This time done in a stream of consciousness style, and keep in mind it’s one of the busiest weeks of the year for me work-wise. It went something like this:

Puppy puppy puppy puppy! Puppy puppy! Drool! Yay! Puppy puppy puppy piddle! D’oh! Webct webct webct puppy puppy webct epitaph webct puppy puppy puppy piddle! D’oh! Piddle Piddle puppy puppy puppy! Webct. email overload. sleep?

Repeat for the past 6-7 days, and you have my life in a nutshell. Not much sleep, a lot of work, a bright-eyed little puppy looking for all the attention I can muster, and again a very frazzled me. On the positive, Soolin continues to improve in terms of piddling outside - we made it through the entire weekend without any accidents and she totally gets that the bell on the door means she can go out, and she pretty much gets that if she needs to go, she should use the bell.

On the negative side, she is not sleeping through the night anymore, now she wakes up repeatedly and barks up a storm. Last night we went to bed at 10, it took her a half hour to settle, then she was up at 2AM, 4AM, and then finally at 5AM I carried her kennel out of the bedroom into the living room and shut my door, I couldn’t take it. I’ve done everything the books say I should do, rewarding her for going in her kennel, ignoring her when she cries (aside from carrying her kennel out and telling her to shut up at 5AM, I have completely ignored her antics) and trying to make sure she gets plenty of physical activity (Saturday we went to Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Sunday we hiked a mile down the road and then I had her bustling through snow that was over her head for like 3/4 of a mile), but instead of improving things seem to be getting worse sleep wise. Tonight I’m going to try a combination of an even longer hike (about 2 miles) partly through snow and not letting her catch any cat naps after supper. The books advise me to let her take them, but I’m going to try one night without to see if she sleeps better.

So…a long winded puppy update. I’ll get week two pics posted shortly. I don’t know when I’ll get back to posting regularly. The work stuff will start to settle down by the end of this week at least.

First up, for the impatient and the curious - stop clamoring, I’ve done it, I’ve done it! Pics of Soolin’s first week can be found by clicking the gallery link above, or by clicking here.

Next. In terms of how she’s doing, she’s just amazing. I can’t believe how smart she is. To give an example, yesterday afternoon my Aunt Melissa gave me a bell to hang on the door, the idea being to teach Soolin to nuzzle the bell when she needs to go out. Less than 24 hours later, she’s already figured it out, and aside from an over-excitement accident when Andrew and Patty came for a visit today, she hasn’t piddled in the house since, and every time she needs to go out she sits under the bell and rings it. My jaw dropped when I watched her do it this morning the second time she wanted to go out. She’s also basically figured out what sit means, and when it’s just the two of us she pretty much does it whenever I ask, but she gets distracted when other folks are around. She doesn’t really like the leash and collar thing, and getting her to come along after me is sometimes a struggle when she has something she’s interested in, like a stick or a person, but in generally she’s better than I expected after only a week.

Personality-wise, she’s a joy. She’s been coming to work with me every day after lunch (I leave her in her crate in the morning when I head off to work) and she’s met tons of people so far. She loves to meet people and is always excited when someone new comes to say hi. In general she’s just a happy little camper. She also likes exploring the campus with me, I’ve been gradually exposing her to more and more of it. I can’t wait till she gets her shots so she can go to the areas where other dogs congregate.

I’ll keep posting pictures on a weekly basis for her first couple of months as she goes through her growth spurt. So far I couldn’t be happier. As soon as she gets her shots she’s going to enroll with me in an obedience course and from what I see so far my expectation is she is going to excel in it.

…A very frazzled me. It’s been a rough week. Last Friday I got Soolin. She’s gorgeous and an absolute blast, but she places HUGE demands on my time. To give you a sense of it, I haven’t played a single videogame since I got her, and I’ve read less than 50 pages in the novel I’m working on. Meanwhile I had an opportunity Monday to present to a large group of Skidmore faculty for the first time which I was a bit apprehensive about (it all went well) and spent a ton of time preparing for, and then this coming Monday classes start so I had a ton of prep work for the upcoming semester. All this adds up to an extremely busy and frazzled me, with no time to play, post to my weblog, or exercise. It’s all worth it of course, the dog is a joy and despite some launch of semester troubles things went well enough that most faculty are both content and all set. I’ll post some pictures of Soolin this weekend in the gallery and perhaps catch up on some posts I wanted to make here, I’ve got email to deal with first though, and a dog to walk every hour or so, today in potentially -20 degree blizzard conditions.

I’ve mentioned a few times how much I like Mocoloco.com. Recently they posted a piece about some beautiful wall treatments by an artist named Jennifer Prichard. Check out the photos - she hand throws porcelain shapes and then affixes them by the thousands to walls in very organic looking shapes. It’s excellent stuff, I’d love to have a wall in my house get a treatment like this.

I’ve been using Gaim on windows as my instant messenging client for several years now. For quite a while now there have been some unfortunate bugs in the user-interface which have something to do with Windows and the windowing toolkit Gaim uses (GTK I think). Anyway the long and short is I haven’t been particularly happy with it lately. Over Christmas holiday my brother showed me the latest Adium. I’d tried it a couple of times in the past and while there were things I liked about it, it was very crash-prone and I never seriously considered switching to it. Until now that is. Whatever was causing all the crashing seems to be gone - no crashes so far in a couple of weeks of use. It’s got an excellent, very customizable interface, it’s based on the same libraries as gaim so its compatibility with the various IM engines is very high, and it’s got some clever scripting hooks built in. It’s mac-only, sorry windows folk, but well worth a look if you’re on that platform. It’s caused me to move my IM stuff off of the PC altogether, home and work.

My birthday is in March. I’m giving you forewarning now so you can begin saving. As you know, I like gaming, and I am an exercise nut. As you also know, I’ve been waiting for the perfect peripheral to combine these interests, and have blogged a number of candidates over the years, and I’ve been using a dance mat and playing DDR lately despite how foolish I feel doing it. Now there’s an even better candidate which recently won an award at the CES in Las Vegas - the Kilowatt. It uses the principle of isometrics to give your muscles a workout, and works with any game, on all platforms. I so want one of these. They’re also going to make an attachment for it that adds an exercise bike onto it.

I’m kidding about it as a birthday gift of course (it’s $1200 plus shipping), though I do really want one, and if I can swing it $$$-wise and the exercise bike attachment comes out I will in fact get one. There was also more promising news from CES in this regard, as Konami bought a struggling exercise chain in Japan and is releasing a set of products related to software and hardware they’re installing in the chain, things like attachments for your existing exercise bike, games aside from dancing that work with your dance pad, and more. Seems like a small niche of interest to me is expanding, which is of course great from my perspective.

Many (most?) folks aren’t aware that there’s a lot of free, over the air (as in, not cable) broadcast content these days available in HDTV. Most folks also aren’t aware that over the air broadcasts for HDTV work tons better than the old rabbit ears from the 1970’s we all remember from our youth. If you’ve been eyeing those Time Warner or other cable company ads where they’re trying to sell you a new cable box and additional monthly services, consider trying a small antenna and trying the broadcast stuff first - football, a lot of the main primetime broadcast tv shows (CSI, for example, not that I am a fan), and a lot of PBS programming is already out there for you too see, for free. And if you think you’re too remote for these broadcasts to reach you, consider this: I’m totally in the boonies and I get 6 channels. Then use antennaweb.org (note that you don’t have to tell them any of the info they ask for - just use your zip and you are all set) to check your location and see what channels you can get. You don’t even need an HDTV set, you just need a tuner and a computer with DVI-in and you can watch and record the content.

If you don’t yet have a tuner, consider picking one up before June of 2005. That’s when the FCC has mandated that HDTV tuners must have Broadcast Flag support built in, meaning any devices sold after this June will be crippled - HBO can, for example, set their programming such that you can’t record the Sopranos if you’re tuning it using a Broadcast Flag-enabled device. So buy your tuners now (they start at around $200) as a hedge against the shenanigans you are going to see later this year. Not that I don’t think we’ll see hacks to get around this bullshit, but they won’t be for the average consumer, you’re better off just buying a tuner now.

It’s human nature to bitch about things, and I’m as guilty of it as anyone is on their blog, so to mix things up, some praise - Voodoopad, from flyingmeat software, kicks ass. A desktop wiki engine with a free server script that’s trivial to get running. If you’re the kind of person who has sticky notes everywhere, you need this app. $25, worth every penny. Mac only. My life is pouring into this little app as fast as I can type.

Well, it’s been a couple of days. First, I’ve been sick. Some kind of stomache flu. I ingest, it comes back up within 30 minutes or so. Not fun. Fortunately it’s very slow at work so I could take today off and be more comfortable at home. I did have to go to work for several meetings yesterday though and was miserable. I managed to leave around 2PM at least.

You might have noticed it was awfully quiet around here over the holidays. While part of this was simply a function of the season, and part of this was because I got World of Warcraft and couldn’t drag myself away from it, part of it was also that I expended a lot of geek energy building a machine to replace the server hosting my web stuff. This was precipitated by the fact that comment spammers were destroying my site and there was no clean path to fixing this. I’d actually been planning to migrate boxes for quite a while - in fact I bought the replacement box well over a year ago - but between changing jobs, moving, and the complexities of migrating all my content I never managed to get around to it. Err, that is, until now. The new box is in fact up and running in a very preliminary fashion. Many (many!) things are still broken, some very badly, but it’s functional at this point. There were a number of issues I had to get over or which are still troubling me, to wit: (click to read the full post, it’s rather long)
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So tivo has launched its new tivo to go software, which allows you to download shows you’ve recorded to your tivo onto your pc so you can watch them on other devices (a laptop for when you’re on the road, for example). Except. Except they’ve crippled it, you have to use encryption keys to access your own recordings, and you can’t share them with others (at peril of having your Tivo account deactivated), and you are not able to encord some cable channels, which are maintained at Tivo’s discretion. HBO being one example. So Tivo, tell me why the hell I would pay you for such a device, when I can go get these recordings off the net restriction free, or when I can use my snapstream box to record the shows myself, restriction free, then move them wherever I like in whatever format I like?

The answer is - I won’t pay Tivo, and you shouldn’t either. Can you imagine how the VCR would have gone over if it had been encumbered with such crap? I’m sure the hacker community will crack their protections but no corporation should be rewarded with your $$$’s for so completely failing to recognize the sea change that’s taking place. I’m aware that Tivo is trying to walk a fine line and they’re terrified they’ll be sued into extinction by big media if they don’t build in restrictions like this, but they’re going to go under anyway with half-assed offerings like this.

New research suggests that eating curry regularly is more effective at preventing the onset of Alzheimers than any current drug regimen. The article I’m linking to also notes that India has one of the lowest incidences of Alzheimers globally. I found this on the excellent boingboing.net. Hamiltons of the Yule extraction should make note of this and eat your curries - it’s in your genetic makeup, which we know from our great grandparents, so get busy with the indian food.