An ode to the Poot

My sister’s dalmation Helena (more commonly ‘the poot,’ or ‘pootie) passed away recently. Pretty sad news, I really loved her. She had a great, full life, and made a remarkable recovery from an infection of the heart to live to a ripe old age of 13. My sister’s written a wonderful eulogy to her over on her website, and you can scope out some photos of the poot in action over on her website. Give your pets a scritch behind the ear in honor of good old Pootie, I’ll miss her.

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Are we also facing a food crisis?

Lost in all the noise about the economic crisis we’re facing is that we may also be facing a crisis in our food supply. The same rationale of deregulating the financial markets appears to be impacting the oversite of our food supply as well, the chinese milk melamine tainting scandal being only the latest issue to crop up. This stuff is creeping out in the global food supply and it’s making me increasingly leery of processed foods. From numerous ground beef issues over the past couple of years, spinache, lettuce, tomatoes, and more, there’s a constant stream of news about tainted food, and with the global connectedness it’s really hard to track where this stuff turns up. What set me off about this today was news that Cadbury had to pull some of its chocolate off the market because they detected melamine in some batches of it and another vendor of creamer for coffee had to do the same. None of this particular scandal’s food has been detected in the US food supply as of yet but I’m not going to be surprised if it does, and increasingly I feel like folks are best advised to steer clear of processed foods. That frozen pizza won’t seem as convenient if it turns out the cheese was made with melamine, and that bag salad will stop seeming like a time saver if you end up ingesting ecoli because it had cow poop on it.

I should note I’m not really sure what to make of all of this. I read an analysis in the last couple of months that suggested the food supply has actually never been safer, it’s just that regional threats like ecoli outbreaks get more widely reported than in the past. At the same time though there’s overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration systematically went after regulatory systems, and it’s not clear to me what impact that had at the FDA and other government inspection and regulatory bodies that oversee the food supply. It seems better to be prudent than sick is what I guess it boils down to.

Fortunately Susan and I eat pretty danged healthy and we don’t eat all that much processed food, so here’s hoping our exposure to risk is as minimal as it seems.

Good old Games – one free invite

Good Old Games is this fantastic new software store developed by the folks who produced The Witcher. They’re selling old, classic games for $10 and under, with the DRM removed and the games patched and tweaked to run on modern systems. Many excellent games are to be had for ~$6, and it’s all wrapped up in a well designed website. In short, I love it. I’ve already picked up Sacrifice and Hostile Waters (which I’ve mentioned in the past is one of the finest games, ever), and I’ve got my eyes on several other games. I mention all this because the site is still in beta and they’ve started offering gift keys to the beta users. So – if you’re seriously interested in the site, drop me a comment and I’ll give you a key. So far I only have one, and this is first come, first serve. It’s all free of course, aside from the cost of the games, but since they’re really trying to stress test the system, please don’t ask for the key if you don’t intend to buy anything – the point after all is to actually use it. You can check out the current catalog using the link above to get a sense if there’s anything there that you’d like, and I’ll note that so far they’ve been adding 1-3 games a week.

Home sick

Not as in missing my hometown, as in like, I have spent the past two days lounging about the house nursing a miserable cold. It’s not excruciatingly bad, it just features sniffles, headaches and a sore throat. Susan is suffering the same fate as I, which we’ve been debating. Is it better to both be sick at the same time, or in sequence so one partner can take care of the sick partner? We haven’t decided yet. Whatever we have has been making the rounds at the office. My weekly IT heads meeting had half the staff out sick yesterday, including me. Must be the time of year.

What happens when you don’t go to a dentist for a decade

That’s right – I haven’t been to a dentist in over a decade, with the exception of an oral surgeon who removed my wisdom teeth about 6-7 years ago. I fell out of the practice of getting annual cleanings shortly after college when I moved away from my family dentist and didn’t have dental coverage during my early career. One way or another I always managed to avoid going until yesterday. The oral surgeon didn’t help things much back when I had my teeth removed, because he scoped out my teeth and commended me on them being in such good shape. Unfortunately they’d started to stain recently, and one stain in particular was driving Susan nuts, so after much cajoling I made an appointment.

The good news: no cavities. Brushing and flossing plus some help from genetics seem to have protected my teeth over the years, which I was greatly relieved about. The bad news: I have gum disease and have to go in for some serious under gum cleansing procedures which will apparently be pretty unpleasant. Once that’s done I have to go to the dentist every three months for a couple of years for followup cleanings which should entirely clear up the gum issues and protect my teeth for the long term.

The other good news is that the stains will all come off, and the dentist thinks I should consider a bleach treatment for them once the cleaning is finished, which should remove the yellow coloration. He also thinks I should get braces to fix my front teeth. I’m not sure on the braces but I’ll probably do the bleach treatment next spring since it seems to mean so much to Susan.

Anyway I’m not sure if there are any lessons learned. I avoided a decade of the discomfort of the dentists chair with seemingly little consequence, though I’ll reserve judgement and possibly sing a different tune after I’ve been through a couple of these undergum cleansing treatments.

The real risk is in the credit derivatives market

I first started hearing about credit derivatives a couple of years ago, around the same time I started hearing about how there was a looming mortgage crisis. If you want to scare the hell out of yourself, go read this article over on financialsense.com. It will take a while to work through it but it’s a great distillation of what’s going on in our capital markets right now and where this might lead us. I could sum it up in a couple of ways – a) it’s all a giant fucking ponzi scheme that deregulation facilitated and b) the risk in credit derivatives makes the subprime mortgage crisis look like paperoute money. We’re talking 10′s of trillions of dollars here.

Even trying as I am to understand all of this I really don’t feel like I have a handle on it. Still, I will say my gut tells me that dropping 700 billion into the markets as is being proposed isn’t going to do anything except possibly stave off the inevitable. From what I’m reading our capital markets and indeed the entire underpinnings of our economic system are profoundly broken. Propping up these cancerous institutions doesn’t fix the problem, it just keeps the patient on life support while it spreads its disease further.

Anyone counting themselves a citizen should be reading up on this stuff. There’s a wonderful irony to all this, in this season of campaigns promising change: all signs point towards us getting change all right, change so radical it’ll shock all of us, only it has almost nothing directly to do with our political candidates.

Make your own freeze dried meals

Backpacker or backwoods camper? Check out this great post over on cool tools that has some handy links to recipes and sources of supply for freeze dried foods that can save you a bundle of money. This is especially great for diabetics whose choices are further limited by the high carb counts in most pre-packaged freeze dried foods.

Back where I started

Sorry folks. I’ll wait for the iphone to get an updated browser with better javascript support. All these other templates I’ve been playing with had one or more problems that were worse than not being able to fully use the site on the iphone, so back we are to this template.

Testing a new comment system

I’m testing a new comment system on Metamusing. If you have a moment, pop your head into the comments and post something, and let me know if it works for you while you’re at it.

Thanks,

[update] That’s the end of that experiment. Disqus (the software I was testing) managed to delete lots of older comments. They were still present in the wordpress (software I use to run this site) database, but they were no longer present on the site’s pages. Once I deactivated Disqus, the comments came back. Thanks for helping test.

Great little tip for OSX

Check out this piece over on tuaw.com that gives a great little terminal command for OSX which puts a ‘recently used applications’ object on your dock. It takes two seconds to do and I’ve found it very handy.

Shine on you crazy diamond

I just wanted to take a moment to tip the virtual cap to Richard Wright, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, who died yesterday after a battle with cancer. There’s a decent piece on him in the LA Times and a nice conversation thread over on metafilter. I’ve been a big Pink Floyd fan for most of my life, and I still love cranking up Obscured by Clouds, Dark Side of the Moon, and a ton of live stuff I’ve collected from them over the years. Thanks for the great music Richard.

Two dogs, one skunk

Midweek last week, Susan heard the dogs scuffling on the side of the house and tried to call them in. She saw a flash of white and thought maybe they were after a cat, but she caught a whiff of skunk and quickly closed the door then called for me in a minor panic. I was in the midst of a Team Fortress 2 match and couldn’t really hear her – all I heard was urgency in her voice. I knew she was downstairs making pickles and was thinking…who has a pickle emergency?!? But after the second time she called for me I came downstairs and could immediately smell the skunk. Still – what could we do? I opened the door and Nori, our black lab, was up on the porch waiting to come in. Soolin was out of sight. I could smell skunk in the air but when I sniffed Nori I couldn’t really smell it, so after running my hands over her I let her in then started calling for Soolin. She came up onto the porch tossing her head about, a thick white froth covering her mouth and chin and a long dribble of drool spraying about. Susan and I were a bit freaked by her appearance and behavior – she kept tossing her head violently, smacking her lips, and drooling profusely. I sniffed her and while the smell of skunk was very strong in the air, she smelled more of chemicals, like windex or something. We brought her inside, confused, as I kept sniffing at her mouth and wiping away all her drool. We started to panic a bit, fearing that she had ingested chemicals or something toxic, based on her behavior, the lack of a skunk smell on her, and the drool. Susan called the vet and pretty quickly we headed off to the animal hospital, expecting that Soolin was going to have her stomache pumped.

By the time we got halfway to the animal hospital we had concluded it really was a skunk we were dealing with, not chemicals. We couldn’t explain the different smells, but the way my car reeked made it clear that it was skunk on them.

It cost me $100 for the vet to confirm this, and I ended up feeling pretty foolish. Susan and I had a really long night – we had to put the dogs in a tub and scrub them with a solution made up of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, dish soap and water. The good news is aside from their faces, which we couldn’t scrub so assidiously, the dogs smell ok. The bad news is the odor lingers around our house and most especially in my car, which absolutely reeks. Based on a conversation with a co-worker who also ended up with a skunked car, I’m going to pay someone to detail it and ask them to focus on steam cleaning the upholstery, we’ll see if that clears it up.

[update] I forgot to mention the reason Soolin was drooling and frothing at the mouth. She took the skunkblast straight to the face and mouth, which is why she was so agitated and drooley. The vet told us it was harmless, but you can imagine how disgusting this must have been, even for a creature acustomed to the occasional snack on some other dog’s poop.

Friday fun: Advance wars in flash

Advance Wars is this great little turn-based tactical game series from Nintendo. There have been a number of advance wars games on the nintendo handheld systems and by and large I’ve liked them all to one degree or another. I’ve been playing Battalion: Nemesis on Kongregate this week and it’s by far the finest advance wars homage I’ve seen. Gameplay is pretty straightforward – it’s a turn based strategy game where you use resources earned from the facilities you control to build units that you maneuver around the game maps in an effort to kill off the cpu player’s units. The world is a cartoon style near future with tanks, planes, infantry and so on. The production values are amazing for a flash game and there are two campaigns to work through. It’s definitely worth checking out if you like turn based strategy games and especially tactical ones.

Aaaaand….I’m back

That didn’t take long. The move was ok as these things go – a bit tough physically, and a couple of really long days, but I’m moved in, the old house is cleaned out and vacant, and my stereo and computer rooms are up and running in a very rough form. I should be back to my regular posting schedule this week as well.

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Monthly Archives: September 2008