A voice-enabled, waterproof, GPS-enabled cell phone from Pets Mobility tracks your dog’s location. It’s also a two-way cell phone, with an auto-answer feature that puts your voice on speakerphone. You can talk to your pup and he can respond with a bark. The doggy phone has a “call home” button so if anyone finds him, they can use the phone to contact you.
I’m not sure I see the value of talking to my dog, but the rest of it makes sense.
L-R: Richard Peck, Jim Bob Green, John Robison, Charlie Peck (seated), Jane Marshall, Joe Browning (seated), Lynn Strickland
I’m committed to the do-over for The Basement Diaries but I’m quickly discovering it’s going to take a lot longer than I anticipated. I keep discovering pages that had fallen behind the digital chest of drawers. I’m starting with just recreating all of the pages and getting them linked. I don’t want to think about re-scanning hundreds of photos. This is the signature image for The Basement Diaries. Everyone has a snapshot like this, that captured a time and place.
Next summer will be the 40th anniversary of “the basement summer,” so I’ll have to have the site back up before then. Which means even less blog time for smays.com.
“The Basement Summer was 1968. Some of us had been off to college for a year or two but gravitated back to Kennett, Missouri, as young people from small towns often do. This web site is about those people and that time. This would have been a lot easier if I had actually kept a diary or journal thirty years ago. But I didn’t, so the only record I have is a few thousand photographs and a lot of fuzzy memories. The time frame is roughly 1966 -1976. If you were there, no further explanation is necessary… if you were not, none is possible.”
That was the intro to one of the first websites I created (March, 1998). I say was because this morning I deleted the entire site. How I managed to do this is of no consequence. I believe I have a back-up in our safe deposit box, but can’t find a copy among the countless CD’s and external hard-drives that clutter my home office.
Given the sentimental importance of this site, I’m surprised by how calmly I’m dealing with this. I spent hundreds of hours creating the site but I didn’t know what I was doing in those early days and the tools weren’t very good. And the resulting site looked like what it was, an early effort by an amateur.
And I have all of the images. Digital and prints. I can do a much better job the second time around. I don’t think I could/would recreate the copy. So I’m hoping I have that back-up. And I feel bad for anyone that might have linked to the original site. Those links are dead. If you were among those immortalized in The Basement Diaries, watch this space for updates.
Update: Seems I did have the foresight to tuck a copy away at the bank. I’ll start rebuilding immediately.
Nice post and Flickr set on the Wild West Arts Convention by Dr. Everett Mobley. He explains this photo in his post. I love this photo. If I had an outfit like that, I’d wear it to work tomorrow. Well, maybe not the hat.
A good blog is: personal, informative, timely, passionate, focused… and, yes, I do have an example in mind. Following excerpt is from yesterday post on Your Pet’s Best Friend:
“When we welcome a new client to our practice, part of the process is a questionnaire about their pet’s health history and environment. The last question is: “Do you consider your pet to be a member of the family?” and most people answer “Yes”. The human-animal bond is very strong. It’s very common for people to say that the pet is like a child to them. Cat-lovers often say that the cat owns them, rather than the other way around. Certainly many (most?) of us consider our pets as companions, as opposed to property. Thus it would seem that referring to ourselves as the “guardians” of our pets is just a nice way of saying how we really feel. [Trade Secret: the real key question is “Where does your pet sleep?”]”
If you come across what you believe is a better vet blog, send me the link.
Learfield pal David Brazeal has looted his son’s college fund to buy himself a new MacBook Pro. He’ll be Mac-dazed for bit, unlearning the thousand things you need to know to make a PC go, but we’ll try to keep up with his progress here.
On the off chance my own Mac experience contributed to David’s high dive into the Mac pool, I’ve added him to the Mac Gallery.
“This 12 to 10 score is amazingly high when you consider that you have to be mounted to shoot and the donkey is usually moving, so you’re hanging on with one hand and both catching and shooting with the other. That’s not to mention that the gym in the old armory is so loud that you can’t hear yourself think. If you’d like a simulation, stick your head and a boombox (turned up loud) into a 55-gallon drum. Have two friends beat upon it savagely with baseball bats. To add essence of Donkeyball, add a scoop of horse-manure to the drum. (And they say there’s nothing to do in this town.)”
Read the rest of Dr. Mobley’s hilarious account. Makes a boy homesick.
I have posted frequently about my friend (and personal physician) Henry Domke. I learned this morning (by email and blog post) that he has decided to leave medicine and do art full time.
He cut back his medical practice some years ago to devote more time to his art but this announcement will be a shocker (I suspect) to his patients and the local medical community.
Just as Dodge City wasn’t the same without Doc Adams, Jeff City will miss Old Doc Domke.
Like all regulars at the Coffee Zone, I’ve been anticipating the arrival of Izabella Schereen Yanis (6 pounds, 11 ounces), the newest addition to the Yanis Family. We hope and assume Taisir used something other than his Treo to capture the first images.
Learfield CEO Clyde Lear proudly displays his new MacBook Pro. Clyde insists it’s for his lovely wife Sue. If that’s true –and we hope it is– Clyde will soon be trekking back to the Apple Store in St. Louis. I think it would be nearly impossible share a MacBook.
For now, we’ll add Clyde to our gallery of Mac Sliders. Someone call Cupertino, we’re gonna need more Kool Aid.