Categories
Critters

Extreme kitten makeover

A couple of weeks ago:
Maria

Today:
Maria

She’s fought off an infection, taken up eating like there’s no tomorrow, and gotten comfortable enough in her new surroundings to slow down and worry about previously trivial stuff like grooming. All in two weeks.

Oh, and she’s decided that Portia’s her buddy.

Maria & Portia

Not bad for two weeks. It hasn’t been easy on her by any means; a week ago I thought we were going to lose her to the infection. But now she’s safe, getting healthier, and now she can get to the good stuff – just being a happy housecat.

I can’t save them all though. Spay and neuter your pets, folks. There’s only so much space at my place – I have almost twice as many cats now as I’ve ever had at any one time, because we’ve taken in two rambunctious rescue kittens this year alone (plus a puppy who’s now about the size of a compact car). For every Portia and every Maria that we manage to take in, there’s a lot more who simply don’t make it, and there’s no need for that.… Read more

Categories
Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Full coverage

I showed these off in theLogBook.com Forums, might as well show them off here (even if they’re still works-in-progress – VWORP!1 and WARP!1 will both almost certainly undergo further tweaks, if not from-the-ground-up reshoots*).

Book covers

As silly as it is to have covers done before there are finished books to go in ’em, it’s kind of a motivational thing for me. And maybe to anyone out there who’d wanna buy ’em.

I promised a downloadable PDF file of excerpts from each of these, plus the also-in-the-works Phosphor Dot Fossils book (let’s call that PDF!1 just for laughs), at OVGE; I’ll see about getting that done soonish.

* they’re actually heavily-treated, composited miniature photography with nifty lighting and crap. My grandfather would either nod in approval or shake his head and tell me I’m doin’ it wrong. Or both.… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Toiling In The Pixel Mines

As the gods of video are my witness…

…the blog post to which I’m about to link may be one of the most useful things in the history of home-server-based video.

AVI Chunk Viewer: how to remove it

AVI Chunk Viewer, or as I’ve come to call it, AVI Chunk Blower is something that gets installed with a lot of video codec packs. What it does is pop up anytime it finds an AVI file that it thinks doesn’t conform to AVI standards, as laid out by its author. It stops you from doing anything else with the file it’s flagged until you close AVI Chunk Blower again. It doesn’t take different codecs into account (i.e. an AVI generated with an AVID codec). It’s the most nitpicky, annoying thing I’ve ever seen on a computer that happened not to be a virus.

And the above blog link shows you how to rid yourself of it by nondestructively renaming a single file.… Read more

Categories
Critters

Once more unto the increasingly furry breach, dear friends

For the third time since the beginning of 2011, the Tail Waggin’ Mail Wagon has unexpectedly brought home a new face on four legs. This one, though, must have a pretty sad story.

New kitten

This is a female kitten who almost got herself run over today during my wife’s mail route. She’s skin and bones – you can feel every vertebra, every rib, every bite she’s suffered being out on her own. She was pretty dehydrated. She’s done nothing but sleep, occasionally coming up for air to eat for a bit, since she got here.

New kitten

She looks like she might be some distant relative of Olivia (for right now, I’ve given her the name Maria – i.e. Olivia’s maid in Twelfth Night – because everyone should have a name). More likely she’s barely survived being part of a litter of kittens dumped somewhere in Crawford County. She has no basic cat socialization skills. She hisses at everyone. She’s pretty skittish around people. She’s had it rough.

New kitten

Portia seems especially defensive about another new kitten in the house, especially since Portia was a bad kitty today and pretty much destroyed a computer I was getting ready for an OVGE display piece. The more mature cats are giving her a wide berth – they know the drill by now. (This is cat #5. Out of those five, we have only one humane society cat. The rest are adopted strays.) The new kitty ought to feel pretty safe – her bunkmate in the kennel beneath her knows how to deal with the other cats.

Gabby's lair

We really need to find a home for this one. Four cats plus two dogs is stretching things pretty thin; a fifth cat, especially one who potentially has special needs (she may not be suited to a multi-pet household), is potentially a back-breaker. Get in touch with me if you’re local and would like to give this poor kid a peaceful forever home.… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology

Wild card

Holiday Special dudeDear Laura who presumably lives in Fayetteville,

I’ve got your 4GB microSD card if you want it. You forgot to remove it when you returned a Sylvania Android tablet to Hastings in Fayetteville. (My wife, in what can best be described as a long-simmering fit of envy over my tablet, bought one of her own today.)

For whatever it’s worth, you forgot to use the “factory reset” option to wipe all your private data from the device. I realized this when I saw that the tablet was already localized to Fayetteville, and then went to add my wi-fi router to the “approved” wi-fi points on the tablet and saw that there were a lot of other wi-fi points already “approved”. Just for laughs I decided to see if whoever returned the tablet without wiping it had left an SD card in the slot. Yep, you did. Man, I’d be pissed if I did that – even if I didn’t want the tablet anymore (really, it’s kind of a neat little gadget if you’re not expecting it to be an iPad – you should’ve given it a chance), I would’ve been able to use the card for something else like my phone. My wife got an 8GB microSD to go in the tablet; she doesn’t need the one you or your folks paid hard-earned money for.

What’s more, I didn’t look at anything that you had on the card or the tablet. I simply wasn’t interested. I wiped the device memory and put the card away in a little microSD case. I’d hope that anyone else in this situation would do the same thing, but I think we all know that’s not too likely. I’m one of the good guys.

If you want the thing back, let me know. Seriously. I’ll mail it to you.

You’ve got to be careful about this stuff, folks. Despite doing the right thing and not looking at anything more sensitive than the machine settings, I already know that Laura in Fayetteville owned this. If I’d looked at the SD card, I bet I could find out all kinds of things. But I’m the kind of dweeb who averts his eyes when someone’s typing their password or punching in their PIN. If you don’t take the security of your private info seriously, how do you expect the next guy to, no matter how well-intentioned the next guy may be?

In the meantime, Mrs. Green is really enjoying Laura’s Android tablet. 😆… Read more

Categories
Critters

Of pictures and pastures and pups

I’ve got several “family portraits” of our cat family, most of which are down to luck. I’ve been trying to keep my eyes open for opportune moments to get both dogs together, but there just haven’t been many opportunities – either they’re not close together, or they’re both asleep (not really at their best), or they’re doing goofy crap like this:

Xena and Gabby … Read more