Meet Speckles...

We picked up a new dog this week. Her name is Speckles. She's a 6 year old Catahoula Mix. We think the other part of her is Pointer but we aren't sure. We finally got to a point where we were ready for a second dog in the house after the loss of our 14 year old Golden Retriever, Beemer, last year.

I have never seen a dog that is more into playing fetch than this one. She will go non-stop from morning until night. She's already become protective of the family and will bark when the doorbell rings or someone knocks on the front door. She is far from vicious though. Speckles is about the same size as our Black Lab, Jack. She's a bit taller but not built as solidly. She's tall and lanky like a runner. She seems like she'll be a good fit for our family.

We got her from a Catahoula Rescue organization. Catahoulas are great dogs. Their full breed name is the Louisiana Catahoula Leopard Dog. Their coats are usually mottled greys, whites, and blacks. Spots are not uncommon nor are two different colored eyes. They were left behind in the Louisiana swamps by Spanish explorers in the 1500s and adapted to the life of running around in and hunting in the swamps. Speckles was abandoned by her former owner at a dog kennel a year ago and had lived there ever since. That's no life for a dog.

: Maybe Katie(acoustic) from the album "Everything To Everyone" by Barenaked Ladies

More Mars Goodness...

A coworker of mine, John, and I have been working on a cool little script in our off time.

We really love looking at the 3D images put out by NASA of Mars taken by their Mars Exploratory Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The problem is that NASA only releases about one decent 3D image every few days. Not nearly enough for our tastes. I was grabbing the raw left and right images taken by cams and then using a tool to make them into anaglyphs(those pictures you use the blue and red glasses to see in 3D). This is a long process as you need to find two images taken of the same thing at the same time, one by each of the left and right lens of a given camera. Not a hard process, just labor intensive.

John and I thought there had to be a way to do this automagically. I started to think about how I would go about doing it after work last week. While I was doing a bit of research on the subject and trying to decide wether to do it in perl or something else I got an email from John saying he had finished the rough image download code. I looked at it and it seemed to work a charm. It goes to the MER page and will get all the matching left/right images for any given day. I played with it a bit and got it integrated into anaglyph software and we were almost there. I hacked on it some more so it would log images it had already downloaded and not attempt to re-download them to save bandwidth. I threw an automatic thumbnail generating script in the mix to generate and catalog the images by Sols so we could find any image we were looking for easily.

There are still a few bugs with the code that we are trying to work through but the basic functionality is there. The biggest one we have is that left and right images are not always taken at exactly the same time and we are matching on timestamps. We think we are close to solving this nagging problem and once we do our image catalog could triple or quadruple. Once we get it solved I'll give details on how we got around it.

Well, I've talked enough about it. Break out your red-blue glasses and give it a try.

: Dirty Pool from the album "Texas Flood" by Stevie Ray Vaughan And Double Trouble

Marathon Mama...

My wife, Shannon, ran in the Motorola Marathon yesterday. She finished in just over 5 hours, solidly in the middle of the pack. I think she did very well considering she had health problems that caused her to miss nearly a month of training right at the height of it. Before the marathon she had only made it to 14 miles before foot problems sidelined her. We followed her progress and cheered her on at several points during the run. We caught her at miles 13, 16, 17, 19, and 22. We made it across town just in time to see her finish the race. She is sore as all hell today. I've been getting a sick joy at helping her stretch out and massaging her muscles. :)

Let it snow...

I went to bed around 1 this morning. It was about 32 degrees with a light mist falling. They said there was a chance of snow but I didn't think anything of it. Usually when they say that in Central Texas nothing happens.

I woke up with an urgent need so I got out of bed. While standing there doing my business I noticed it seemed to be awfully light outside. I figured it was getting close to morning so I looked at the clock. 2:30? huh? Looked out the window and everything was white. It had snowed about 2 inches in an hour-and-a-half and was still falling. I woke up Shannon and my son to watch it snow. When we got up this morning around 7 we had about 3 inches of fresh powder on the ground to play with. It was so powdery that snowballs were hard to keep together. This was the first 'real' snow our son had ever seen. Yeah, we've had dustings and icestorms about once a year but this was real honest to goodness snow. Enough to really play in and make his first snowangel. Our dog, Jack, loves snow and ice. He had a blast running around, playing fetch, and eating the snow.

After a bit of playing I threw the tow strap in the Defender and went out looking for some extra cash. Unfortunately it is a Saturday so traffic was really light and no one had managed to get themselves stuck in a ditch as usually happens when things freeze around here. Bummer. I could have used some pocket money. Just when I go to rely on the stupidity of Austin drivers they let me down.

Homeownership...

We did it. We bought a house. Actually, we bought the house we have lived in and rented from my parents for the past 7 years. It feels weird, that's for sure. Signing paperwork for a six-digit loan is nerve racking. It's amazing how simple the process was though. Applied for the loan 2 weeks ago and closed today. No fuss, no muss. I guess when you have good credit they don't hassle you too much. We picked the perfect time to get a home loan too. Rates started rising the day after we locked in our interest rate. I don't expect they'll be that low for quite a long time.

If there's one bit of advice for potential home buyers it would be to whatever you can to keep your credit good. Don't run up a lot of credit card debt. Don't make late payments. If you can't pay cash for something you probably don't need it too bad.

A look inside the mind of a 7 year old...

My wife and I had a little disagreement with our son tonite over the eating of broccoli. We wanted him to eat it. He didn't want to. We said fine, but when you don't eat dinner you go straight to bed. This was 5:30 in the evening. Needless to say, he wasn't keen on the idea but he went.

My wife and I decided to get some exercise playing DDR after dinner. Once we were done I went into the computer room to play some games and I noticed that my son was stuffing a backpack. Oh boy, we get to go through the whole 'running away from home' thing. I didn't let him know I saw him and let him finish. About 5 minutes later he snuck past us and went out the front door with his backpack on. Naturally, I followed him to see how far he'd take it.

About a 1/2 block away a car started approaching and he ducked behind some parked cars so they wouldn't see him. After he got to the end of the block I caught up to him and asked him if he brought a jacket as it was 50 degrees and he was in just jeans and a t-shirt. He thought about it and said no. I talked him into coming home to get at least get a jacket. We walked home and into our warm house. He sat down and his dog Jack started licking him like crazy showing him how happy he was that his master was home. We talked for a while and he decided that his life wasn't that bad at all.

He did end up eating his broccoli and enjoyed his ice cream for dessert.

After he went to bed I had to see what a seven year old packs when he's running away. The picture is of the contents of his backpack. 14 Hot Wheels, A pile of Lego, One Bionicle, a rock, a Transformer, a hockey trading card, a small Battlebot, some Power Ranger toy, his favorite Woody doll, a flashlight/radio, a small LED flashlight, another radio/flashlight combo, a soccer ball bracelet, and $7.35. No clothes or food but I'll give him credit on the flashlights and radios.

Barenaked Ladies Tix...

Heard that BNL was coming to town on March 10th so I went online to get some tickets. Went through the whole ordering process and when I got to the final submission page I hit submit and the agency's webserver gave and 'Unable to process' error. I decided to call instead to avoid having multiple charges to my account because their webserver was hosed. I got a pair of reasonably decent seats over the phone.

About 6 hours later I got a confirmation email that my online purchase was successful and here's my electronic receipt. Damnit, now I've got two pairs of tickets to the same concert. I guess I could call them up and return the second pair but I decided to keep them.

Anybody want a pair of tickets to the March 10th Barenaked Ladies concert at the Backyard in Austin at cost?

: Gringo In Belize by Jerry Jeff Walker