Sephy’s Platzish

Pretty much anyone who has a pet knows the significance of the Rainbow Bridge. I first heard about it around ten years ago when we received a piece of paper from our vet on the passing of the first dog I remember - a black lab, who was found at home by my brother having passed away after being to the vet the previous day.

Back in January, I asked about some strange behaviours that my dog was having involving licking her legs. The advice was to take her to the vet, but unfortunately we couldn’t afford to do it at that time, however, we did take her to our vet when, on the second day that I was working, she started limping heavily and favoring her right rear leg. It turned out that it was just a pulled muscle, but the doctor also took a look at the bump on her face. He made the independent determination that it was a cancerous - a melanoma.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure that this could be right because of the fact that he didn’t do any kind of analysis other than looking at it. However, he did give us some meds for her, and said that time was running out for her - nothing specific or anything, but sooner rather than later.

Now that we’re 4 months after the diagnosis, the growth on her face, which started out as a slight bump, has grown to something that has almost doubled the width of her face. On Friday, I noticed that there was some skin showing, but nothing major. However, Saturday comes around, and I notice that the skin has been broken. At that point, I think we had come to the determination that it was time to make a move.

The vet’s office is closed on weekends, so we have waited until today to make the call to the vet. At first we were going to have my brother come out to take her over to the vet, but in thinking about it, it is only fitting that since she is "my" dog (I even had my Senior pictures taken with her), I should be the one who does this, and to be the last one to take off her leash, and to take some last photos of her.

That’s something I’ve done a lot of these last couple of days - take photos of her. She’s been laying quietly on the floor, or on the couch, and mostly sleeping. If she’s up, she’ll be licking herself because (and this is my thought as to why) she’s trying to take away some of the excess saliva that she has in her mouth. However, it’s just been a lot of sleeping on her side the last day or so.

All that is left for us to do is make a call to the vet (which I know will be hard to do), and to have her set up with an appointment tomorrow for us to take her in for one last examination and probably then to be taken away and being given a proper and humane farewell, along with her crossing the Rainbow Bridge.

Lastly, here’s a photo of her from better times - the beginning of last year -

Saturday was the first day of summer up here in the Northern Hemisphere, and of course, winter in the South. However, it was also the first day of the opposite season for each part of the world if you’re a twenty-firster.

It’s a term I first heard on a program called Garage Logic, from the Twin Cities, and which I listen to from time to time via podcast. Basically, the premise of being a twenty-firster is that you consider the shortest day of the year, and consequentially the beginning of longer days a day to celebrate. The longest day, however, is a day to be depressed as, since the days get shorter, you know winter is on its way.

In other words, a twenty-firster considers the start of summer the beginning of the end of long day, and the start of winter the beginning of our trek towards summer. Never mind the fact that the worst weather of each season doesn’t happen until a month or two later (more so for winter than summer, unless you consider the hottest days the worst days — mostly because of the storms that accompany them…).

To be honest, I don’t really care what season the calendar says it is - if it’s snowing in July and I’m up here, then I know something’s wrong. Just the same as if it’s 100 degrees in March, then there’s an error somewhere else. But generally, the rules about when it should be warm and cold are upheld from year to year and from quarter to quarter.

So, the big question is - are you a twenty-firster?

As some of you may remember, I wasn’t too impressed with Firefox 2 when it first came out, mostly to do with a single change to the structure of the search box. However, I finally broke down and upgraded to it and I’ve liked it, especially with the addition of a few extensions like tab mix plus to make my browsing experience my own.

Strangely, though, when I went to my home page, Firefox Central, and saw the redesign of the page the other day, it was a sign to me that the new version of the browser was out. Now, you’d think that with my prior history with a new version of software and not liking it too much, I decided that I’d be back on the cutting edge of technology and download the new version. So I did, and I have to say that I’m impressed overall, but there are a few qualms that I have.

New Location Bar

The most talked about feature by far of the new version is the redesigned location bar - dubbed as the "Magic Bar". It’s not a lie - it is quite magical. For example, if I know I saw a page about something, but can’t exactly remember the address (which for me is highly unlikely, but that’s me ), I can just type in a word that was in the title, like "Gruen" and that will bring up a list of sites that I’ve visited or bookmarked that has Gruen either in the title or in the address -

Something that you don’t see is that when a site is bookmarked, it’s got a little gold star next to it, which brings me to my next feature - one-click bookmarking. I didn’t buy into it before, but in practice, it’s devilishly simple. To bookmark a site, I usually drag it to my folder called Sites on the toolbar, but now all I have to do is click on the star in the toolbar (it shows where the go arrow is in the screenshot above) and it’s saved. Then, another click brings up a menu, which lets you file the bookmark where you want it. This even works for sites you’ve already bookmarked, such as my local radar -

Other neat features

One of the things I have a lot of are links to different RSS feeds in my Bookmarks Toolbar, and from time to time they don’t work. Usually it’s because of an error, but one thing that they’ve added to the menu that comes up when you click on a "livemark" is something deadly simple - a menu item that says "Open "Site name"" - which does just that - open the main site for the livemark so that you can view that page directly.

Also, they’ve added some other useful menus, such as the Most Visited under the bookmark toolbar, where you have a list of the ten sites you’ve visited the most over the last few days, along with the option to save your session without having to tweak your homepage every time you want to use that feature. Of course, you can still just exit the browser, but this way you have the flexibility to do that if you want.

One caveat

And it’s not even Firefox’s fault. Whenever you upgrade to a new version of Firefox (or any browser for that matter), some things tend to break. It’s no different in this case where some of my most favourite add-ons have proven to be incompatible with 3.0, but I think that’s more of a simple coding change that needs to be done.

At first, Adblock (I have regular adblock, not adblock plus) was incompatible, but just as I went to check for updates, it looks like it has been updated.

However, Firebug, Fasterfox, Tab Mix Plus, and All-in-One Gestures are not compatible yet. I would suspect that it won’t be too long before that’s sorted out though.

Overall impression

Overall, I have to say that I’m glad I’ve upgraded to the new version of the browser - it adds quite a few features that are really neat (including being able to resize the search box), and it uses quite a bit less memory - I’ve had it open for quite a while now and it’s only using 117MB of Virtual Memory and 108MB of RAM. Also, and to be honest, I haven’t noticed this too much since I have relatively fast Internet, it’s apparently much faster at loading pages.

If you’re someone who waits for software to be stable before it’s released, that’s alright, but I don’t think you’d be going wrong to take a chance and upgrade to Firefox 3.

I haven’t mentioned it too often on here, but I am an owner of some interesting electronic equipment. No, not stuff like a 1950s-era Bakelite radio (though I know of one right around here!), or some kind of funky Japanese robot dog purchased from the Internets. The equipment I’m talking about is a police scanner.

Actually, this is something that I’ve been interested for a long time - even way back when we had a ten-channel scanner that had the channels for my county (though only two of them would work now I believe), along with the weather channel. If you wanted to program it, you would have had to purchase a crystal to receive a specific frequency. Wanted to listen to something else? Sorry, out of luck.

Normally, we’d only drag it out when we heard sirens or when there were storms in the area - one infamous tale that I’ve been told is from a snowstorm in the ’70s when one of the cops was driving around and had gotten off of the road, and then wound up at a church, and stopped to pray for a bit.

After a while though, the scanner has gone missing and I don’t know where it is, other than to say it’s probably somewhere in the house somewhere. To be honest, I didn’t bother with wanting to listen to the police or anything exciting until one day the railroad put up a box near the house and, if I was listening to the three-channel weather radio we had at the time, it would interfere with it whenever a train went through.

To make a long story short, I go off to college, come back home, the weather radio’s broken, and I have nothing better to do with my time (since I wasn’t working) than watch the trains. That leads me to Radio Shack and buying my first programmable scanner - the first night, I listened to ham radio, got some frequencies on the web, and then put them into the radio. I also listened to some interesting stuff like goings on at a local Burger King (not the window cos those are pretty weak signals) and the city buses.

I didn’t know it then, but I needed to have a different type of scanner to be able to track these conversations about unruly passengers, or to listen to other Sheriffs’ departments. So, after I started working, I invested some cash into getting a scanner capable of receiving these other areas. And that changed my ways of listening to the radio - now I was listening to the freeway patrols, getting to know a lot more than I needed and even being able to hear lane closures for motorcades when they happen.

It was also around this time that I was given an antenna - which I didn’t know anything about mounting, placement, or anything. For quite a while it sat, quite literally, in my bedroom with a cable extending from it to my scanner. I also had a couple of other antennas which allowed me to hear signals from a wide swath of the area, and even from the east coast. However, due to the confusion of what exactly I was listening to (I couldn’t get the tone information to figure out exactly what it was), I started to get interested in buying a new scanner.

So, I did - I purchased what has to be one of the best scanners out there - the Uniden BC780XLT - the only thing that it doesn’t do is digital, which isn’t that big of a concern yet here anyway. I also purchased a basic scanner that is useful to find new frequencies when it was on sale for $70 or so after Thanksgiving one year. This trifecta of scanners has been the set I’ve used most often, and here they are as a happy family on the day I bought the third one.

By that time, I had figured some things out about the antenna I received, the sordid details I’ll go into in another post, but I was picking up signals reliably from most of the southern third of the state, and even in to Illinois and Michigan. However, after that winter, I started to get involved in other things and the scanners took a back seat.

Sure, I’d bring one along if I was going on a long trip, but I had lost interest in doing the long listening sessions I’d have with it, just listening to hear what I could get in over the airwaves. The best one to me is still when I picked up Environment Canada’s weather radio from the area near Lake Erie or so. I even used a spreadsheet to log the frequencies and tones I’d get. The scanner got put away, and I kept myself busy in other ways.

However the storms over the last week, and the general start of the summer storm season has rekindled my interest in scanning. I think part of it is that when I had my little scanner at work the other week, people were very interested in it - more for the fact that it got the weather than anything else, but it set off a spark in me.

It’s done so much to rekindle that I’ve invested another $33 in a new antenna (and adapter) to replace the old one and now have it mounted outside on the same setup I’d used for the other one. Now, I can hear the trains well before they get here, thanks to similar boxes some 10+ rail miles away, hear almost all of the same agencies that I’d heard in the past, and in general, keep abreast of what is going on with the local radio scene once more.

As one fella I know on an Illinois scanning list says, Happy Scanning!

One of the things I’ve been grumpy about a lot is the way that severe weather warnings are presented on local TV. Do they need to be presented? Yes, because it is a public service to inform the viewing audience of where storms are and if you need to take cover from said storms. That’s something we all can agree on. However, there are good ways and there are bad ways to handle informing the public of severe weather.

Let’s look at a bad way first, shall we?

This picture comes from just a couple of weeks ago, on the Sunday before Memorial Day, when we had some (as you can see on the radar picture) storms in the area. They weren’t severe (at the time), and there was just a watch issued for the area.

However, the fine folks at channel 12 decided to do what they do every time there’s a watch issued for the area - squeeze the picture so that it’s completely unwatchable and essentially waste about 1/8th of the screen with their graphic telling you that you’re watching channel 12’s weather bar. Of course, not to be outdone by the weather department, you also have the convenient reminder that you’re WATCHING CHANNEL 12 in the lower right hand corner. By the way, the reason for the black bars is that this was taken from their digital feed, and if it were not for the watch bar, the show would have been in HD, and the 12 logo would have been about 1/4 the size.

By the way if you think that channel 12 are the only ones who do this kind of thing, here’s what channel 58’s bar looks like (note that this is from September 2006, during which time they were running a promotion and squeezing the picture even further than they had already with their weather bar!)

Channels 4 and 6 at least use a bit of sense (though how much sense is questionable because it just happens that they wind up wasting more space by doing this) and just shrink the picture so that the aspect ratio isn’t messed up; only the picture is smaller.

Now, let’s take a look at how this kind of thing should be pursued (or, at least how it was pursued by the local stations in the past). First off, I should commend channel 12 on their old way of doing this - they would just put up text at the bottom of the screen that read, for example, "T-STORM WARNING ___ COUNTY". It was simple, didn’t interfere too much with the picture, and was a perfect solution to a complex problem.

However, what really got me going on this was the fact that I was able to pick up stations from out of the area yesterday (ahh, the old days of TVDX, you might say, and that’s true, and this was my first time doing some digital DXing, which made it that much cooler ). Thanks to the weather, a lot of the stations had their warnings up and showing for you to see.

On every single occasion, no station had squeezed, squished, crunched, or even re-sized a picture to accommodate the warning information. All they did was put a simple overlay of the affected counties, and text telling you what warnings were out (along with the counties affected). In another instance, an ABC affiliate broke into their programming (game 2 of the NBA finals), but did something that I think would give Milwaukee TV bosses heart attacks (well, except for channel 6 back in 2007) - they kept the game on in the bottom left and had the meteorologist in the upper right!

So, you may ask, what did warnings look like in the "olden days" of TV (i.e. anywhere but Milwaukee yesterday). Well, I could show you a picture I took of one station that is literally stuck in the early 90s with just showing a storm cloud in the lower left — which is what they used to do on local TV; sometimes with an S or a T to tell you what kind of warning it was. However, as it so happens, I have an old picture from channel 4, from a taped airing of "Days of Our Lives" circa I have no idea - maybe late 90s or early 2000s.

Look! A full-screen picture (though it wouldn’t be in HD because none of the major stations have the technology yet, but you’ve got the feeling it’s coming) with a simple overlay. Can anyone tell me why the TV stations can’t make such a simple step backward that would, in the end, be a huge step forward?

Oh, and by the way, I must also give kudos to the PBS broadcaster in the area - channels 10 & 36 - because they can do an HD overlay, and the size of it is very comfortable - it looks like a postage stamp on an envelope. When viewed on a 42-inch screen, I bet it’s the perfect size.

What I’m curious about is if Milwaukee is the only TV market that does this stupidity. I have this inkling that we are. That should be a lesson to them, but I don’t think they care to listen…