Giving up my dog - Charlie

Charlie has been a revelation to my life these past three months. He snuggles and cuddles with me. He's a bit of a box of rocks and looks at me with these deep, sleepy eyes. "huh? yeah, I guess I can go over there. hold on a second..." as he trundles around. But he has a problem, he doesn't get along with our other dog at all.

They are both rescue pugs and so there is a lot of risk with both of them as they come from fractured backgrounds. But hey, my love and I are up for challenges and there's no love like someone you've gone through some challenges with. We got Greta, we got serious about taking care of another life (no more drinking irresponsibly, gotta wake up for bathroom!) and saw the wonderful rewards of that life loving you back. Of loving you so much in its puggy little heart that it would do anything to protect you. Both of us.

What we know of Greta's background is sketchy. Her original owner died suddenly. Greta and his other pug were found with the dead owner three days after he died. We know that Greta doesn't like seeing either of us, especially CBot (love of my life) sleeping heavily and unresponsive. Its a trigger. She thinks she's alone again. Upshot for CBot: can't get hangovers anymore, Greta gets skittish and unhappy. Kind of an upshot, less ruined mornings.

We could have thought more about this, probably should have thought more. We could have thought about how Greta would react to a new dog. And we did. We thought, 'Greta lived with a dog for years both with her original owner and in foster care. She'll be fine.' We figured with two of us there would be enough laps to go around. Four hands to provide belly rubs and four thighs to plunk against as they fwump down into a snuggle position.

This isn't how dogs work. That is how rational and expressive beings *can* work. It is possible to convince a human who has the faculty of speech that this new, strange situation is okay. That its a good thing because there are now more of us in this family and more is good. We can support each other and offer love and kindness. Hey, if you play cards right, kid, you'll have someone to snuggle with all the time! Even when CBot and I are out for the day or the week. You'll have each other.

Or you could give the two of us warnings from day 1 that you were not okay with this new dog living here. You did, we ignored you. That may be harsh on us, as we did notice and respond, but we responded poorly. We didn't get help, we didn't try anything other then a pat on your head and an admonish to, 'be nice to your brother.' That's not her brother. Greta had litter mates but she never had a brother.

Its a guarding problem. She views Charlie as a threat to take her humans away. Nothing could be further from the truth but I can't sit her down and tell her (I've tried) or cry into her fur asking her to be a nicer pug (tried: doesn't work). Its possible we could work for months to try and get a small improvement. As it is, Greta gets angry and starts sending out warning signs when Charlie is in the same room as her. But these are older dogs. They are rescues. They have who knows what else going on in their heads and who knows what other behaviors that are going to come pouring out if we can overcome these.

If they were younger and we knew their complete histories, we'd try more. But we know the shell of Greta and nothing of Charlie's. We got Charlie from the rescue, he apparently got surrendered during a divorce/re-marriage scenario. What else has he seen and what else is he going to exhibit that we haven't touched on yet? Can we make a happy home for these two loggerheading pugs?

We're saying no, no we can't. We're saying that their guarding behavior is impeding us from providing them with a fulfilling life. We're saying that we are not up to the task of constantly managing their interactions as more of these trigger points are found, tripped and a fight breaks out. We're saying we don't want to see them get hurt because we can't provide them safety from each other.

We're giving up Charlie, the new one. We're going to take him back to the rescue and say, 'this is the best, gentlest pug we've ever met. he'll be great anywhere but with us.' And we'll do out best to not be angry at Greta. And we'll move forward stronger and with better tips for making your eyes hurt less after crying (put cold water on cotton balls, place on eyes: charm!). And we will miss Charlie every day. He's my first dog and I have never felt this much pain before. I have never felt so terrible and not been able to do anything about it.

The rescue is a good one and he was in excellent shape when we got him. And while we have failed to provide for him, it wasn't because we didn't love him. It wasn't because we didn't try. We needed to take stock of the duration of their lives and ask: 'what's best for them?'

These guys: http://www.seattlepugs.com/ are getting our pug back. Check it out, maybe you can find a great dog or send them some money as they take care of needy, wonderful dogs who did nothing wrong except want to be happy and safe.

learning python the hard way: day 1

I'm working through lpthw with the lady type. Its a tremendous amount of fun so far. We are both laughing and enjoying the way @ZedAShaw is presenting the material. I cut code for food and the lady has always been interested but this is her first language. Its a great way to get started.

Every time she finishes another exercise (through 3 so far), she smiles and enjoys it a little more. There will be hard parts for sure and at points it'll frustrate me (I'm an old Perl guy, python is strange to me). But it looks to be fun.

bewhahahahaha... direct quote, as she shakes her fist at me, "You people up there... acting all lofty with your ivory towers!" She has now discovered that python's print evaluates boolean expressions to 'true' and 'false.' This is gold, so gold. Because: she's right! Especially the tower bit!

Thanks Zed!

Following Sports as Hobby

I'm having trouble following sports as most of the writers I used to like are gone. ESPN.com used to have a deep stable of excellent, thought provoking or enjoyable writers. Rob Neyer, Bill Simmons, David Thorpe, Wiley, Law, Hollinger, Stark and more. Some of those guys are still there and I simply can't stand them anymore. Stark has turned into an abominable shit-stirring for no purpose other then shit, Wiley is dead, Thorpe seems to have only haters he feeds constantly and Simmons is evolving and exploring and I don't care.

Law is still around and his chats are great but I only care about prospects a little, so I can't stay too focused. Hollinger is great like all of the time but the NBA just finished a great post season and will now go fuck itself up real hard for a year or so. That should make for excellent reading: still no games. Sorry guys!

And Neyer left. Neyer was why I started reading everything at ESPN back when. Its why I have an insider subscription. And I can't follow him to SBNation. ESPN might be an ad-whoring mongrel of a site but its got nothing on SBNation. Giant, page covering gilette ads? check. Oh, those ads mean if you click anywhere but the text of the article you end up on the ad landing page? awesome. And those ads are ugly as fuck? trifecta hit. Where's my sad sack of cash?

Luckily for me I'm getting into programming as a hobby as well as my job. I'm finding I want to explore the programming ideas I ignored for years. I imagine it will make me a better programmer but I don't think I care. Its like, 'hey! you're better at your job!' Okay? Neat. I enjoy reading about compiler's now. *shrug*

I hope I don't turn into a language zealot now. I was able to stave that off by not getting involved or too close to my field. I hope I can maintain emotional distance as I decrease intellectual distance. We'll see!

*this was supposed to be tweet, couldn't quite get all that emotion in. Also, additional bitching about Neyer is needed. He was more enjoyable at ESPN when he had a muzzle. He kind of sounds like an old punk who's been trotted out from storage but is still shouting about the sex pistols even though they've been irrelevant for two decades.

Design Problem - Part One

Grr... I am having trouble fully defining my problem. This means I do not understand it, so the designs are flawed. I've been moving faster lately. I don't always think this is a good thing.

Moving slowly and deliberately has been my preferred mode for awhile. I'm quiet by nature. Pondering several things at once: something technical, something humorous, something lewd and something relaxing. I've become mono-thought based.

aside: I've been putting adverbs in this text. I hate adverbs. I take them out, but I view them as mental weakness.

I want to curl up and around with my problem. My problem is a friend. my problem is a companion. We can fight and argue. Frustrate each other, but we always come back. The problem because it exists and me because I do as well. But my current problem is diffuse. It has no requirements. Its a bogeyman stemming from a pile of shitty communication and passive limitation acceptance. My current problem is a organizational lack of commitment to a plan. But this makes sense as two of the four levels immediately above me are now vacant.

A series of leadership voids is creating engineering failures. The managers who are missing should not be designing anything, but they should be forcing issues be resolved. This sucks. Time to go read some Spolsky, see if I can get something useful.

Cooking as permanent hobby

You can have booze as a hobby and overdo it, get drunk and vomit everywhere. You can have Half Life Team Fortress 2 as a hobby, overdo it and fail out of school. You can follow any fad or whathaveyou, and do that one thing for 18 hours a day for two weeks and be done with it.

If you do that with cooking, you'll have a tremendous amount of food you haven't eaten and be broke as shit from spending all your money on food. No one is going to make pancakes all day or roast turkeys. If you're serious about overdoing your cooking, you're going to be making lots of different dishes with different ingredients.

You're not doing that. Cooking is a self moderating hobby. And if you're saying, 'well, what if I eat all the food and put on 300 lbs?' Food coma: it exists.

In other news, I made Red Chard for the first time ever last night. Tasty.

Bucket List

Getting it started:

1. Fart on a baby (thanks @JennyJohnsonHi5!)
2. Get slizzered at the club
3. remove the blight of java from the earth
4. have another rum drink in the Caribbean (should be repeated)

More later when I'm angry again!

Junely array lists

I'm writing real code with real objects and everything, ma. Look at me, I'm using a big boy language with exceptions, IDEs and integrated build and deploy frameworks. I'm growing and learning if nothing else.

I have never really been an OO developer before. I don't think it matters, I'm just gluing shit together. Its not any harder or easier then what I used to do. 3 sprinkles of a new date time object, 2 pinches of framework calls and a solid week of bashing my face against array index calculations. I'd enjoy it all a lot more if the sprinkling and dashing weren't based on reading horrible recipes, erm... documentation.

Dox writing sucks. This is accepted fact. But if your dox suck, so does my ability to use your code. And maybe the underlying issue isn't that developers are bad writers, but that we're bad editors of both our code and english. We write some code and start using it. Now its locked in and we don't want to deal with the editing/refactoring process. Guess what we have?

Fucking National Enquirer of code. Why yes, I want to use a date/time object which makes it an absolute bitch to represent the date as a single number that references an objective 0. You know, as a single number like seconds from epoch or days since Christ's birth/death. Shit that should be there. And this is supposed to be the best this new to me language has?

Fuck me, gimmie a shell and a goddamned call to date. I'll fuck some shit up there.

terrible Hawaiian lager

had redhook for beer friday again this week. my choices are redhook, some ipa and blue moon. its always free so there is no bitching allowed but redhook is the only one I'd buy on my own. which means: it gets enjoyed every time.

gwen stefani: bubble pop electric: hahahahaha, oh god. this song is so good and terrible and wonderful and awful. pop rock, bad sexual innuendo, accurate description of teenage romance and strange possibly racist backup singers. I need more of this.

I probably need to say goodbye to my comfy chair soon. I haven't sat in it for several months now as its been in storage. I was fine with packing it up because I'd see it again. But letting it go forever? Oddly nostalgic and somewhat crippling fear. Its a wonderful chair and I have the the original documentation from 25 years ago when my grandpa bought it, but I think a few pictures and a fond farewell will do it proud.

I have now personified my chair. I didn't have a meaningful relationship with my grandpa. I love him, but I don't know him. He died when I was 10. He got me interested in coin collecting but I flipped out the one time I was supposed to crash at his house with him and my grandma and had to go home. I suppose I'm holding onto the chair as a way to try and get to know him. Have a meaningful relationship with him in some way.

Its quite clearly impossible, the man is dead. And even if he is an angel or something he's not gonna sit down with me and have a conversation about his army days. I can imagine whatever I'd like, but its not going to happen. When I look at my stuff, my furniture, things that I bought, I don't much care. I take care of it and I enjoy it and when its time to move on, I move on with no problems. But when its a gift or a hand-me-down I find it almost impossible to let the object go. Its all I have of that person right now and I don't want to let it go.

This is part of why I dislike receiving gifts. I know I have a finite capacity to hold on to things, to hold on to people and I quite like the things and people in me life right now. I don't care if there's an upgrade available. I have a different rating scale of things and what I have right now is best in the way I care about.

This isn't unique, really. Studies have been done that show if you have to price an object you price it much higher if its in your hands then if its on a shelf. I assume the above is an offshoot of this behavior. This behavior has been exploited for years by marketers and salesmen to, 'have a taste! see if you like it!' And because it is an exploited behavior I view it as weak and something to be avoided.

I can apply this security patch to things going forward so new items and new things don't have the same hold on me. But stuff that got through when the barn doors were open? Locked in. But they won't last forever and I need to get rid of them sometime. I'll probably want a La-z-boy again in the future, but for now I'll be happy with a desk chair and a pug. It'll be beautiful, we'll all see.

weekending with WoW and sushi

We have failed our lettuce experiment. We acquired gorgeous, delicious lettuce. It was tasty in my taco salad. It was wonderful as a cookie deployment system and it held up with great taste for some other meal I can't remember. Or maybe it wasn't that great then? Maybe its wilting and wasting away in our fridge was earned? That two-timing, flavor lacking red lettuce!

Oh, who am I kidding. I have a terrible memory. The lettuce was tasty and we failed it. We failed to eat it while it was in the flush of youth. The flush of 'not being wilted and gross and dude, this is supposed to be crunchy.' Those were glorious days now gone.

If we had our juicer, we could still give it a proper burial by blade. Scattering its pulp from its juice and then savoring its final gift to us. Alas, we're still in the mold haus which means: no juicer. Or toaster oven. I never knew what I was missing before I had one. Its like, 'I want to bake something small very quickly.' Bam. Efficiency in a countertop.

The future is coming and it brings juicers, toaster ovens and honorable deaths for our almost expired produce. The world works in mysterious ways and I intend to make a snack out of it.

orange peels and coffee cups

Having an orange with a cup of coffee is delicious and natural. The citrus tang melds with the bad coffee's bitterness. And the touch of sweetness in an orange lingers for just a second to trick you a little bit into thinking you're not drinking free office coffee but a crafted americano from an espresso machine.

mmmm.... coffee hijinks.

I should be getting my own grinder back soon. I may dump it immediately though and get a burr grinder. For science purposes only, of course. I need to make sure its a good buy before I get one for my dad. My dad, a man who I've been meaning to but a coffee pot and grinder for over a year now. I'll get it done eventually, probably.

But then, for science, I can see if it is a better brew. After that I'll start experimenting with water types and see if that matters. I've been told you get the biggest jumps by using a burr grinder and home roasting. I'm hesitant to try the roasting though as I'm terrifyingly poor handling fire. I'm casual with it which means I light things on fire I don't mean to. Like foam couches.

Daily JunkBotting

Starting playing WoW again for real last night. Fired up my lvl 70 char, got back into my old guild and started to relearn the game. I haven't played in a solid 6 months. Huh, that time frame aligns nicely with when I started applying for jobs.

Its almost as if I have my life back. Almost. I need a desk that doesn't cause massive amounts of trauma first. I'll get that after I get a new apartment which I have hopefully been approved for as of today, checks willing. The desk that came with my current apartment has a magical ability to turn my shoulder into fire within 30 minutes. Sad fact of the day: I have to rest my casting arm while playing for now. It gets tired and hurty. Saaaaaad.

Even better, got to hang out with hyde! Thats the draw for me for playing and sticking with WoW: hanging out with friends. We talk about the game and who we should light on fire next but we're also shooting the breeze about jobs and beer while we hit things in their respective face-like objects. For the horde!

Back in the Saddle

I need to start writing again. Twitter and perl golf emails aren't cutting it. Mostly because only two people are actually golfing now. Sad, I've ruined one of the few things I built.

I suppose its better me then someone else though. It was my responsibility and I was responsible for killing it. I win.

I'm in Seattle now. I moved here from Chicago in a riveting tale of whining dogs, doughnuts and comically large bottles of Japanese beer. Kirin Ichiban: making me feel like its okay to have 'one beer' when that 'one beer' is a novelty bottle. Yay!

Next: keep evaluating what is so far a shitty, shitty product. If only they had a manual