It's a Dog's Life

Jake did not get off to the best of starts. He was an obnoxiously cute puppy, as Aussie puppies are. He was adopted by a family that we suspect consisted of at least a mother and a 9-10 year old boy. The mother, it seems, would lure him with a treat then grab him and put him in the back yard to bark for hours. The boy would roughhouse with him, judging from how Jake reacted to boys in that age range, getting all excited and wanting to jump on them.

They got tired of him when he stopped being so cute, and dumped him at the Martinez shelter sometime around his first birthday, in 2000. Lucky for us.

Jake at Ocean Beach in 2001. Trouble

Hollie and North Bay Canine Rescue did just that, in October the day before Jake was going to be terminated, after he'd been in the shelter for 6 months. We met him in January 2001 in a horse paddock where he wouldn't stop moving -- just kept roaming out and coming back to check in with us, watching everything. Ferghal liked him, and he liked Ferghal, and that was it. When we told Hollie we'd like him to come live with us, she said with surprise, "Really?"

Trust did not come easily to Jake. He got out of the yard a couple times and went roaming with Ferghal. Once I needed to get to work and Jake kept about half a block ahead of me, until finally I sprinted up to him and let out a primal yell and smashed an apple on the ground near him (I don't remember why I had an apple). He headed for home at that point, still keeping ahead of me, and something had changed between us. It took longer for him to trust Mari -- when she would offer him a treat, he would start to go for it, then pull back with a "you're not going to fool me with that trick" look on his face; if she reached for his collar, he would startle. Echoes of his past.

There are shepherds that herd with their eyes, and shepherds that herd with their voice. Jake was solidly in the latter camp. His bark was penetrating, bordering on obnoxious. Actually, I think it left "obnoxious" in the dust. At the dog park he would fixate on a dog and bark at them to get them to run. Sometimes they would go after him. I would chase him around the dog to catch him and make him stop. We took to fastening a long-line to him so we could step on it and pull him off. We met Shasta Marlowe and Stacey Wiley at the Alameda dog park, and they took him on off-leash walks, initially with a weighted fanny pack dragging behind him.

Our relationship gelling

He was a dog who valued order, and routine. When I started taking him out for walks every morning, and insisting that he sit at street corners, our relationship started to gel. One day Mari rearranged the living room while Jake was in the backyard, and when he came back in he stopped dead in the kitchen, barking and refusing to go farther. Mari finally figured out it was because of the changes, and gently led him in with treats to see that the living room was still safe. He loved a good belly rub. When you came by while he was lying on his side, he would raise whichever back leg was on top in the pose that Mari dubbed "How you doin'?"

In September 2002, on a walk, Jake got something up his nose. He was sneezing for three days, and needed his teeth cleaned anyway, so our house-call vet came and put him under on our kitchen table and looked up his nose, but there was nothing there. Partway through the teeth cleaning, we both felt something was off -- Jake's heart rate was down below 40, and the vet gave him something to counteract that, but apparently the damage was done. When Jake came out of it, he couldn't bring his tongue completely back in his mouth, and over the weekend his symptoms increased: when he tried to drink water, we'd end up with a gloopy layer floating on the water, and Jake hadn't managed to get much in. His back legs got weak. Various symptoms that were reminiscent of rabies. I called UC Davis vet school, and they said if it were rabies, they wouldn't be able to see him for 10 days, but since he'd had his rabies vaccine and there were no known cases of vaccinated dogs getting rabies, it was ok to bring him in.

When we first got to Davis, Jake could walk on his own, and I remember him standing in my lap as I sat on the floor, while the vet told me what might be going on with him, and the tests they wanted to do: MRI, and spinal tap, and implanting a feeding tube in his stomach, because his gag reflex was no longer strong enough to chance feeding him by mouth. When he came out of that anesthesia, he could no longer stand on his back legs, though he could still get up on his front ones. He was in the kennels in back, but we insisted on seeing him there while he was recovering. We hung out with him for the afternoon. Leaving him that first night was heartbreaking. I took his head in my hands and scritched him under his chin and promised we would be back the next day. We kept that promise, driving up to wheel him out on one of those flatbed carts you find at Home Depot, and hang out with him on the grass for the day, every day he was there. A few days in, when they were going to put solid food in his tube for the first time, I noticed some redness in the water in the tube, and it turned out it had popped out of his stomach and was between his stomach and his abdominal wall. They had to put him under again to surgically implant another tube (the other they'd done endoscopically), which made sure it stayed in, but when he came out of the anesthesia, he could no longer get up on his front legs, either. For a diagnosis, the vets never got closer than immune mediated idiopathic polyneuropathy: his nerves were inflamed and they didn't know why. (Talking with vets trained in other traditions, it looked like the rabies vaccine, in chronic rather than acute form, had gotten triggered by the anesthesia.) They treated him with prednisone, to suppress his immune system, and after 10 days in Davis, including a couple hotel stays, and a speeding ticket, we brought him home.

A few things they don't tell you in the discharge instructions: 1) have a puppy pad and adult diapers for the drive home (I still recognize the exit to Hercules where we pulled off I-80 to deal with that), and 2) don't wash the syringe with soap and water, as the plungers have a thin film of oil on them to make them move easily (so much harder to feed a dog with an unlubricated syringe).

When we got him home to Alameda again, we waited a couple days, and he waited until we were out of the room, before he first pooed. He was able to scootch himself away from it across the hardwood floor to get away from it, which was the first small step along the long road of recovery. We fed him a puree of rice and poached chicken and water through the tube in his stomach every 6 hours (Mari took the 2am shift). We bought a radio flyer wagon, and I would line it with fleece and towels and diapers, cover him with a cargo net fastened with a bungee cord, and we'd roll off to the park, with his tail swirling in a big helicopter of happiness. He'd usually pee along the way, sometimes in the diaper, sometimes not, and when we got to the park I'd unload him from the wagon, and he'd shuffle along after squirrels. Over the month he was able to gradually get farther and farther off the ground.

The morning we were going to take him back to Davis to have the feeding tube removed, I woke up at 6 knowing something was wrong. I reached for Jake (we'd moved our mattress downstairs to the dining room and had been sleeping on it on the floor) and his feeding tube was gone. He'd chewed it out, and his stomach contents were now between his skin and his abdominal wall (his stomach was adhered to his abdominal wall by scar tissue, so things didn't go into his peritoneum). Thanks to the prednisone: raging infection. We bolted back to Davis for 5 days in the ICU, where he was the belle of the ball, since he was actually responsive. He loved having a student tasked with watching him 24 hours a day, while fluids dripped from drains in his belly and he wore an enormous e-collar (now we knew his jaw worked well enough to wreak havoc, again). Because we were so experienced, they discharged him when he was still on a feed-every-4-hours schedule, which was rough -- do you feed him at 2am and 6am, or at midnight, 4am, and 8am? About a month of additional slow recovery later, he was up and walking around better, and they took out his 3rd and final feeding tube. Many thanks to James Lavely and Dale Olm and Robin Woodley.

Jake's erratic footprints

Then came the months of PT with the folks at Sol Companion: working in a water tank with treadmill, lying on top of a fitness peanut and putting weight on his paws in the right way, trying to walk in a straight line on a board. We moved our bed back upstairs and I carried him up and down the stairs a couple times a day. He became the sweetest, most trusting dog. In April we went up to Gualala and took him to Bowling Ball beach. He took off down the beach, trailing his long-line, and I ran after him, dropping my camera and camera bag along the way. I finally caught him after he got into the water and was wallowing around in trouble, but trusting that I'd come for him. I waded in and pulled him out, so angry but so happy he was able to run like that. He was 4 years old.

Running on the beach, all
paws off the ground

It took 2 years for him to be able to go up the stairs by himself, and he could only do it occasionally. He tended to throw himself into things and hope for the best. He would howl with sirens but never with us. When dogs would try to hump him he would let out these piteous yelps, but he would still go running toward the sound of a dogfight. We worried that his wonky way of walking would lead to degenerative problems in his joints and whatnot, but he kept going about the same for years and years. When we went to the water, he'd make a beeline for it and lie down in it for "his dip." When I started at Google, in Seattle, I would take him to work with me a couple times a week. If we took the ferry, we'd walk around the parking lot, and I'd give him my emptyish yogurt containers to lick out. If I was walking, we'd walk together with him off leash except when crossing busy streets. He had such a spring in his step when we'd set out.

We never vaccinated him again, preferring a titer test to verify his continued protection, and avoided anesthesia like a plague. A couple years ago, he had a big cyst under his chin that needed to come off. His trust in me was so great, that the fabulous Karen Myhre (now, sadly, moved to Alaska) did the surgery with him on his back using only local anesthesia with me with him (which went fine until he started struggling a bit because, we found out the hard way, he really needed to pee). Together we kept him going with raw food, and Cindy Geisler's chiropractic every week, and Alicia Lamb's water treadmill and exercises, and Darla Rewers' acupuncture, and Kendara's swim therapy, and of course his own joy and happiness at being alive.

Jake is unimpressed with
his booties

In 2012, it became harder for him to walk the 1.5 miles to work with me, so we'd sometimes walk there but have Mari pick us up. In late 2013, he no longer had the stamina for walks with the rest of the family, so we got out the old red wagon and rolled him with us part of the way, eventually graduating him to a converted bike stroller where we sometimes had him in the stroller, and sometimes not. The first time we took him out onto the trails with the other dogs, he was so happy. In 2014, he started needing rubber booties for both traction and to protect his toes and the tops of his paws from being dragged along the ground. When he came to us, he came with a blanket he would suck on, and a soda bottle he'd chew on. Somewhere during 2014, he stopped sucking on his blanket.

Head tilted after his strokes

In February he had the first of his strokes that left him with profound vertigo and unable to stand, his eyes twitching back and forth as he tried to figure out which way was up. He got better in a day or two, but had another couple strokes near the end of March. We'd been here before, though, so out came the little red wagon, the puppy pads, and the adult overnight pads, and we hoped he'd get better. We figured he'd either get worse, or he'd get back to being able to go outside with just a little help, but neither happened. Instead I spent 4 months mostly working from home, carrying him up and down the front stairs, or out in his wagon so he could take care of business. He remained pretty happy, while I got some mean tendonitis in my right elbow but got to hug him multiple times a day. Wesley Hawkins gave us a few breaks, taking on rolling Jake around in his wagon, in addition to caring for the rest of the menagerie. It became clear that Jake's decline was going to be very gradual, and I began to wonder whether he had to actually be suffering for me to end his story, and why should he have to suffer rather than go out without suffering, all while thinking I was being self-serving. By the end of June, it was clear that I couldn't keep it up much longer. Ted Kerasote has a good list of questions when thinking about euthanasia, but they only helped me some.

Hollie, who had rescued him 15 years before, came up for July 4 weekend, but the following weekend he started having trouble standing to poo and pee, and that was the sign I needed. We had a peaceful last weekend at the shack, and then a week of goodbyes with many of the people who loved him. His last day was July 17. We took him to Magnusson park for a final long dip in the lake, and the weather couldn't have been better. Got him home, and fed him ice cream, and bacon, and brisket, before Dr. Sara sent him off to college.

Life is a bit grayer now, but I have so many good memories of our time together. He reminded me that pets are not property, they are self-willed sentient people with whom one is collaborating on life. I feel lucky to have had him in my life for 14 1/2 years. Some photos, and his final video:

Sideways

I wrote this about my dog Jake, who passed on July 17. I meant it to be sweet, but like so much of our life together, it went a little sideways (in a good way).

I gave my dog a piece of my heart
To carry for a while.
He gave me all of his
And did it with a smile.

I sent him off to college
He took my piece with him
But I’ve still got his heart with me
Inside a little tin :)

This Indecision's Bugging Me

For the past 3 months or so, I've been struggling with a decision. It's harder than deciding where to go to college. It's harder than asking the woman who is now my wife whether she would spend the rest of our lives together. My oldest dog is dying. Very, very slowly. The question, of course, is when do I help him finish the job?

At the start of February, he had some vestibular problems -- couldn't stand up, his eyes kept flicking back and forth -- that lasted for a day. At the end of March, he had another episode, and this time it seemed like it was caused by a couple of strokes. He couldn't stand to eat, or drink, or eliminate. He'd just turned 16. But here's the thing: we've been here before.

Back in 2002, Jake went through months of not being able to walk, owing to a bad combination of rabies vaccine and anesthesia that inflamed a bunch of his nerves. Fed him through a tube for 7 weeks. Worked from home for 3 months, before the time of ubiquitous WiFi. Loaded him into a little red wagon and carted him to a local park twice a day, where he was able to shuffle around a bit after squirrels. Had a diaper in the wagon so he could pee while we walked. We moved our mattress into the dining room, on the floor, where we slept for 3 months. After that we moved the mattress back upstairs, but it would be another year before he was able to climb the stairs on his own. In the meantime, I carried him up and down as needed.

So in April, I put a puppy pad and an overnight serenity pad in the wagon, and started rolling him around the neighborhood. Great success. I figured he'd either get better or get worse and things would resolve one way or another by the end of April.

I was wrong.

He got better, but not better enough to be able to make it outside. He stands up to eat, with a little support, but rarely to drink. He pees standing up, but more often than not he poos off the back of the wagon. So I carry him up and down 23 stairs 3 or 4 times a day, to get to a patch of grass where he's got the necessary traction to take the necessary action. I go to the office for no more than 4 hours at a time. I don't exercise (other than carrying Jake). He wakes me sometimes early in the morning. Sometimes multiple times at night. Thank God for CBD tincture, which helps him sleep through the night. Sometimes he poos in his sleep. His life is so limited from what it used to be, but he's been here before. He doesn't get depressed or distressed. He trusts that I will be there. I will carry him. I will clean him. He gets frustrated some times. That makes two of us.

And yet. When we go out in the wagon, he's engaged, he looks around, he looks happy. When I sit on the floor with him, he rests his head on my leg and sighs contentedly. He's always interested in food, even when he was vomiting for a day. He always needs to know where I am, once I get back from my brief stints at the office.

He's never going to get back to walking out the back door on his own. But sometimes he's able to get up on his own and walk across the grass (as much as 20 feet!) to pee. That usually happens shortly after I've decided this is going to be his last week.

We have this notion that the time to send a dog to college (as we like to call it) is when his quality of life is sufficiently degraded. There has to be an element of eliminating the dog's suffering. The implication, though, is that a dog should suffer at the end of his life. Why should that be?

Certainly Jake's life is dramatically more limited than it was. We no longer go for morning walks. Don't really even go for morning rolls, because he's become Not A Morning Dog. He doesn't suck on his blanket any more. He goes out a few times a day and sniffs a little (too much and he'll fall over), and pees, and twice a day I load him in his wagon and roll him around different parts of the neighborhood. For all that, he seems happy.

My problem is, I'm not. I am stressed. I'm not as productive at work as I want to be. My blood pressure is up. I have tendonitis in my right elbow from the way I have to pick him up multiple times a day. I can't travel because Jake needs special care. I find myself feeling like the townspeople in The Visit, who would never kill Alfred Ill for the money the wealthy lady offers, yet who start buying new shoes and other things on credit: I think of life without him, getting back to normal. But putting a dog down because of the impact on my life feels selfish. Mari keeps reminding me of Ted Kerasote's list from Merle's Door, and by those criteria, it's been time for a while, except that his condition doesn't seem to bother Jake. He just keeps going, as he's always done. This weekend I came up with the criteria that if he can no longer stand through a meal, or he can't stand to poo two days in a row, then it's time. We're on day 1.

Wrapped

It’s a simple thing:
A wedding ring.
A little band of gold.

But every morn
I put it on
To tell the world I'm "sold".

I said "I do"
And I meant it true
Even when we're old.

The Religious Right(s)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

Sounds pretty straight-forward doesn't it? It's my religion, you can't tell me how to express it. You can't make me pay for contraception insurance coverage for my employees, even if they're not of my faith.

Reality is more nuanced though. Mitt Romney can only marry one wife, even though Joseph Smith said otherwise. If I were a worshiper of Satan, any human sacrifice would be considered murder. Mohammed Atta, if he'd lived, would not have received a free pass even though the hijacking was an expression of his perversion of Islam. All these things have something in common: they are religious practices that harm other people. Refusing to include contraception coverage in your insurance coverage for your employees harms those employees. You, as an individual, are free to not use contraception, but the government is within its rights to insist that you cover contraception in your insurance package, just as you cover erectile dysfunction treatments. QED.

Trickle Me Elmo

(I originally wrote this in the summer of 2008 but didn't publish it. Sadly, it's as apropos now as it was then.)

What loon came up with the notion of trickle down economics? This notion that somehow if you give more money to the rich, it will benefit everyone? That somehow if you give businesses more money, they will "naturally" take that money and invest it in their operations, grow them, create jobs, etc.? Would you like to hazard a guess as to where the rich and business tend to put their excess money? Yes: they buy various investments from other rich people and businesses who think they've made enough money on whatever it is they're selling.

What is it that actually prompts businesses to invest in and expand their operations? Sales. What drives sales? The 95% of the country that aren't rich. Haven't we been hearing Didn't we hear for most of the Bush administration that it's "consumer spending that has been supporting the economy"? All the while the businesses were retrenching following the dot-com implosion, it was consumers buying what businesses had to sell that brought us out of that recession. It wasn't the rich buying stocks, or golf club memberships, or fleets of cars, or $10,000 shoes, or any of the things one tends to buy when one has more money than one can sensibly use.

It's a very simple concept any capitalist can get behind: businesses grow their business when they can make more money by doing so, and they can only do so if there's a market, and there's only a market if people have money to buy what's being sold. Giving a tax break to a business for which there's no market simply causes them to put more money in the bank, or pay the additional profits out as dividends.

Update: Goldy posted an eerily similar post on the SLOG today.

In Memoriam - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

I've just left the memorial service for Steve Lacey, who was killed a week ago by an enraged drunk driver. I didn't actually know Steve all that well. He worked in the Kirkland office, mostly, and I don't go over there much. But in the last four years we've had a few chats, and beside that, he touched many people's lives -- the church was entirely full.
There are many surface similarities between us (which is part of what is so distressing about this event, I suppose): he was a year younger than I, also tall, good humored, loved to build things, loved to write code, loved to create things to help people. He shared more of himself than I do. A lesson to be learned there, perhaps.
I do not believe it is possible or healthy to live your life as if you could be killed by a drunk driver while driving to Costco on an ordinary Sunday afternoon. But to do the important things first: that I need to work on more. Thank you for that lesson, Steve and those who spoke at his memorial. My heart goes out to all of Steve's family. May life give you better than what you got on the 24th.

Brother Can You Spare a Billion

I've been looking at the money being raised in the market, both in VC and IPO transactions, and aside from wondering what the hell those companies are going to do with all that money (Color: 51 million? you going to do some serious TV advertising? You're not a hardwaree company...) I can't help but wonder if this is what the wealthy are doing with their tax breaks? It seems like there a lot more effective ways to create the kinds of jobs we need in this country (hint: it's not a few thousand geeks in silly valley, though I'm one of them.)

Then There Were Two

[ed: I started this post on the 17th of November, with Ralf's body in the back of the van]

It never gets any easier. Our sweet boy Ralf went to college today, with a push from us. You would think after 8 graduations, I might be inured to it. I think I'm happy that I'm not. With Bob it was easy to see she was ready to move on, and I spent the day with her, then took her to the vet to be put down. Harry bled out after surgery. Rosie did too. They were hard because of the suddenness. We sat up all night with Madeleine until she died, mostly quietly. The others were harder or not, depending on the circumstance and whether they felt they were ready.

None of them was easy.

Ralf, though...there were some possible treatment options. He had good stretches of a few hours. But really. When I got home, he used to get so happy and whirl around, barking (we think that's how he injured his shoulder, but it's really who he was). He used to bark at horses, applause, and fake bird noises on TV, standing indignantly with his ears forward and his nose an inch from the screen. He hadn't heard birds in a year, though there'd been plenty to hear. He couldn't stand up on his own, and in the last couple weeks couldn't even get into a sitting position. He'd been reduced to lying, with his head on a pillow, snapping in pain when we would get him up, and staggering around panting. Steroids might have helped, but for how long? It was mostly clear what he wanted, so we gave it to him. We are blessed to have Rachel Bergman in our lives.

We took on Ralf back in 2002, as a foster dog, because we've got a soft spot for collies. He was 6 years old, 105 pounds, and crazy. Then Jake got so sick, and the only people who wanted Ralf were families with small kids, not the carpenter-guy-who-would-take-Ralf-to-job-sites that we thought he deserved. When we finally got out of that crucible 3 months later, we had a 4th dog.

Through the not-quite-9 years he was with us, he taught us about patience, the importance of food, love, silliness, joy, and endurance. We endure without him now, even now, occasionally expecting to see him, or hearing his soft meef. When he came to us, I repeatedly said I didn't want 4 dogs. But really. Who was I kidding? I want him back.

The Art of Photography

Made a quick stop at the MOMA in SF today. Really interesting exhibit of Muybridge shots, including many old photos from SF in the 1860's. There are also a series of stereographs that cemented for me an impression I've had over the years: photography really need a 3rd dimension. There is definitely a place for 2d photographs and what they can convey and how they can move people, but the lack of a real 3d option for photographers means we are missing out on so much that we could experience from other people's viewpoints. So many times I catch something, close one eye, and recognize the loss of the 3rd dimension renders the photo uninteresting. I know there are ways of using the modeling of light to convey the 3d dimension, but often that light is simply not available. The other exhibits reinforced for me my definition of art: art is anything that moves me emotionally. If it has to be explained or placed into an intellectual context, it's masturbation, not art.

Birthday Girl's Lament

(to the tune of "My Girl")


I want sunshine
on my damn birthday.
It's still cold outside
and it's almost May.

chorus:
Well, I guess you'll say
what can make me feel this way?
Seattle (seattle, seattle!)
Fuckin' Seattle. (Seattle!)

I've got so much water
I've got prunes for feet.
It's been cold so long
I don't believe in heat.

(chorus)

I don't need no mountains,
or green covered hills.
The cold and the people
make me want to take pills.

(chorus)

Fuckin' Seattle.
I want sunshine on my damn birthday!
Seattle...
I'm tired of all these cloudy days
Seattle...

The Eyes Have It

They say the eyes are the window to the soul, and that's how I knew she was gone. We'd lain on the floor with Daisy most of the morning, reassuring her, petting her, reassuring ourselves. I was looking at her when it happened: her eyebrow and right eye had been twitching but she'd watch me when I moved, then her eyebrow slowed and suddenly she wasn't looking any more. Within two minutes, her body tensed, her eye rolled up, her tongue came out, and she was dead. It was hard to sit with her, hard not to call our excellent and generous vet and have her put Daisy "to sleep". Hard to gauge whether Daisy was suffering, any more than a being on the verge of death would suffer, feeling her body shut down. I'm sure it wasn't painful. Her breaths got shallower. She seemed at times to be dreaming, as her paws would twitch, though her eyes were open. I will remember staring into those eyes for a long, long time.

There is closure, and there is completion in life run its course, all the way to death at the finish line. We cannot know what any other being wants, whether that other is human or canine. Even if someone writes down their wishes, we can't be 100% sure that the-person-who-wrote-those-wishes will feel the same as the-person-who-is-facing-death. With a dog it becomes infinitely harder. So we went with our gut, knowing we had a conflict of interest, wanting to keep her with us longer, wanting it all to be over so we could get down to grieving and get on with our lives, sadder but also no longer angst-ridden trying to figure out what she might eat, since she couldn't tell us that either.

Witnessing a loved one's death isn't for everyone. We surround ourselves with animals, so we've had more than our share, and we've got a rough decade ahead of us as the remaining 3 cats and 3 dogs "go to college." I'm awestruck, saddened beyond words, grateful, all at once.

Daisy came to us 15 months ago from the Seattle animal shelter. It was clear she'd been an only dog, and it took her a while to get used to being in a pack. The beach was new to her. But those eyes, man. Mischief. Curiosity. Love. Determination. Happiness. She would greet me gently when I came home, waiting for the other, more rambunctious dogs to finish. She'd come up and put her head between my knees, and I would scritch her head, down her back, and end up at her butt as she sidled between my legs. I will miss her more than I thought I would. Go in peace, and good luck at college, love.

Welcome to the Dark Side

For anyone who doesn't know me, I work for Google. Have done for almost 3 years. Enjoy it. A lot. I'm just stunned at the level of antipathy getting directed at Google lately. Talk about being in the down part of the news cycle. It used to be people loved Google and what Google did for them. The media couldn't write enough positive stories. The excellent search. The free email with lots of space. And the ads were occasionally useful. These days, though, there's this nebulous fear that Google Will Do Something Evil. That the data Google collects, which is collected in the service of giving you better information when you search, is going to be turned over to... the government? the advertisers? Someone Who Will Do Unspeakable Things With Their Newfound Knowledge Of Me And My Searches And Email And Photographs And Everything Else I Put In The Cloud. Today Google had to pull their Olympic-themed logo because of outcries that Google was capitalizing on the very sad death of a luger in a practice run.

Yes Google collects information. It also makes a lot of what it knows available to you and gives you control over a lot of it. But how is it wrong or evil to show you an advertisement that interests you, as opposed to one that doesn't? Are you such a marketing tool that you can't resist when you see an advertisement for something you want? I didn't think so.

Questions for the Health Care Conservatives

I've been listening to the health care reform debate with increasing bewilderment. Not over what we should do. I've already been pretty clear about that. No, I really want the answers to these questions:

• Why is a private-sector bureaucrat incented to not pay for your health care better than a government bureaucrat whose directors are incented to keep you healthy?
• How can you call the insurance market, as it currently stands, a competitive marketplace? Most companies contract with only one insurance company, so the only way for most people to choose their insurance is to go work for someone else.
• Why are all the expenditures made by private insurance companies, the lack of which expenditures constitutes the supposed advantage a public option has over private companies, so valuable / important that we should continue wasting money that could otherwise go to keeping people healthy?
• How do you sleep at night, given all the lies and bullshit you're tossing out there to make people afraid?

Things I Dislike About Bainbridge Island

They say that Bainbridge Island has the highest per-capita number of lawyers of any city in the state. Possibly the country. I mostly like BI, the small-town feel, driving at night with my high-beams on because there are almost no street lights. All the trees. What I don't like is the self-important hypocritical nasty-ass gits who seem to flock to the place. Take, for example, the blog Let the dog in, that Google Reader was kind enough to suggest to me. I looked at the first post in Reader and thought, "meh." Then I got to the bottom of the post, where it says this:

"Copyright © 2009 Let the dog in!. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement and in BIG, BIG TROUBLE. Please contact legal@www.letthedogin.com so we can take legal action immediately."

It reminds me of the story I heard of a guy from the city who was putting up a fence at a park, and was greeted pleasantly each day by one of the neighbors, and when he was just about done with the fence was told that that same neighbor was suing the city because the fence was too high. Number one: who the hell would be taking posts from some random housewife (and I mean no disparagement to housewives, but usually what goes on in their house is of interest only to the people that live there) and putting them on their website? Number two: if someone were foolish enough to do that, who would be such an idiot as to reproduce such a notice along with the content? Really? You're going to set up a special email address for people to contact you about copyright infringement? Really? Really? Puhlease.

Poeta Vox Vocis

I find myself

vexed

by that lugubrious animal

The Poet's Voice.

You know it.

As it takes a piece of beauty

and rends it

piece

by

piece

with unexplained

pauses

and odd rushes of breathless heartless pointless babble

so unlike a brook that I can brook no reading

that treats its subject so harshly.

Poems are precious

not precious,

as poets recite them.

They are lively.

They should move with a natural flow,

like a happy creek,

not creak along

like an old man

with narcolepsy.

It's 1:30 in the Morning. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

Perhaps your children are the pricks with the firecrackers and other things that go BOOM that are keeping me up. The acepromazine has mostly worn off my dogs, so I'm reluctant to go to bed, where the noises are more present than up here with the TV on. It's at times like this that I want one of those old loudspeaker trucks and an endless loop of Tiny Tim singing Tiptoe Through the Tulips, so I can park next to these assholes and let 'er rip.
A firetruck goes screaming up Stone Way. Is it uncharitable of me to hope that one or more of these nitwits has set themselves on fire? I think not.
If you don't know where your children are, perhaps you should get their asses in bed, and put the rest of us out of our misery.

Did I Miss a Memo?

So, apparently today was Be a Dick to Pedestrians Day in Seattle. Normally I find the place pretty friendly, but today on the way to work I was walking in an unofficial crosswalk (i.e. from one street corner to the opposite corner) and this douchebag in a pickup, one of these big guys who likes to drink a lot of beer and push people around, comes barrelling down 35th St as I'm crossing. I glare at him as I'm crossing, because it's clear that stopping is not in his plans, and as he slows down he yells, Get out of the fucking road! I glare more and yell, Respect the fucking crosswalk, asshole! while his buddy's on the phone in the passenger seat. Dude starts to slow down and ease over to the side of the road, so I start walking towards him, and he changes his mind. This being Seattle, though, as I continue my walk to work, a guy in a Forerunner who'd been waiting to drive across 35th leans out his window and says, I'm sorry man, that was bullshit.

Then on the way home, I'm standing on the edge of the Burke-Gilman trail under the Aurora Bridge taking a picture of it, and some punk on a bicycle goes whizzing by and yells, You're standing in the way! so I yell back, No I'm not! and keep taking my picture. What a weird day.

Intuit Doesn't

Back in the day, the folks at Intuit gave a damn about the user experience, but the people who cared seem to have long left the building. The sorts of things I see in Quicken 2008 or TurboTax just make me shudder. Let me give you a few examples:

• I'm filling out my taxes this year, for the 2008 tax year, and I enter a date, like, say, 4/13. Can you guess what date TurboTax thinks that is? 4/13/08? Ha! It actually thinks you meant April 1, 1913. I kid you not.
• I have my main Quicken file on a server in the basement, and the internal database management is so incredibly bad, after every operation, the entire screen flashes (I mean, every single UI control in the screen) as it redraws, and it puts up a little dialog telling me it's refreshing Quicken data. This is on a machine with several gigs of RAM just waiting to be used.
• While I'm talking about refreshing, I just had to close quicken, because it got into some kind of refresh argument with internet explorer, where each window kept repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting. You get the picture.
• My favorite idiocy in quicken is when it's matching up downloaded transactions, and rather than matching a transaction with an uncleared transaction for the exact same date as the downloaded transaction, it'll choose to match it against a cleared transaction for a month prior. I mean, who wrote that code? Sarah Palin?

The sad thing is, from everything I hear, all the other financial management packages suck even worse, so I stick with Quicken, and I stick with TurboTax. But damn!

Photos of the Week - 3/8

This week's images are two that I like a lot, but didn't quite make it into my Photo-a-Day project. They were both taken at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

I like the sense that these two are riding up to fairy-land, with the big umbrellas at the top of the escalator:

These ladies with their huge duffel/suitcases are in Vegas for serious. They ended up going up into the "Spa Tower" at the Bellagio.