A Good Friend Gone

Late in the middle of the night, Charlie’s (our dog) spine suddenly ruptured. Most likely from all the various ailments he’s been dealing with, and the medication to help him. He was in terrible pain, more pain than I’d ever seen any animal in. I didn’t want to see him suffer anymore and decided to put him down. I didn’t want to stay to see the vet do it, but he’s been faithfully by my side for the last 12+ years, I couldn’t bear to let him die alone. I can’t really get the picture out of my head of my dear friend dying before my eyes. I know he’s at peace now, even though I am not.

All this on the eve of my daughter’s birthday. At first we weren’t going to tell her, but I don’t like deception so we told her in the early afternoon. She’s definitely handling it better than I expected, (and certainly better than I am)

Panography vs Giving the people what they want – You Gotta See This! iPhone app

Sam told me about this app he saw a write up about that’s called You Gotta See This!. What the app does supposedly is this: You click “record” and then wave your iPhone around (slowly) and it will take several sequential photos and based on the movement of the camera and the gyroscope in it (assuming iPhone 4 compatibility only here), it will line them all up to create a picture. Now this picture will NOT be a panorama. It will be what they call a “Panography” – basically a series of (outlined) photos, overlapping each other to create an effect associated with David Hockney. (I wonder if, as an artist, he is thrilled to become another Ken Burns, where people can computerize his style.)

I was really intrigued by the app and was this || close to buying it, but then noticed the reviews. People were really annoyed that you could not get rid of the seams. The developers retort: “Stitched Panoramas are not Seamless. This is by design. ‘You Gotta See This!’ is not a panorama app. The purpose of the app is to create what is called panorama collages or panography”. (Side note – Chapter One in Developing Applications for Dummies: Standard responses when things don’t work the way people want them to: 1) “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” and 2) “The application is working as designed.” Ugh. )

Fair enough – but it seems to me that getting rid of the seams would be possible. I can understand that the point of the app is to create this cute effect, and I can see using it every now and then – but I can also see getting kind of annoyed that I don’t have the option to create the photos without the seams. I’d rather have some stitches not line up perfect and have most of the seams go away (or at least their “shadow outline, or Polaroid outline” go away) and let me touch it up with Photoshop, but still allow me to have a really cool big panorama picture – than be forced into always having a “cute effect” picture. The user base clearly wants this feature, and they don’t seem to be giving in and have no intention to.

Is it just me, or does that seem… petty? Silly? You’d think that an iPhone app developer, given the feedback on how to make their app better or more useful, would do so, especially since I would imagine the change to do what people are asking for, would not be a huge leap away from what the app is already doing. Given the choice, if another app that comes along does something similar, and does get rid of the seams, I’m all over it. Personally, I’ll take functional and useful over cute.

You can read more about the app and see some samples of the pictures it creates on the developers website: boinx.com

If you want cute photos, (or hope they’ll get the hint from their userbase) – you can also buy the app here:

Dog Update

Just so I don’t leave you hanging about the dog…

Friday was a really bad day. I went to see him in the morning – he was still not doing well, getting worse. He looked horrible. I looked in his face and silently pleaded with him to hang on and get better. I talked to the vet over the phone in the afternoon and he suggested one last treatment before we gave up. All along we were treating his problems like they were ulcers – except the medication that should have worked simply wasn’t working. If it wasn’t ulcers – the other options it could be was cancer or inflammatory disease. He suggested giving him steroids to see if it helped.

A few hours later, I stopped in to see him. I brought the kids with me because I wasn’t sure if they were ever going to see him again, and I was getting ready to tell them to say goodbye to him. But when they brought him out, they put him on the floor, and he ran over to us, wagging his tail. Before he was shaking non-stop (most likely from pain), but he was hardly shaking at all – this was only hours after they started him on the new treatment. I couldn’t believe my eyes. We took him outside so he could pee, he did, then pulled towards the car like he wanted to go HOME. This is not the behavior of a dog that is giving up!

The next morning he looked even better. They told me if everything continued as is, he could come home that night. I couldn’t believe it! The dog had literally come back from the dead. That night I brought him (and about a dozen medications LOL!) home and he’s pretty much back to his old self now.

I’ve been told this is not a “cure” – his stomach is diseased. What this buys us is some more time with him. Whether it’s cancer or inflammatory disease, the steroids will eventually stop working. In the meantime, we are so glad to have him back with us for however long we can keep him. I still don’t know how I’m going to cope when the eventuality comes. He’s like my daemon / animal spirit. He’s always by my side and I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to say goodbye to him.

Flower 2

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Flowers

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ood thing I still have a just a few more photographs from vacation to post. At the moment I’m completely bed bound. I threw my back out on Friday, it was just about tolerable until last night (Saturday). I didn’t sleep well, was in pain for most of the night that just got worse and worse. Thankfully there’s an “After Hours” doctor office nearby, so even though it was a Sunday morning, I was able to get in and seen by a doctor (or at least a nurse practitioner as the case may be). Lots of anti-inflamatory meds, pain meds, and muscle relaxers, and my back is again just tolerable on pain. I’m not quite sure how I’ll survive tomorrow. I still have tons of work piled up from vacation, so it’s not like I can just dose up on pain meds and be all set. They totally knocked me out today. But even just sitting doesn’t ease the back pain.