Poor puppy..

The puppy is still having problems with her ear, and has now made herself bleed from scratching and rubbing.. Jen's calling the vet as soon as they open at 8. :(

(no subject)

From today's PA, on Apple's latest campaign:

I don't find the neurotic caricatures selected for these ads compelling in the least, they're not realer, they're people I want to avoid at all costs, examining my own life to systematically eradicate any similarities I might find between us.
...
If Apple really wanted to sell more Macs, they should just show people how it looks when you minimize shit in OS X. I thought I was going to pee my pants.

Puppy ear troubles

Turns out it wasn't water in her ear, but a bacterial infection (uncommon in puppies, apparently), so it's good we took her in when we did (before it got into her middle ear or deeper, or became a chronic problem). She'll be on antibiotics by capsule and cream, and while we were there, she got her shots.

Of videos and playgrounds

My MEng advisor requested that I make a short video showing the rowing machine from start through to some power strokes, offload it to the computer, encode it to MPG, and send him a copy no larger than 5MB. First attempt was a 55s video, which turned into a 10.4MB MPG after encoding--and the encoding took at least half an hour. So, I managed to clip it down to 25s while still showing what he wanted to see, encoded it again--4.4MB--and FTP'ed it to my home computer so I could email it to him. (Web mail and the like limits to 2MB attachments.)

Now that that's done, I'm off to the playground downtown that Jen and I helped with a week or so ago, to help with some finishing touches. (Jen and the dogs are at home, asleep, having not gotten much sleep last night due to anxiety over Valkyrie's ear condition.)

Play!

After leaving lab, I went directly downtown to the Henry St. John building to help finish the playground.. today's work was largely applying wood sealer and installing the wood border; I sanded down all the wood for a hanging-ring jungle gym and then sealed it, took a handful of little digital pictures, most of which will appear here at some point. It's a nice-looking playground, much better than what I hear it replaced. :)

In other news, my answering machine message now says "Hi, you've reached Scott, Neal, and Jen's line. If you're calling about housing at 305 Thurston and have email, please send mail to [Nick's address]; otherwise, please leave a message." Neal is no longer handling housing for the fall, and Nick doesn't have a phone number.. and thus no one at this number wants calls about housing at 305 Thurston.

New LJ niftiness.

It is now possible to screen comments left in your journal, with varying degrees of control.
It is also possible to set the default security level of your [future] posts to something other than the default, Public.
Finally, N@ suggested a way to work around the default lj-cut anchors (if, for example, you want the comment page (after clicking an lj-cut) to start displaying earlier than where you actually typed in the <lj-cut>.)