I’ll admit it, I have a minor fascination with all things zombie, err, excepting Rob Zombie that is. I recently happened across Monster Island. It’s a full novel that the author published using a weblog, a trilogy actually. Tolstoy it ain’t but if you like zombie action in the George Romero mold, this is the stuff for you. The author has also made it available for cell phones and ipods if you’d prefer to take your zombie brain munching action on the road with you.

I’ve just upgraded movabletype, the software I use to run the weblog on this site, to the latest version. It’s been a couple of years since I upgraded so I was a little worried things wouldn’t go smoothly. And they didn’t, but I managed to recover before anyone was likely to notice. Anyway one of the side effects of this is that I’m turning comments back on, at least for the short term, as the update supposedly helps tremendously with comment spam. If you post a comment now you’ll have to wait for me to approve it for it to appear, which is a little frustrating I suppose but less frustrating than having to plow through 100 viagra and cialis spams to read the actual comments on the weblog.

I also spent 2 hours (!!!) cleaning out all the comment spam that was in the system since the newer movabletype provides a mechanism for more easily deleting unwanted comments. Hopefully legitimate comments remain but some might have fallen victim to me trying to wade through a lot of data as quickly as I could. So if you’re comment is gone, sorry. I did my best.

Consider yourself warned – if you’re weak of stomach, eating, have no taste for tales containing more scatological detail than a proctologists report, or hate dogs, move on to the next post and do not read this one. Everyone else is in for a fantastic if maybe slightly disturbing laugh at my expense.

Soolin, my 6 month old golden retriever pup, is crate trained. I get up around 6AM and most mornings I let her out of her crate then crawl back under my covers. She hops on the bed and we play for a little while before I let her out. It’s our morning ritual. This morning she woke me up before 6AM, scratching at the door to her crate and making a racket restlessly moving around. I let her out, figuring she had to go to the bathroom and would make a beeline for the door. Instead she hopped up on the bed. She was spade on friday and I’ve been keeping her from engaging in too much physical activity so I concluded she was just restless because she’s spent half a week laying around. Anyway, I crawled back into bed with her. Not two seconds after I did this, Soolin hopped in my lap and exploded in a miasma of wet gloopy diarrhea so foul, so utterly and completely disgusting that I literally shrieked in horror and shock. I couldn’t fucking believe what had just happened. It was everywhere. On me, on my spendy down comforter, an old and beloved blanket I’ve had since college days, and all over the bed itself.

Soolin herself was terrified, partly I’m sure because she is completely aware that she is not supposed to excrete inside, and partly because she’s never heard me shriek. I don’t think anyone has ever heard me shriek, come to think of it. She ran off to the corner of the bed (my bed, which came with my cottage, is enormous – a california king which is more than 6 feet wide) and cowered. I sprang into action, trying to contain the damage. I didn’t want it to penetrate into the bed mattress, and I managed to get everything off the bed before it did, though I left a trail of poop across my house that still reeks despite hours of cleaning.

The down comforter and college blanket were a total loss. It took three cycles through the washer to cleanse the bed pad. The sheet took only 1, thankfully. I had to go buy a new comforter, a cheapy at target since it’s summer and I won’t need a full thick one like the one I lost until winter.

Thank god I’m basically an easy going person. I was infuriated at nothing in particular for most of the morning – there was no one to blame, it’s not Soolin’s fault she got sick and there was nothing I really could have expected to do differently that would have saved me this travesty. By the afternoon though I was laughing about it and figured ehh, might as well share. So laugh it up at my expense, assuming you can stomach imagining a poop-drenched me, murfled hair and angry glare ablaze, running in my skivvies through the house this morning cursing up a storm and dripping unspeakable horror about the house. I don’t mind 😉

Check out this dog powered scooter. I want one! Soolin could easily pull me into work every morning using one of these, and it would be good for both of us as well as the environment. All told it would run me about $500 to get one of these. A bit steep, and I’d probably catch grief from folks who think it would be cruel to Soolin. If I had a husky this thing would be perfect, they have energy to burn.

I updated the software that runs my photo gallery and added several new photo albums. Before I get to the links for those, I want to commend the menalto’s gallery folks. It’s just a superb piece of software and a shining example of open source at its best. The upgrade process went off without a hitch and was clearly and comprehensively documented, and they added a bunch of new features to the system. One of the new features is a handy RSS feed system. I haven’t gotten it configured quite right yet so you might want to hold off on adding it to your feed list, though the address won’t change so there’s no real harm if you do.

Anyway the new albums are all under the ‘Other hikes in the adirondacks’ section, which you can access here, and include photos of several recent hikes, including a monster 13 mile hike to the top of Pharoah Mountain, a short hike in and around the Split Rock area on the west shore of Lake Champlain, and a hike to the summitt of Crane mountain. The Crane and Pharoah galleries both have excellent QTVR panoramas to check out, and there are tons of photos of me, Soolin, beautiful vistas, and even a few of Andrew. Check em out.

I happened across this cool watercraft – $600 gets you a super light weight water skimmer. I’m somewhat tempted to pick this up for my two Lake George camping trips this summer, we’d have a blast playing on the thing. Check out the video for details on how it works. Anyone know of a DIY kit or other source for a watercraft like this that isn’t quite so pricey? Seems like you could build something very similar relatively easily, the toughest part would be getting the wings angle correct. It also seems like it would be possible to make one that had a better way to transfer energy to the thing instead of hopping like a kangaroo. Still very cool though.

These band-aids cracked me up. These are definitely going in someone’s stocking this christmas.

Check out the EVT Z-20 electric scooter – $2k, small, relatively speedy and quiet. I could imagine using one of these to get to and from work during the summer, and it would solve my ‘no parking spaces downtown’ problem when I go get my mail at the post office. I wonder if you need a license to drive one of these in New York, anyone know?

Check out these spendy but cool pushpins. I have speaker wire cable snaking all over my house and these would have come in very handy. They’re pretty pricey but I’ll lay odds some mass market manufacturer will have them cloned in no time.

I spent a significant amount of time over the years working on the Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan website. It just relaunched yesterday after undergoing a significant redesign. Sadly most of the work I put into this over the years has now faded away, but I still get a mention in the site credits (very gracious of them), and it’s a significant improvement over the old site. It also made the news on Bowdoin’s site, where you can read a puff piece on the site’s history. Of course they don’t cover the aspects that are of interest to me, which in brief are: how the original designer envisioned it as a frame-based site, which didn’t actually work and led me to develop it as a dhtml-based site back in the era of netscape 4. This was a constant challenge to keep updated as the browser wars and dhtml/javascript evolved. How I later worked with Kevin and others to move it to a data backed (all xml) and flash front end design which, while a bit clunky, did work really well. How Kevin discovered, by accident, a fantastic set of woodcut copies of the scrolls which even the scholar was unaware of, and how I worked to get that in-house at Bowdoin (they cost a couple of hundred $$$ and were very rare. Ultimately the scholar managed to acquire them). Those materials now inform the site’s presentation more than any of the other original materials. Also due to politics they’re not able to talk about who originally helped conceive of the approach we took to this site, namely my old boss, Peter Schilling, now at Wagner.edu.

None of this is really sour grapes (though were I Peter, I’d be thinking the grapes are in fact rather sour), but being a geek I do find that stuff more interesting than most of the material in the Bowdoin news story. I’m hardly john q. public though.

Anyway the site is well worth a look. Great use of flash, interesting subject matter, and you’ll even learn something to boot. Check it out.