Goodbye

We euthanized Rukh tonight. It was time.

He was a great dog.

#^#@^&^

Well, we got the xray results for Rukh yesterday -- much worse than we expected. We stopped all the meds earlier this week, because they were just making him nauseous, and we weren't too hopeful that they had been doing any good.

Not really. His xrays look awful. What was a dozen small spots and a few dime-to-nickel sized spots only a month ago is now dozens of tumors, some a few inches across. If the chemo did anything to slow it down, it wasn't much. It's just too aggressive.

He still seems to feel ok, but he's not getting up to eat and drink unless we prompt him, and even then he's having a hard time getting up on his own. I think he's just getting weaker, since he's not getting enough oxygen. That, and laying about all day just makes him stiff. But he still wags his tail, and still wants to go outside, although he's sleeping most of the time and even a short walk taxes him too much. He's working pretty hard to breathe, even just going out into the back yard.

He really deosn't have a whole lot of time left. The Adorable Husband thinks a week, maybe two, before he's having a hard eough time breathing that we aren't going continue. It's scary not to be able to catch your breath, and I won't do that to him.

Damn. Just...damn.

Snow Update

Remember the three-minute scrolling warning that we were going to have a Blizzard! Oh, no!

Not.

One.

Flake.

Killer Chickens

Using some very interesting new technology, scientists have been able to analyze the protein codes in the fossilized bones of a 68 million year old T-rex. DNA evaluation is usually impossible because the fossilization process simply doesn't preserve it well.

So, relationships between bones is usually done by other types of analysis -- shape, size, age, etc. Rather subjective, and very dependent on the amount of remains there are. Given that fossilization is (despite the popular belief from Jurrasic Park) a rare process. Most animals die and their bones rot and disappear. But this new technology can find molecular-level similarities in bones that clearly show how bones are related to one another.

There's a lot of detailed molecular biology involved in how they figured this out, but:

The first results, described in today's issue of the journal Science, show that the collagen protein in T. rex bone is extraordinarily similar to that of the modern chicken, confirming current thinking that dinosaurs' nearest cousins are birds.

I don't know what else they tested against, but as they continue to use this particular method of comparison, I'm sure the data store will expand and they'll have more and more samples to compare against. It's a neat start. I'll be curious to see how all this data pans out. The article here details how they are trying to use this new technology, adn how it's being tested.

Or course, I have to admit that getting some level of confirmation of the theory that dinosaurs are the ancient ancestors of modern chickens actually makes me rethink just how scary a T-rex was -- and, having seen chickens in action, it actually ratcheted it up a notch. Chickens are not docile, friendly creatures, not at all! Imagine a huge T-rex with the personality of a chicken and dagger-sized teeth. Scares me.

Warning Overkill

So, spring snow storm. No biggie. Except that this notice takes about three minutes to scroll over the top of the television screen for "the National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Warning for....

LARIMER COUNTY BELOW 6000 FEET/NORTHWEST WELD COUNTY- OULDER AND JEFFERSON COUNTIES BELOW 6000 FEET/WEST BROOMFIELD COUNTY- NORTH DOUGLAS COUNTY BELOW 6000 FEET/DENVER/WEST ADAMS AND ARAPAHOE COUNTIES/EAST BROOMFIELD COUNTY- ELBERT/CENTRAL AND EAST DOUGLAS COUNTIES ABOVE 6000 FEET- NORTHEAST WELD COUNTY-CENTRAL AND SOUTH WELD COUNTY-MORGAN COUNTY- CENTRAL AND EAST ADAMS AND ARAPAHOE COUNTIES- NORTH AND NORTHEAST ELBERT COUNTY BELOW 6000 FEET/NORTH LINCOLN COUNTY- SOUTHEAST ELBERT COUNTY BELOW 6000 FEET/SOUTH LINCOLN COUNTY- LOGAN COUNTY- WASHINGTON COUNTY-SEDGWICK COUNTY- PHILLIPS COUNTY- INCLUDING...FORT COLLINS...HEREFORD...LOVELAND...NUNN... ARVADA...
BOULDER...GOLDEN... LAKEWOOD...LONGMONT...AURORA... BRIGHTON... CITY OF DENVER...DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT...HIGHLANDS RANCH... LITTLETON...PARKER...CASTLE ROCK...ELBERT...FONDIS...KIOWA...
LARKSPUR...BRIGGSDALE...GROVER... PAWNEE BUTTES...RAYMER... STONEHAM... EATON...FORT LUPTON...GREELEY... ROGGEN...BRUSH... FORT MORGAN... GOODRICH...WIGGINS...BENNETT...BYERS... DEER TRAIL... LEADER...AGATE...HUGO... LIMON...MATHESON...FORDER...KARVAL... KUTCH...PUNKIN CENTER...CROOK... MERINO...STERLING...PEETZ... AKRON... COPE...LAST CHANCE...OTIS... JULESBURG...OVID...SEDGWICK... AMHERST...HAXTUN...HOLYOKE 430 PM MDT THU APR 12 2007

The scroll one of the channels was even longer.

Faster! Faster!

Remember sitting down to a game of Monopoly with your family? Or Parcheesi? Or an hours-long game of Risk? Apparently we were a slower, better-focused group of people then.

Parents are lobbying game manufacturers to "shorten games" because, they claim, they take too long to play and kids aren't having fun.

Michelle Hastings admits she's sometimes cheated to get through a game of Candy
Land with her 5-year-old daughter, Campbell. The board game can take just too long, she said. Disney Monopoly is another big offender.

"A game like that, it could literally take you days," said Hastings, of Holliston, Mass. "A lot of times, you don't play games because they take so long." Board game makers are heeding pleas of parents like Hastings and introducing games tailored to busy lives and shorter attention spans that take only about 20 minutes to play

So the game-makers are releasing "express" versions of the games. Some have nifty electronics to speed things up, others are just simplified to make the game move faster and be easier to play. There have always been "fast" games (Uno, Go Fish, Crazy 8s), but not everything has to be at light-speed!

Best of all for busy parents and kids, the games are brief and they're packaged differently so they can be taken along in the car."It's analogous to a kid picking up his Game Boy for 10 minutes," said Chris Byrne, an independent toy consultant based in New York. "Yet it involves the whole family."

Easier. Faster. Is this really a good thing? C'mon -- not everything in life is instantaneous and not everything should be "easy". This trend actually kind if disturbs me. Everyone has made up rules to a common game to get it over quickly if you really don't have time; but to demand games that are shorter because they take longer than 10 minutes to play? Seriously, do parents really want to teach their kids that a) everything can be done quckly and if it's not fast then it's not valuable and b) they should always be able to "win"? This is where I put on my child-free hat and criticize parenting: kids really do need to learn that they don't always win, that some things do need work and practice and attention to do properly. It's not enough to try. You have to succeed. The world really doesn't give a damn about your fragile self-esteem. [turn off harpy-mode]

Methinks that the demand for faster games has absolutely nothing to do with the kids' attention spans and abilty to play. It's the parents who think things take too long. (As evidenced by the opening paragraph of the article.) Kids can sit and do the most inane things for hours on end, they are perfectly capable of playing a game lasting an hour. Or at least, I certainly remember doing so. I remember playing cards with my dad for a couple hours (he taught me cribbage -- great for math!) and spending the afternoons playing Monopoly or Life with my friends. Scrabble should not be a 10 minute game. Well, maybe it can be, but that's an entirely different mode of leisure, in my book.

And books! If everyone is used to 10-15 minute bursts of entertainment, how on earth are we going to teach them to appreciate books? It takes most people a few days to finish a long novel...if their entire childhood is spend on fast-forward, will kids every learn to enjoy that?

I'm one of the highest-input-requiring people that I know -- I have to have something to read while sitting the carwash or waiting in line to get the mail. I read while I watch television (how's that for a bizarre twist?). I have a ton of hobbies that are tedious and time-consuming in a way that only a zen master can appreciate (a 24x36" cross stich piece on 36ct linen, anyone?). I multitask by default. I feel let down when movies are only an hour and a half long. I really don't get the weird "must be connected must be amused must be entertained" vibe that I get from alot of people. I really have a hard time being passively entertained. Sit in front of the tv and just watch? Not likely.

Apparently, I'm weird.

Catching up

Apparently, it's been a busy week. Or I've simply been too depressed to post. Either way, I haven't had much to say lately. For those who pop in to see what's going on at Chez Phouka, sorry about that.

So what's up? The wine cellar is in and trimmed up, and I've been feverishly entering all the wine into the Wine Curator software that I bought. Very nice. And then printing out labels to hang on all the bottle tags so we can identify things. Yes, appealing to my weird, OCD-organizational habits. I even found little images of grapes, red and white, to put on the labels.

We talked today about Rukh, and decided that we really don't want to keep him on the metronomic chemo that he's on. The combination of chemo, anti-inflammatory, and antiobotic seems to really make him feel crappy, and frankly, I'm not willing to make him feel crappy anymore. I'd rather have four weeks of happy-dog than six of not-so-happy. We're going in for x-rays on Saturday to see where things are, but we've stopped everything except the thyroid meds -- and even after only a day he actually seems perkier and his face looks better. Yeah, you, might think it's hard to discern much of an expression on a fuzzy face, but anyone who's met the beastie would notice a difference. I feel much more calm about the whole thing now. Now we just make him comfortable and spoil him rotten and wait. That's ok.

I expect that his xrays show rather aggressive growth of the tumors in his lungs -- I will be surprised if things haven't progressed much. Although even if they haven't, and things appear to have stalled, we're still going to stop treatment for the cancer itself (chemo, etc). It will give us an idea of how long we really have, though, and that's important.

Seeing in the Dark

As anyone in the technology industries know, the cock-eyed change to Daylight Savings Time early this year caused all sorts of computer distress: patch releases for Windows that boogered up other applications, database issues with timestamps, etc. All in the name of "saving energy".

I've always been skeptical that this has any effect on energy consumption. So what if using lights later in the evening...we're just using them earlier in the mornign to make up for it. We no longer have the luxury of changing our schedules to match the sunrise-sunset, we still have to get up in the morning for work at 6:00 am, for example, and if it's dark outside, we're turning on the lights and turning up the heat.

But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage.

"We haven't seen any measurable impact," said Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co., one of the nation's largest power companies, echoing comments from several large utilities.

It's nice to have more hours in the evening that are light, and leave work in the daylight, but the whole "energy savings" things is a bust -- an opinion that most energy companies expressed last year when this whole thing was suggested.

I feel quite vindicated.

Internet Gateway

I have to admit that I get very annoyed at poor spelling and grammar on the 'net. Not that I am immune to typos or dangling participles, but the number of people who can't figure out the difference between your and you're and don't understandthat there, they're and their are different words. Or too and to. Its and it's. And the bizarre evolution of txtspk in IM and text messages has me confused.

I can't tell you how many emails I receive that have 'I really like you're website'. Or the misplaced apostrophes that show up all over in ads and webpages. We should have some sort of standard!

So, Defective Yeti blog has set up an Internet Gateway for users, testing just these things. Refresh the page a few times -- there are a number of different tests!

Wine Cellar

The Adorable Husband spent yesterday putting together the 19 boxes of wine racks that arrived last week. They come as an enormous jigsaw puzzle of side pieces and cross bars and molding and all that -- something the Adorable Husband loves to do.

He didn't have to buy new tools, but he did have to special order really long screws to secure things to the wall. We ended up adding another 2 1/2" of insulation to the outer concrete wall because we were actually having problems keeping the cellar WARM enough. It seems to be stabilizing now. At any rate, in order to secure the racks to the walls, he had to find 5" screws to get through the wallboard, insulation, and the bracing for the racks. And, since the Adorable Husband is a Handy-Fix-It-Scandinavian, they are solid. We could climb them. There is no way these things are moving.

It took him the better part of two days to get things together and attached and laid out properly but it looks so cool! I'll take some pictures and post them when he gets all the molding up. Soon, I promise!

More info on Dog Food

Ok, I'm not defending Menu Foods, I think their response to this tragedy is shameful. They are making decisions based on the bottom line, and trying desperately to cover their collective asses about this whole thing because it wil cost money to fix it.

However, even human food producers don't test every product they use. They don't test each load of ingredients, regardless of where they come from. THey might test samples now and then, but each new shipment is not checked before dumping the bag into the hopper of the machine. That doesn't happen. While I feel Menu Foods needs to step up and take responsbility for their actions, the tainted wheat was not something that would have normally been tested for, even if it was used in your wheaties.

Even if they did test, what do they test for? It doesn't seem reasonable to expect testing for "everything" -- our food producers rely on existing laws and regulations to ensure that the food they receive is "good". By choosing to import food from an unregulated country, Menu Foods made a huge mistake; but we import billions of dollars of foodstuffs from countries that do not follow our FDA rules. And even if they did follow those rules, only about 1.3% of the food imported into the US is ever inspected or tested at all. 1.3%. Scares the hell out of me, I tell you. Less than five percent of US beef is inspected. We risk eating contaminated food every time we eat something we didn't grow ourselves. And even then.

What I can't figure out is why Menu Foods and the related companies didn't approach this like the Tylenol case -- "Holy Crap! THis is awful! Something happened and we're going to get to the bottom of it. We were following the laws about food safety and apparently that wasn't enough. Here's what we're going to do...."

Instead, we get protestations that they don't really see a clear correlation, that it's someone else's fault, that they aren't liable because it was tainted when they bought it, etc. Shameful. I'm waiting for one of hte high-end dog foods (SD, Euk, etc) to start advertising that they are making food NOT at Menu Foods, even if they have to open their own plants to do so.

By the way, the shipper of the tainted wheat gluten is ChemNutra, sourcing from Xuzhour Anying. ChemNutra’s shipments commenced November 9, 2006 and ended March 8, 2007. [snip] ChemNutra shipped to supplies wheat gluten only to pet food manufacturers.

The total quantity of Xuzhou Anying wheat gluten shipped was 792 metric tons.

Wikipedia is keeping up with the story -- perhaps not as fast a breaking news, but they seem to be well fact-checked.

Slower than Molasses in January

I never thought about the old saw, "Slower than Molasses in January", but I never would have thought it derived from an actual event.

In 1919, a huge molasses tank in Boston, owned by US Industrial Alcohol, exploded and flooded the town with a sixteen-foot-tall wall of molasses that killed 21 people, injured over a hundred, and took out several buildings. Two and a half million gallons of molasses (about 14,000 tons) leveled several city blocks. The molasses was for distillation purposes (for industrial alcohol and rum)-- and the accident precedes the start of Prohibition by one day.

More here, and a writeup on the accident here.

As I read through some of the articles, I discovered that this is not the only Molasses Flood. This happened in 1911 in New Orleans, as well.

And how fast is molasses in January? Well, estimates say that the molasses ran through the streets and through buildings at about 35 miles per hour.

Snow!

Woke up this morning to about six inches of SNOW.

Last weekend it was near 80 degrees. Yesterday was in the 70s and sunny and beautiful. Last night at 1am (when I finally staggered up to bed) it was clear as a bell.

This morning? SNOW. Lots of it.

Good news for us, since we've got family coming in today who want to go skiing over the weekend. Yeah!

Another Decider

Hypocrisy, thy name is Dobson.

James Dobson, from Focus on the Family, has self-righteously decided that HE is the arbiter of who is christian and who is not. According to Dobson, Fred Thompson (a former TN senator who may throw his hat in the ring for the 2008 election) is not a Christian. Dobson weighed in (apparently with the self-described role of judge) on the presidential hopefuls for 2008. Apparently, most of them aren't really Christian...at least according to the definition that Dobson made up.

Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson's claim. He said that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith."

"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added. "Dr. Dobson wasn't expressing a personal opinion about his eaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to 'read the tea leaves' about such a
possibility."

So according to Dobson, to be a Christian you must “talk openly about your faith”. Non-evangelicals aren't Christian? Oh, really? Pulled that out of your ass, did you? Does it matter that you're directly contradicted by your own religious foundation?

Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 6:1)

When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. (Matthew 6:5)

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think it’s up to somebody who consistently acts in opposition to the teachings of the Christ to decide who’s a Christian and who isn’t. I know a lot of good people who are christians, in act and deed every single day. They don't go around proclaiming how righteous they are, how much better they are -- they just do it. Every day. Dobson talks the talk but he certainly doesn't walk the walk.

Of course, the fabulous construct that he used: I don't know he's X because I've never seen him do Y, has no basis in logic, no basis in fact, and I think we should use the same idea to characterize everyone else, too. I don't know that Dobson isn't a child molester, because I've never seen him throw up when someone mentions it. I don't know that Newt Gingrich isn't addicted to crack because I haven't seen him refuse to buy some.

Hey, this is FUN! I can make up some cockamany definition of something and then hold everyone up to it, or accuse them of being horrible people. Don't eat popcorn? You're obviously a terrorist. Watch Friends on TV? You're definitely stealing from your employer. Drive a pickup truck? You're a shoplifter. See how easy this is?

Well, if you don't mind being a hypocrite.

Wichita

So far, the one and only travel requirement for my current client has been one day travelling to Wichita for a face-to-face meeting. Well, it ends up taking two days, since you can't get a direct flight except in the evening, but that's it. One day.

So I flew out with the project manager on Monday night and returned Tuesday night. It was a fun trip, to be honest. They took us out (all of the project team -- some 12 people) to a veeeeerrry nice steak dinner when we arrived, and then we spent a day in a meeting.

Sometimes those can be horrible -- people aren't prepared, the people in the room can't make decisions, all the worst behavior you find in business settings. We may have been bemoaning the fact that the client doesn't seem to have done large projects before, and that they don't quite understand the importance of the requirements and design phase of things....but they were absolutely on the ball for this meeting and it was tremendously productive. Wow.

Of course, my travel karma reared its ugly head, and our flight out was delayed 2 hours and the flight back by nearly an hour. Pretty tame, compared to my usual travel chaos.

I am SO looking forward to starting the development on the project!

Manual vs Automatic

Both the Adorable Husband and I drive manual transmission cars -- we both prefer them, and have driven sticks since we started buying our own cars. But they're getting harder to find, as most new cars are build with advanced automatic transmissions (Triptronic, etc) and only a few car options on the very cheap end and the very expensive sports car range continue to offer manuals.

Not so in Europe, of course, were most cars are still manuals. But in the US, only 17% of the cars on the road are stick shifts. This came up recently because we're just starting to look for options for a next car for the Adorable Husband (in two years or so) and his current favorite -- the Passat -- is moving away from offering a manual transmission and opting for their Triptronic automatic in all their cars. You can apparently still order a manual, but it's now more expensive than the automatics. Instead of the surcharge for an automatic, which was the norm for many years, it's now a premium to have a stick.

What surprised me more was the percentage of people who are driving sticks and looking for cars with manual transmissions. From Product Design and Development,

...consider the findings of Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research, which conducts extensive surveys at the retail end of the automotive business. He says that for the past three years, women, not men, have driven the manual transmission market.

In last year’s survey, 14.3 percent of women versus just 8.5 percent of men were shopping for a stick shift. In 1985, the numbers were dramatically reversed: 4.4 percent of women versus 52.8 percent of men.

I wonder what has prompted the change? Control? Manuals used to be cheaper? Flexbility? One of the suggestions about why over 80% of cars on the road are automatics is that people are doing so much more intheir cars -- cell phones, Starbucks coffee, etc. They don't have a hand free any longer to shift. Sounds reasonable to me.

Although I'm still looking for manuals when I buy my next car.

Beastie Update

Just an update on Rukh. He's doing pretty well, although we can tell that he's not feeling terrific. We're not sure if it's because of the new drugs he's on, or just feeling crappy in general. He's on a major antibiotic daily, Piroxicam (like Rimdayl) as an anti-inflammatory, and Cytoxin every other day as a low-dose chemo drug.

It's supposed to slow things down a bit, but we're not sure that it's worth it if the combination makes him queasy and unhappy. If he's only got a few weeks or months left, I'd rather they all be as happy as possible, you know? So, we're giving it a week and we'll see if he perks up or not.

We're also looking at putting him on thyroid meds to see if that also makes him feel a bit better. HE's always been on the low end of normal, which is low for an Akita. He wasn't symptomatic before, but with everything else that's going on, he seems to be now -- losing his fur, feeling lethargic, etc. It's hard to decide what to do; with so many drugs in his system, and so much happening in the last few weeks we can't tell what's causing the problems, so it's just shooting in the dark.

But, he's still happy to go for a short walk, get's excited about biscuits, and seems to be feeling ok, if not good at this point. He gets tired really quickly, and sleeps a lot, but that's to be expected. At the moment, he's racked out inthe living room, after having had pizza for lunch.

Dog Food Recall

By now, everyone knows about the Menu Foods pet food recall -- apparently the new info is that hte culprit is a chemical used as rat poison that contaminated the wheat-gluten that the company imports from China. The chemical is not illegal in China.

If you feed either canned food or those little foil packets of food from any of fifty three name brands, definitely check the list of recalled foods here.

Makes me wonder if it's worth paying a premium for Eukanuba when the same plant produces wall-mart brand goods, too. So far, this does not extend to dried kibble, but I have to wonder.

Buttons

I heard a perfectly common-sense theory on why women's clothing buttons "backwards" -- ie, left-handed with buttons on the right, and men's clothing buttons right-handed, with the buttons on the left. I never really thought about it, except to laugh a bit when one of my coats is "backwards" for me or I wear on of the Adorable Husband's shirts.

The explanation? Buttons showed up on women's clothing in the mid-19th century, when the whole concept of "idle rich" was a real biggie. Women's buttons were backwards because the had to be right-handed for the maid. Men usually dressed themselves (although not always, I guess), and so they needed to have the buttons properly placed for a right-handed person to dress themself, while women had assistance and thus the buttons were placed for a right-handed person to dress someone else.

Kind of elegantly simple, don't you think?

There are, of course, many other theories (including some cockamamie idea that it forces women to use their inferior hand to remind them that they are inferior to men).

Someone else has spent a LOT of time thinking about the buttons quandary, and has written up a neat article on it.

Brilliant

Archaeologists have argued and puzzled about how the enormous stones of Stonehenge were moved and set upright, how the many-ton blocks of the pyramids were moved, how people without benefit of pulleys and complex machinery could move these enormous weights.

Well, the elegant and amazingly simple solution of a retired Flint, MI carpenter may be just the ticket. Wally Wallington has figured out how to move enormous stones by himself, how to tilt up the standing stones, he even moved his son-in-law's barn 300 feet by himself. He has a website explaining how he figures all of this out. Brilliant. You can watch the entire proces here.

Absolutely brilliant. A wooden crossbar, a few stones and one human. He raised, moved, and set a 10-ton stone by himself with tools available to neolithic builders. Wow.