I do things with computers.
I really like BlogEngine. Updating it is quite simple and hasn’t been much of a pain in the ass so far.
I’ve added some more pages to the site as well. I uploaded some old cassette tape recordings I did when I was 9 years old. Perhaps I will write more about that experience in the future. Not that anyone actually reads these. 99% of the traffic is spam in the form of referral link spam or attempted comment spam. It’s pathetic.
I haven’t posted much of anything lately. I haven’t had much to say, or just not sure what to say.
Cobar is doing extremely well and for the most part has recovered from his ordeal. I have nearly completed his web site (http://www.kuparr.com) . I’ve just been very un-inspired lately about all my web sites. I think I will migrate some of the posts about him here to his web site. There was a big scare when we went camping at Potlatch State Park where he jumped into a 15 foot deep cistern, culvert type of thing. He managed to escape any noticable injury which is unbelievable.
As I mentioned, we went on our first camping trip of the summer season. We went to Potlatch State Park and the first night it had rained quite heavily. The most rain on the first night that we’ve experinced when we started the whole summer camping trips about 4 years ago. The weather cleared up and it was a wonderful weekend. We did that the Memorial Day weekend. It was relaxing and I actually slept without having to take anything to relax me and sleep. Normally I have a difficult time sleeping when camping, even though I love it.
Can’t think of anything else to say.
In one of Cobars first major outings from his illness we took him to the Dog Easter Egg hunt dressed as the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. He was a bit barky when we first got there but he settled down and had had a lot of fun. We didn’t win any prizes in the easter egg hunt this year. Too many of peoples human children were grabbing the eggs, not the dogs. Cobar managed to grab about a half dozen eggs though, he loves doing it. After the egg hunt there was an hour wait for the fashion show so we took a walk around the park. This was his first walk since a brief moment at the beginning of March when he was feeling good. He managed to place 3rd in the small dogs, which we were confused a bit as he’s not a small dog (over 30lbs). The toy he got he loves very much and he’s playing with more of his toys as we let him access to them. His barking was my biggest concern and so far the day after he’s doing well and appears normal and still has a normal voice.
It has been a few weeks since my last update on our dog Cobar. The blood transfusion was like getting a new dog. I am still amazing that just the blood transfusion made him that better, all in about 24 hours. It was difficult to keep him from not barking, but certain things alinged to help out. Mainly bad weather kept door to door salesmen from coming around, which is the biggest thing that makes him bark a lot. We were able to keep any other barking to a minimum. It is now almost three weeks since the blood transfusion. He’s transistioned from prescription diet canned food, to very low fat dry food that is soaked in water and then given to him in a soupy mixture. I think this change in diet has helped quite a bit. And we may have narrowed in on some past issues with constipation he has had. He’ll be going to his normal vet for a check up tonight. I don’t think he’s completely recovered from this ordeal, but he’s definately improving day to day.
Our dog went from bad to worse in the past week. He kept the cycle of feeling good, then getting worse. This time around, from his constant pain, he was making these whining, groaning noises from his throat. This progressively got worse and worse to the point that we brought him back to the internet medicine vet and they did an endoscopy on his throat to discover a severe hematoma and bleeding near his larynx. It was very bad, much worse than I thought. He had increasingly started to sound like Darth Vader in his breathing, but what I never thought about what that his airway would swell up and restrict it. This is what was happening. If we had no scheduled this check-up and went with the endoscopy, it would have been around 48 hours or so that his airway would have been restricted and he suffocated.
After the endoscopy they immediately started giving him blood plasma to increase the clotting factor and get him to heal. We went with the doctors recommendation of one bag of plasma for the transfusion. It’s not cheap and we’ve quickly exhausted the funds for his care already. In an fortunate yet unfortunate turn of events, a toy poodle had come in during the evening with an emergency that required it needed plasma as well. However, it being so small, it didn’t need the entire bag of plasma so it was donated to Cobars recovery. The blood transfusion was successful, in the terms that it did not create more problems and he is, slowly recovering from this severe internal bleeding event.
We don’t know yet if there will be long term issues, but I some how doubt it. He is eating properly now as well. It’s all around a good thing. There’s quite a bit of stress lifted from us. There is still a good 2 week window of healing. So that is the latest update.
The day I posted the previous article about our dog, I learned that he has Giardia. This would explain a lot of his problems. He was put on two different types of meds to get rid of the parasite and he was doing fairly well until this weekend. Some minor, yet consistent vomiting started up. Gave him some Ace and other pills and that was able to get him through the night without vomiting. This morning he seems to be doing better, but I think that is still up in the air a bit. Will continue to post articles about once a week as updates to his health.
Ugh. Sometimes it just never ends it seems. Yet, I fear the ending. Or at least, the worse case scenario. I always preach to not succumb to the fear of loss, yet I seem to fail myself.
And yes, this post is about our dog Cobar.
He recovered from his illness in January and was doing good up until about two weeks ago as of this post. He started acting a bit weird and he started urinating blood. That was a very very bad sign. Bleeding of any kind, especially internally is just really bad. Of course, this was on a weekend so a trip to the Vet Hospital was in order as the normal vet practice is closed. They did a very good job of looking him over and determined he got a UTI. Which was a bit odd. Over the course of about five days he started to improve, and for the most part he had improved, except he was urinating a bit more than normal. Instead of just peeing once he would pee two, maybe three times. I was beginning to worry that this was more than a UTI. Possibly issues with his kidneys.
Then comes the record low temperatures. When it gets cold out, you can get dehydrated quickly. A week into his recovery he became very stiff and limping which we finally realized that he was severely dehydrated. More than we had thought, most likely due to this cold weather. So we whipped up some soupy canned food for him which is loved and chomped down. Getting some good food and hydrated well.
Of course, thats when the nightmare starts. His diarrhea started several hours after eating and just continued on into the night. After awhile there was nothing to come out but he was clearly straining to push something out. He was beginning to show signs of something like a kidney stone. Very similar to what happens to me, except, I tend to projectile vomit, and fortunately he never got to that stage. He started to refuse any food or water, so we were forced to hydrate him using a 3ml syringe and just squirting water into his mouth on a regular basis. We created a solution of Vitamin Water and regular water. This proved to be a good thing.
Of course this was over the weekend. We thought this might be a continuation of what was wrong with him last week, but it did seem different. He’s not repeatedly trying to pee. It snowed, so we can immediately see if there was blood in his urine. But there seemed to be a great effort in straining to go.
So, hydrating him every 2 hours of 9ml’s of Vitamin Water/Water solution and a vet visit for Monday. He’s doing good, Monday, but clearly in a lot of pain when the pain meds wear off. He’s still also on his anti-biotic. So, in the afternoon my wife takes him off to the vet. I finally get some time alone from this ordeal.
Could it get worse? Of course! His blood work comes back good. He’s hydrated fairly well (only 6%-8% dehydrated). Our hydration was working and was probably a very good thing. But why the straining of trying to poop? His prostrate appears to be swollen (enlarged). Great. It could be abscessed or worst case scenario, cancer.
So now he is on some heavy sedation, a stronger anti-biotic and an appetite drug to give him an appetite.
And I am about 80% complete with his web site. I’ve been drained physically and mentally to want to mess with it more.
What next? I can’t go farther back in the line when I am the last one.
I’m telling you, the Internet is great. I love the Internet! And what’s more great than the Internet. Blogs on the Internet! Blogs, I’m telling ya! Without the Internet, I could not have made up these awesome true life stories.
It started sometime in 2002 or 2003 when we decided to setup a web site for our cat. We named our cat after the cat in the Peppy Le Pew cartoon love interest Penelope or Penny for short because of her tuxedo coloring. Her nickname was Monkey Kitty. Well, obviously penny.com or Penelope.com was already taken, we wanted something unique, so amazingly monkeykitty.com was available. It was a learning process for my wife in building a site from an HTML template and I think it was the first time both of us ever used CSS and server side includes. We used some ASP based photo gallery software, can’t remember when I switched it over to CopperMine. It was your normal run of the mill personal pet website with a photo gallery. Once we set it up we really didn’t update it much at all. In 2009 our cat passed away and that was probably the first time since 2007 I had done any sort of updates with the site.
So as you can tell by my other blog entries, I have been working on all my domains, learning new things here and there. I discovered kind of randomly this Google service for Webmasters. It’s part of Google Search and it will tell you about what the Google Search Bots are finding on your site and a bit more information about how your site is indexed in Google searches. I initially setup the Equestrian Pages site as the first for this and it gave me some good information and over time I think it will be helpful. So I setup a few more domains with this, AutoNarcosis, Equestrian Journal, and Monkey Kitty.
So, I wait the 48 hours or so for the information to roll in on the domains. It’s information I am not surprised by. Everything is consistent with what I knew from years of web log analyzing the domains. But, Monkey Kitty seemed to have an odd thing. It only had one web site linking to it. I was surprised that there was even one link to it. It’s such a plain personal cat site, not much there. It’s barely ever updated. Penny is cute though. The domain linking to her site pointed back to this ‘Web Technologists’ blog site. Before specifically searching for the link I read through quite a bit of the blogs and got the increasing feeling that when I find the blog entry for my cats site, it would be derogatory in some way.
I couldn’t manually find the blog entry with the link in it. I am beginning to wonder if it’s a link within the comments. I do some searches with the sites built in search and nothing comes up. So I go back to google to search for the mention within the sites domain. Sure enough, I find it. Oh wow, yeah. (Here’s the article)
The article is about the authors definition of award to justify some rant about a competing award website that is more obviously setup as a link system. They specifically use my cats website as an example of a site that should not have been awarded something from an award site that gives out awards. It’s been so long it is hard to tell what award Monkey Kitty was given, so we no longer know if it’s in or out of context. I point out that the award site they are ranting about in the article is not linked to in the article, yet they did take the time to link to the sites they deemed should not have gotten awards. And years later, the illegitimate award site being complained about is still up and running, but the competing award site he is defending is some plain looking blog in German. So much for that business model. Perhaps there is a reason?
Oh, but it gets better! Whats this on his blog site? A link to a pet blog? His wifes pet blog? This is just classic! Rip on some personal pet web site to make your competitor look illegitimate at the same time making the content of the site seem just as illegitimate then setup a pet blog later on.
I talked to my wife after writing the majority of this article before publishing it. It’s even better, since, she remembers signing up for both award sites. So, it wasn’t the site he was ragging on how he found the cat site, it was submitted to the site he was a judge on.
Circle of douchebaggery complete!
Grunties?
Ok, so yeah, my family is a bit odd. As a small child going through the whole potty training of going to the bathroom, my mom had come up with taking a crap and turds in general as Grunties. Not sure exactly where she picked up on this term, perhaps from her own mother, I don’t know. From what I can remember she explained that the term is from the faces we would make taking a crap. The Gruntie face, because, we grunted, or something to that effect. I think it was myself that might have ended up being the one who did the action for my mom to coin the term. But for the longest time my sister and I would call dog turds or whatever turd we found on the ground Grunties. Not having any sort of clue that this wasn’t a common term or that others wouldn’t know what we were talking about.
The day came when the realization that no one has a clue what the fuck we are talking about when my sister and I are playing in the backyard with some friends and my sister screams out “Don’t Step On The Grunties!” The other kids are just baffled at what the hell my sister meant. The dog crap! Don’t you call them Grunties too? Blank stares and that Are you crazy look came out of our friends.
So yeah. Don’t step on the Grunties!
I started working on re-encoding the files as I had mentioned in a previous post.
I don’t have the best input device currently. I am using an old ADS VCD-USB device that is only compatile in Windows XP. My laptop is still XP, so using that to encode the old VHS tapes. I am encoding them first to WMV3 as Windows Movie Maker is the only program that seems to work properly encoding the live video on the laptop. It’s old and slow. From the WMV3 format I am converting them to the new open source WebM format for online. I chose this format as, it’s similar, or an upgrade to the Theora video format that I have used previously. I wanted to use the open source format over the others. I also know that it will be natively supported in the new versions of IE and Firefox. It currently is supported in Chrome, so the videos will only work in Chrome. And of course, since I am on the cutting dull edge of technology, I screw myself in the process. I tried to install the WebM and Vorbis DirectShow plugins to test out Windows Media Player, but my WMP crashes after I install the Vorbis codecs. So if you want to watch the Karvanek Conspiracy videos, you’ll need Chrome now.