Tonight, we brought Molly home from the hospital. Overall, I’d say she’s doing well, although she’s exhibiting some problems with walking — her hindquarters almost seem stiffened, which makes her walk like her back legs won’t bend. The doc thinks that it’s not a complication from her sugery, and might just be the drugs they’ve had her on. She’s been given sedatives to calm her down — she’s not a big fan of being in a cage, and she was overly restless given what she’d just been through.

When they brought her in the exam room for us, she whimpered and whimpered. I sat in the floor with her, and she finally curled up sorta on my lap, and started to fall asleep. On the ride home, Beck and her sat in the back seat of the truck, and Molly leaned up against Beck and fell asleep. In fact, she had several really hard sleeps tonight. It kinda backs up the sedative theory.

It’s wonderful having her back in the house, despite her smelling a little icky, and being exhausted from the experience. I can’t think of anything nearly as comforting as listening to her snore while she sleeps on the floor.

The pack is definitely whole again.

Beck and I went to see Molly this morning. She walked into the examination room, and you couldn’t imagine the relief I felt.

To see her walk in, waggling and happy, was a shock. I was expecting to have to visit her in a pen. Her being so mobile was a joy to me. And now we’re being told that we will be able to pick her up tomorrow night. That is amazing to me.

She’ll be keeping quiet for a week or so, but after that, it’s business as usual for Molly. I’m thrilled!

$2.279

Look over there to the right. See the gas price? It’s over a dollar less than it was just after Katrina.

As current events — like gas prices — sometimes inspire me, with my inspiration I started thinking about DLWS and about once again driving to Yosemite, rather than flying. Gas was $3.099 — and the pundits said it was heading to $4/gal, not to recede until after the winter — locally when I made the decision to fly. That picture has changed signficantly.

That’s not to say that there won’t be gas along the trip route that might be more costly than here; I’m sure there will be. But the overall picture has changed, and it appears that this is a more reasonable driving trip once again. However, I’ll lose my travelling partner. Beck has decided (currently) to stay here to be with Molly, just in case.

I’m thrilled about attacking the drive again, but I’ve gotta get the appropriate approvals from work to once again take the time off. Knowing me the way they do, I wouldn’t be surprised if they never took it off the calendar.

Beck called the hospital a little bit ago, and they said Molly was standing up, and wagging her tail. That’s terrific news!

We’ll go down later today to see her, take her some pumpkin for inclusion in her dinner, and let her know everything’s ok.

Tonight, we came perilously close to losing Molly.

The girls had a grooming appointment this morning, and spent their day getting bathed, clipped and made beautiful. When they’re taking a trip to the groomer, I don’t feed them in the morning. Emma gets amazingly carsick sometimes, and it’s just easier if you’re not gonna feed one, to delay feeding them both. I got the call that they were ready, and picked them up around 5pm. Molly was as bouncy as could be, happy to see me, and ready to get home to dinner.

By 6pm, things had turned very grim. She was in the yard, trying to vomit, and couldn’t. In fact, she acted like she could get anything out of her body from either end. And I could tell by the way she was moving that she was incredibly uncomfortable. Then I felt her stomach, and it felt very full and hard. I knew I hadn’t fed her, so that was obviously wrong. I ran through the house to see if there was something obvious she’d gotten into — no luck — while Beck got on the phone with the animal hospital. They told us to bring her in, and Beck headed to the hospital with her.

The downside to this was that I had a scheduled work bridge call at 7pm. I felt like a real heel staying here for that, but what could I do? I was asked on the call if we needed to get someone else on the call to cover for me (thanks Gene!), but how can I justify delaying work progress on account of my dog? I mean, for me, that’s absolutely the right answer — she’s family to me — but not everyone views pets that way. And frankly, the dozen folks on the bridge call gave up their family time to be on that call on a Saturday night. I don’t feel like I could be the cause of delaying that for an hour while trying to find someone else to cover for me and getting them up to speed with what we’re trying to do. Surely it’s not in the company’s best interest to tolerate delays because someone’s dog is sick.

Harriet (another Berner owner) sent me an e-mail while I was on the bridge call to let me know that Beck had arrived at the hospital, and that she was heading down to the hospital to be with her. I got off the bridge around 7:30, and talked to Beck before heading out. It was just then that the doc came in to tell Beck what the diagnosis was: gastric dilatation and volvulus, which is commonly called bloat. Basically, her stomach had twisted 180 degrees and was full of gas. This is something that just happens to big breeds, with no real explanation, and no real solution aside from rapid diagnosis and surgery. You see, in just a few hours, the dog can go from showing no symptoms to being dead from this.

They were prepping her for surgery and would be started before I could get there. They would have to expel the gas from the stomach, and then untwist her stomach. The danger here is that there could be signficant damage to the stomach and spleen that can require the removal of part of the stomach or the whole spleen. This is very, very serious condition.

I started setting the road on fire between here and Kirkwood and arrived at the hospital. Harriet, Beck and I sat and waited. And waited. And waited. It seemed like an eternity until we got our first progress report on the work being done. One of the folks there came out and gave us the news that Molly had come through the surgery well, and there was no signs of distress in the spleen or stomach. Her prognosis was looking good, and when the surgeon was done, she’d come out and tell us the details. Needless to say, that was a huge relief!

We asked if we’d be able to see her a little later, and the tech we were talking thought we probably wouldn’t. He told us that they give the dogs pretty strong hallucinaginics, and sometimes they snap at things that aren’t really there, which of course gave all of us a very much needed laugh. Molly can be pretty dingy sometimes, and I could just see her trying to grab invisible butterflies in the air!

The surgeon later came out and explained what she’d seen in surgery, and basically she felt like Molly would recover completely after some recovery time, including being in the hospital a few days. There was nothing else for us to do, so the doc asked if we wanted to say goodnight to her. Well of course we did! She took us back to her recover area, and laid on a mat was Molly, with tubes flowing in and out of her. She had no idea we were there, but it was good for both of us to see her, scratch her muzzle, and know she was doing well.

Things could have ended up so very different. We were supposed to go to Chicago this weekend to visit with friends. The only reason we didn’t was because Beck’s been a little under the weather. Had we done that, Molly would likely have been found dead in her kennel at the boarders or when the housesitter came back from their day job. Even had Beck and gone to dinner, Molly would probably have been gone by the time we got back. We were just that close to losing her tonight.

So what did you do today? I saved my dog’s life tonight, and I’m feeling pretty good about that.

Happy Birthday!

Today is the 40th anniversary of the completion of the Gateway Arch down at the Riverfront — happy birthday!

The arch is the tallest US national monument, and is the tallest stainless steel structure in the world. Not to mention that it’s a very cool platform from which to view the city!

Tonight, we’re headed down to the arch grounds to join in the festivities. I’m sure photos will follow!

$2.359

Today my Information Week junquemail included a blurb about a item up for auction on eBay — an 11-DVD compilation of Bill Gates’ 1998 antitrust deposition.

11 discs? Of Bill of Borg? No thanks.

Just how interesting could this be? Well, IW doesn’t exactly give it two thumbs up, but I think they are only looking at this story based on the clips that had been released years ago. I mean, there could be telling pieces of data in this set if examined deep enough. Does Bill scratch his nose on the left side when telling a tall tale? Does he stroke his chin menacingly when talking of crushing his competition? Does he know anything about cigars, or Monica Lewinski?

Truth is, the 34-year old guy from Arkansas selling this is just trying to kickstart his fledgling IT company. That’s right — he’s trying to fuel a startup. With business plans. Developed over the last three years. A startup that will squish Microsoft. From his bedroom. In his parents’ house.

Nope, I’m not kidding. Read the piece.

His closing quote in the article?

“I believe one day my planes will fill the sky.”

Really…… I guess his plans to squish Microsoft involve building aircraft to fill the skies and somehow gum up the works of Bill’s empire. Good luck buddy — I’ll be watching out for your code, your organization, your planes, and the double-wide in Arkansas with the air traffic control tower extending through the roof.

Well, I’d forgotten about some of the trials and tribs I’d found a year ago when I last set up e-mail posting.

One was for the dreaded NOOP that neither mail server I’ve run has liked. For that one, I changed class-pop3.php to have the NOOP look like this:


function noop () {
if($this->RFC1939) {
if(!isset($this->FP)) {
$this->ERROR = _("POP3 noop:") . ' ' . _("No connection to server");
return false;
} else {
$cmd = "NOOP";
$reply = $this->send_cmd( $cmd );
return( $this->is_ok( $reply ) );
}
}
}


The second had to do with weird things that happened when there was no mail to process. For that, I changed wp-mail.php:


# if (0 == $count) die(__('There doesn’t seem to be any new mail.'));
if (0 == $count) {
print 'There doesn’t seem to be any new mail.';
$pop3->quit();


The last thing I noticed today as I used the new functionality was that entries had the wrong time — an hour earlier than clock time. I’m still working on that one!

These seem to have quietened things down, and that’s a good thing…

Gearlog has an article about a chemical bark collar. The premise is that when phydeaux barks, he gets a little shot near the snout of cintronella.

Now, this seems cool to me, and a lot less trouble than shock collars. We’ve seen those before, and with a dog with a great deal of fur, it’s tough to make ‘em work. The dog just laughs at you after a while. This thing though seems like the best gadget of all to keep the pup quiet.

Of course, with my dogs, they’re just as likely to find an attraction to the smell, and suddenly I’ll have little puppy cintronella addicts. I wonder if there’s a twelve-step program for that?

I’ve been really faunching for the new iPod that supports video. I keep saying that I would wait until the hard drives were larger — I think 80gb or larger is a real possibility, given where the drive technology is right now. In fact, I’m a little surprised that this didn’t happen with the new announcement.

I’ve been trying to find out a little more about the box — aside from reading Apple’s spin sheet. Finally, I found something on Playlist that seems to address this little device directly.

The good news? Battery life is now about 20 hours when playing music (playing video, the battery life is about three hours). The video out reportedly looks real good when piped to a real TV. The dock connector is the same, so the dock on my iMac oughta still work, as should the dock connector in my truck. Oh yeah, and it comes in both white and black now, just like the iPod nano.

The bad news? Well, no more firewire data transfer, although you can still charge with that. That’s a bummer, especially for a device that wants to play 200Mb files (TV programs). Also, no more remote control port. That means that the remote control in my truck wouldn’t work with it. That’s a crying shame too — driving along the road seems like a perfect application for remote control of the iPod.

I was also trying to find out if I can put my own movies (home video, or DVDs I own) on the little guy. The answer is an emphatic yes. Apple even provides a documented procedure to show you how. Cool! So now your favorite poker training video can accompany you on your trip to Las Vegas.

So, to upgrade, or not? Well, I’ve got mixed feelings about it. The bigger screen would be great, especially for photo viewing. I don’t see me watching video on the little screen, but ya never know. The smaller size is appealing, but the loss of remote control and firewire data transfer both seem like mistakes — although probably needed to make the device smaller, and simplify support. Of course, that means that one of the things I was also holding out for — a firewire media reader for the iPod — will probably not be realized.

On balance, I think the plusses slightly outweigh the minuses….