Puppy update - no dog yet.

See an earlier entry for more details on yesterday's installment of our puppy hunt. Today we went out to two shelters. First there was Pets in Need in Redwood City, where we'd previously had success getting one of our cats 8 years ago. They had a poor selection of dogs today; only one coming anywhere close to what we wanted. It was a chiwawa mix with a serious underbite. Looked like it was growling continuously. When we visited with it, it was very shy, almost to the point of being frightened. This was not a match for an active young boy.

Our second stop was the Animal Services & Placement Center in Palo Alto. They only had three dogs. None of them anywhere near what we wanted. Duncan was disappointed, but he's now understanding that this might take a little while and I think he's okay with that.

Probably my wife will go out with him next week to a couple of the shelters in Santa Clara county that are a little further afield, and see if they have any ideal candidates.

[Technorati Tag: pets]

( Jun 26 2004, 06:48:07 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

Snood - don't go there!

Every now and then, I get interested in a computer game to the point of addiction. The previous one was Pit Droids. The current one is Snood. As it says on their website, "forget life... play snood!" and it's very apt. I've spent many an hour playing this game on my old Windows 98 PC at home. It'll also run on Macs, Pocket PC, Game Boy Advance and Palm Pilots. I tried the latter and it's a tad too small for my aging eyes. This is the only shareware game that I felt was good enough, that I was happy to pay the money to get the full version. The full version includes many more game levels and puzzles. You get free updates. There is also an editor for creating your own puzzles and levels. There is a Snood store for getting t-shirts, hats, mugs etc. The author is Dave Dobson and he should be very impressed with his creation which has had millions of downloads. The parent company, Word of Mouth Games has a few other games to choice from, but for me, the demo versions have not had the addictive powers of Snood. If you want to keep your life, don't go to their website. But if you want spend many an hour on a fun additive game, this one takes a lot of beating. You've been warned.

[Technorati Tag: Games]

( Jun 26 2004, 02:06:44 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

Google Hacks

We all know how good a search engine Google is but I wonder how many people realize that there are lots of special hacks that can be done to help you refine your search. Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest have an O'Reilly book entitled Google Hacks that goes into 100 of these in a lot more detail.

There are a couple I use all the time.

• :site
  When I wrote the recent blog entry about a website that helps you select which kind of dog to get, I remembered that it was somewhere under www.ivillage.com but not the exact URL. No problem. I just entered:

        site:www.ivillage.com what dog breed
      

  as a search into Google, and it came back with the URL as its top hit.

• :daterange
  Recently at work, I wanted to find a Tcl/Tk plugin for my browser. Trouble was a search of

        tcl browser plugin
      

  was finding a lot of old cruft from circa 1998 which didn't seem to be applicable any more. I then remembered Google hack #11 - daterange: for date range searching. But you need to have the dates in Julian format. Well that's easy. I can google for:

        julian date converter
      

  and the top hit points me at a nice online converter for this. I generated a couple of Julian dates so I could search over the last 2-1/2 years and then went searching with:

        tcl plugin browser daterange:2452276-2453168
      

  The top hit now points me at: http://www.tcl.tk/software/plugin/ where there is a link to download a plugin for Mozilla.

The Google Hacks book website contains a list of the hacks in the book. It also allows you to download a ZIP file of the examples. There are also several complete sample hacks online. O'Reilly has set up a site where you can add comments about each of the hacks.

There are other sites that have documented Google hacks. Here's a good one.

[Technorati Tag: books]

[Technorati Tag: Google]

( Jun 26 2004, 07:20:05 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

Our poor son still wants a puppy

About a week ago I wrote about how our son would like a puppy. Yesterday I mentioned that we were going to go look for a puppy at one of the locale humane societies that evening. Well folks, I'm here to advice you that this is not the way to go about doing this if you have a small child and don't want to end the day in potential emotional disaster.

We arrived at the shelter in the early evening after a forty minute drive on the freeway which would have taken us twenty minutes if it hadn't have been Friday night rush hour. We went to look at the dogs in the back. Our son Duncan found three that he really liked and we put their numbers in order on the adoption form, and handed them over to volunteer #1. We were told that our first choice hadn't been taken yet, and if we would like to wait a bit (could take a while), then our name would be called, and we could have a visit with our choice and make sure everything was fine.

We went and sat with the other potential dog and cat owners-to-be. Two hours later our name was called. We were told by volunteer #2 that our first choice had already been taken (it apparently had been the second choice on somebody elses list). This (as you can imagine), was a huge disappointment. One second choice dog only had one eye. None of us wanted a one-eyed dog; we had visions of lots of problems in our future. Accidents just waiting to happen. So we had a visit with our third choice.

To cut a long story short, even though Duncan like the dog, the dog didn't really want to know us too much. It was a little too skittish.

So we tried looking at the dogs again. We even looked at the Chiwawa's. Duncan found two chiwawa mixes that he really liked. We visited with the first one, and everything was going great. Even I was liking this dog. We said, okay, we'd like to adopt this dog. Great says volunteer #2. Then volunteer #3 pokes her head over the top of the fence surronding the visitors area and says we can't do that. That dog has already been taken and yet another volunteer (who'd I'd personally like to strangle) hadn't labeled the adoption papers, that this had occured.

By now I was getting very frustrated. Duncan was upset, but willing to go have a visit with the second chiwawa he'd picked. We went back and looked more closely at the paperwork for this dog, and it was highly recommended that it not be adopted to a family with children under 8 years old (our son is five, almost six).

There were no more good candidates. We'd been there three hours. At this point Duncan burst out crying and I can hardly blame him. I felt the same way. We calmed him down and left.

We are going to try an animal shelter in Palo Alto later this morning. We are going to take a different approach. We will ask before hand exactly what they've got and either my wife or I will try to vet the potential dogs before our son gets too emotionally invested in a particular animal. Hopefully today things will go better although I have my doubts.

On a side note, there were two TV camera crews at the humane society premises last night. Seems our governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would like to terminate dying pets a little quicker to save some money, then reneged. The local news crews were there to get some local commentary. The cameraman took quite a lot of footage of Duncan looking at the cats as we were patiently waiting for our name to be called. I've no idea if he's going to be part of a future 15-30 second news article or if he's going to be "dropped on the cutting room floor".

This story. To be continued...

[Technorati Tag: pets]

( Jun 26 2004, 01:01:35 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]