bunn

Elephant Dog Tara Banana & State of the Mollydog

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:09:50 GMT

Tara Banana has swole up. She can just about open one eye and is all over bobbly lumps. She looked like Les Dawson even before this transformation. Now she looks like a deformed and partially inflated Dawson who is unable to open one eye.

We are off to the vet at 3pm, but suspect an allergy to Frontline Plus, as she was flea treated yesterday.

edited an hour later : actually, I just looked again, and she now looks less like Dawson and more like that Orc in the Return of the King movie with the strangely melted looking face.

Mollydog's leg is looking a lot better - there is still a sore looking pink bit that weeps somewhat when she walks on it, but no metalwork or bone is visible.

It did seem to 'stand still' for a long time, but then I worked out she was having a crafty slurp at it at dead of night, and started wrapping it in a layer of vetwrap when she was going to be unsupervised: this seems to have got it making progress again.

However, I have noticed that that leg is a bit warmer than the other one, and also that she seems to be favoring it more over the last few days. It doesn't look infected, so I am crossing everything that this is part of the healing process and not an infection that has got inside the leg. Wondering whether to take her in for a final checkup and ask if an antibiotic would be justified.

She is able to run on it, and the muscles are looking a lot more balanced, but she is still favoring the bad leg when moving at speed and tends to carry it if she thinks I won't notice.

Az's wardrobe: Az seems to be feeling the cold more and more this year. He has a coat but even on mild days it doesn't seem to be enough: he shivers and his ears get cold. He does have one fleecy sweater already, but I've just bought him this one as well, to wear under his coat if it gets really cold.

retail disappointment

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:57:37 GMT

How come the sodding COOP sells 12 different sorts of flavoured cream and NO BRANDY BUTTER?

I still have had no mincepies yet this year. Woeisme.

EDIT: soddit, the local shop had none either! Damnit, I shall just MAKE some.

In which Az is unexpectedly helpful

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:24:05 GMT

I almost can't believe what Az just did. Tara Banana was puffing and blowing a bit, and I was just making coffee and not really paying attention to her.

So, Az gave me his most withering expression, stood up, turned the handle, and opened the patio door so that Tara could go out for a wee. He didn't go through the door himself, he just opened it, pushed it open and stood there waiting for her to go out.

Honestly the longer I know that lurcher the more impressed I am. He is soooooo clever!

Spam: a cunning (and annoying) approach

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:49:31 GMT

I've had a few emails recently get through my network of filters, and have been wondering how they managed it, as they used words that would trigger any spam filter, and all seem to have exactly the same text. (I do have a strange soft spot for the innovative and amusing kind of spam, but nobody wants thousands of identical emails promoting products one would never buy).

I just became annoyed enough to fiddle with the filters to stop them, and by checking the source, discovered why they had made it through.

The spam filters that filter primarily on content, work by reading your email looking for suspicious strings of letters. The spammers had got round this by adding random letters in the middle of all possibly-contentious words - so for example: Vibtlagnmbra. The random letters are different for every email, so the letter string is always different and cannot be filtered out.

Then they used HTML to colour the excess letters white, make them very small and float them away to the right margin, so that the message looked the same to the human user.

This is awfully cunning. And awfully irritating.

OK, I could turn off rendering HTML in emails, but this wouldn't stop the spams, it would just render them unreadable. I could filter out all HTML emails. But I don't want to do that, I get HTML emails that I do want to read.

I could do more validation of the sender's email address - but I don't really want to do that, because many spams come from genuine, valid addresses that are being forged. In a perfect world, there would be better systems for validating who sends emails so that I could be sure that an email coming from a different IP or SMTP server was spam, but sadly, that's not the case.

I do get HTML emails from oddlooking SMTP servers and varying IPs that I actually want to read, and the process of validating addresses using an SPF record is sufficiently complex that I can be pretty sure that many of the people who send me email will not be able to do that.

In the meanwhile, I've settled for filtering on the code that hides text and floats it to the right. This isn't a great way of doing things, as it's possible that a valid email might also contain that code, and also I can think of quite a number of permutations on this technique using different code - but it is the best 'least likely to lose desired mails' approach I can think of.

However, I suspect that ISPs handling vast amounts of email traffic will go instead for the validate sender approach - thus ensuring that genuine emails become even less likely to be reliablly delivered than they are now.

Hum. It is annoying that spammers insist on muddying their own water in this way. If they could just be a bit more restrained about it, then people would put up with them, but this sort of thing will eventually end up killing email, and driving people to more validated but less private and less universal messaging systems such as the various social media sites.

I deduce that once again, nothing has happened

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:08:03 GMT

The local TV news is leading, yet again, on a possible review of water bills. OK, water bills in the Southwest of the country are much higher than elsewhere, but I think this is the third? Fourth? time in the last couple of weeks that it's been the lead story.

We know the story: the bills will come down slightly, and that will be swallowed by growth and geography. If this is the lead story then I assume that nowhere in Devon and Cornwall has anything at all happened.

Oh well, I guess it beats surfing hamsters and the romantic engagements of geese. Also, the weather isn't good enough for hamsters to surf at the moment.

I forgot to mention that I have broken my iconic No Whining mug. I feel bereft!

Edit: I spoke too soon. No surfing hamsters, but the second story was some baby otters in a bath. V. cute.

More Meerkat Marketing

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:49:16 GMT

I am still fascinated by how the 'compare the meerkat' campaign has come to life like Frankenstein's monster: surely it must now be doing so much stuff that its creators never anticipated. Now it is marketing completely separate and unrelated businesses: is there any limit to the power of the Meerkat?

Harrods donates all its Alexsandrs to charity

Been there, close to that...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:49:12 GMT

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6947512.ece

Charlotte Shaw, one of a team of teenage walkers, fell into a stream on Dartmoor and died. It sounds like she was a fairly fit and competent child, but that her companions were not, and that she was forced into a position of taking responsibility for them because they weren't permitted to break off the training when they got cold and wet.

I really didn't think they still did stuff like this. In the early 80's I vividly remember teachers at my rather poor quality North Devon school (different one, similar idea tho) doing exactly the same thing on my Duke of Edinburgh's hike. Exmoor, not Dartmoor, but I can honestly say I have never been so wet and cold while clothed.

I hope they at least had modern equipment: we were told we must wear the supplied heavy and uncomfortable poorly fitted Navy-issue boots and carry terrible heavy absorbent rucksacks which were a real torment to carry when completely soaked, and they rubbed, and rubbed... I was at least not too horribly unfit, but a friend I was walking with was very unfit and rather overweight and I can still feel the stress now of the thought running round and round the back of my brain 'what do we do if she collapses out here in the pouring rain...?'. Struggling on, mile after mile, soaked through, freezing and exhausted. No mobile phones then of course....

Allowing children to take risks if they want to do so is something I can see as a positive: forcing unwilling children to march across rough, dangerous country riven with flash floods and bogs in pouring rain for no particular reason is something I find difficult to register as anything other than abusive. It certainly put me off the idea of ever going hiking as a hobby, if that was the idea.

Poor Charlotte, and poor Yasmin. :-(

Princess Tara Banana is ready for a new home

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 21:36:33 GMT

Photos and video here if anyone would like to see her : http://www.oldies.org.uk/?p=17146

Good things in a dark time of year

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:59:36 GMT

- Light slanting low under heavy blue clouds that look like they are painted in Payne's Grey

- Rainbow in one direction, hailstorm going the other way, sun on my back, rain on my face

- The birds flying in flocks and being flung about by the wind,

- The rain and the shapes of the hills through the mist.

- Houses with fires, evening walks with stars

- Torn strips of cloud streaming past a full moon.

- The way the primroses are coming through already, and the roses can't quite decide if the summer is over and keep trying one more bloom.

- Dogs all covered in mud all happy and wiggly when you try to dry them with a towel, laughing at you and the mud with happy faces

- All the paths and beaches empty except for me, and dark trees still flying ragged orange leaves.

Unseasonality

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:15:23 GMT

A festive ad for Aldi just came on. It showed in passing what looked like a tray of stuffed strawberries.

1) what kind of maniac stuffs a strawberry?

2) who wants fresh strawberries at Christmas anyway?

3) why can we not just accept that strawberries out of season taste of nothing but bland-yet-sour pap and just eat something else?

4) How come we can buy strawberries all year round, yet the season for satsumas, which I ADORE and which as a citrus fruit ought to store much more easily, is so very very short? *

* actually I think I know the answer to that, strawberries are tolerant plants and can be forced into production when a more sensible plant like the divine SATSUMA would scorn such profligate behaviour.

Princess Tara Banana

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:20:21 GMT

She came with an enormous pedigree,a leaflet advertising her breeder, 4 beds, two bottles of shampoo and a couple of bags of very brightly coloured dogfood (I have thrown these last away: boxers are quite lively enough without the aid of artificial colours and whatever meat was cheapest when Mr Baker and Mr Tesco were purchasing dogsmeat six months ago.)

For a dog that has lived the last 8 years as an only one, she's not doing too badly with the other dogs and the cats. The cats have almost all decided that she is inoffensive (Suma is still a little cautious) and the hounds are being pretty good with her, give or take Az having a grump at her when she snuffled him when he was asleep.

Or, at least, I don't *think* she's too bothered by the cats or dogs. She mostly ignores the cats and interacts politely enough with the dogs. That said, she is not a happy doggy. She's doing a lot of puffing and trotting about, she's very clingy, and there have been several little accidents. At the moment she seems to be too stressed to pee in the garden, she just loses it wherever she is when she can't hang on.

I am getting a DAP diffuser tomorrow, perhaps that will help, though no doubt mostly what is needed is time.

Philmophlegm's Dog Review
Philmophlegm has a tendency to review my foster dogs. So far I think Saffy has come off least worst with " not very scary". Tara's review is not particularly enviable:
"she seems fairly well behaved, but her face is weirdly deformed and really really ugly. And those noises! It's like having a pig in the house"

Him: "she walks around the place going HOFF HOFF HOFF. Like Darth Vader with fleas"

Me: "she doesn't have fleas!"

Him: " She walks like she has ants in her pants".

That's not a marketing campaign... THIS is a marketing campaign!

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:35:14 GMT

Cute meerkat story with commercial twist.

Am simply awed by the sheer spread of the 'compare the meerkat / compare the market' advertising campaign. They must barely need to pay for ads any more, just enough to keep things rolling and the character at the front of mind, keep people saying 'Simples' and associating meerkats with insurance. The other comparison websites must be steaming at the ears.

I like to imagine the staff of the agency that came up with this one. I imagine them giggling maniacally and rolling on their backs in a giant pile of money. It's nice to see a job done well.

A boxer is imminent

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:08:52 GMT

I have another foster dog booked, supposed to be arriving Saturday if the volunteers come together for the transport run. She is Tara, a 10 year old white boxer. Never really known any boxers, so this is going to be interesting.

She's coming in as a bit of an emergency: the owners have arthritis and osteoporosis and are having to keep her in a crate a lot of the time in case she knocks them over: apparently she is quite lively and will jump up, and being a boxer, is naturally pretty boingy anyway. They are considering having her put to sleep if they can't move her, so I hope the transport run does come together in time. She's in Liverpool, but we've been unable to find a closer foster home or rescue space.

Researching boxers, the one thing I notice on all the boxer websites is the advice to make sure they are taught not to jump up as puppies before they get too big! I assume the owners missed that bit out 10 years ago. Let's hope old dogs can pick up new tricks...

She seems to have a fair bit of stuff with her: the list is:
Folding Crate, toys, cushions, feeding bowls, vaccination certificate, pedigree papers.

If she has pedigree papers then maybe she will actually turn out to be a boxer rather than yet another peculiar and unlikely-looking crossbreed, but as there is no photograph yet, I'm not counting on it! I'm glad she has her own toys, I was just wondering whether to get something boxer-proof: my dogs like soft fluffy toys but I'm not sure they will stand up to energetic boxer play.

I am also told that she eats only Baker's Complete dogfood, which may further explain the problem boinging and jumping up. If there is one food with a reputation for making dogs hyperactive, it's Baker's. Will be interesting to see what difference a proper dogfood makes: the change in Sacha's coat in just the a week and a half she was here was quite striking.

Brace for drool...

Impressed with Rackspace

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:38:22 GMT

Credit where credit is due. I have contact with a fairly wide range of hosting companies, and Rackspace are the best I have ever had to deal with by a country mile. It probably helps that they don't do shared hosting at all, only server rental. You pay for what you get, but what you get is *really* good.

I sent them a message asking about modifications to configuration at 2pm. By 7pm they have sorted the mods and send a comprehensive message explaining exactly what they have installed back again - that's pretty good. Their server is fast -well, it should be - and they maintain the hardware as well as the software and keep you updated about exactly what they are doing.

And it's consistent too, I've never had the experience, all too common with other hosts, that I've carefully explained exactly what I want to know/have changed and they send me back a generic answer that doesn't fit, for example. Nor do I ever feel that I am dealing with someone who understands less about their service than I do, which is always a bad bad feeling. (Actually reading this it sounds like my expectations are pretty low, and I guess they are! Reflection of the industry, sadly.)

Things done and undone

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:38:10 GMT

Things done
- finally replaced those dratted bulbs in the porch and outside the front door. Now visitors no longer need to bring torches after nightfall.

- Encouraged by this, bought a replacement wall lamp to replace the knackered old floodlight on the wall. Probably the energy will be gone by the time it gets here though and it will spend the next 5 years in the utility room.

- homechecked someone to foster cats for a rescue. Philmophlegm decided to come along when he heard it was a cat homecheck, and was rewarded by the chance to meet a Burmese and an Asian cat.

Dog occurrances
- email from my mother to say her dog Ronnie is probably on his last legs after having a sort of fit. He has had a steroid injection : hoping this may improve his condition.

- found next door but one's young Staffie upside down in my bag of dog food again yesterday. She gets in through the cat flap. To my eyes she is too skinny for a young dog

- Mollydog is walking quite well now and did an almost 2 hour walk on Saturday. The pin in her leg is still just visible. I've lost her magnetic collar and have now ordered a replacement. To my surprise, this didn't instantly cause the old one to resurface but no doubt it's only a matter of time.

Things undone
- Redesign of an annoying little site. Site owner agrees that current layout is functional and effective but says it lacks 'zing'. What that means only he knows. Actually, I don't think he does know.

- forms to allow people to send unnecessary details to a monstrous State database.

- various irritating amends and reports which I quoted too low for in a rush of enthusiasm in September but really need to get my act together and get done anyway.

- dratted new blinds for the bathroom which I meant to fit months ago

- more forms for the Oldies club site to collect volunteer data, collect more information about dogs to be surrendered, and allow information collected that way to be edited and managed.

Asking Views

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:41:12 GMT

The card machine at the Coop has taken to asking questions while you wait for shopping to be scanned.

Some of these questions I was heartily in favour of , for example:
"Did you find everything you were looking for" is an excellent question for a supermarket to be asking that has been known to run out of bread, milk, lemons, bananas,tinned sardines etc entirely by 6pm in the evening.

I can even cope with questions like "do our ethics make it more likely that you will shop at the Coop' because although there is an obvious quibble over putting ALL the ethics into one giant pot, and I would definitely like to add footnotes like "if you are that ethical how come none of the meat in your fridge is either free range or organic" and "dubious about the concept of ethical supermarket" and even "my personal ethics prefer THESE bananas" ... yet on the whole, I can probably say a generalised 'yes' to the idea of ethics in food shopping.

I'm not sure about the "were the staff neat and clean" type question which seem a bit intrusive, but I can honestly answer yes to all of those as they are a lot cleaner and neater than me with my wellies and post-dog-walk birdsnest hair.

Today's question: "Is it good that we support Variety Club" though - I have no yes no answer to that. My first reaction is : What the f*ck is Variety Club? And in what sense 'support'? Do they mean they currently fund it, whatever it is, or are they asking if they should fund it, or is this 'support' more in the sense that they take all Coop employees down to cheer it on Saturday afternoons?

Despite the lure of being asked for an opinion - with buttons to press that went beep! I had to ignore it. SO HARD!

Paintings

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:46:13 GMT

I had a go at a rather stylised painting of greyhounds. I really liked the pencil sketch, but it went horribly wrong when I applied paint, and in the end I gave up without finishing it. Probably this would have worked much better as pen and ink.

I decided to practice some clouds. First, I tried to copy a photo, using the knife. It took aaaaages and the clouds still look a bit stiff and unlikely:

Then I tried another photo again with the knife. I think this one is better, probably because it's dark enough that there isn't much detail on the clouds anyway and it's a stronger image to start with, but it still took amazingly long to do.

Then I did some clouds with a brush. So much quicker, and the clouds look more real, I think. This probably needs something in the foreground but I don't know what yet.

Bit of a change from clouds, I drove along this road this afternoon: the sun was quite low and it was shining down the tunnel of trees and reflecting off the wet road, looking rather lovely. I'm pleased with this one (and I did it really quickly with the brush, no photo and no sketch at all, which probably proves something)

State of the Mollydog

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:17:42 GMT

Mollydog has been sent home with no bandages today.

You can still see bone and a big screw, so it's a bit squicky. She has strict instructions not to lick it. I have some antibiotic cream to plaster on at regular intervals to reduce the likelihood of damage if she does get a crafty lick in. I keep hearing cats licking themselves and whipping round to check it isn't her.

Very difficult to put a cone on a greyhound that is large enough to stop it licking the bottom of a back leg, given length of neck, nose, legs, remarkable flexibility of entire dog, etc.

That's what I call an active old age...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:54:26 GMT

Someone called to enquire about surrendering an old working labrador. The dog is now 13, the owner is 90. The owner bought the dog as a working retriever to take out hunting. Owner was 81 at the time!

Feeling like the bottom of an inverted pyramid...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:35:41 GMT

There is a huge monumental governmental project afoot to capture huge amounts of data about anyone who flies outside the UK and submit it to a Monstrous Central database. There are working parties and coordinators and guidelines and monstrous great teams of highly paid and (I hope) highly trained people working on this.

But of course, someone has to actually collect that data from the passengers, ensure it is captured and stored and sent to the Monstrous Database in a timely manner. That task, for one small airline, is done by me and my airline contact, Steve.

I am somewhat concerned that although we have received an absolute DELUGE of materials, much of it explaining concepts in incredible detail (want a full specification for SFTP...?) or giving brain-numbing descriptions of templates - we haven't had what I would have thought was the basics.

Like, 'don't send this data in plaintext email' - if I had to point out that wasn't a good move, then someone, at some airline somewhere has probably not said it. And nothing on how the data is to be stored at all, or whether we are supposed to delete it after they have flown...

Apparently the longterm plan is for the system eventually to be responsive: the airline will send off all its passenger data half an hour before the flight takes off, then the Mighty Arm of the State will reply to say who should, and should not, be allowed to fly. This will happen both in and outbound, so it's possible that someone might fly out of the country, then find that a database glitch makes it impossible for them to get back in.

The potential for mistakes and chaos there strikes me as truly hair raising.

Oh yeah, and the other thing is, we have to do this for flights to France, but not flights to Ireland. It's supposed to be about security and terrorism, but I'm not entirely clear why Dublin is less of a likely source of terrorists than Grenoble. Am imagining crack squads of terrorists on skis swooping from the Alps.

Hat update

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:15:20 GMT

In case anyone was wondering, I bought this hat and would recommend the seller for anyone seeking an affordable and well made waterproof hat. It's just a tad loose, but not enough to blow off (and if it's very windy, I can always tuck my hair inside it to wedge it. )

Actually, given the prices I'm quite tempted to buy the plait detail one and the trilby as well. And for that matter, I'm kind of in love with this straw hat and also with this one.

But no. Nobody needs that many hats. Do they? Also, if I buy sunhats it will rain non-stop for the next 3 years, I know it will.

When links aren't links...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:44:17 GMT

I devised for the Oldies club a system for sending details about dogs to the charity. It isn't vastly sophisticated, but it asks a bunch of important questions about each dog, logs the result into a database, sends a notification to the relevant person depending on what options were selected, and produces reports which are integrated into the user management system for the website so that only the appropriate people see them.

I was modestly proud of it, but for some reason there was a lack of keenness from a number of people to use or depend on it, even though it was considerably more reliable than email, not being subject to the whims of spam filtering, and much easier to refer to than notes from a phone conversation.

Recently I discovered why this was. The interface I created displays the most important bits of info, and allows you to click on the dog's name to see the rest of the details that relate to him. The link on the name is indicated by the name being blue, bold, underlined, and producing a 'hand' icon on mouseover in the traditional manner. I didnt' think it needed more explanation than that, though I did stick a line at the top saying 'click dogs name to view'

But no, several people did not realise that a blue, underlined, piece of text that does 'hand on mouseover' was a link. They never clicked on the name, so did not realise that the form captured every detail they might require. Nor did they read the top text, they only scanned it, missing my vital note about the name.   These are not stupid people, nor particularly web-unsavvy ones. They just didn't know about something that I thought was standard.

The lesson here is that default link formatting is no longer obviously interactive to many web users. I think I should have made it look like a button, or included an extra [view full details] or something.    Interesting.

OMG we have toes!

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:58:34 GMT

Just taken Mollydog in for rebandaging again, and she has come back with toes visible on all 4 feet! I haven't seen the toes on the affected leg since August. At long last she is no longer a partial Pobble*.

She's supposed to start putting weight on it now, but persuading her to do that when the leg is so wasted is not that easy. At the moment she's basically using it only as a parking brake.

* does anyone remember a children's book in which the Pobble sets out to reclaim his toes? I'm sure I remember one quite clearly, but Amazon knows it not.

Family history question

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:04:58 GMT

My sister has decided that she can't let sleeping myths lie, but must investigate the truth behind the king of Barbados.

I know clarienne & louisedennis (and perhaps others?) have recently researched their family history - can you advise on which websites are particularly useful, or which would be worth paying for access? So far as we know, she would be looking at records for Kent, Essex and London.

I have told her that I don't want to know unless they turn out to be at least as strange and unlikely as the myths, but have apparently been assigned the job of creating an illustrated family tree, featuring cartoon deathbed scenes...

State of the Mollydog

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:07:41 GMT

Mollydog is still slowly, oh so slowly, healing. Today she had the cast removed, and is now wearing a much lighter bandage. The difficult thing is that the cast over her incredibly thin greyhound skin which sits directly over her bones with precious little in between tends to rub and form ulcers. But the leg still needs support until the bones have grown together properly to support the knackered tendon. So, still no exercise and twice weekly bandage changes. Today's X-ray looked OK, but we'll know more in a week or so.

Her back leg is now looking very obviously wasted and you can see the bones right the way up to the pelvis :-(.

Just to add to the excitement, she has also developed two fun new moles, one of which was cracked and bleeding. They have removed the bleeding one and sent it off to be analysed. Please cross all body parts you possess that it's not a sign of something horrible.

Embarrassingly, after being able to see the other mole, on her neck, very easily at home, I got to the vet and could not find the damn thing. I'm sure that he thought it was a tick that had dropped off. Anyway, I found it again this evening and have trimmed the hair all round it so it should be easier to see next time. No doubt that mole will have to be removed and sent off for analysis as well. Yet more staples. Metal staples in flesh just seem wrong somehow...

The insurance company, Axa, are being a bit of a pain. The first set of claim forms went off to them ages ago: I phoned this week to ask how much longer it was likely to be, and they told me that they needed a full clinical history. Which they had requested from the vet in a letter, sent by post... Needless to say the vet had not had the letter: at least the girl had the decency to sound embarrassed when she told me that they'd posted it! Why they didn't just phone the vet to ask for a copy of the history, I don't know: instead I had to phone the vet and ask them to fax the history over, which they did very promptly.

I really hope that the claim is processed soon!