were trying to send everyone in the country to university. Very commendable, but it's not going to make everyone brighter. It's politically incorrect to say this but some people are brighter than others. You send the bright ones to university, you don't send the others. Raise the bar again. Make going to university something to be desired, to be worked for, to be earned and if that means only the top 10% go (as it used to be) then so be it.

BUT the point most people miss is this doesn't make people who go to university better, just different. Who's the best out of a Noble prize winning physicist and a Australian Aborigine? That depends if your in CERN or the middle of the Australian outback. If it's the middle of the Australian outback I know which one I'd rather be with, and it's not the one wearing the lab coat. So by all means help people to reach their maximum potential, whatever that potential is, just don't assume it's gonna be the same for everyone.

So your challenge for today is go out and give something a try, give it your best shot ... and if you fail with style your still a winner as far as I'm concerned :-)

Apple iPhone Apps vs Windows Mobile Apps

Let me confess at this point - I have bought an iPhone4. Yes it does have a signal problem if you hold it in the wrong way ie perfectly normally. But the interface is wonderful and the display is to die for.

Previous to this I've had a number of Windows Mobile devices and before that Windows PDAs which worked very well. The revolution that Apple started was, for me anyway, in noticing that people prefer to use fingers, not styluses, to use their PDA/phones. Your finger's natural, it's always attached to the end of your hand, and your unlikely to drop it in the mud.

So I've be shopping on the Apple Apps Store to replace all those useful little programs I had on my Windows Mobile device. And I've noticed something fairly interesting. The apps on Windows are generally better. They have more functionality and they work very well - they're just fiddly to enter data into - lots of prodding with your stylus. The Apple Apps look better, are easier to enter data into, but they don't work as well. The under the covers functionality isn't there yet. This is hardly surprising, some of the Windows programs have been in development for over a decade now.

Does this worry me - no. I'm sure the Apple Apps will catch up, either by more development or by the existing Windows developers porting their apps to Apple. What strikes me as funny is Microsoft offering money to Apple Apps developers to port their apps to Windows (The Register). Guys, wake up - have a look at what you already have and play to your strength. Good quality apps with oodles of functionality that just need a GUI update.

BTW - no comment on Android as I can only afford one new phone at a time. Hopefully I'll play with Android at some point in the future.

The Big Conference Call - what to expect

If you ever work for a large company at some point you'll be involved in the Big Conference Call. The video below gives you a good idea of what to expect ....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbJAJEtNUX0

The scary thing is this is just sooooo true to life, however he did miss a couple.
The Mute Moment

Dave: So I'll just hand over to George at this point.
-silence-
Dave: George?
-silence-
Dave: I think your on mute, George.
-silence-
Dave: George?
-silence-
Dave: George, could you just check your not on mute?
-silence-
Dave: Well, we'll just move on for the moment. Harry, are you there?
George: Sorry Dave, I was on mute there.

On-Hold Music
Someone in the call puts the conference call on hold so they can take another call and accidentally connects the entire conference to their On-Hold musac (musac: That really bad music that you hear in elevators, dentist offices and grocery stores, etc). I have been on conference calls where this happened and the only way to clear it was for everyone to drop off and the moderator to close the call. Come to think of it that was a very productive call ...... hmmmmmm :-)

Do Dogs Go To Heaven ?

Supposedly this was a 'church signs' debate, played out in a Southern town, between Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic church and Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian church. From top to bottom you see the response and counter-response over time... The Catholics are displaying a much better sense of humor. One gets the impression that the Presbyterians are actually taking this seriously. The churches face each other across a busy street.

All Dogs Go To Heaven

Only Humans Go To Heaven Read The Bible

God Loves All His Creations Dogs Included

Dogs Don't Have Souls This Is Not Open To Debate

Catholic Dogs Go To Heaven Presbyterian Dogs Can Talk To Their Paster

Converting To Catholicism Does Not Magically Grant Your Dog A Soul

Free Dog Souls With Conversion

Dogs Are Animals There Aren't Any Rocks In Heaven Either

All Rocks Go To Heaven

It makes me laugh :-)

Old Drum

On September 23, 1870 a case was heard in the Johnson County Courthouse, Warrensburg, Missouri. The case itself was unremarkable. One man had shot another man's dog and the dog's owner was seeking compensaion. What was remarkable was that in his closing argument the lawyer representing the dog's owner made no reference to the facts of the case, instead he delivered this

Gentlemen of the jury: The best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has, he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it the most. A man’s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads. The one absolutely unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him and the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous is his dog.

Gentlemen of the jury: A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer, he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounters with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens. If fortune drives the master forth an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him to guard against danger, to fight against his enemies, and when the last scene of all comes, and death takes the master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by his graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, his eyes sad but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even to death.

He won the case. His name was George Graham Vest (1830-1904)

The Point of a Dog

There's been a resurgence in interest from the scientific community in dogs and their behaviour recently. Collies that can recognise 200 (Rico) or 300 (Betsey) different objects by name, dogs that can understand when their owners point at things (Time). They're starting to wonder if dogs might not be more intelligent than they previous thought (like here and here).

Sad to say I can only assume from this that the people engaged in animal behavioural research do not own any dogs or cats or horses or even stick insects. Anyone who owns ... or rather shares their life with any of the above knows they are intelligent. OK, I'm not completely sure about the stick insects - we don't own any - but the rest most definitely are.

There's a great quote from Chris Bonnington (I think) when he was talking about mountaineering -

"To those who understand no explanation is necessary, to those who don't none is possible."

I think the same holds true about animal intelligence. Those who work with animals know they are intelligent, those who don't can only see the dumb animal.

Take ours (not literally - they're ours!) Dogs have a habit of turning round several times before they lie down. A primeval checking for snakes apparently. Anyway one of ours, if sat on the sofa, won't turn round if there is anything on the arm of the sofa in case she knocks it off. Instead she stands there looking pathetic until someone moves the stuff off the arm. Then she turns around and settles down. Once that's accomplished the articles can be replaced on the arm of the sofa. No one's taught her this. She's generalised it from knocking something off the arm once in the dim and distant past to any article in that place can be knocked off now. Wow! I won't tell you how many cups of tea this has saved. And like I said no one taught her this she figured it out for herself. Makes you think, huh?

The End Of The CD - a step backwards ?

We keep getting told that the CD is dead and in a few years time all music will be downloaded online. That the CD will become the preserve of the specialist like LPs are now. Why?

The history of recorded music is one of progress and increasing fidelity. People trying to make the music sound more and more like the original. Indeed the modern term Hi-Fi is a shortening of high-fidelity reflecting the strieving to reproduce music ever more accurately. Thus we progressed from wax cylinders and disks through LPs and tapes to the modern CD. Each step was a progression, with the quality of the sound getting better and better.


Then came the MP3 player (hands up all of you who remember the RIO). A great idea - your music store on solid state memory in a very small, convenient package. Much smaller than a CD or tape based player, much more robust ... but in those days flash memory was very expensive so in order to get the biggest bang for your buck, people compressed their music. Sure there was some loss in quality but you could get 10 times as much music on your player. Result!


Soooo MP3 became the de-facto standard for portable music players. Once the music industry woke to up this potential revenue stream (and stopped trying to sue everyone for listening to their own music in a new way) the online music store was born. And of course it made perfect sense to deliver the music as MP3 (or AAC etc) files - it's in the right format for the MP3 player and it takes less bandwidth to down load it. But all of these formats are "Lossy" formats, part of the information is thrown away when it's created. It's close, but it's not as good as the original so high-fidelity becomes low-fidelity. This is why I still buy those antiquated CDs I want the best possible sound quality!


Now "they" say that all music will be bought online soon, and indeed there are people I know who haven't bought a CD in years. So does this mean we are all to be condemned to low-fidelity music? I hope not. I think there are enough of us out there who still want the real McKoy, so music indutry take note, give us quality and long live the CD ... until we get something even better of course :-)


Fi·del·i·ty is defined as:

1. Faithfulness to obligations, duties, or observances.
2. Exact correspondence with fact or with a given quality, condition, or event; accuracy.
3. The degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or image of its input signal.

Geocaching Your Dogs

Looking  for something new to try when your walking your dog?

For those of you who haven't come across it before, geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunt played with a GPS enabled device like an iPhone and a sense of adventure. The idea is to find a hidden, outdoor container or cache and then log your results online. The GPS is used to guide you to the container. The sense of adventure is used to work out how to reach it :-) This is geocaching.

The great thing about geocaching is it's generally very dog friendly. A great example of this is the walk we did today in Pamber Woods. We often take the dogs for a walk there, but sometimes it's nice to get off the usual tracks. So when we arrived we fired upthe geocaching app on our iPhone and had a look around. Sure enough there was a variety of caches nearby including a set of 5 linked caches that defined a new walk we hadn't done before. Shortly thereafter we found ourselves walking round a very large field on the public footpaths. Our four legged friends were in heaven - loads of new smells to sniff, rabbits to chase and small beasties to hunt! In the mean time we were doing our own hunting for the caches :-)

Our four legged friends helping us to find a cache !

If you'd like to find some new walks and have a go at geocaching have a look at www.geocaching.com