Before anyone accuses me of animal cruelty and reports me to the SPCA let me explain! "Target Training" is a useful skill for you and your dog. It is invaluable in agility training and for doing ad, movie, TV, or theater work with animals.
The idea is to train your pet to recognize a target and go to it. I use yogurt container tops (both pint and quart sizes). The eHow website has a good introduction to target training.
Once you and your pet are adept at targeting, you can put it to the test. You can place the target behind a barrier or on a small platform Currently, Zen and I are working on a differentiation exercise. She sees two targets and needs to pay attention to hand signals to know which one is the focus. Zen is wonderful if not just a bit too eager at times – she specializes in the triple pirouette !
This is geek-dom. All geek-a-phobes, anti-geeks, geek-aholics, …. move along, there’s nothing to see here. Still with me ? Sorry to hear.
Today was a day of writing technical documentation. Not the most fun I get to have at my job but it needed to be done and everyone else took a giant step back when I wasn’t looking. Most of the text came along pretty well but then I hit the need for a UML Sequence Diagram. First, I should say that "U-M-L" must be missing a letter because it clearly is a four letter word. Second, I didn’t know I needed a sequence diagram when I started out.
I needed to find a drawing tool that could create these obscure but very specific pictures. It had to be simple. Really simple. BRAIN DEAD SIMPLE! Did I mention it needed to be simple? I found the answer at websequencediagrams and it could hardly be simpler. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Let me tell you a story. It starts in a man cave, starkly lit by the light of a large window. In the distance you can hear a dog snoring … (wait, let’s try that again) … In a dark corner, you can hear the most horrific sound; so loud it would wake the dead ! … (there, that’s better) …
… for geeks only, the story continues in the sequence diagram included
A friend once said, “lock me in a room with a cricket and give me no way to kill it and I’ll give up all the secrets of the world.”. Well, he didn’t exactly say that but he did make it clear that the sound of an unrelenting cricket is a powerful torture device.
Now that the aircraft hangar is clean and empty and echoes madly, a single cricket is a very loud and annoying sound. Multiple crickets are multiply so!
The iPhone is a powerful handheld computer. (Yes, it can also make a phone call but who does that anymore?) So the logical test for me was blogging with it. Here is my workflow …
My blog posts are nearly always accompanied by a photo, image, or graphic. The layout is mostly standard with the image on the right near the top and the text flowing around it.
My blog is running WordPress software. I’ve installed the Postie plugin which adds extensive “blog by email” support. I’ve configured WordPress’s “media” settings to create small, medium, and large thumbnails. I have configured Postie to use the medium sized thumbnail and to add the necessary markup to position the image and to link to the original.
What was left was to find a solution to “decorate” the images. On my desktop computer, I use Windows Live Writer. It has build-in features to add drop shadow, borders, etc. I also have GIMP for more extensive editing. On the iPhone I’ve installed a few different apps. The most technical of these is PerfectPhoto which gives me most of the color/light editing functions of GIMP. For taking pictures and handling some predefined edits, I like Camera+. (Before you ask, I did snag Camera+ before Apple pulled it from the app store – Google for the controversy.) The ColorSplash app is for that “colored b&w” effect and Photo Finish is for adding borders and edges (I don’t like the look of a plain photo for my blog). I wish Photo Finish supported native resolution but it always rescales to match its fixed frames. (It looks like a 1.0 release and the developer has moved on.) For blogging “on the go”, I can live with it.
To blog, I just compose an email. It’s a bit backwards actually. The iPhone does not let you add a photo to an email. Rather, you email a photo – from the camera roll – and add text to it.
This post is an example of the above process and tools. Oh. Before you send you email to get posted, make sure to delete your ‘sig’ at the bottom. There’s probably no need to post you contact info
I’ve furnished the “not completely finished” second floor of the farmhouse with random left over furnishings. For the time being, that includes an inflatable bed.
The bed was my temporary sleeping surface during the transition to Virginia. It has also served as the guest bed in a pinch.
I had forgotten it was a double-deep mattress. So, when planning what would go up stairs, I *thought* I needed a platform to get the mattress off the floor. I had a half dozen rustic wine crates so I set them out and put a top across them.
When I rolled out the mattress, put the memory foam pad on top, added the goose down duvet, and then inflated the mattress …. well …
Before anyone accuses me of animal cruelty and reports me to the SPCA let me explain! "Target Training" is a useful skill for you and your dog. It is invaluable in agility training and for doing ad, movie, TV, or theater work with animals.
