Harley and Scout - New Found Brotherly Love

Scout seems to be adjusting well to his new brother Harley (and vice-versa). Donna wanted to show some friends at work pictures of Harley, so I used my camera phone to take these pictures so I could send them to her phone. Since they were taken with a camera phone (all except for the first image, which was actually taken later than all the other ones) the image quality is rather poor but I still thought they were kinda cute.

They aren't curled up together in one big furball yet, but they are getting along much better than I would have expected for the 2nd day. They got to spend a lot of time playing in the back yard today and they seemed to be enjoying each other's company. I think the addition of Harley will be good for Scout, since Scout (much like his owners) could stand to lose a few pounds, and he's expending a good bit of energy keeping tabs on Harley.

It's funny how dogs don't always do things according to their owner's plan. We got a new bed for Harley, and that has worked out pretty much like the new food and water dishes we bought for Harley. Harley is using Scout's old bed, and Scout is using the new one we bought for Harley.

Meet the newest member of the Asberry family!

Here are some pictures of the newest member of our family, Harley. He is a Husky mix that we are adopting from Atlanta Pet Rescue. We were in PetSmart the other day, not really looking for another dog, when I laid my eyes on Harley. I have wanted a Husky for a long time and I couldn't resist taking a closer look. Donna is an even bigger sucker for animals than I am so she didn't need much convincing. He has such a great personality and he stole our hearts pretty much right away.

The tricky part was that we were getting ready to leave for Indiana in a couple of days, so we couldn't adopt him right away. So we've been waiting, just sure somebody else would adopt him from under us (they don't hold pets for adoption, which is understandable) but we were able to pick him up tonight.

He is a very docile, friendly, well-behaved dog. Our only concern has been whether or not he would get along with our current dog, Scout. They haven't exactly warmed up to each other yet, but I think it's going to be OK. There have been a couple of interesting moments, one or two growls, but that's about it.

We got them seperate food and water dishes. The funny thing was that we put the dishes in seperate rooms. Instead of Scout eating where he always eats, and eating from his old food dish, he ate Harley's food. Of course, Harley proceeded to eat Scout's food!

They were also really funny in the back yard. We turned them loose to run around and I discovered the origin of the term "pissing contest". Harley would find a place to pee, and as soon as he was done Scout decided he needed to pee in the exact same spot. And vice versa. They were funny to watch running around in the back yard.

At the moment, Scout is asleep on the couch with Donna. Harley is sleeping on the floor by the Christmas tree. For the moment, everyone is sleeping in heavenly peace. :)

Death to Palm OS! (oh, and .. .Christmas, Part 2)

So at this point I'm just about ready to flush my PDA (a Tungsten T3) down the toilet. We just got back from our trip to Indiana, and picked up our dog from the vet. We've always had the vet give him shots for heartworm prevention. Well, apparently they don't give the shots any more, and we have to start giving him medicine once a month.

Well, gee, that seems like a situation where it might be useful to have one of them there watcha-call-em Pee Dee Ays. So, I'm trying to set up a monthly reminder to give our dog his heartworm medication, starting next month on the 22nd. When I try to create the reminder, in the same way I've always done before, the stupid thing MOCKS ME by saying (in a most user-friendly way):

Fatal Alert
DateDay.c, Line: 1666, Record not on day

It also puts a nice big "RESET" button in the middle of the screen, and I can't do anything but hit thatbutton to "reset" the PDA. And then if I try again to create the reminder, it does the same stupid thing.

ARHRHRHRHRHRHRHGGHGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I HATE COMPUTERS!!!!!
One of those Dell Axim's is sounding better and better all the time.

But on a lighter note, "Christmas is over, fool!". This is a new quotable quote which I originated just today. Donna found it quite amusing, so in the spirit of the season, I hereby donate this new phrase to the public domain.

We just got back from Indiana where we had a nice visit with Donna's family. Here are the pictures from our trip. Some of them I took with our camera and some were taken with Donna's parents'.

We headed for Indiana last Wednesday night just as the big snow storm started. We ended up stopping part way and staying in a hotel until the storm had pretty much passed through. We were glad we did. Once we eventually did continue north, we started seeing snow once we hit northern Tennessee, and by the time we hit Kentucky we started seeing all kinds of cars off the road. A bunch of them were nearly buried in the snow as a result of the snowplows that had come through afterward.

When we got to Indiana the temperature was in the low single digits. Let's just say we spent most of our time indoors. As much as we miss our family and friends in the great white north, we are glad to be back in Georgia, where it is supposed to be 50 tomorrow, and in the mid 60s by the end of the week! Even so, I'm still not quite sure we've moved far enough south.

Christmas: Part I

So a couple of weekends ago we had my side of the family in town for "Christmas". Yes, it was a couple of weeks early, but it was the only time we could coordinate everyone's schedule. We all had a great time. Everyone seemed to be in a pretty festive mood, and for once, nobody was sick as a dog! Seems like every Christmas at least one of us has a sinus infection, stomach problems, or the black plague.

So here you will find a photo album recording the events, although the first few pictures were actually from earlier, when Donna and I were setting up our tree and torturing our poor dog.

Sadly they were only here for the weekend ... they didn't arrive until late Friday and left Monday morning. That was pretty tough. But I remind myself that I need to be thankful just for the fact that we were all able to be together, even if only for a short time.

This past Saturday, we had my sister's three boys overnight. In keeping with the Chrstimas spirit, we all decided to watch a nice Christmas movie, "Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys", featuring the triumphant cinematic return of Corey Feldman! This fine film truly brought my nephews and I closer together, in the true spirit of Christmas. My wife Donna, for some inexplicable reason, decided to pass on this movie. I guess there's no accounting for taste!

Christmas is not over for us yet, as we will soon be visiting with Donna's side of the family in warm, sunny Indiana! We are already freezing our butts off down here in Georgia so we can hardly wait to get away from it all up north. :)

Hope everyone out there in cyberland has a Merry Christmas and an above-average New Year!

It's Fun To See Saw

Ah yes ... the weekend approacheth. Friday neareth. Bliss! Which reminds me, I never posted my review of last week's movie fare, Saw.

This one I had to go see by myself. My wife is not up for scary movies in general, and this one in particular since it looks pretty warped from the previews. Even my dear sister, who likes scary movies, and said she'd go see it with me the day after Thanksgiving, backed out once she read the description of the movie. So the night I went to see Saw (I just love saying I went to "see Saw") my sister and my wife paired up with each other and saw that dreadfully awful looking Bridget Jones movie. Whew! Lucked out on that one! (BTW: My wife's succinct review was that it was "so-so").

So, it's about 10:30 at night. I'm ready to be creeped out. The lights dim, the film begins to roll ... and I find myself watching the beginning of quite possibly the scariest movie ever ... SpongeBob Squarepants! Now I'm no Spongebob hata', but that wasn't quite what I signed up for. The other people in the theater began to riot. They were yelling and screaming while throwing Skittles, popcorn, and Molatov cocktails. (OK, I exaggerated ... there were no Skittles). Within a few minutes, they got the correct film loaded into the projector and the movie began. Well, no, actually it didn't. Another 15 minutes of previews began. Previews which seemed to be, strangely, targeted at a completely different audience (read: mentally disturbed individuals) than the first set of previews I sat through.

So finally the movie begins. Two guys wake up in a large, extremely nasty looking basement bathroom. They don't know each other, or remember how they got there. They are securely chained to some big steel pipes. There is a body laying in the middle of the room, covered with blood, holding a gun. There is a tape recorder on the floor, and the two people who are still alive (for the moment) both have tapes. The tapes contain a thoughfully individualized pre-recorded message for each of them. One of the guy's messages states that he has to kill the second guy by 6pm, or the first guy's wife and daughter will be killed. Oh yeah, and one other little detail. Both guys have a hacksaw with a dull blade, which barely even scratches the chains which are confining them. But, one of the characters quickly surmises, the hacksaw would be able to cut through flesh and bone. So they could escape if they really, really, really, really wanted to. And didn't mind limping. And bleeding. A lot. Oh, and it's just a guess, but I think the title of the movie just might, possibly, be connected to that little aspect of the scenario.

Now, I like scary movies. I'm not particularly a fan of extremely gory, graphically violent movies, but I do like weird, scary ones. This one did sound pretty bad from the synopsis, and yet that whole scenario with the saw simply fascinated me. Kind of like that guy in Colorado. What would you do?

Well, it turned out to be a pretty decent movie. There certainly were some graphic scenes (surprise!) but it wasn't as though it was a non-stop gore-fest. There did happen to be a serial killer involved. But mostly it was focused on the characters trying to figure out how they got there, figure out who might be responsible for their plight, and how they might escape. Hopefully without having to cut off anything important.

I don't want to give away the ending but I will say that there is a nice, unexpected plot twist. Actually there were at least two. I certainly wouldn't rate this a 5-star movie (well, unless maybe it's on a 10-star scale) but it was quite enjoyable for what it was -- a scary movie. Probably not up for consideration by the Academy, but I had a good time. If you like scary movies (and are somewhat deranged) you will probably enjoy this one.

Random ramblings

So, ZoneAlarm is really starting to piss me off. I recently purchased ZoneAlarm with AntiVirus. I had always run AV, of course, but in preparation for my trip to Colorado, I decided I needed to install some Firewall software, since I would be connected to a lot of public wifi networks, etc. I thought it might be nice to have one piece of software installed to do both functions.

During the evaluation period it worked flawlessly. Right after I bought a license it continued functioning just great. Then I got one of these popup dialogs "An update is available, would you like to install it?". Foolishly, I said yes. It updated, then promptly gave me a Windows error dialog stating that the TrueVector internet monitor had crashed. Ooops. Now no network activity. Same thing. Reboot. Ooops. Crashes with the same error. Finally I ended up having to disable it, reboot, uninstall it, and then reinstall it. Success!!! But wait ... there's more! After running fine for several days, the automatic updates of antivirus signatures started failing. Doh!

It kept popping up a dialog at random times saying it was downloading updated AV signatures, then almost immediately errored out complaining that the AV signatures were corrupted. No matter how many times I retried/rebooted/etc. it still failed. To top it off, you can't even schedule when it tries to download the updates, so invariably it pops up the stupid error dialog in the heat of battle in Battlefield Vietnam or Half-Life 2. ANNOYING. I've googled, searched the ZoneAlarm forums, etc. and have't found a solution. I paid for it dammit, so I want it to work. Oh, well. Add ZoneAlarm to the list.

I finally gave in today. I completely uninstalled ZoneAlarm, rebooted, re-installed ZoneAlarm, rebooted again (I LOVE WINDOWS!), updated the AV signatures and everything appears to be working OK. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. We'll see what happens the next time it decides to update the AV signature.

Speaking of ranting, why do good things always have to get screwed up my some pointy-haired corporate type? One of my favorite geek shows on TV is The Screen Savers. The original show that I grew to love had Kate and Leo. They made a great on-air team. I watched it for a long time.

Then, for various reasons, for awhile we didn't get the channel they were on anymore. (They were on ZDTV which became TechTV and is now the hideous G4TechTv. Probably a couple of years ago I started getting TechTV again, and was really happy because now I could watch The Screensavers again! It still had Leo but Kate had been replaced by Patrick Norton. I really missed Kate but Patrick was pretty good and all was well with the world.

Then, earlier this year Leo left and Kevin Rose joined Pat. Kevin had done "dark tip" segments on the show before and he was pretty cool, so if Leo had to go at least they'd picked a good replacement.

Then G4 bought out TechTV, and moved the studio to LA. Patrick decided to leave the show, and they hired another new guy, Alex Albrecht. He took a few days to grow on me but I started to really like him. He and Kevin were really funny and played well off each other. It was like hanging out with a couple of geek friends. Well, except for they did all the talking and didn't seem to be listening to anything I was saying.

Then G4TechTV decided to uncerimoniously dump a bunch of people, including Alex. They canceled some other shows (which I didn't really care about, honestly) and announced that they were "revamping" the Screensavers. So, the new version premiered this past Monday. Kevin is no longer hosting, but he's still on the show doing the occasional segment. The new hosts don't impress me, much. I'm sure there nice people but it just isn't the same show. I will say the new Kevin at least has a sense of humor. Maybe they'll begin to grow on my like Alex did. I don't know.

Then again, maybe I'm spending way too much time obsessing about a stupid TV show and I need to talk to my doctor about upping my medication. Either way, change is bad.