Ongoing series about the tribulations of living with pets.

If Pavlov used a Labrador I think his experiments are void.

Well the cats are still at it. Last night Michelle was dishing up dinner and turned her back for a second and one of the cats nipped up onto the bench and tried to take off with a chicken drumstick. Read more »

Ongoing series about the tribulations of living with pets.

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.
Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
        — Groucho Marx

We have a three year old Labrador named Tobius or “Toby” for short. He was supposedly the runt of the litter, but turned out to be a big black doofus with an attention span about as wide as the space between his eyeballs. Read more »

The first in what will hopefully be an ongoing series about the tribulations of living with pets.

“A cat by any other name is still a scheming little fur ball that craps behind the couch.”
        — Unknown

4th June 2010

The two new cats we’ve got are incorrigible. Despite our best efforts to date they will still go on the kitchen benches whenever they can get away with it. Every other cat we’ve had we’ve been able to train to stay off the benches, but not these two. Read more »

I’m happy to say the number of gadgets I own has been growing a bit unmanageable in the last few years, in particular the number that need USB either for power, communications or both. The downside is the number of cables and other debris that gets strewn around my desk. So I made a USB box to tidy it all up:

Internally it has two powered USB hubs, one of which is connected to the computer, the other is just for use as a power supply (for the GPS and battery charger, which don’t need to talk to the computer).

The seven port USB hub, with five in the front and two in the back, is hot glued into the front of the container for each ad hoc USB access.

Keyboard, mouse and backup drive are all direct into the computer as the motherboard has plenty of ports. Read more »

A couple of days ago, a couple of friends put the following on their status on Facebook:

People need to understand that children with special needs are not sick. They are not searching for a cure, just acceptance. This week is for special needs education. 93% percent of the people will not copy and paste this. Will you be part of the seven percent that will and will you leave it on your wall for at least an hour?

Now raising awareness and understanding is a fine thing, and I know and love the kids my friends were thinking of when they cut and pasted this message. Today’s topic is not the important subject of children with special needs, the above just happens to be the latest example of what I do want to talk about, which is how not to win people to your cause. Read more »

Photo by Milen Dimov, Used with permission’Twas a year ago today that I started using Twitter and Facebook. I kicked it off with a test message to see if I got my twitter missives automatically being sent to Facebook properly. Hardly an auspicious start. I was not an early adopter of social networking tech, and at first blush, you can’t blame me. Do I really want to read 140 character messages of what people had for breakfast and their progress on the house work? Fortunately I found it wasn’t all asinine ephemera. Read more »

Recently Carter, a friend of mine was diagnosed with Leukemia. I’ve put a bounty on my head to help raise funds for his ongoing treatment. You can read the details at http://bounty.evanmclean.com/

“Your son has Leukemia.”

I’ve known Carter for the whole of his seven years, and I’ve known his parents, Kim and Maria for over half our lives. Six weeks after they moved from Melbourne to Chicago for Kim to fulfil a life-long dream, working with mission focused communities in the USA, their world got reduced to the four words above when a doctor told them this news…

Happy New Year everyone.

Hard to believe we are already over a week into the New Year and so much has happened already.

Many of you would have heard about our cat Murray, but for those who haven’t, I am retelling the story here.

Evan and I got Murray as a four-year-old cat from the animal shelter. We had lost a cat not long before and were wanting a second cat to complement our female tortoiseshell CD, but didn’t want to have to deal with a kitten all over again. Read more »

I’ve already blogged about a cat named Murray so for today, a simple note to observe that Murray is no longer with us. From his unexpected reappearance in late August, we are grateful to have had the opportunity to share another four months of life with him before arthritis and other maladies of old age finally caught up to him.

We spent our last evening together the same way we spent our first: lying on the couch watching movies with him asleep, purring away on my chest.

Bye Murray.

“Play tricks?” laughed the cat.
“Oh my my! No, no, no!
I just want to go in
To get out of the snow.
Keep your mind on your work.
You just stay there, you two.
I will go in the house
And find something to do.”
Then that cat went right in!
    — The Cat In The Hat Comes Back, Dr. Seuss

I’ve been working on my little wallpaper management bash shell script that handles changing wallpapers on my desktop. The image to the right shows the system information that is displayed down the right edge of my screen. From the top you have:

Click for larger view

• Local weather forecast for the next four days.
• The current and next calendar months.
• List of the last twelve incoming phone calls.
• Various system info such as cpu usage, disk space and top five processes.

(The image contains bogus phone numbers, don’t bother trying to ring ‘em.)

Ever since I upgraded my desktop to two monitors this background information has been a lot more visible off to the side, and so I decided to give it a bit of an update.

Originally I was using conky to display all that information, but all the info aside from the system info is fairly static, and could easily be updated when the wallpaper changes every five minutes, instead of being a set of conky processes, so I’ve been playing a lot with ImageMagick and sharpening up my bash scripting skills to actually write the information onto the wallpaper image. So far I have the phone log and calendar being written, and plan to do the weather forecast next, so then I will only be running one conky process.