Turkish Dogs - particularly Anatolian Shepherd Dogs

I ran into this amazing video a couple months ago.


I haven't run into any help files that allow me to stop the autoplay. What an amazing woman. I wish I could hear what she does, but apparently she can't hear what she plays, so much as sense it in other ways.


Got an email yesterday that advised a 'blue plate special' on some casual games at Sandlot. Only $5 a game. Not bad! And there's a pirate themed one called "Pirate Island", apparently a variation on 'match 3' with some pretty interesting graphics. :)

Also ran into a google ad for yet another Pirate-themed massively multiplayer web game called "Dogs at Sea III".
One of my goals this year is to at least try a MMORPG for a few hours. As yet, I haven't found one that has a theme that really appeals to me. Maybe I'm just not MMORPG material, but maybe it is just because I'm not sure what I want to see in such a game. I certainly won't be able to get involved with guilds/alliances and planned battles since I'm often away from the keyboard when things get interesting (speaking from recent experience with simple real time chat services!)

About Dogs of the Seas!
"Dogs of the Seas" is a browser based Massive Multiplayer game.

You start your adventure as an unknown pirate in the heart of the Caribbean. Battle and Trade your way to affluence and standing. Your armed battle ships that sail through the Caribbean shall make you famous and dreaded pirate! Find valuable treasures, or hunt for other dreaded pirates. Take missions from the local agents, and qualify for adventurous smuggler jobs, pursue other smugglers or take part in regular events. Handle and trade with rare goods or produce valuable and powerful ships or cannons. Wild computer pirates and peaceful dealers populate the Caribbean waters along with thousands of fellow pirates. Sink your opponents and plunder their vessels in real-time battles player vs player (PvP) or against the computer generated factions. Trade with alliances or friends on the high seas for valuable possessions. Create an alliance or join another to participate in the political turmoil of the Caribbean.

Lastly, this picture of a vast assortment of fresh lokum (Turkish delight) at an Istanbul market has been driving me nuts. Must go to Eve's Market and pick up a few boxes this week.

Labels: Food, games, Video

I got some fun pics of Helmut, the Beachboy in SoCal, enjoying the beach. I always get a kick out of these blackberry pics from Geno! This is one Anatolian boy that is sure getting a lot of socialization. :)

And here's one a bit so close, he didn't fit into the frame. Looks like he's having fun with a cute golden retriever.

Late at night, trying to sleep, I can't sleep and trying to keep out of range of hubby who is coughing up a storm (he's the one that got the flu shot!), I ran into a cool logic and problem solving game called World of Goo. Intrigued, I downloaded the demo to my bedside notebook and get a kick of it so far. The opening screens, the humor and some of the graphics are so weird! The game is designed primarily by two guys rather than a whole army of programmers. If you like what Wiki has to say about it in the first link, check out its homepage at http://2dboy.com/ and download the free demo there.

Must be the doggie person in me but when I saw these rugs over at Weburbanist, I was sure some of them would make great beds for a snoozy Anatolian shepherd. I just don't get the one that looks like the aftermath of a sheep shearing event but there's plenty of oddness to be had there.

Hat tip to Diane who shared a very interesting blog post about service animals, particularly the alternative ones. The movie showing Panda the minihorse being clicker trained is amazing! No captions but if you have some familiarity with clicker training, it's easy to see what is being targeted and how well Panda is doing in this training. The NYT article linked in post is a long and interesting read that might annoy some of my service animal associates but the whole matter is probably a 'do not miss' for most!

Not the least of it all, tonight while resetting a license for some publications I get from Zinio, I ran into Arabian Horse World! Check it out. If you like horsey eye candy, take a look at what is available. You can get the sample copy for only 99c (Nov 08). I was a long time subscriber of the paper version which was a very heavy, glossy paged quality publication that would fill up a rural mailbox in its cardboard box back in the mid eighties. Well, now you can see the stunning photography and beautiful horses but in lighter-than-air digital format. What's not to like? Check out the link.

Labels: behavior, compu-internet, games, Helmut, horse

Happy New Year!! :) :D



Over the past couple days, I installed my new hard drives. My goal was to clone/remove my old IDE hard drive and end up with two SATA hard drives and two optical IDE drives.

My newest hard drive is a Seagate SATA internal, 750 Gig Barracuda (refurbished), whose namesake is a ferocious fish. Something like the fish in the picture. I figured, since SATA drives aren't jumpered and would default to the order that they are plugged into the mainboard, I didn't expect a problem connecting them. According to the plan, the Barracuda was going to rip all the files out of the old Caviar IDE and become my main drive. The Barracuda would then run with a SATA Caviar drive which would provide additional storage. Theoretically my SATA system could be 4 or 5 times faster than with the old style IDE hard drive. Sounds good to me!

Well my Caviar drives are made by Western Digital (WD), a different brand than the Barracuda, and the WD models are named something delicious, Caviar. Mmm, yummy. Supposedly the two SATA's, the WD Caviar and the Seagate Barracuda could share the same tank!

Erg... With the three drives plugged in, installing the new Barracuda created some odd glitches. The two Caviars were conspiring!

When I used the WD software to find the Barracuda in order to clone my soon-to-be-retired IDE working drive, the software never recognized that the unformatted Barracuda was attached. Bleh... When you don't stick with a brand loyalty, sometimes it gets weird, at least until the drives are all formatted. It was the Barracuda that needed formatting. The pair of Caviar drives together didn't want to talk to the Barracuda, even with all sorts of BIOS settings and with me wearily changing the mainboard cable connections. It took me a while to work through my list of ideas and I finally found the trick that would work. I temporarily disconnected the SATA Caviar then booted only with the old IDE Caviar and the new unformatted SATA Barracuda. Finally the software realized I had an unformatted Barracuda to install. I was able to format the Barracuda and clone the old IDE Caviar over to it.

Now that old Caviar is retired from my system and will gain a loving home in another of our machines.

If I sound like I'm babbling, chalk it up as a weird techy fishing story and the late hour! ;) (In the meantime, I had also discovered the old versions of DOS I had, could not cope with the chipset of such a huge drive. Remember when HUGE was something like 3 Gig?)

Anyway, I used MaxBlast (which is Seagate compatible now) to do the cloning. My goodness, it took about a day to clone the old drive over to the Barracuda. It seems to have gone very well despite the quirky fishy start. Now in place of the old IDE hard drive, the old IDE cable is now attached to a DVD and also to one CD drive (master/slave). My SATA Caviar and Barracuda hard drives are sharing the same tank and sharing files. However, I'm not yet sure if I'm all that much faster yet!

I still have to deal with some registry issues that happened when my main board died in December, but I feel pretty good about this machine so far. Hopefully I can get by without doing a fresh install of XP Pro.

TADA!!!
Together, they can make a difference. Caviar & Barracuda sushi anyone? ;)
(it's a generic picture; not barracuda sushi. most likely salmon with salmon eggs)
For some reason, I have a hankering for sushi.

Labels: compu-internet, Food, frustration

I love this slide show which Marvie sent around this time. I just don't tire of seeing the beautiful photography. The philosophical reminders about human expectations is sometimes amusing; sometimes bittersweet, but just about anyone regardless of faith, philosophical leanings or stance can enjoy it. :)

Among other things of beauty, I'm something of an aquarium nut. I used to keep 3 or four different aquariums when I lived in a larger house. I used to imagine some day having a waterfall and koi pond indoors (a sort of atrium) and an aquarium the size of one wall. I've kept many kinds of fish over the years but have never had salt water fish. Anyway, I always enjoy seeing beautiful or interesting aquarium set ups. Today Weburbanist has such a presentation.

Molly. Isn't she pretty? I've had several inquiries for her but some people are just too far away to do a 'trial' to see if she will work out, but inquiries lately have been stepping up. The perfect home for Molly will arrive yet! Molly is a pretty 'akbash' style female that we picked up from Placer County animal control to help her have another chance at finding a forever home.

One more...

Labels: Critters, DigitalArt, Molly

A pic from Geno!
Dom with a NICE whopper of a Christmas present -- and Helmut, the Anatolian, up close in a sweet holiday blackberry picture.

Here's a Christmas pic from Rebecca showing Helmut's sister, Jasmine. Jasmine has happily adopted Rebecca's daughter's pug puppy for a bud. :)

Holidays and the end of the year can be such a mix of celebrations and losses. We've had great sadness over the untimely passing of several Anatolians and of other dogs belonging to friends and acquaintances in recent months. Two of these Anatolians were littermates to Ruya. One died after spay surgery and the other appears to have died in her sleep, cause unknown. :(

I also finally discovered the reason for the recent weird computer behavior and keyboard malfunctions when my motherboard suddenly failed in the middle of December. So apparently it had been gimping along and causing illogical patterns of malfunction. The good news is that despite the fact we couldn't plan a budget for this unfortunate event, the rebuild of this desktop machine is coming along nicely, albeit, a bit slowly. But it will be a pretty nice machine soon enough. Here's a useful page that was very helpful when I discovered a crash and a bad driver install had corrupted networking services in my registry.

Sending belated Christmas and holiday wishes for all. May the new year be brimming with the good things; with happiness, health, good luck, prosperity and success for us all. :) There is so much for which to be thankful.

Couldn't resist posting a fun video of Lucy tackling a job at a chocolate factory. Captioned, of course!

Labels: compu-internet, Helmut, Jasmine, Video

I love my doctor. Which is saying a lot when one is deaf and one is usually used to short notice appointment doctors that seem to be a little clueless with communicating with the deaf (duh, write it down Doc). My regular doc (no random one for me, thank you) made time for me this week and the short of it is that I'm on a round of antibiotics and have a thousands of bucks worth of scans and tests to come once a referral goes through. (sigh)

Computerwise, I've accumulated some hardware over the past year from various sales that I need to plug into this main machine. For the most part I'm just running out of drive space (blame it mostly on digital cameras, archiving digital pedigrees, also some movie clips and lots of music that hubby wants on the main network drive). Sometimes when space gets tight, weird annoying things happen. I'm still quite comfortably up to specifications for use of my various high resource, hardware hungry programs, and so nothing needs upgrades in that direction for at least another year or so.

I am however, still using IDE hard disk drives and am finally going to go all SATA when this update is done. Unfortunately I don't have all the cables I need yet. Plus, for the past several days or so, my cordless USB keyboard has suddenly started behaving oddly (again). It'll quit working (like totally dead, requiring reboot sometimes within minutes of a reboot) or will lag in bursts, sometimes skipping some keys as I type, or inserting some in multiples (ittttttt likeeeethiii) and function keys going bonkers at any time. argh. That is really irritating when trying to answer emails - makes the replies incoherent so I have a bunch in my draft boxes to get to. Without a keyboard it's difficult to do anything else! (the built in MS keyboard is just too slow for the amount of typing I have to do) I've tried different driver rollbacks and upgrades. Most of the keyboard errors reported online seem to have no fixes. I'm using an old fashioned, newish wired keyboard (PS2) for now but this may or may not be the fix since I had this problem with a favorite PS2 wired keyboard earlier this year - and NOW this kb is occasionally randomly inserting numbers into some w4ords as I type. BUT I need to be able to type to get any computer/internet stuff done!

One of the hard drives I'm installing is a refurbished (like NEW! lol) 750 gig Seagate Barracuda for which the right serial cable doesn't exist in my home, yet... So another delay in the making. But while looking for info on the cable to order or buy, I ran into this picture on google images ---
You can find the rest of the story at this link. If you just want to see the pictures scroll around the whole thread. I always enjoy seeing cool systems people put together and the stories behind them! As it provides useful information that can come in handy. Actually it's a great thread, if you start on page one where the computer-to-be is still in 20 zillion brand new exciting boxes. If you're like me or any of us nutters who need a machine customized to fit specific needs, and like to save money (and get premature grays) by 'rolling our own' computers -- the whole thread will remind you of the gamut of the silly mistakes, the bigger ones, the angst and gnashing of teeth that one might be able to relate to. ;) (btw, the photos of xipotec's new system are really cool... my main machine is not near as 'pretty' any more and I just removed enough dog hair from the bottom of the case to build a small rodent -- :p And notebook computers are just plain boring, I won't even mention them.)

Speaking of dog hair, why is it that two of my Anatolians (Boone and Ruya, born a month apart, January/February 2003) are fully molting their undercoat when the temperatures here are turning so chill!? (Night temps are in the mid-thirties fahrenheit, which converts metrically to about 195 kilometers -- thank you Bintie!) Bella, Coco (both the same age, Oct 2006) and Molly (rescue) are all in full coat with their winter insulation fully installed.

Labels: compu-internet, deaf, frustration, humor

Excellent Hip conformation in an Anatolian Shepherd Dog
(this is Semavi Burali "Bertha")

Caroline Southen has some updates on her November blog about Anatolian health. She's also updated the complete list of UK Anatolians that have ever obtained BVA hip ratings. The ratings include pass and fail, not just the good ones. Sadly, there are not more breeders in UK that check hips, and dysplastic dogs are commonly bred together. An international comparison of hit ratings is here.


There was a heartbreaking article in The Scientist just over a week ago, about two little twin girls who have a rare genetic disease called Nieman-Pick Type C (NPC). You do need to sign in as a free account holder to read the free article... here is an excerpt from this one to get you started.

What can two little girls teach us about Alzheimer's disease?

By Alison McCook

When you meet identical four-year old twins Addi and Cassi Hempel, you might notice something about the way they walk. They used to run around like other toddlers, but now they are more wobbly, more uncertain, and walk with their legs somewhat wide apart, as if aboard a boat. They can sway in any direction, losing their balance. They fall more often than they should.

They will notice you, and smile. They don't say words but they talk, a rhythmic, nonsensical babble from which a crystal-clear sound occasionally escapes: "ice cream," "paddycake," "four." Their heads have a slight bobble, and they sometimes can't angle their eyes downward, so they fall again.

Unlike most children, who get better at things with time, Addi and Cassi's gait will get worse, and they'll reach more for railings and furniture for support. They'll fall more, adding to the bruises that already dot their elbows and knees. The few steps in their parents' newly renovated house will become impossible; when walking gets too difficult, they'll use a wheelchair. They're not potty-trained, and likely never will be.

They will stop saying words, and may stop speaking altogether. Soon, they'll start to forget things they once remembered; like which bed is whose in the room they share, or who their parents are. They may start to have seizures. As their condition worsens, their swallowing will deteriorate, and their parents may place them on feeding tubes. In several years, they will likely die - first one, then the other. [to see the rest, go here...]

Reading the whole article put me into such a reflective and sad mood. While it's not quite the same thing, I remember reading "Flowers for Algernon" in a science fiction anthology of best selling stories. It was in the sixties when I used to read just about anything that didn't wiggle out of reach if I'd grab it. I understand there was later both a book and a movie based on the short story and these had changes in some details of the story. But never mind them!! I want to read the short story again. ah... found a copy of the original short story (circa 1959). Yay. :)

Labels: breed_info, Science

Silly stuff - Making my own picture font....

How to make your own font character in XP. The link gives the basic instructions.

I tried it out a couple months ago. The doggie image is based on an old gif I made when I first created my Semavi dog, Anatolian icon. Actually, it was in PCX format back when and the original didn't have a spike collar -- I just added the collar for this exercise. The dog is not a very good likeness of any of my dogs, but at the time it was all done dot by dot twenty years ago on an old XT computer with an old DOS computer, no Windows! I just hang on to the pic, never sure how I'll torture the thing next time I run into it. The odd thing about it is that over the years with different base image rendering programs, the proportions of the leg and body length changes depending on the program and font that renders it. Sometimes the image is very square and other times it is stretched left to right. I haven't tried to figure that out.

In this image for this font creating exercise, below, you can see what I mean about the changing proportions. :)
You can see it rendered above in Wordpad, along side other decorative fonts for fun. Real useful, ha, I know!

Give it a try if you've got a logo or evil little icon you want to mess with.


Now for ---
Something less intensive...

How to type upside down. (- go to the link which requires javascript)
I'd put a sample of what this ɯɐɹƃoɹd can do, it's so ʎןןıs, but you can go ʇno ʇı ʎɹʇ for yourself!


I found a wonderful captioned Bill Cosby video. Enjoy!

Labels: compu-internet, humor, Video

Happy Thanksgiving!

SEND a card to our troops! (courtesy of Xerox technology)

I ran into a variation on the turducken. I've never had one, and to many the original turducken was supposed to be a joke, but some people love and rave about it. Supposedly John Madden is one of them. I know I'm a meatarian type, so I'd be happy to try it but it's a lot of meat to fix at once for my purposes. Actually I've never had fried turkey either. When I first heard of that, I thought that must have been some sort of joke -- this was over fifteen years ago, but apparently there are now a variety of turkey fryers sold at cookware stores for making it throughout the year. No, this new creation I surfed into looks like something I'd have no patience to fix, and again it's too much meat to put by at once, but I'm sure I'd get first in line for, to try it out. :)

Check it out.... Turbaconducken (Turducken Wrapped in Bacon) from Bacon Today. I love Bacon. Don't have it often. I haven't even tried the chocolate dipped bacon candy yet, but as I love sweetened meats, like Canadian bacon, pineapple pizza; sweet and sour pork; baked ham with fruit & honey glaze. I can well imagine that chocolate covered bacon is on my list of to-dos. :)

Have a safe day!

Labels: Food, humor, strange

Bill Creswell finds captioned online videos or he captions many of them himself. He adds them to a VodPod feed via a widget which provides a constantly updating, wide variety of interesting pieces, from movie trailers, to music video with captioned lyrics, topics in disability, political stuff, oddball humor; many other things. He has another feed of his collection here http://ccmovies.org/ .

So cool! Much appreciated. I told him so. :)

I added his vodpod widget to the left panel of this template. You can find it quickly by clicking here. Take a look at some of the vids in the feed. There are many more on his various webpages, and the widget box gives a link to one of these collections. Thanks again, Bill! :D

Jamie Berke at About.com mentioned an interesting article about the idea of potentially using infrared to stimulate nerve cells in the ear to detect sound at a level better than that of current cochlear implants. The idea of being able to hear music again is very intriguing. The idea of ultra sensitive perception is something that transcends the imagination (or mine at least... I start thinking too much!)... I really wonder what it is that one actually senses when infrared is used this way. For some reason I get a weird vision of Telltale Hearts in the walls, alien communications, ticking watches, and peeling paint or other odd things I'd rather not be hearing. Time will tell if this technology will actually be useful.

Electrical stimulation of the inner ear by a cochlear implant produces blurred maps, but the light stimulation produced maps that were as sharp as those produced by sound in hearing guinea pigs, says Richter, who presented the findings at the Medical Bionics conference in Lorne, in the Australian state of Victoria, earlier this week.... [get the full article here at New Scientist]

Labels: deaf, Science, Video

Chickens do have amazing abilities. I thought this was one of the better videos on chicken head orientation. :)



Constitutional crisis?
I thought it a bit odd, what is going on for Donofrio. He set up a Blogger blog when another site of his went down temporarily. The Blogger blog has since been taken down for about 24 hours as of this writing.

American Thinker has much of the Hawaii birth certificate info up to date.
A news site in Oklahoma has another summary.

I thought Salon was a bit amusing, after all, elected officials say one thing during campaigns and then do another. Honeymoon killer - Salon

Labels: behavior, humor, Politics, Video

Discovered some very useful (free) tools for maintaining my bookmarks across several computers. I also needed a temporary solution for password storage. Found it all here.

I was amused to learn that Denofrio [sic?] "retired his license to practice law to become a professional poker player".

In something that sounds a bit completely different in a casual game, there is "Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!" which you can read about at the link. What an intriguing name for a game. As is typical of most casual games, you can try before you buy. You get the first 60 minutes of gameplay for free, then you can choose whether or not to buy the game so you can have more time to complete it and replay as desired. :)

A bit from the description given in the review at Gamezebo:

As it turns out, high school girls in the 1920s got into about as much trouble as they do nowadays - they just do it with flapper-style flair and scratchy swing music playing in the background. The game does a superb job of immersing you in the Roaring '20s, and the biggest treat of all is the irreverent dialogue. This isn't one of those games that you can just click through on your way to the next puzzle. Each sentence is dripping with wit, and – parents be warned – healthy doses of innuendo. ("I lost my cigarette lighter. If I don't find it, I'll have to ask a boy for a match. Who knows what he'll want in return!" or "Myrtle is an ignorant amateur at the art of passion. Why, last summer in India, I satisfied a Raja, while remaining full flowered.")

That's all for now...

Labels: compu-internet, Firefox, Freebies, games, humor