Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

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

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

Small update: show dog heat stroke deaths

by

Thanks to Di for this update. Mary Wild’s arraignment was scheduled for yesterday, August 12. According to the Jefferson County public court records, Ms. Wild waived formal arraignment and criminal setting scheduled for September 15.

Contact information for the Jefferson County prosecutor’s office is still available at Kinship Circle. Help make sure that this crime is punished with the maximum penalty allowable.

Links to earlier posts on this topic (some contain links to news stories if you are just now hearing about this):
Killer heat: don’t let it get you and yours
Update: show dog heat stroke deaths
Update: more on show dog heat stroke deaths

(NaBloPoMo | August ’09: 13 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 201 of 274)

More to life, other than being really, really ridiculously good looking?

by

Yesterday I mentioned that most dogs have a rather large number of nicknames. My dogs are no exception, and Axel probably has more than his share. Sorry to the poor dog that has only one or two names because Axel has taken so many! One of those came from his budding show career: Zoolander.

His return home after a few months on the show circuit happened to coincide with a showing of Zoolander on cable. I like Ben Stiller, and I have always enjoyed this satire that makes fun of modeling and fashion. And really, what are dog conformation shows? Okay, fine, I guess they are more like beauty pageants. But the thought of Axel as Ben Stiller’s “really, really ridiculously good looking” but slightly dim male model Derek Zoolander character just makes me smile. For the record, though, I don’t think Axel is dim. But he is ridiculously good looking.

If you are not familiar with the movie, Derek Zoolander does have a problem. He is not an ambi-turner: he can’t turn left. This is hugely funny to me as it applies to Axel Zoolander, because in conformation showing, all you do is turn left. Watch the next time a dog show is on Animal Planet or something. The dogs are gaited counterclockwise around the ring, and if you watch when the dogs go down and back individually, the dog usually turns to the left to come back.

This gets even better when practicing Rally Obedience. Derek Zoolander compensated for his inability to turn left by making 270° right turns. Imagine my delight that 270° right is one of the stations for Rally Novice. By now, Axel Zoolander is probably getting a little tired of hearing my stupid jokes about ambi-turning.

Fortunately, even though he has to put up with my lame jokes, Axel is in fact getting very good at ambi-turning, with some very nice work on all of the required turns, including the 270° right and left and 360° right and left turns. I think he knows there’s more to life than just being really, really, really good looking!

(NaBloPoMo | August ’09: 12 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 200 of 274)

Are you smarter than a two-year-old?

by

This article on dog intelligence has been floating around for a couple of days now. According to Freya and Axel, the part where Professor Stanley Coren and team put the Rottweiler in ninth place on their list of the ten most intelligent breeds, has got to be totally wrong, since Rottweilers are obviously the smartest dogs on the planet and maybe in the universe. I happen to agree with them, but we are admittedly somewhat biased.

I’m not exactly shocked at too many of the findings. The fact that most dogs can understand as much language and math as a two-year-old human child is not surprising at all. Ask most dog owners how many nicknames their dogs have and respond to, and how many toys and people the dog can identify by name. Add to that the commands that even barely-trained dogs know, like sit and down, and that’s already a lot of words out of the 165 to 250 words, signs and signals that most dogs are supposedly able to understand.

This amused me, though: “A survey of more than 200 dog obedience judges in the US and Canada has also helped to reveal the most intelligent breeds.” It’s a good thing that an expanded version of the article linked does go on to mention that there is a difference between intelligence and trainability. My dogs are very intelligent, but I can’t say they’ve been particularly easy to train. Not for me, anyway. Maybe I’m the one that is not smarter than a two-year-old!

This statement, though, is something I’ve seen so many times:
“[Dogs] can also deliberately deceive, which is something that young children only start developing later in their life.”

When our first two Rottweilers, Heidi and Oscar, would be given treats at the same time, Oscar would usually finish his first. If it was a large treat, like a rawhide bone or a large biscuit, he’d finish well before Heidi. One day, he was watching Heidi still enjoying her treat. He got up and ran to the back door and barked a couple of times. We, and Heidi, of course assumed that Oscar wanted a potty break, so we all got up and headed to the door. Oscar ran back around to where Heidi had left her treat and grabbed it. And that was all he wanted. He was able to fool Heidi on several other occasions with this trick, but eventually she did catch on.

And this is probably more misdirection than deception, but every one of our dogs, past and present, has used the trick of parading some item back and forth and making it seem super happy fun to try and get a more coveted toy away from one of the others. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Intelligence, instinct, deception, whatever. It’s still fun to watch.

(NaBloPoMo | August ’09: 11 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 199 of 274)

Now where did I leave my linkage

by

I almost never use URL shorteners except on Twitter. I like seeing the domain that a link is originating from, and as long as character count is not an issue as it is for Twitter or SMS, I do not want to click on a shortened URL and take the chance that it is not what it is advertised to be. I really like that TweetDeck gives you the chance to see the long version of the shortened URLs, and that FriendFeed expands the URLs for its feed. Sorry. Just paranoid, I guess.

So the closing of Tr.im won’t affect me much, if at all. Most of the shortened URLs I’ve used on Twitter, regardless of the shortener, are links to time-sensitive news stories and will probably expire within a few months even if I had used the full URL.

This did, however, make me think about linkage in general. It led me to backup my Delicious.com bookmarks, which I have not done in a very long time. I also scheduled some time to check my blogs and journals for dead linkage.

Of course, the big social media news of the day was that of Facebook acquiring FriendFeed. I’m still deciding what I think of that, probably because I don’t use either Facebook or FriendFeed to best advantage.

I am so sick of all the games and apps on Facebook, mostly the fact that game scores and quiz results are considered “news” for the news feed, that Facebook is mostly unusable to me. By the way, if you are a Facebook friend and have actually posted real news or better yet, photos, you might want to go old-school and email me or call me so I know that it’s worth digging through the so-called “news” to find whatever you’ve posted!

I joined FriendFeed a while back, but I haven’t quite figured out how it fits into my what-I-do online. Same with Ping.fm. I don’t currently use the social aspect of Delicious.com at all right now. I use it simply to make my most-used bookmarks available to me at any location. I suppose I should look into the sharing and social aspect as well. I guess I should take some time to update my social media social life in general. Talk about demented and sad, but social, huh?

(NaBloPoMo | August ’09: 10 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 198 of 274)

MiFi 2200: would be nice, but…

by

I was at our local Verizon Wireless store with my husband on Friday. Our intended missions (possible early upgrade for his phone, holster to fit over a Seidio Innocase for me) both failed miserably. But I did get to check out the new-ish BlackBerry Tour (nice enough, but definitely not worth the early upgrade cost for me) and the MiFi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot.

vzwmifi2200

The MiFi 2200 is something I’d like to have just because it is cool. But since Verizon Wireless doesn’t have a true unlimited mobile broadband plan any longer, it’s too pricey. The 5GB mobile broadband plan is about $60 per month, and with a low cap like that, I can’t justify it solely for the cool factor. The discounted cost of the device itself with a two-year contract would be $99, and that part is fine with me.

I’m scrambling to think of a way to cost-justify it, and I just can’t. Even if I were still attending and doing the show secretary thing for sieger shows, most discount hotels have free or inexpensive broadband available so I wouldn’t truly need my own wireless hotspot.

I still want one, though!

(NaBloPoMo | August ’09: 9 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 197 of 274)