Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Very Merry Christmas from Henrietta and Merna

Sorry about my previous post (PF 2009) which might be disturbing for some viewers. To make amends, here is heartfelt Christian song, much needed in these difficult times:



Also: Special bonus from their father.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

High-Tech Solution For Low-Tech Problem (Part 2)

This was my first use of Google Sketchup. Pity it doesn't run natively under Linux...

Dog steps - Google Sketchup

A little explanation if you care for it: The dogs are sleeping with us in the bed since God knows when. The bed is over 60 cm high but Chucky is capable of jumping on it from the ground and Albert had a little wooden box next to the bed and he used that as a springboard.

So the problem was not getting to the bed but I was worried that jumping down from the bed can be harmful to their backs (especially for rather heavy Albert with rather short legs).

Of course, the hardest part now is to teach them to use the stairs and not just jump down from the bed...

P.S: I did not construct the stairs, of course. I just gave the blueprints to the carpenter and afterwards glued the pieces of our old bathroom mat (with penguins!) to the surfaces.

Saturday, December 06, 2008

High-Tech Solution For Low-Tech Problem

Because od the nature of our lives, Jitushka often wakes up to go to work/school shortly after I go to sleep. This complicates any potential start-of-the day communication, especially concerning the dogs. It's not easy to let the other person know when our dogs were last fed/walked.

I solved this problem like a man. Like a geeky nerdy man, that is. I made a special CGI web application to track the dogs.

Venčení - High tech řešení

Because we both have www-enabled mobile phones, we now just use a private URL on my webserver where we can see when the dogs were last fed and walked and we can both set these times to "now" or to some predefined times in the past ("30 minutes ago", "1 hour ago" etc.). And we can see the info and set it from any place with network coverage.

I pity the people who had to solve this problem 10 years ago. They were screwed and had to resort to uncool paper and pen.

TODO: Automatic sending of alarm SMS when the dogs are not walked for 10 hours or more!

Monday, December 01, 2008

Cooking By The Book

This video is a work of genius. Every second is brillantly done, it's catchy and it's so wrong on so many levels.

Remember, if there was no Internet, we'd probably never see this.



For those not "in the know": This is a mashup of two completely unrelated videos.

For those "in the know": This is the stuff Pedobear's dreams are made of.