Recently a sad thing happened. We found our white toy poodle, Jemimah Jean, dead in our garage on Thursday night a week ago (the 23rd of Feb).

She had been a bit subdued for maybe the last week, but we don't know what she was sick with. A few days previous I'd given her a pat and remember thinking she had a lot of fleas; we'd planned to give the dogs a bath that weekend and give them their flea treatment after. Both dogs were being kept outside coz they were overdue for a wash.

Mimah had been an outside dog for the last few years, so my 4-year-old and 2-year-old were pretty much alright with it, but my wife and I can remember when she was a gorgeous puppy galloping around our old rental house. She was a big part of our lives back then.

Then on Sunday we went to give my other dog a bath -- he's a black toy poodle called Berry. We discovered he was smothered in ticks! They were clustered all over him. I'd trimmed him maybe a month before, and only found a few ticks then, but our grass has been pretty long lately and I think perhaps he'd picked up whatever ticks had been on Jemimah as well.

My wife went out and bought a can of an acaricide called Nucidol to wash Berry in. When I read the how-to instructions, they told me I had to wear a long sleeved cotton shirt and cotton pants, a washable hat, waterproof gloves to the elbow, and if a drop got on me I had to go and scrub down in the shower with soap. I decided it was a job for a professional, and booked a mobile dog wash to come by around 11am Monday to do Berry's tick bath.

On Monday morning, my wife was watching Berry through the window and thought he looked a bit woozy. We decided to bring him in to a vet for a quick checkup, so I drove him down the road to a nearby vets and had him checked over.

The vet was amazed at the number of ticks on him but said the Nucidol bath he was booked in for was the right way to go. Otherwise his heartbeat was good, his temp was good, and he seemed fine. I bought some Frontline tick spray to use after Berry's tick wash, dropped him back home and went off to work.

Maybe an hour later, my wife was calling Berry and when he didn't come, went looking for him. She found him down the side of the house, lying against the fence. He was twitching a bit but basically floppy and couldn't lift his head to look at her. She bundled him up and drove him back down to the vet.

The vet apparently shoved some other dog they had right off of surgery table, and started checking Berry over. He was massively anaemic and perhaps he'd had a sudden serum response to tick saliva or something. They told my wife they'd work on him and she went home and called me.

I got to the vets around 10:30am I think. Berry was on the surgery table breathing oxygen through a nose cone. He was getting fluid from an IV and they were shaving him down and spraying his ticks with Frontline tick spray. With the rehydration he was stirring a bit, but his blood test results came back and he was really low in red cells -- he needed a blood transfusion.

So the vet assistant went off in her car and brought back this huge dog. I think it might have been her sister's dog or something, but I'm not sure the sister got asked.. anyway the vet and dog went into another room and ten minutes later the vet came back with a big bag of blood -- it looked like maybe three-quarters of a litre or more. Berry weighed just over 3 kgs, so it was maybe a quarter of his body weight.

They hooked the blood up to Berry's IV. Soon he was stirring a bit more and actually recognising me. The vet and assistant started to relax a bit around then. About 15 minutes after his transfusion started he was doing obviously better and they could move him (with blood IV still going) off the table into a cage. I went home and filled my wife in, and finally went back to work.

On the way home that afternoon I stopped in to see him. He was subdued but looking around. They told me they'd move him to a differnet vet surgery to keep him overnight (where I think someone comes in during the night to check the animals). He spent Tuesday and Wednesday there, with occasional visits from my wife and I. On Tuesday they stopped the blood drip came out but he had a fluid IV the whole time.

Last night (Wednesday) I brought him home. He seems pretty much ok now -- he's been a bit quieter than usual but I expect that's mostly from being a bit overwhelmed with all the stuff that happened. And the total bill was something like $530 -- about half what I expected.

So, that's the story of my last week or so. We've said goodbye to a pet we loved, and worked to save the life of another. And I'm much more familiar with the lifecycle of Brown Dog Tick now than I ever wanted to be.

I found this story on Slashdot, so it might not be news to one of my two readers. But I know Mum doesn't read Slashdot.. anyway, check out this freaky wasp. It slides it's stinger around in a cockroach's brain to find the right spot to inject venom to disable the roach's "escape" reflex.

Urgh. Freaky freaky freaky.

This admittedly geeky little song thing has a certain charm to it. Here's a little snipped of lyrics..

.."It's free!" they say -- if you can get it to run
The geeks say "Hey, that's half the fun"
Yeah well I gotta girlfriend, and things to get done
The Linux O. S. sux..

..but don't worry, every OS gets a serve.

It's been really, really hot here.. up to 41 degrees Celcius, which is about 106 degrees F.

I've seens a couple of traffic islands where the concrete slabs have been pushed up by heat expansion. Check this out..

When I first saw this one the apex was 6 to 8 inches above where it should be. I took this photo about a week later; the white grinding traces in this photo is where the city has ground down the ends of the slab to stop it from standing up, which is why it's not as high here as I remembered it.
false Daniel 2006-01-03T13:30:00+10:00 2006-01-03T03:36:57Z 2006-01-03T03:36:57Z tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17668438.post-113625941741941476

A few weeks ago I heard that Joss Whedon had given up on the Firefly/Serenity universe and wouldn't be making any more stories with those characters. Well now Slashdot pointed me to this comment where Joss says that's crap.

All right, now I have to jump in and set the record straight. EW is a fine rag, but they do take things out of context. Obviously when I said I had 'closure', what I meant was "I hate Serenity, I hated Firefly, I think my fans are stupid and Nathan Fillion smells like turnips."

I hate to sound like a huge geek, but.. woohoo!

false Daniel 2005-12-21T21:48:00+10:00 2005-12-21T12:09:21Z 2005-12-21T12:04:48Z tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17668438.post-113516668890779290

It's been really, really hot this year, so whilst on my traditional fruitless search through the shops for good Christmas presents, I've been buying more drinks than usual.

A few days ago I wanted a drink and all there was to choose from was some juice selling for about $375 per fancy glass bottle, or Powerade.

After a lot of soul searching I opted for the Powerade. As I took my first swallow, an idea for a research project leaped into my mind. I resolved to seek an answer to the question: is there any flavour of Powerade that doesn't taste like a sweaty armpit?

So far I've ruled out blue, yellow, and red. I'm not sure how many more "flavours" there are.. hopefully not many.

false Daniel 2005-12-09T12:47:00+10:00 2005-12-09T03:01:03Z 2005-12-09T02:55:14Z tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17668438.post-113409691406106424

I'd embarassed to admit that I'm quite excited about the six new Microsoft fonts.

I use Trebuchet a lot because it's clean and friendly; it hard to tell with such a small sample, but the new font Calibri might be able to replace Trebuchet as my favourite.

I have always had a soft spot for Georgia too, especially in bold, but it's a bit too spotchy for my liking, and the loony hanging numerals always bugged me. Perhaps Cambria can do what Georgia doesn't quite achieve.

Ok, I feel better for having indulged. If you follow the link above be sure to scroll down to the 6th comment, about the way the font descriptions are written:

The font descriptions remind me of some wine reviews... "it has an open, friendly design with just a hint of broccoli. The T's are assertive, while the I's are impetuous.."

Funny.

false Daniel 2005-12-06T16:20:00+10:00 2005-12-06T06:42:47Z 2005-12-06T06:30:01Z tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17668438.post-113385060120576743

A brief break from the insanity of XSLT this afternoon has allowed me to recover my position as the Emperor of MiniPutt.

My MiniPutt minions:

• Simon
• Tim

false Daniel 2005-10-19T17:07:00+10:00 2005-12-21T12:12:50Z 2005-10-19T07:08:20Z tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17668438.post-112970570046570960

Hmm, it looks like Blogger is having occasional trouble with the images I'm posting. I'll fix them all up soon.
Update: I've moved the blog to my danielbaird.com server, so now I can put images where I want them. So now it's all good.

false Daniel 2005-10-17T12:16:00+10:00 2005-11-23T09:30:14Z 2005-10-17T02:27:00Z tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17668438.post-112951602040438119

I found a great interactive (java) charty, mappy thing that shows the popularity of given names. It's hard to explain.. go there a give it a go. Don't miss the bit where you can type the first few letters of a name to see just those that match.
http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

false Daniel 2005-10-14T15:52:00+10:00 2005-11-23T09:32:59Z 2005-10-14T06:06:34Z tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17668438.post-112926999463169255

The well known Nifty Corners can be used to apply rounded corners to page elements. Nifty and similar tools add a bunch of elements of varying heights to simulate a rounded corner. I've realised that there's a cool way to do corners in HTML documents that uses lots fewer inserted elements than Nifty Corners.

The trick is, that when borders meet, browsers draw a nice diagonal chamfer. Like in this picture.. see how the browser's rendering of the borders makes a nice neat diagonal line where the borders meet.

Nothing special yet, right? Next, we'll see what happens when there's differently sized borders, and no content.

Ok, this is the same div with zero width and height, wide bottom and right borders, and narrow top and left borders. The 'content' of the div woulld normally be the bit between the four borders, but because the content is zero sized, the borders are triangles that meet in the centre; of off-centre, in this case. Hmm, interesting. Next we'll try less colours..

Now the top and left borders are coloured white, like the background. The bottom and right borders are blue.. and you can see the effect I've been going for here: a two-line approximation of a curve. Shiny.

This example is quite large, but at 10 pixels across instead of 40, it's quite a nice looking corner. Position this one div over the boring square corner of a blue box, and you've got a nice curvy looking corner.

It gets even cooler.. if you put a second div inside the first, you can have four lines to approximate the curve. Like this:
I've coloured the inner div lighter than the outer so you can see where they happen.

Ok that's as much as I can write today -- I'll come back to this later and maybe whip up a function to apply this rounding to your corners.

false Daniel 2005-10-14T14:09:00+10:00 2005-11-23T09:22:14Z 2005-10-14T04:15:35Z tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17668438.post-112926333511456026

This great set of posts are from a dad whose six year old wanted to make a computer game. Not exactly sure why I liked reading them so much.. maybe I'm hoping I'll have to handle a situation like that in a couple of years (my eldest is 4).

false Daniel 2005-10-10T15:38:00+10:00 2005-11-23T09:18:26Z 2005-10-10T05:39:26Z tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17668438.post-112892276661977465

MIT have this great design for a laptop.. small, rugged, super-portable. The keyboard and screen rotate individually around the handle, and inside the handle is the power unit -- including a hand crank for manual recharging.

The total cost is supposed to be US$100. The idea is to mass manufacture (minimum order is 1 million) and sold to governments in poorer countries to provide to schoolchildren. Lauch date is 2006 or 2007.

Glorious pics and diagrams-of-use here, including the integrated carry strap / power cord and other great ideas.

This whole design is sweeet, and I want one in a way which I am sure is quite unhealthy. Hopefully there will be a retail release so I won't be reduced to mugging some poor Cambodian kid (told you it was unhealthy).

false