Our dog died this week. Sandy had been with us for more than 13 years, but had been having health problems for the last 6 months. Late in life, she developed diabetes and started having epileptic seizures. We kept it under control for quite a while, but eventually it was too much for her system. It also turned out she had liver cancer, so that may have precipitated the failure of everything else. We are very sad about her death and will miss her greatly.
Sandy and a toy
We got Sandy from a rescue group where, though being scrawny and having just come off the street, she wagged her tail like crazy and was a very sweet dog. We got her just before Halloween, and she was terrified by the Trick-or-Treaters, so she hid under my chair for the evening (and never did so since). We knew she was a little special because when the vet spayed Sandy, we were told she had a couple extra blood vessels that caused a bit of trouble, but it all worked out. She hated the cone over her head to prevent her licking the stitches, so I took it off and she never messed with her incision.
We got a great trainer and trained Sandy to behave well. She was a quick learner, particularly when food was involved. She could be bribed to do nearly anything, which was good later in life when we had to give her insulin shots and such. She also learned from corrections, but we had to do it well. She drove my wife crazy by trying to bite her way up the leash on walks and runs. I think Sandy thought it was both playing and protest, but my wife couldn’t stop it. Finally, she got in one good correction with the collar snap, and Sandy never tried it again.
While my wife did most of the walking and poop-picking-up, Sandy saw her as slightly subordinate and a plaything, perhaps because my wife sometimes got down on the ground to play with the dog. I was always seen as the alpha dog and Sandy was very good at obeying me, much to my wife’s chagrin. We could get Sandy to jump through hoops, crawl through tunnels, and do figure-8 around our legs as we walked (particularly if there was promise of a treat coming). She was a good watchdog and barked at all the deliverymen and anyone else that came to the door.
Despite Sandy’s questionable time before we rescued her (she cowered sometimes when we made certain motions, so she must have been beaten), she was housebroken and never pooped in the house, except when she was terribly sick and couldn’t help it, and that was only a couple of times over all those years. She only peed in the house once, and that may have been her experimenting with what she could get away with. She squatted over a mat and started to pee and when I shouted “NO!” she stopped and never tried it again.
Sandy was quite a chewer when she was young. When we were at work, we confined her to the kitchen for a while (as we were training her and trying to understand her behavior) and she chewed up part of the linoleum! We put her in a huge cage in the middle of the kitchen (well, not really a cage – we called it the Bellagio, because it was so grand) and one day, she managed to knock it enough over that she jumped out over the kiddie gate and escaped into the rest of the house. My wife came home at lunch to walk the dog and opened the door to see Sandy with some undergarment in her mouth racing past. Sandy had caused a bit of devastation in several rooms, including licking a pair of my slippers to death (the linings were completely trashed), eating my chapstick, and generally chewing things that shouldn’t be chewed. No real harm done, but shocking that she had so much energy. This was even though my wife was running with her several miles a day and going on several walks. We expanded the Bellagio (making it so large that my wife could wheel a chair in and sit with Sandy with the roof on) and put a roof on it to prevent future great escapes when we were out.
Eventually, Sandy calmed down and had the run of the house. She loved laying upside down and napping everywhere, but she had an odd quirk. She always wanted to sleep with something pressing against her, often digging into her head. When we would try to convince her to move her head somewhere more comfortable, she would push it against something else.
Sandy, of course, loved food, especially meat. Once day, I accidentally dropped a frozen burger on the way to the grill and she thought “wow, meatsicles from heaven!” and started licking it. She didn’t get to keep it, but she had a nice time while it lasted. My wife dropped a taco once, and Sandy inhaled it before we could say anything. She also liked many vegetables, particularly corn on the cob (see the movie on my YouTube page), broccoli, and carrots. She hated fruit, tomatoes, and alcohol (if I waved the top of an open beer bottle near her, she turned away).
For a long time, Sandy slept in the kitchen of the Redondo Beach house, but when we moved to Irvine, she started sleeping at the foot of our bed (on the floor – she wasn’t allowed on furniture). Thus began the multiplication of dog pillows – we eventually had 4 or 5 around the house to suit her whims. She did use them all. The only time she tried to get on furniture was after we had taken care of a friend’s dog. We think the other dog must have gotten up on the couch while we were out, because shortly thereafter, Sandy very slowly and deliberately put her front paws on the couch and made to climb up. She was watching me all the time, and I was speechless with what I was seeing. Once I recovered my voice and said “NO!” that was the end of it and she never tried again.
In her early years, Sandy was a counter-cruiser. We caught her on her hind legs with her front paws on the kitchen counter looking for things to steal and chew. And the tail was wagging in such a nervous wag! Later in life, she liked pulling things from trashcans and chewing what she would find. We’d discover a trail of chewed tissues and dental floss leading out of the bathroom. We think she was just trying to get our attention if we were sleeping late, because she didn’t do it when we weren’t home.
About 4 years ago, a neighbor dog broke away from her owner and mauled Sandy. The other dog ripped a huge swath of skin out of Sandy’s right rear leg and also left puncture wounds on her neck and shoulder. After a night of surgery, Sandy came home very weak with another of those cones on her head. She was so miserable that I took the cone off and she never messed with her stitches. She eventually recovered, but her leg became stiff so she could never sit properly again. That was sad, because we had trained her to be such a pretty sitter (she started off with a very sloppy sit, but ended up with a perfect sit posture). She also couldn’t manage the stairs in our new house, so she had to sleep downstairs while we were upstairs, which was sad.
I’ve spent the last 13 years narrating all my actions and thoughts to the dog. She was a constant presence that I could talk to, explain things to (and she patiently listened), and was very comforting to have around. She was fun and playful, though not particularly cuddly. Sandy was a terrific companion and we loved her. If there is a Heaven, perhaps she is there, and perhaps she will put in a good word for us because of her life with us.
We’re getting lots of examples of Cloud Computing for use at home these days. Examples include Apple‘s new iCloud, the Siri digital assistant built into the iPhone 4S, Google Documents and GMail, and cloud backup, like Mozy, Carbonite, and the one I use, CrashPlan. All of these store your data in the cloud (on servers somewhere on the Internet) and provide you services using that data. Cloud Computing means you don’t have to maintain infrastructure (servers and programs and such) and can use the services from nearly anywhere. It’s great for businesses that need to scale services quickly. So what’s the problem for home users?
The problem is that home Internet access isn’t up to the task of supporting the data intensive cloud services, and, even if it were capable, capacity limits put in place by our service providers will severely curtail the cloud’s usefulness. The examples below range from annoying to potentially catastrophic. For cloud computing to work for average people, these problems must be fixed. If not, a lot of people are going to have big problems, as described below.
Cloud backup is a great way to make sure your data is backed up to a remote location that will survive even if your house is burglarized or burns down. You run a program on your computer and it backs your data up to the cloud whenever you have a network connection. This means you always have a backup in case of disaster. The first problem anyone using these tools encounters is that it takes weeks to make that initial backup. That’s right – the upload speed from our homes is very slow, usually on the order of one or two million bits per second, and I think the cloud backup providers throttle even further, so the upload speed is typically not at your bandwidth limit. Once the initial backup is made, future backups are incremental, only sending changed data, so are usually fast. Problems can occur for people that use virtual machines (Parallels or VMWare, for example), because the virtual disks they use tend to be many GB, so just booting a VM guarantees a significant upload, even if only changed parts of the disk are sent. Everybody is getting better and better digital cameras all the time, so more and larger photos are being stored on hard drives and they also need to be backed up, along with our iTunes files and digital movie copies, etc. Things are pretty ugly, because even average users will soon have hundreds of GB of data that they care about and don’t want to lose.
All of the above is annoying, because our home Internet infrastructure stinks, but it gets worse: If you have a failure or loss and need to restore that backup of say 200GB, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may prevent it. Even with the faster download speeds, such an undertaking will take days, but with capacity caps that are now being put into place by cable companies and other ISPs, we may be blocked when we hit that cap, or at least significantly slowed. Yes, I know some of the backup providers have services where for an outrageous fee, they will mail you DVDs or maybe a hard drive with your data, but that’s on top of the usual monthly charge. So if your MacBook gets stolen, not only will you need to buy a new one, but you’ll need to pay to get your files back or be blocked by your ISP. Not very comforting. Perhaps cloud backup isn’t as good a deal as we thought and we all should keep local backups as well (yes, I know that’s a good idea, but not nearly as low impact and convenient as cloud backup).
Apple’s iCloud is a new player in this game, and it will cause lots of trouble. One feature, PhotoStream, automatically uploads your photos to the cloud from your iPhone and then down to iPhoto. It really works and is surprisingly nifty. It took more than a GB of photos from my wife’s new iPhone 4S, sent them to the cloud, and the next day, they were in her iPhoto. That’s pretty handy! But wait, that means it uploaded a GB of photos to the cloud. Then it downloaded them again. Then iPhoto uploaded them again (at least I think that’s what it was doing when it was hogging my internet connection all day). So we’re aiming for those ISP-enforced capacity caps without even knowing it.
Even the nifty Siri assistant built into the iPhone 4S uploads the commands to the cloud for interpretation (and the results may require internet data too). So the data plan from your phone company, unless it is unlimited, will be slowly eaten away by constant Siri use. It may not be much, but it isn’t nothing.
In short, there are companies selling us cloud services for the home that will be strongly affected by limitations imposed by our network connections and by our ISPs. Before long, these competing interests will collide and we, the consumers, will be screwed. We will have to pay more if we want to use these very handy cloud services.
I have some (not nearly comprehensive) suggestions on how to avoid such a crisis.
ISPs should track data usage as cloud service usage grows and adjust their capacity caps upwards as needed so even above average users never hit them. The ISPs always say the caps only affect the top 1% or less, so they should keep it that way.
Allow occasional exceptions to the capacity caps. If someone calls and says they are restoring a cloud backup, lift the cap that month, as long as it is a rare event.
The services should allow preferences to be set to make sure we don’t upload or download too much so we trigger these caps.
Essentially, these cloud computing services will transform all of us into heavy data users on our networks, so it will no longer be people downloading porn or pirating movies or songs that are the big bandwidth hogs, but ordinary people that take photos and movies with their phones and back up their media libraries. No longer will the ISPs be able to claim that it is only abusers that are using all their bandwidth, because it might be all of us, but just happening behind our backs by automatic programs accessing the cloud for us, but without us explicitly initiating it.
While these are mostly sky photos, they are from the back deck and front deck of my house, and if the weather were clear, the ocean would be visible. Catalina island is visible in a couple of them.
Because our new city is very eco-friendly, herds of goats are used to clear the hillsides and canyons, which are prone to fire. The goats are moving up the canyon behind our house and are pretty entertaining to watch. The following videos show some of them doing their thing:
Hiperwall Inc. today announced the new version 2.0 of the Hiperwall display wall software. The new version significantly enhances functionality of existing components and adds two new ones that are very powerful. See the announcement or the Enhancements list for an overview of what is new, but I’ll mention a few of the new features/capabilities and describe why they are significant.
Security: Any connections that could connect from outside the Hiperwall LAN (such as Senders and Secondary Controllers) use authenticated SSL connections to enhance the security and integrity of the system. Sender connections even within the LAN use SSL to authenticate the connection.
Multi-Sender: The new Sender can deliver multiple portions of a computer’s screen to the display wall. This means several applications or data feeds can be shown from a single machine. Of course, the entire screen can be sent, as before. Sender performance is also improved, particularly when a Sender window is shown across a large portion of the display wall.
Secondary Controller: While the usual Control Node is very powerful and easy to use, Secondary Controllers are even more intuitive and easy to use. Secondary Controllers can be anywhere in a facility to control walls distributed throughout the area. They show a low-bandwidth view of the content on the display walls, so they can be used over wireless or at home to monitor the wall’s contents and behavior. They can also focus on a single display wall (in a multi-wall configuration) or show all active objects. You can see how easy the Secondary Controller is in the following video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_iXg-FDjYk
Share: Until now, the Sender has been able to show applications and other data on a Hiperwall from anywhere across the Internet. With Share, Senders can be shared with several Hiperwall systems, enabling collaboration and communications across distributed sites. Share automatically adjusts the data rate based on link conditions to each display wall it connects to, so systems connected via lower speed links will not slow down the data feed to systems connected via fast links.
Streamer: The Streamer can now send what is shown on a display device, in addition the the usual capture device and movie file streaming. This is not meant to replace the Sender. which sends the contents of a computer’s displays, but typically provides a higher frame rate at the expense of much higher network bandwidth.
Text: Generate attractive text labels and paragraphs with any installed font in any color and with colored or transparent backgrounds. This is great for digital signage or even labeling Sender or Streamer feeds.
Slideshows: Slideshows now have more advanced transitions, so attention-grabbing wipe and fly motions can be used.
There are many other great new features and capabilities, but the ones listed here are the ones I think will have the biggest impact on our already very easy to used display wall software. The Secondary Controller makes content manipulation even easier and more intuitive than before, so customers can take advantage of Hiperwall’s incredible interactivity and flexibility. Share makes sharing content among walls and among sites quick and easy. Even small features, like content previews, make the Hiperwall experience even better than before. Visit Hiperwall.com for more information.
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