Red dots on the brain.
Being a full-throttle geek, I find this stuff absolutely fascinating.
Quick update: one of the fish jumped out of the pond, but I think I rescued it in time. The baby canaries are growing up fast. They aren't any less ugly. (Ugly duckling had nothing on baby canaries.) But they're cute, in a gross, feather-free kind of way.
It frequently amazes me how vibrant and diverse the internet (and more specifically, the Web) has become over the last ten years.
A perfect example of the craziness is this discussion about the widely-used heretofore free blogging engine Movable Type.
It's an intense discussion in a multi-user blog about a tool used to create and easily maintain blogs. And although the signal-to-noise ratio isn't yet measurable, it's quite likely that the folks at Six Apart will read the entire page of comments. Better yet, it's also quite possible they'll take many of them to heart.
I just installed the pre-3.0 release of Movable Type on my server, just to see how it works. I was especially interested in the feature that allows readers to comment on what you've written. Anyway, nothing's up as of yet, and I may just end up building a comment-tracking tool from scratch for myself. We'll see.
Our house is slowly evolving into a zoo. We started with two cats. (My wife might argue that I should be counted among the animals, but we won't go there.)
Now we've got the same two cats, two canaries, three canary eggs, seven fish (a mix of catfish, goldfish, and koi) and a plethora (let's get loose and count the back yard as part of the house) of lizards, squirrels, birds, toads, and frogs.
But we've only signed contracts with fourteen of the animals--from the cats to the koi. So that's the official family zoo.
That said, we've had kind of a traumatic month. As far as the animals are concerned.
First, the female canary got sick. (The avian vet, who I still think is some kind of Dr. Doolittle, said she had an infection in her right lung.) We got various drugs to feed her, right in her water and food, and she's better now. She got a calcium shot, too, which she apparently needed. But more about that later.
Just this last week, one of the fancy goldfish got another smaller fish caught in its mouth. That's what we think, at least. It's hard to say for sure. Whatever the reason, the fish died after a day of acting very strange.
On the day we found him, our female canary laid an egg. She hasn't done this for some time, due to a calcium deficiency (note the shot she received) and we're pretty excited about it. She has since laid two more (one per day) and so we're expecting new canaries in a couple of weeks. We won't keep any of the babies, but we've already got good homes lined up.
And last night, our siamese/tabby mix got sick somehow, and she has been sick all day. She also got a trip to the vet (not the avian one, of course) and now they're doing bloodwork on her to see what the problem is.
So the cycle continues. Actually, I'm going to go find Jota right now. She could probably use some scratches under her chin.
