Stuff I Bought This Month

After spending much of the month of April being extremely frugal (a word, by the way, I just had to look up the spelling of... God damn Google ...), I went on a buying binge this month as my material needs meter spiked into the red. Here's a quick list of some stuff I bought. Sadly, I can't remember it all:

Landscrapers Sandals from Territory Ahead. They have covers over the end, so no one has to see my ugly big toe.

About 80 bucks worth of gasoline.

A cooler for the wife -- supposedly it keeps things down to -90 degrees Kelvin or something.

A car deodorizer. Someone explain to me why after spending $140 bucks to get our car detailed, including a shampoo of the entire interior, it still smells like feet.

A new plastic tray. We've had one for a while that I use each day to carry my lunch from the kitchen to the living room where I watch the Daily Show. But it warped. So we got a new one that's got colored stripes and looks all summery.

An iPod cassette adapter for the car. The FM tuner is great for when I'm home, but in the car, as radio stations come in and out willy-nilly, it doesn't work very well. So back to analog.

A subscription to Audible.com -- it'll get me one free audio book a month and plus I'm now getting This American Life each week. Great to listen to on the iPod while I'm mowing the lawn for 3+ hours each week. First book I got was The DaVinci Code, so I can see what all the fuss is about.

Real books!

• Shutter Island and A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane (Author of Mystic River)
• Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers By Michal Baden (very famous guy who works on corpses) and others
• The Harry Bosch Novels: The Black Echo, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly (all in one big volume; because I haven't started a new mystery novel series in about, oh, a week)
• Hidden Prey by John Sandford (like Ed McBain, Sandford can do no wrong in my eyes)
• Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk (Author of Fight Club... I read his book Lullabye and I think I liked it. I'm still not sure. So I'm giving him another shot.)
• Four Blind Mice by James Patterson (A novel featuring the whiney character Alex Cross... yet, like a car wreck, I can't look away! So Patterson knows what he's doing. Plus, he writes really, really short chapters.)
• The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (Neil is still the only major author I ever sort of had dinner with, plus, I like children's books.)
• A book on watercolor techniques (which I read and then promptly forgot 99% of)
  Posted by Eric G. at 11:09 AM | Comments (4)

Leash Laws

I wrote this on the date posted, but didn't actually put it on the site until a week later. But I can mess with time here, because, well, it's my frickin' site.

We've done a lot right with our dogs over the years. They eat great, they aren't barrel-shaped (like most Labradors in the world which eat like goats if given the opportunity) and, for the mart part, they're polite.

Except on a leash. By the hammer of Thor, did we go wrong there.

I'm not sure what happened. When we first got Siren as a wee pup, we were as clueless as most dog owners. We immediately signed her up for obedience classes. She was trained on the correct way to heel on the left before she was on solid food. It's inexcusable that eight years later she'd just as soon dislocate a shoulder as walk like a prim and proper canine lady.

She's always been like this tho… the training just never took with her. We tried walking her with a Halti collar, the type that loops around the snout -- most people mistake it for a muzzle (which is just fine, I like to watch them back away in fear. Of course, my feeding the dogs whipped cream before walks probably had something to do with that, too.) The Halti is supposed to give you control of the dogs head as you walk because, as it turns out, most dogs have incredibly strong necks. Thus, using a standard flat-buckle collar is akin to trying to stop a subway train by grabbing the overhead support rail really tight. Halti's make some dogs go absolutely crackers however, jumping around like they've swallowed hot coals, scrapping at their faces to get it off, get it off, Christ Almight, it's like being sprayed with acid, get it off.

So we moved Siren to the tried and true pinch collar, the type with huge metal links that when tugged cause it to dig into the dog's neck. This worked wonders on the chocolate poop-dog for a while, though it comes with some guilt. Mostly the guilt you get when other people tell you that it's cruel. Eventually you get over it when you realize that such naysayers don't realize that walking even a small Lab can be like hooking oxen to a plow.

(I do still carry the guilt of the time I was walking Siren in downtown Northampton for the first time on the pinch and I gave her a correction to stop her from darting across a street. She yelped like her tail has been stepped on by a Sasquatch. She was barely a year old at the time it probably looked like I'd kicked the puppy. The crowd didn't realize she had and has the shoulder and leg muscles of a steroid popping line backer.)

Flash forward past the heady days of owning a single mutt and now we've got the two Yellow idiots as well. Caper's training consisted of only agility and off-leash romps when he was a pup, so his inability to walk on a leash was a foregone conclusion. Kylie came to us when she was two, so she was a lost cause as well, but she has the added feature of not being trustworthy off leash either. Bon once lost her in the woods for half an hour at the Delaney Watershed where we used to walk the them. It was a true panic inducing visit that lead to Kylie rarely going off the pinch collar thereafter, and a spike in the stock price for the makers of Ben-Gay after our purchases.

Today we're up in Rochester, at an agility show that Bon is running with Caper. I tagged along because I wanted to get out of the house and I need a yearly reminder of why I don't usually come along to these things. The rationalizations are:

1. Bon usually has a bunch of CDLs* to hang out with (everyone she knows in the area doing agility is in Spain today, at a national competition)
2. I usually am a jinx for whatever of our dogs is running… my presence on the sidelines of the ring seems to always lead to an off-course penalty.
3. I seem to always go when it's cold and miserable weather.

Today isn't warm and sunny by any stretch, but I think the new reasoning will be the baby-sitting. We had to bring along Siren and Kylie as well and I'll have to entertain and feed them as Bon is working and competing. And since they're both such hellhounds when trying to walk, I anticipate it would have been just as much fun to stay at home.

In the end, we ended up leaving the park early as it started to pour. Caper did indeed screw up is run, Siren was terrible on the leash just crossing the parking lot, and Kylie didn't even get a chance to play by herself in the big field. So it was a crackerjack day for all involved.

Another Dream Job Gone

TechTV is being shut down. This according the blog of TechTV host Leo Laporte -- a great guy who used to write for Access Magazine. I was lucky enough to edit his column and learn something more often than not.

I still regret the time I edited his column to say Microsoft's speech technology was brand new when it had actually been around for a couple of years. I'd never heard of it. Oh well...the things that stick with you for years.

Since I've got the sheepskin in TV/Radio communications, I always thought it would be great to work in that industry but doing what I'd come to love as a career: tech journalism.

When my own (at the time) company launched ZDTV in that time to take on CNET's syndicated shows with a whole network, I was enamored with the thought of making a move. I'll never forget being only about 18 months on the job and doing an on-air audition for the higher-ups in NYC. I was asked to pretend I was interviewing the then CEO of a company about which I knew as much as I did quantum mechanics.

They didn't exactly break down my door with offers to move to the West coast, and I wouldn't have gone anyway. That was always the stumbling block... I don't really want to live in California.

Still, I felt terrible for the industry when CNET shut down all its TV production. I've seen TechTV weather many storms from my safe perch in the NorthEast. I've had friends who worked there (Hey, Ray!), and tried like hell to get other people jobs there. (Operative word being "try," much to their everlasting relief as of today, I'm betting.)

I first met Leo when my wife did a guest spot on TechTV's Call for Help in February of 2000, back when the boom was still booming and she was a hotshot contributing editor with PC/Computing (before that mag also was run into the ground). After Leo started writing for Access a couple of months later, we were in pretty constant contact for the next year, since the column was weekly. We drank at the Bellagio in Vegas during Comdex and traded some war stories (his were better than mine). He invited me to do a guest shot myself on Call for Help during the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show, also in Vegas -- in front of a live audience. I talked about Web appliances that were supposed to take the world by storm. None did. I can't remember what they even were. I'm not much of a prognosticator.

I told Bon this morning how losing TechTV made me sad: "I always figured that on the day you came to your senses and divorced me, I'd just up and move to California and get a job on TechTV. Now I have no backup plan."

One of the options I would probably never have taken in my life is now not even available, and that's depressing. But not as depressing as it would have been to take the option and have Comcast fire my ass and those of many other hardworking people in favor of their craptacular G4 channel, a clusterfuck of programming that's bad on so many levels as to be unwatchable. I tried one night. I know not to judge a book by its cover, but if you can't grab me in the first five pages why should I stay? G4 couldn't even grab me with a game show pitting people against each other by playing Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee. How could you do that wrong? (It wasn't Wil's fault, that's for sure.)

To Leo, Pat, and Martin (the only three guys I really know there anymore -- the total laid off was 285), my condolences. I've little doubt this will be only a blip on the radar of your careers, but I know it'll feel worse, having been there.