Where’s the peanut butter?!

This week in pets - three exciting developments…

Io banned from off-leash After a terrifying incident at the
park late last week when Io decided rather than returning the ball, he
would jettison straight past me toward one of the other dogs in the
park and proceed to flip out and run across the street when that dog
decided to chase him a little, he is now banned from running off leash
in Cowen Park. You aren’t supposed to do this anyway but he’s been
pretty good about it in the past and there are always a bunch of dogs
there off leash so I took some chances.

Jupiter has family! Returning home Friday night we had a common
run-in with our cat, Jupiter: we can’t pull in to the driveway because
he has sung his siren song and coaxed a backrub out of a passerby,
maybe just to remind us “I have plenty of options and don’t really
need to rely on you, you know…” But these people braved the
insane intensity of our Prius headlights to ask “Is that your cat?” It
turns out Jupiter is one of a litter of three kittens born around the
block from us in about 2000 or 2001. He was formerly known as
“George” (which is funny since that’s the name of one of our
neighbors) and he has a sister who lives at the house with this couple
who were out visiting with him Friday night! It’s really interesting
to find this out and I’m looking forward to hearing the story again
since I really didn’t catch the whole deal.

Iocam back in business! What would any post be without some
geekdom? I have a webcam running showing Io in his cage or our
livingroom and after some frustration with my webhost, it’s rolling
again. The problem is that I have it run at some interval, taking
snapshots, looking for motion, and, if motion is detected, uploading
the picture via scp to my webhost. This sounds and should be pretty
simple but the upload would start failing every so often. Should be
pretty simple, the host probably just enforces policy that starts
rejecting clients that keep pinging it within some threshold to stop
DoS or something. But the yahoos running my webhost can’t distinguish
between me asking them for clarification on an acceptable use policy
that they should be able to tell me and “programming help” which they
say they can’t offer. After a couple useless rounds, I just gave up
and lowered the sample rate from every 30 seconds to every 4 minutes
and now it works just fine. If you’re interested in the cam and don’t
know where it is or can’t find it, contact me. I’ll post the script
shortly…