Home sweet mess

We drove home from Virginia Beach yesterday, in fairly good weather and making fairly good time. When we finally reached the house, we found Houdini-Dog still in the kitchen where he belongs, for a change.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the only reason Chance was still in the kitchen was because the bathroom door had blocked his ability to pop the gate all the way out. So instead, he shredded the corner of the carpet he could now reach. Whee. Nothing like a 6 hour drive to come home to a pile of shredded carpet, carpet padding, dog toys, and poop.

So my first hour home consisted of mopping the floor. Joy.

Anyway, it didn’t take us long to get settled in — the house was mostly clean before we left and my sister left the place in pristine condition for us when we arrived home (sans Houdini’s attempts to escape via carpet burrowing, which she clearly couldn’t have predicted. Hell, she even unloaded the dishwasher for me.) so we mostly just need to catch up on laundry and the mail.

Sounds so simple when I say it that way, doesn’t it? How come it alway takes so much longer?

The other thing I need to do is transfer files off the laptop and onto the desktop so I can finish Tuesday’s comic, start Saturday’s, and generally get off my ass in getting my online life back in order. WordPress needs an upgrade, the Mac has a security patch to install, the laptop’s optical drive is dead, etc. etc. it never ends.

In an attempt to get off my ass a little faster, I threw out two thirds of the RSS feeds and comics I read just so they wouldn’t pose a distraction. I’ll probably throw out more as the next week or so goes. How well that will actually motivate me, I can’t say. But here’s for more blog and less late comics.

Now here’s a resource I don’t want to forget

The optical drive on my iBook G4 is shot. That doesn’t render it unusable, but it does render it annoying.

So I went internet-hunting for a quote and discovered this nifty site. iFixit will not only sell you the parts (and tools) you need to fix your ailing out-of-warranty Mac hardware, but also provides guides for gutting said ailing Mac so you can install the part. Very niiiice. Especially considering how far I had to dig to find the guide the last time I needed to replace something.

On the other hand, Apple just quoted me $99 to replace the drive, and considering that the part is running at least that on most 3rd party websites and this includes labor, I’m tending toward that. I’m not sure the guy I was talking to really understood what I was asking though, because the price seems REALLY low. But $99 sure as heck beats not having a laptop.

We’ll see….

Steven Poole: Free your mind

Steven Poole: Free your mind
is an article on digital publishing to free and whether it’s working for him. It goes hand in hand with a number of music and movie arguments I’ve heard about strking a good balance between drm and distribution. Credit to David Pogue’s Circuits column on the NY Times for the link. (google him – the iPhone doesn’t have cut and paste.)

Chance update & some quick pics

These photos look like crap because my original revision iPhone has a lot of trouble capturing these new high-energy puppies they’re producing these days.

The top left and the bottom are taken at 9pm a few days ago after a looong walk around our complex. The top right was taken this afternoon after romping with my sister a while.

won't eat a french fry, but he'll eat a stick. napping in front of the window.
long walk flop in the grass time.

Some highlights:

  • He is terrified of french fries, but will eat leaves, sticks, and bugs. Nature boy!
  • We’ve spent a lot of time this week barking at the dog that lives in the shiny black dishwasher, and occasionally at the dog that lives in the stove. Dishwasher Dog even gets scratched at, and one day I caught Chance trying to peer around the edge of the door to see Dishwasher Dog better.
  • The bad news is that he’s escaped from the kitchen twice this week. The good news is that when he has the run of the house, he’s making a good effort at returning to the kitchen (where the pee pads and litter box are) when he needs to go.
  • My nose didn’t get bit once this week, which is definitely an improvement.
  • We’re making good progress on “sit” and “come here” and “come on” (or as everyone else knows them, sit, come, and heel”), and he’s starting to get an inking of what “wait” (everyone else’s “stay”) means. And he definitely understands that “Hey!” is “stop what you’re doing and pay attention to Mom”.

I’m thinking of doing puppy updates every Thursday, so that a) I have a chance to get a few decent pictures throughout the week, b) you have something visual to look forward to and c) I can track his age (since he was born on a Thursday). No guarantees yet, especially considering how busy this week is supposed to be, but that’s the plan.

And yes, at some point, I’ll learn how to embed this crap correctly here instead.