Fire extinguishers...

... housed in an old fireplace.

Larry Larsen has posted some very cool videos of him playing around at home with eye tracking hardware. He has some videos of him playing xbox games with eye position overlayed but I found the roller coaster video the most interesting by far (it vividly demonstrates how strongly we are drawn to look at people's eyes).

Nala - ˜1990 to 2006

After gracing us with her presence for the past seven years our three-legged princess is gone.

We adopted Nala from the San Jose Humane Society shortly after buying our house in 1998.  After a few visits and not finding the right dog to take home we were walking along the row of dog runs and saw a super-cute black lab-type dog standing up, front paws on the gate, wagging her tail at us.  Cute face, happy, anxious to meet us and... what the?  She's only standing on one leg!

We were immediately taken with her personality, affection and heart.  She wouldn't play fetch for more than a couple tosses, she wouldn't go out in the rain and if it got cold, she just wanted to be inside.  She was definitely a princess... but a princess with a huge spirit.  Initially we marveled at her ability to get around on just three legs, but the novelty soon wore off and we stopped noticing that she only had three legs.  It never bothered her, after all... she had one more leg than we did. 

Nala's lack of a leg did eventually slow her down in 2004 when she developed Idiopathic Peripheral Vestibular Disease, commonly called old dog vestibulitis.  The affliction, not uncommon in older dogs, is essentially loosing the function of your inner ear.  Without the body's built-in gyroscope to help balance, the world starts spinning and it takes a while to adjust.  After a few weeks Nala learned to rely on her sight, muscles and other inner ear for balance.  Nala was at 100% in about a month.  Almost a year to the day later, she lost the use of her other inner ear and had a much more difficult recovery.  True to form, she fought through again the second time (though she never was quite as stable as before).

 
Nala had the marked head tilt symptomatic of old dog vestibulitis

As we prepared for our move to Ireland we included the necessary steps which would allow us to bring Nala with us.  The regulations of importation of dogs into Ireland now allow you to prep your pet ahead of time to avoid the six-month quarantine.  By getting a rabies test performed by the correct organization six months before importation your pet can enter the country without having to be put in a kennel for six months.  Nala would have been able to join us in Ireland on August 7th, but it wasn't meant to be.

We were moving to Ireland before Nala would be able to enter the country and thankfully we have some great friends who also love dogs, our good friends Leslie and Jason.  We were initially a little concerned that things would be rough on Leslie and Jason because we weren't quite sure how Nala would get along with their newly adopted dog, Kaos.  Nala, who has always been a little aggressive towards other dogs, wasn't too bad of a house guest (other than an early issue with relieving herself inside).  Nala joined their pack quickly, immediately latching onto Kaos.  Nala apparently spent most of her time following her new pal around. 

"So, you want to leave me with a dog named 'Kaos'? A you sure that's okay?"

Leslie, having just lost her dog Micah in February, had the unenviable task of contacting us on Monday to let us know Nala wasn't doing well.  This past weekend Nala stopped eating and the vet said it was likely kidney failure or lung cancer (or perhaps both for all we knew).  In her later years Nala had a history of urinary tract infections and was on a special diet which was easier on her kidneys, so we knew there was an issue there.  Combined with her kidney issues the vet was having trouble hearing a heart beat on one side of her chest which could indicate a rapidly growing tumor in her lung.  My first desire was to throw as much money at it as was needed, I didn't want to lose Nala, but I knew that was really just a selfish reaction.  It was time.

Leslie holding Nala before taking her to the vet on Tuesday night.

Nala passed away last night at around 6:30 PM pacific time.

There is a whole mess of entertaining podcasts out there and one can spend hours finding entertaining ones. I have a list of my top podcasts but there definitely is one that sits at the top of my list. But before I go on, I'll give a brief explanation of what a podcast is.

A podcast is a lot like a radio show you can listen to whenever you choose. Technically it's little more than a blog post with an audio file attached, but the combination of software and hardware out there has made it very easy to get into subscribing to a large number of progarams. A huge benefit of blogging software is it provides a simple mechanism to an author to publish their work and for readers, a simple mechanism to know when there is new work to be found (last time I talked about blog reading software or "RSS Readers" was 2004 , I think I'll need to share my findings on that later). But I digress, for more details I point you to Wikipedia for a detailed description.

Back to my original point, my absolute favorite podcast. If you are a regular listener of NPR on the weekends you may have had the occasion to listen "Wait wait... don't tell me!". It's a news quiz with a panel made up of a rotating cast of humorists, authors and comedians. Think of it as one part daily show, one part Ben Stein and four parts high-larious. The absolute best way to get a feeling for it is to listen to the show (which you can do with or without being a podcasting geek). Recently they put out a "best of" show which is a great way to get an introduction to the flavor. Just go to the show page for July 8th, 2006 and click the "listen to the whole show" link. One bit of advice: when it asks you what media player you want to use, don't select Real Player, it's evil (and I don't say that just because Microsoft makes the other choice, I say it because I honestly think the Real Player is crap).

For those of you who use an RSS reader or a Podcast aggregator to download programs automatically, be sure to check out the rest of NPR's podcasts, they have a lot of quality programming available.

We've been dreaming about and planning this for so long now that it hardly seems it could be happening... but it is.

We're an hour away from touching down in our new home, Dublin. I suppose at this point we are officially expatriates.

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There's no URL, I have no idea what it's selling, it was in plain text (i.e. it didn't have a web beacon to probe for receipt) and... well... it is just plain weird.

"I'm not going into the Zone. What instructions do you have?"
As simply and as quickly as that, Kirk Maynard Gull spread his wings,
"What?"
forty miles per hour! And under control! If I dive from five thousand feet

This is a real cup holder.

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Aparently Buick felt the target audience of their rendezvous would be driving around drinking bottles of wine.