Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

Belated Saturday Freya

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Were you looking for Saturday Freya? No? I knew that title just wasn’t catchy enough to stick!

Saturday’s class was pretty uneventful. Freya works a lot better in her Saturday class than her weeknight class. I’m sure it has a lot to do with the fact that she gets to play for a while at home before we head out to class. For an early weeknight class, I’m running her out the door within 20 minutes after getting home and neither of us has time to relax.

We’ll have to work through it, though. For the upcoming trial, the Sunday 9:00 am start time and a very short drive to the trial location means we should have ample time for proper warm-up (including mental warmup, especially for me). For our weeknight class this week, I’ll have to hope for a slow day so I can try leaving work a little bit earlier and get in an actual warmup before leaving.

(NaBloPoMo | November ’09: 3 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 248 of 274)

So many online places… so little time

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A couple of days ago, I noticed a Photobucket placeholder image that was a little different than the one we’ve all seen that appears whenever an item stored on Photobucket has been moved or deleted. This one said “Account inactive” in red text, followed by “[username]’s account has been inactive for 90 days.” It has been close to 90 days since I logged in to my own Photobucket account, so I went to check in on my own files.

I found this in the Photobucket FAQ:

Why were my linked images deactivated?

If you do not log into your Free account within a 90-day period (three months), Photobucket deactivates your linked images on other websites. These linked images will be reactivated when you log into your account.

Important! If you do not log into your account within a 365-day period, your account will also be deactivated. If you go Pro, your account and linked images to third-party websites will remain active for the duration of your Pro subscription.

Ooookay. Good to know. I don’t know whether email notifications of the policy change were sent out or not, just that I do not remember getting one. I’m not upset, because everything I have on Photobucket (or Flickr, or YouTube, or Facebook, or… anywhere) also lives on a CD, DVD, thumb drive, the giant-ass external hard drive, and/or the internal hard drive of one or more computers. Hey, I didn’t say I was super organized about my data. But I do back it up somewhere, even if I’m not always 100% sure where. It just makes me wonder how often I should check in on my semi-dormant online places, or whether I should dump some of them completely.

Speaking of dumping online places, back in September, I completely left the VZones virtual worlds where I had been a member for over five years. I spent a fairly large amount of time there when I was a member (in fact, I originally joined to have something fairly time-consuming to occupy idle moments on days when my husband was at the firehouse), but strangely enough, I don’t find myself missing them at all.

I’m not sure whether it’s even worth caring about, because you can delete almost all of your personal information before quitting, but there are sure a lot of places, mostly forums, that do not physically delete your account when you quit. I am guessing they have to keep the member count artificially inflated to keep the advertisers happy. There are no technical reasons to prevent you from deleting an account from the database that I know of. So yeah, your accounts won’t be consecutively numbered any longer, but that doesn’t — or shouldn’t — actively screw up anything.

Just going through my bookmarks, I can see a bunch of places that I don’t visit much any more. I’ll really have to decide whether they should be dumped permanently.

(NaBloPoMo | November ’09: 2 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 247 of 274)

Rescue me (this time, not the TV show)

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These days, I’m not able to contribute as much time and money as I would like to… well, a number of very good causes. One of those causes is Rottweiler rescue. Today I gave a few hours of my time to help get Rollo, an abandoned Rottweiler, from his temporary foster home in Ohio to the rescue in Wisconsin who will be getting him ready for his next chance at a good life. He was a little scared, but he was a nice dog, not aggressive or wild, and traveled well for me as we went from a meeting spot in the southwest suburbs to the next meeting spot just over the Illinois/Wisconsin state line.

Although many potential adopters are now aware of the number of purebred dogs that find themselves homeless each year, I am not sure that the advantages of adopting from a breed rescue rather than a shelter could be considered widespread common knowledge yet.

In most cases, a dog adopted through breed rescue has been evaluated by people familiar with and knowledgeable about the breed. The dog may have also spent time with a foster family where any problems would be noted and worked on, and information passed on to the adopter.

If you are concerned that adopting a dog through breed rescue means condemning a shelter dog to death, please know that in many cases, purebred rescue dogs do come from shelters. Many of the transports I have assisted with are to move a dog from a high-kill shelter to a breed rescue foster home.

My current dogs were both acquired as show prospects. This does not mean that I do not support rescue, just that I wanted a show dog. Our last rescued Rottweiler was a very important part of our family and we miss her to this day. She was a very maternal presence of the tough love variety and when Freya and Axel were puppies, I always wished that Missy were still around to “raise” them.

If you are looking to add a purebred dog to your family, and are not interested in showing or breeding, please consider your local breed rescue as you go about your search.

(NaBloPoMo | November ’09: 1 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 246 of 274)

Freya’s Midweek Mischief – not our best work

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Sometimes Freya and I work in perfect harmony. Wednesday evening’s class was not one of those times.

I’m posting a video from our training session anyway. It doesn’t show our best work (I sincerely pray that is not our best work, anyway) but it does demonstrate how video can be a huge help in identifying areas to work on.

For example, I could feel she was sometimes lagging behind me, particularly on the straight figure 8 through the cones. What I didn’t realize is just how much she was lagging at points, and how little encouragement I was giving her to keep up, until I watched the video.

One thing that we lost most of our points on in our first trial in July was for not having a loose leash. Video is almost essential to help with this, because the leash doesn’t always feel particularly tight in your hands (or maybe that should say my hands) even when it is tight enough to warrant a point deduction.

So here we are. Don’t laugh too hard, and hopefully next week’s video will show our better sides!

A Rottweiler opens the mailbox…

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Recently, I was fortunate enough to receive a pay-it-forward from Jen of Jensconsin. Along with the lovely and warm mittens that will help keep away the chill of soon-to-be winter, there were some treats for the Rottweilers from Jen’s son. Thank you so much!

I’ll be doing a bloggy pay-it-forward here at Rottweilers Ate My Laptop sometime during the winter.

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Freya misunderstands Jen’s note and decides the mittens are for her. Here, she has not quite figured out that her lack of thumbs is going to be a problem.

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Freya finally figures out that the cookies, not the mittens, are for her. She doesn’t take her eyes off my hand till the cookie arcs in her direction.

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Freya once again laments her lack of thumbs as she tries to figure out how to get Axel’s cookies, too. She vows to figure out the Zip-Loc principle before Axel returns home from the shows.

(NaBloPoMo | 75% Challenge: 245 of 274)