How inconvenient

Wow at Al Gore for his utility bills!!! I'm with Boortz on this one, let everyone have what they want/can afford. But don't get all self-righteous and preach about how we're screwing up the environment.

Coursing last weekend

A little more reflection on coursing last weekend.

It's hard sometimes for me to find a happy medium in course design. For the big dogs I like to see a big, open course that let's them really stretch while showing their agility on corners that aren't asking them to do 90 degree turns. I think these course plans showcase good Whippets as well. I get a lot of grief about my choice of plans because some owners/breeders (especially of slower big dogs and most Whippets) want to see choppier courses with more acute turns.

Thanks to Woody and Jennifer for their help all weekend. We've gotten a really nice influx of new coursers in the past year and it's nice to have a couple step up to the plate and really work hard to help put on the trial.

Remember that we're all volunteers out on the field. In the Atlanta area, there are four very active coursing clubs. Basically, the same group puts trials on for all four clubs. If you can help in any way, set up, huntmaster, lure operate, clerk, whatever, please step up and help!

I lure course because (1) I love to watch my dogs run; (2) I love to watch other good dogs run; and (3) because I like the social aspect of getting together with others who can appreciate the good dogs.

Being able to turn while running slow does not equal agility.

One more time.... Being able to turn while running slow does not equal agility.

Forfeit your celebrity

Not that I give one whit about what she does with her life, but in my mind, once you become a celebrity you forfeit your privacy. Why do celebrities actually believe that the personality cult that they've created for themselves will actually turn off at will?

"Britney Spears has voluntarily checked herself into an undisclosed rehab facility today," (Larry) Rudolph (Spears' spokesman) says in a statement. "We ask that the media respect her privacy as well as those of her family and friends at this time."

The peaceful religion that is Islam

Ladies, watch what you wear.

It actually....

turned out to be colder than the forecast. But if you wear enough clothes you won't get cold. But if you wear that many layers, you get sore and tired... Oh well, it was a very nice weekend, even with the cold temps. We had 61 dogs on Saturday and 76 on Sunday. One of the biggest weekends we've had in a couple of years. We had a nice turnout of Ibizans and Ridgebacks. Not an overwhelming number of Whippets, but still quite a few. The Ridgeback Cameron won BIE over a couple of nice Ibizians and a Pharaoh.

Nellie ran in Singles on Sunday. She's beautiful to watch run and I hope that she gets her focus so that we can certify her. Lobo took 2nd on Saturday, but in the process took a pretty nasty spill in finals and cut under his shoulder pretty badly. He's sore, but he'll be ok. Everett took 3rd on Saturday, but came back strong on Sunday to take Breed. He's getting back in the groove after the collision in Tallahassee in December.

Looking forward to racing this weekend. Actually I'll be home taking a midterm, but R is going to take the dogs down to Jax for racing on the training track. Tallahassee is the next weekend. Looking forward to getting down there again.

Easy there Junior!

Someone needs a spanking!

Bratty little kid

h/t to Tam.

The chilly South

We have our first trial of the year this weekend and the forecast for Cartersville is:I know that's not bad for a lot of people, but here in GA we don't do twenties too well. I've been tired of cold weather since the first cold snap of the year. At least it's not going to rain!!! :)

Bogging down in blogging

I really do like to blog. I don't think that 99% of what I have to say has any kind of importance, but it's nice to put stuff in writing sometimes. I really should do this more often, but with work, kids, dogs, and the other minutiae in life, the blog tends to be neglected. I think I'll regret this as I get older, much as I regret not having any journals or logs from my younger years. I really don't have many memories of my childhood (good or bad) or even of my teen years for that matter. I don't know why, I just don't.

Anyway, all that to say that I'm going to try to do more writing in the future. Not for you (not sure if there's even a you), but for me.

My day...

Installing a pressure regulator in my house... Got started today at about 12. Cutting out the section of pipe for the regulator was no problem. Getting the regulator in, not really a problem. Once it was in, problem. A little leak, not around where I had soldered the pipes, but around where the teflon tape was sealing the fitting into the regulator. Ah well, trip to Home Depot. Get more fittings and that liquid seal stuff. Back home, put new fittings in, go to solder pipes again, forget to empty water out of pipe. Oh, that was the last fitting to solder. Dammit. Have to cut one side of the regulator out and sweat the other side. Back to HD for pipe that I forgot the first trip. Back home, put a f-ing patch in instead of the damn regulator. I'm sure I've melted something in there and I really needed a shower. Small drip where the patch is. I'm done for the day though. It'll just have to leak. Next weekend, I'm sweating that whole length of pipe out from elbow to elbow and replacing the shut off valve. Reminder to self, disassemble shut off valve before soldering so that I don't melt the rubber gasket...

Fun day.

You don't say

This article at /. talks about Google's dealings in North Carolina last year while the internet search giant was seeking tax breaks for possibly locating a server farm in the state. Does this surprise anyone? Major corporations do this all the time, with benefits for both the corporation and the state/locality. In recent years, Tennessee has gotten a GM plant, South Carolina has gotten a BMW plant, Alabama a Mercedes plant and Georgia a KIA plant, all because of corporate courting. I don't hear much gnashing of teeth about these deals, but over at /. the geeks are up in arms about "big business" and whatnot. I just don't see what the big deal is...

Walking the dogs

Saturday was a very nice day. When R came home from dropping off the kids, she had the great idea to take the Greyhounds over to my step-father's families land. He and his brothers own quite a bit of land in Ola, just a few miles from the house. Anyway, we went over and spent about an hour with Sweeney and Nellie just wandering around. R and I had a great time, just getting out and spending some time outdoors together is a treat. The Greyhounds were happy and tired. We'll have to do this again soon.

I really want to work up to having the dogs off lead while we're out on the property. My old Whippet JR was a great dog to have off-lead as he had great recall. Sweeney will come back to R with no problem, but we've never really just walked around hundreds of acres with him off-lead. I'm not sure about Nellie either, especially since she's young and we haven't worked much with recall. Something to think about, especially if I'm ever going to take one of them out to do some OFC...

Vista cont...

Dammit, it keeps freezing on me again. I have no idea at the moment. Nothing new except JRE 6.

EDIT: Well, it continued to freeze for about 30 minutes (the freezes last about 30 seconds and I can't tell what causes them). Anyway, after that freeze free for the rest of the day. If anyone has any ideas, send them to me!

Vista

Vista, Microsoft's newest OS, sure is pretty. And it runs pretty fast. It's a pain to get set up though. I spent the better part of the day trying to install Vista on my desktop, a 2.6GHz Dual Core with 2 GB RAM. According to MS, my machine is a prime candidate for Vista, so I decided to take the plunge.

First off, I'm installing an MSDN version that comes with our subscription at work (this is my work machine). This is a January, 2007 release, so is probably what's going to be released to the public at the end of the month. I installed Vista on a machine that has been running XP Pro. The installation process gives you a choice of performing an upgrade on your machine and preserving programs and documents that are already installed. Of course it's a very good idea to keep a backup of everything just in case. The other option is to perform a full install of Windows Vista.

I started out by trying the upgrade. The process seemed to move along quite nicely for about 30 minutes, but after that it hung up. From this point, I tried to cancel the install but could not, everything was just locked up. So, from this point, I had no choice but to do a hard reboot of the machine. I restarted the install process and once again, got to about the same point and the install hung. At this point, I wanted to see if I could roll back the install to XP as that is an option given in the install. No luck, the machine would not boot into any OS.

At this point I figured I better just opt for the full install. This seemed to go well for about 30-45 minutes before hanging. I was getting frustrated at this point, to the point where I considered dropping back and just re-installing XP. I hadn't worked on it this long to just quit, so I tried again. This time was it! Finally, the install proceeded without a hitch. Very easy to set up once you get the OS installed. Setup wizards were very intuitive and should be easy for even the most non-tech-savvy type to handle! One thing that I have noticed is that I had problems with Vista locking occasionally for about 30 seconds. I was never able to nail down exactly what thread or process was causing this to happen as it has finally quit, but I think it had to do with my graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS) and the drivers. After installing the drivers for Vista and working through some of the settings, I'm not getting that lock up anymore.

Overall, I like Vista. The graphics are pretty, the OS is fast. I don't think the search function is quite as hot as MS has touted, but it's improved. Organization is a little improved over XP and other previous Windows versions, but it might take you a while to get used to it. So far all of my applications are working without a hitch. I don't recommend non-techy people installing Vista right now though. If you're uncomfortable with having to work through install issues or wiping out your OS to install something fresh, I'd wait a bit. MS is sure to have an update out sooner rather than later.

I'll keep you updated on any new developments, if there are any.

Fields and dogs

Last weekend we went back down to Moreland, GA to lay out a couple of course plans for the SEGC trials in March. For Saturday we have 1000 yards laid out, mostly sweeping turns, a little agility and plenty of terrain! I can't wait to see how the dogs do on this at the trial. We ran Sweeney once and he did great! Nellie ran a couple of times and looked really good, even on a tighter course that we put out after laying out Saturday's. Overall, it was a really good day with the dogs.

We're going to Jacksonville next weekend for our first foray into NOTRA. This is something I'm really looking forward to, especially after Sweeney's performance at the Winter Challenge. Dr. Anna Midgarden was out gathering some more data for her Borzoi study, running dogs on a straight and measuring their speed in a 50 yd trap. According to just about anyone I talk to, this is the most accurate measure of pure speed that has ever been done. Anyway, Sweeney went out and blazed down the straight at 40.23 mph.

Anyway, we're looking forward to seeing what all the dogs can do on the track. The track at Jax is a sand greyhound training track. Really nice surface, safe for running and conducive to speed.

Windows

So, after fighting with my laptop for the past couple of weeks, I finally decided to do a clean install of XP. I'm glad I did since now everything is running nice and speedy! It's a bit of a hassle having to re-install programs and copying documents back and forth, but after using this machine for gosh, it must be three years now, day after day, it was time to clean everything up. Sometimes Windows just needs to be freshened a bit! :)

I have Vista installing now on my desktop. Looking good so far. I'll update this when it's done.

Good to see

Two years ago, it was decreed in England that hunting with hounds would stop. The anti's finally had their way and a ban was passed forbidding fox and hare hunting with hounds. Here's an article revealing that the ban isn't really working...

toth to Stephen Bodio

If only I had Dan's photo equipment!

This was in the back yard today. I know it's hard to see, but as far as I can tell, it's a Pileated Woodpecker. Pretty!

Ipod ramblings

I finally got an IPod! I'm a huge music nut, have been forever. I have 200+ GB of music on a hard drive, all of it legal :)! So, I've been wanting an MP3 player forever (or at least since 98 when the Diamond Multimedia Rio came out). I've waited and waited, not really liking the idea of ripping all my music and not liking the UI's on the mp3 players that have been on the market. Apple hit a home run when they came out with their Ipod and I've sort of coveted one since. I still didn't relish the idea of ripping all those cd's, but finally bit the bullet and bought a large HD and got down to it. Ripping took a few full days, but the results are worth it. I still waited for an IPod, knowing that I'd get my chance sooner rather than later. Finally this past Christmas it made sense from a technology standpoint and a $$$ standpoint to make the move. I am now the proud owner of an 80 GB Video Ipod with about 50 GB of music on it. I had to re-sample a lot of the stuff I want to put on it to a lower bitrate, but the sound on the Ipod is good.

Now Apple has released the IPhone. What a beautiful piece of equipment that is! I love the concept, but I don't think I'm going to be an early adopter (I used to be, back in the heady days of early DVD and AC3). I love the package, I love the concept, but come back to me when you put a real storage system in it. The IPhone is going to be released with 4 GB storage (not shabby) with an 8GB model following soon after. This is probably based on the flash storage capability of the Ipod Nano instead of the HD capability of the Video. Flash technology is increasing at a huge rate, so don't be surprised to see the IPhone (and Nano) grow in storage size over time.

Anyway, I'm really happy with my Ipod and look forward to a long relationship with it. :)

Farmington redux

Annie sent me this image of the Farmington site. Note that one field is different from what was discussed last Fall. Thanks to Annie for providing this to me.

This guy....

This guy is a grandfather! Congratulations to Jessi and Chris and to all the Alley clan!