Dec 10
We got the first photos from the Lytro up and ready to share. While they’re not all prize winning photos, they should give you an idea of what the currently capabilities of the camera are. Several of the images even show off the Lytro’s newest features – Perspective Shift and Living Filters…
Check out the gallery here…
Jun 3
While emotions are still a bit raw – this won’t be another post about grieving, instead this is a post about what’s making us smile and helping us move on… So don’t worry this post won’t be sappy or a depressing…
We’re big fans of the teas from Teavana, yes they’re a little pricey and I think just like Omaha Steaks or crack they can be a bit addicting… But their Honeybush Vanilla Tea has helped sooth some nerves and calm us down… As an added bonus it’s not illegal like crack is!
By the way, have you discovered Texts From Dog yet? This one had us giggling a lot:
Somebody was telling me this past week about the judging this for this year’s Cleveland Photographic Society’s photos of the year. The requirements for the “Nature” category is that entries must not have any manmade elements in them – aka no “hand of man.” The judge in the Nature category came across one photo, stopped, and stated that she was unable to judge the photo because of the road the ran through it… It turns out that the photographer who shot the photo was assisting with organizing the photos and leaned over and told the judge: “That’s not a road, that’s the Colorado River!”
Another thing that makes us smile – getting a screaming deal… Like walking into Best Buy and getting an Open Box microwave that’s normally $330, marked $249, and only paying $99! Turns out that today only our local Best Buy was having a blow out sale on ALL of their Open Box range top microwaves – every single one of them was just $99.
Jun 2
I wasn’t going to do a post about today, and Patricia’s earlier post echoed my feelings pretty well. But I’m still trying to deal the emotional roller coaster of the day and hopefully getting words out will help…
First – to the woman in the waiting room of the vet’s office who saw Joe’s cowering and quivering and misunderstood where it was coming from – while I understand that when you looked down at him and said “don’t worry nobody is going to hurt you” that you meant it from a kind and caring place. Unfortunately given why we were there and what we were going through, your comment was actually emotionally devastating.
To Margaret and Becca at Menagerie Meadows – thank you. Thank you both for your kindness, compassion, and understanding. We greatly appreciate all that you did today. We’re truly grateful to have you two caring for the medical needs of our pets, and whether it’s in Strongsville or over in Valley City we’ll continue to bring our cats in to you.
Since we got home I’ve been remembering all the things about Joe I’ll miss and the great memories he’s given us… He truly was a dog that was perfect for us:
Joe was a terrible watch dog because he believed that anybody who came to the house for any reason was truly there just to see him, and gave them an enthusiastic welcome, until he got tired 5 minutes after they arrived and he climbed back in his bed to go back to sleep. New people are exciting – and exciting is also tiring.
As much as he liked visitors – he loved his people even more. One of my favorite things was pulling into the driveway and seeing him standing in the bay window watching for us to return. He would greet us at the door so excited not only was his tail wagging but the entire back half of his body was wagging. In the last 4 years he started greeting us with one of his toys as well – not so much to share with us – as he’d follow us around carrying his toy almost as if he was telling it “see I told you they would come back!”
We couldn’t bring mylar balloons into the house – because Joe thought that they were the living embodiment of everything evil, nothing terrified him more than mylar balloons. Consequently, mylar balloons were also one of the few things that Joe would ever bark at. It was almost a year after we got him that we heard him bark for the first time.
As rarely as Joe barked, he was still an incredibly expressive dog with a full range of sighs, grunts, and groans as he settled into a nap location – or was disturbed from wherever it was that he had decided to collapse.
Joe was also pretty much oblivious to much of the world around him. On the plus side this meant that for many years we could let him out in our unfenced yard without any sort of tether and he wouldn’t wander off. This also meant that he would stumble past countless birds, rabbits, and squirrels, who would run off in terror all while Joe had no clue that they were there.
On the other hand as a puppy he was determined to catch the dangerous leaves and moths on the other side of the sliding glass door from him…
One of our favorite games when we first got Joe was to play fetch with him by taking him up the stairs in our townhouse and tossing a ball down the steps. Joe would charge down the steps to retrieve the ball and come running back up… After two weeks he got wise to this game, and when he got to the bottom of the stairs would get the ball and walk off instead of coming back upstairs. We changed the game, tossing the ball up the stairs instead, after another two weeks he got wise to this game (probably due to bashing his snout into the wall too many times) and would get the ball and lie down at the upstairs landing, refusing to come down.
It took Joe 3 years to learn how to catch a ball – and that was only after a good friend who loved Joe about as much as we do decided that he was determined to teach this to Joe.
One thing he never figured out was to lift his leg to pee.
Cover him with a blanket and he’d get lost…
He never licked – EVER. What passed for a kiss from him was when he would occasionally stick his nose in your face.
Cocker’s aren’t known for being that great with kids, but when The Boy was born Joe earned the nickname “Nursery Dog.” When The Boy would cry Joe would run over to the crib (or the baby monitor) to see what was going on. Every time we walked in with the infant carrier, Joe had to stick his nose in and sniff The Boy, almost as if he was confirming that we brought him back.
However a few months after The Boy was born Joe stopped trusting him, and it wasn’t until The Boy was almost 5 before Joe would willingly let him come up to him. As an infant The Boy would grab Joe’s fur whenever he was in range and yank HARD, and getting tugged on was one of Joe’s least favorite things. No matter how hard The Boy pulled, no matter how much Joe hated it, he never got mad at The Boy. He never, growled, snapped or even barred his teeth – he just walked (ok sometimes he ran) away.
In all the years that we had Joe we only heard him growl 3 times. The first was when he was a puppy and our at the time youngest cat, Chase, was a kitten. Chase decided to kneed on Joe’s belly in the middle of the night, by the third night Joe had had enough and growled at Chase. The only other two times we have heard Joe growl was when he was much older and one of the cats decided to try and push him away from his food…
Cocker’s are known for having issues with ear infections – and I don’t think there was a time when he didn’t have an infection and one of his ears was bothering him. Thankfully unlike most cocker’s his infection never got so bad that he lost his hearing.
He liked the cats though, it wasn’t that unusual for him to fall asleep with his nose up a cat’s butt, or for one of the cats to use him as a pillow.
And this is still my favorite picture of him…
Goodbye buddy… I hope that in your last dream your ears weren’t bothering you, you had all the Marrow Bones you could eat, and that you were dreaming of how happy you were with the family that loved you so much…
Jun 2
Years ago, long before we were a Bloke and a Bird, we were two newly married people starting out.
It started with a joke, “if we ever get a dog, let’s get a Cocker Spaniel and name him Joe…Joe Cocker.”. It stuck.
As we closed on our first house, we began the search for Joe…often asking every Cocker we met, “are you Joe?”
One day, in a horrible puppy mill place one buff colored cocker said, “yes.”. We may have been lured by the “male cocker spaniel on sale” sign (Clearance Puppy for all you Marley and Me fans), but were truly sucked into the big brown eyes.
We learned that he was bred for a Christmas gift litter and he was the one not chosen. He was all teenage awkward when joined our family.
Joe was special, in a short bus kind of way. He’d forget there were steps and fall up them; he’d dribble water as he drank as he was easily distracted; he was not bright.
But he was the most beautiful running dog I’ve ever seen. He had grace at high speed that he didn’t have in walking.
He never learned walk on a leash without getting tangled. He would sit for a treat only when he was in the mood and then his butt would often slide out from behind him. And he never really passed puppy school, more like he wasn’t asked to leave.
More times than not I was sure Joe was more cat than dog. He’d sleep all day and do the best impression of a throw rug.
About a year ago, we noticed he was shaking more and pacing at night. Many trips to the vet we determined he had dementia. His body was healthy but his brain was slowly giving out. We tried to make jokes that he never started out with brain cells, but the truth is we were slowly and painfully losing him.
Knowing what was going on, we started to see the episodes come more often, last longer, and be more severe. A few days ago was the worst yet. We’ve had him on some anti anxiety meds to help, but at three to four times the dose nothing was touching it.
Tonight, the Bloke, Bird, and the Boy made the hard choice to say good-bye. Our vet is the most amazing woman who literally cried with us as we hugged and said goodbye.
We are sad. This choice was hard because his body was healthy…though aging and slowing down. But what made him Joe was just a shadow left in the face of fear and anxiety.
So now it a time for letting go.
“letting go
Letting go
The hardest part is knowing
That I’ll miss you so
I’d like to wish you well
Oh but it hurts so
Sometimes doing what is right
Is letting go.”
—Joe Cocker (not the dog)
Apr 27
Truly by co-incidence I got to be in the Washington DC area for the arrival of the Space Shuttle Discovery at the National Air & Space Museum’s Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center. I was fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of Discovery as it flew around the area on the back of the 747 transport aircraft, and after much prodding from Patricia made the drive out to the museum to see Discovery and Enterprise nose to nose outside the museum and to see Discovery get rolled into her new home in the museum.
It was fantastic to get the opportunity to see the two shuttles together and to watch Discovery get moved in – but at the same time it was a very sad moment for me. In many ways I think this shirt from Think Geek sums it up…
Growing up I never had a phase where I got into cowboys – but I was into space travel and space exploration. The Apollo missions had already wrapped up, but I was alive when Skylab was launched. When Skylab came back down, my friends and I combed the neighborhood looking for pieces of the space station – never mind that it didn’t come down over the New York City Suburbs.
The introduction of Enterprise and then Columbia was a big deal to me. I had all kinds of space shuttle toys, took the Space Shuttle Operator’s Manual out of the library countless times. The wallpaper in my bedroom was a cutaway print pattern of the shuttles.
The Shuttle Fleet was supposed to be the gateway to the solar system for us. On the backs of the Shuttles space stations would be built. Those space stations would be the jump-off point to the Moon and to Mars. The Shuttles were supposed to bring in a new economy too – with exotic manufacturing taking place on the forthcoming space stations which would get their raw materials mined from asteroids, and the new goods brought down to earth onboard Shuttles.
The Shuttles were supposed to be all-purpose space vehicles – carrying cargo and satellites into space, repairing malfunctioning satellites, helping to build space stations and then providing them with supplies AND people. The European Space Agency built Spacelab to expand the research capabilities onboard the Shuttles. At one time there was a launch facility at Vandenberg AFB in California so that a Shuttle could be launched into a Polar Orbit. The Space Shuttle Operator’s Manual talked about the possibility of a shuttle being launched into high earth orbit and studying the Van Allen Belt and other missions.
These weren’t the day-dreamings of a school child – these were ideas put out by NASA and folks close to the space program.
Most of it never happened….
Admittedly, most of those ideas were pie-in-the-sky, money is no object, spectacular sounding wishes that sound great when pitched – but really weren’t practical. But the fact remains, the Shuttle Fleet and the principles that led to their creation were just the tip of the iceberg. There was a great deal of potential in the Shuttles that was never exploited, and the loss of Columbia essentially killed the Shuttle program.
I think that’s why I found Discovery’s arrival at the Udvar-Hazy Center so sad… Not that it was the end of an era – or even the end of a landmark in human space exploration. What I think I found the most upsetting was the unrecognized, and unexploited potential. The Shuttles could have and should have been so much more than what they ended up being. The loss of Challenger and ultimately Columbia brought about an exceedingly risk averse culture to a profession that at it’s very nature is nothing but risk. Some may argue that it wasn’t risk aversion – but more of a focus on safety, but to explore and exist in space will always carry a great deal of risk for those who make the trip. Instead of using the Shuttles to continue to push the boundaries – NASA reverted to the Shuttle’s default role of flying cargo truck.
As disappointing as the lost potential, is the reality that the Shuttle Fleet was retired without a replacement. NASA is forced to rely solely on other space agencies to get people and supplies to the International Space Station. NASA’s replacement launch system is still several years away – assuming that political pressures don’t kill it completely. There is a push to get private companies to develop methods to launch people and cargo into space – and there appears to be some progress on that front. But even still, should the US Government be dependent on a commercial entity to get them into space?
Since the Apollo missions, the US has been a leader in the exploration of space, and despite all the fanfare surrounding the final Shuttle mission and the transfer of the various Shuttles to museums around the nation – the fact remains. The US is relinquishing it’s leading role in space exploration, and is doing so not with a bang – but with a whimper…
Jan 28
Our friends at the Cleveland Photographic Society are celebrating the club’s 125th Anniversary this year.
At 125th years they’ve been around LONGER than Kodak and are one of the oldest photographic clubs in the United States.
In addition to their usual slate of photographic events – they will be offering all sorts of special events throughout the year to celebrate their anniversary.
Dec 29
For a limited time you can get ABC’s drama Pan Am for free in the iTunes store. We’re not talking one or two episodes in low quality either – this is all 9 episodes in HD. The question is – does this mean that the show will be back after New Years?
Click below to head over to iTunes and download away.
Nov 19
We’re really not football fans here at The Bloke and a Bird, but we live in a football town.
We live in a town so passionate about football that it’s amazing that they tolerate a team that is so consistently bad. We are always stunned that even when temps are in the teens, the wind is blowing 20MPH off the lake, and it’s snowing – the fans are still at the stadium 8 hours before gametime and the game is still sold out – all to see a team with a record typically well below .500
One fan sums up the passion for the team and their exasperation with the Cleveland Brown’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory…
Nov 11
Many years ago, when I either had fewer demands on my time, less of a social life, a better memory, or some combination of the three, I didn’t need to track a calendar and appointments. I was able to track everything in my head without any trouble. I don’t know if I’ve got more going on now, my travel itineraries have become more complex (hey you fly to Duluth on the first flight out of Cleveland and then drive back a few days later making stops in Milwaukee and Chicago along the way, followed by a trip to Buffalo the next week, and Sault Ste Marie MI and Detroit the week after that and tell me you can keep track of it all…) or what but I’ve become much more reliant on my calendars online, on my computer and on my phone.
Because I need to access my calendar on my computer, my iPhone, and my iPad it’s important for me to keep everything synchronized. Simple you say – your computer is a Mac and these are all Apple devices – just use iCal on your Mac and sync up your iDevices using iTunes…
But – I have not one, but 2 computers. I have a desktop (also a Mac) and my laptop which typically comes on the road with me. I need all of those things to sync their calendars up too… ”To the iCloud!” you shout, just link iCal on all the machines to iCloud and you can continue to sync the iDevices using iTunes OR thanks to IOS5 you can even sync the iDevices wirelessly to iCloud….
Unfortunately the problem is even deeper than that… iCloud is new, but the need to keep my calendar in sync between my computers and devices isn’t a new issue, and neither is the need I have to be able to share my calendar with Patricia and her devices as well as my own devices, AND access my calendar from work where they use PCs AND don’t permit access to iCloud for security reasons.
Enter Google Calendar. I can access it from anywhere and share it with Patricia… But the only way to automatically keep Google Calendar in sync with iCal (which would ensure that the calendars on my iDevices stayed in sync with everything else) was to buy a third party application. Despite the fact that Google Calendar exports calendar events in a format that iCal understands and accepts there’s no way natively for iCal to automatically fetch calendar events from Google, nor is there a way for Google to push those same events down to iCal. Amazingly that’s something that you can do on a PC with Microsoft Outlook.
But then Apple released OSX Lion and iCloud. Great! I thought. iCloud supports calendar syncing between machines, iDevices and friends and family. Finally one calendar solution to rule them all! Everything will play nice, and all the calendars can live together in a nice pretty white plastic and aluminum world with hardwood floors, right? Not quite…
For starters, iCloud is pretty skilled at creating zombie calendars – it managed to resurrect 4 old calendars that I had created and long since deleted when I was first trying to figure out how I wanted to use iCal. Not only that, but it was kind enough to populate those zombie calendars with the last several years of events and reminders, so right out of the gate I was bombarded with multiple alerts for events that had occurred months – even years ago! My calendar was now littered with invites to old events. Plus most of the events on my calendar from the last year or more and everything scheduled in the future now had as many as 6 different entries for the EXACT SAME EVENT! Oh and Patricia was flooded with invites and updates from events that had occurred in the past as well…
Then there’s the third party syncing software that is still needed to sync iCal to Google Calendar. After the mess that iCloud had made to my calendars – the syncing software freaked out. It noticed that my iCal calendar has been blown to hell and now isn’t anywhere close to what is on the Google Calendar. The changes were so dramatic that the normally calm and cool syncing software that runs quietly in background just got up, declared “Dude, you’re on your own – call me when you unscrew this mess” and walked down to the corner bar for a pint of Guiness…
I also can’t seem to convince iCal that I don’t want to see the copy of my calendar that’s up on iCloud. Since I’m syncing my local calendar with iCloud, the two calendars are the same so I don’t need to see both of them, but no matter how many times I uncheck my iCloud calendar in iCal, when I relaunch iCal there’s the iCloud calendar again.
Oh – and iCal and Google Calendar – they still don’t play with each other….
Then there’s TripIt. For keeping track of my travel itineraries TripIt rocks. TripIt allows me (albeit manually) to push my entire travel itinerary down to iCal. All the flight information, hotel reservations and details of my trip are entered as appropriate calendar events in iCal by TripIt. They even include addresses, confirmation numbers and anything else I’ll need with for the reservation in the calendar event that they create – even the times on the events are adjusted so that the reminders happen at the correct time even if I’ve changed time zones along the way!
Where the problem comes in is again – iCal. You have to manually push events from TripIt down to iCal because it won’t fetch that information itself. That’s a minor inconvenience though. If I make a change to an existing trip and push it down to iCal – iCal isn’t smart enough to recognize that this is an update to an existing event. iCal just imports the data and creates a whole new event, one with good information and one with bad forcing me to go back and clean up iCal…
This shouldn’t be so hard. All these calendars talk to each other using the same standard. With a standard for data entry and the vast amount of computing power involved here – why is there absolutely NO INTELLIGENCE used by any of these calendar applications? Why in order to keep everything in sync do I need to build a house of cards that can collapse at the slightest quiver?
