Posts Tagged ‘pets’

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April Fool’s Joke

April 8, 2015

Over a thousand people have downloaded an episode of the embedded.fm where I interview our cat

At least three people listened to the whole thing, probably more. It was not our usual hour, only about 20 minutes but still I interviewed our cat. Chris piped up occasionally with the most hilarious additions. But I didn’t really expect other people to listen to the whole thing. I did it for my own amusement. I felt a bit guilty as it caused Chris lots of work (editing it was really tough! And yes, that was our cat though there were multiple recording sessions).

This is the first time I’ve ever participated in April Fools day. It has always been something I avoided or looked on with annoyed amusement (ThinkGeek, though, that is pure amusement).

There is a community to having done a prank like this. 

I found the episode really funny to plan, to do, and to listen to. It worked for me and even thinking about it now makes me want to giggle.

But a joke that is shared? It is much better.

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Beagle Bone Black

May 17, 2014

I have a beagle. She’s a great dog.

No, that’s not right. She’s a terrible dog.

When you look up breed information about beagles, you see “merrily stubborn” and “amiable and determined.” What that means is “thinks you are an idiot but is pleased with the opportunity to laugh at you.”

My dog thinks I’m dumb for not wanting to roll in whatever it is she just rolled in. In her world, I’m her not-so-bright straight-man, trying to make her go in boring directions instead of following her supernose. But she’s a happy-go-lucky dog, having accepted the burden of trying to teach me about the joy of squirrels.

(Seriously, she’s an awesome dog, far too intelligent, and very seldom as sad as her pictures indicate.)

And so we plug the beagle into the USB port…

Every time I think about the Beagle boards, I fall into rumination about my pet. Let’s just say, this board had best not act like my dog.

But let’s see what it does act like… Philip over at Fliptronic loaned me his Beagle Bone Black for a week or two after my twitter-whining about Sparkfun’s lack of stock got overwhelming and I finally just asked if anyone had one I could borrow. Yay Philip!

I spent some time on beagleboard.org, reading about the system. It looks sort of like an Arduino or an mbed or any number of other small processor development boards. I keep forgetting that it (and Raspberry Pi) are computers, not really embedded platforms. Certainly, it has more oomph than the computers I had in the 90s.

Now that I have one in my possession, what am I going to do with it? I don’t have an end goal but I do have a couple of things to try, mostly following along with some Adafruit Beagle Bone tutorials.

Step 1 is unbox it, then plug in the BBB to USB.  That was relatively unclimactic until I plugged the hub into my computer. Then it started signalling planes with its ridiculously bright blue LEDs. Next step, install drivers.  Clearly my beagle told them about my mental deficiencies because they’ve really made the getting started page simple.

Though, of course, it didn’t work. (I swear, computers hate me.) Everything installed ok, didn’t say I needed to reset my computer. The getting started page say to use Chrome to navigate to http://192.168.7.2/, which will be a network-over-USB thing. That doesn’t work. The page says older software images require ejecting the BBB as a USB drive but that gives me an error (as in “An error occurred whiled ejecting ‘Removable Disk (G:)”, thanks Microsoft. Unplugging USB doesn’t  work but it does get the flashing lights to stop.

Oh gods, the flashing lights. They make me really, really anxious. I put a sparkfun box over them but it still leaks. I thought I could deal with it but making it stop was such a huge relief.

I think the next step is to find a bigger, less light leaking box. Oh, and reboot my computer to maybe activate those drivers I installed (despite the huge warnings Microsoft put up).

 After Windows reboot

The reboot didn’t work but using the USB cable from the box did. The BBB is serving up a webpage which has little scripts I can edit and run (from the webpage). There is an IDE that runs (Cloud9 IDE) though I have to sign up (I hate signing up for things, particularly for things I don’t know if I’ll want to play with).  There is an SSH shell that doesn’t work (“This webpage has a redirect loop”) until I set the date (there is a button on the page that will do that).

Lots to do. Lots of hardware pins.

I’m torn between an dimming an LED and reading about I2C RTC so I can use the information to talk to an accelerometer or something. (I suppose I have an I2C RTC around here somewhere but I know where the accels and fuel gauges are.) I also want to update the FW build, maybe cross compile it myself so I understand all of the pieces. Oh, and I could try out Willow Garage’s robot operating system for Angstrom (the Linux variant that the BBB runs).

Oh, I2C was pretty easy. I don’t even need to know the address? What sort of black magic is this?

There is so much here. I’ll be lost for awhile.  That’s ok.

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Tesla!

February 16, 2013

lt has been a month so I figured I’d talk about the new car, give it a review. And then this week was full of NYT and Tesla arguing like internet n00bs (proving, even if you are the NYT and CEO of a medium-sized company, someone on the internet is wrong).

Let’s recap my views on the Tesla… I thought it was silly and expensive. While C likes bleeding edge technology, I’d rather wait until someone else dealt with the bugs before getting mine. Since I write (err, fix) bugs for a living, well, I understand that it just takes awhile before things are solid.

Also, it is an expensive car. Really, really expensive. We could use that money for something else. Something worthwhile. Maybe three normal cars that we juggle in the backyard using our giant robot.

More than a year ago, I tried to get a friend to convince C it was silly to put down the deposit on a car that wouldn’t ship for a year and would be on the gushing bleeding edge. Said so-called friend told us he’d already put down his deposit; my hope for rationality was quashed.

Then it was like a game of chicken. I figured C would use his refundable deposit to have a stake in watching things. It would be amusing to him. And we’d never go through with it. Because, wouldn’t it be better to have a giant car juggling robot? Or something?

In the end, it is much cheaper to buy the car than to put my foot down and have my husband be unhappy. Clearly, I am a pushover for him.

But I wasn’t entirely a pushover for Tesla.

I didn’t like that Tesla isn’t a car company. While I don’t like the car lots or the dealers, I understand the process. Tesla isn’t that and I’m not confident I can navigate the shoals of an up-and-coming car manufacturer. Plus, I saw Tucker. I know how this story can end. (The Tesla has side headlights that come on when you turn, highlighting where you are pointing. It was eerily familiar after the Tucker movie. Also, quite amusing.)

Tesla did not help their case during the decision-making process. We went to one of their test drive extravaganzas, with balloons, soft-serve ice cream, a DJ, and the opportunity for one of us to drive the car on windy roads while the other one tries not to throw up on the super-expensive backseat. I hated the whole event. I was frustrated I couldn’t talk to the salesfolk because the music was so stupidly loud. I declined to ride along as I tend to get car sick and already knew the road they were taking; it wasn’t going to end well for anyone. I generally made my husband unhappy with my complete crankiness. But he still enjoyed test driving the car.

I was worried that we’d get the car and I’d still be cranky: unable to drive it for fear of hurting it, unable to look at it without thinking how many hours we’d have to work to pay it off, unable to ever bond with something that financially irresponsible.

It took two days. Maybe less. We got the car on Saturday, took it for a long drive, had annoying problems (had to stop at a gas station! oh, the chagrin!) and eventually came home with me liking the car but not loving it (also, slightly carsick). I didn’t drive it until Sunday and then only to pop to the library and back: boring, even in a nice car.

The next day, I took friends out to lunch in it. I accelerated outrageously and cornered hard (I <heart> freeway on-ramps). I showed them the frunk (front trunk). They oooh’d and aaaah’d over the utterly ridiculous retracting door handles. We talked about the car always having a full tank when it leaves the house. They played with the sunroof. I showed them the adorable key (vroom, vrooom!).

In showing them the sweetness of the car, I somehow realized I’d fallen for the Tesla.

It’s name is Electron.

C says it is too dirty for a photo shoot, I’ll just take a picture I’ve been thinking about for awhile…

 

Let's take a look at what's under the hood...

Let’s take a look at what’s under the hood…

Hey! This car is puppy powered!

Hey! This car is puppy powered!

Does anyone have 30-60 hamsters I can borrow? I think that will be even funnier.

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Gravel, expired squirrels, grapes, Trident gum

February 12, 2013

Beagles don’t live in the wild and I know why.

The first time we took Zoe to the vet for “gastric distress” due to “dietary indiscretions”, we felt like terrible puppy parents. We should have known. Because she enthusiastically wanted to play ball (even as she was vomiting), we thought she’d just eaten too much grass (which she seems to do because she likes to barf).

When the vet used the term “dietary indiscretion”, it strongly reminded us of the politician who belittled his hypocritical immorality by calling it a “youthful indiscretion”. Both terms have this feeling of joyful breaking of the normal rules. This completely describes our beagle.

And Zoe does like to eat things. Really, anything is fine.

Last week, while I was in class, my husband sent me a dog shaming photo of Zoe. If you haven’t seen dog shaming before, you really should follow the link. Dogs are terrible creatures. And putting signs around their neck has really made their bad behavior a lot easier to take. I wrote a post-it note for Bear a few days ago (my first) and it made his annoying behavior humorous.  Which them made it easier to deal with, which is to say, distract them from the badness, interest them in something non-destructive.

So, while we’re read the site for awhile, we’re new to actually shaming the dogs. I think this was C’s first attempt.

Does it look like she's trying to blow a bubble?

Does it look like she’s trying to blow a bubble? It says “I ate Elecia’s Bubble Gum (including wrappers)”

One important thing, though… like they used to say on America’s Funniest Home Videos, if someone is actually in danger, put down the camera and help.

Sugarless gum is poisonous to dogs. It is the Xylitol sweetener. Oh, and before I go on… Zoe is fine. Bear is fine. But it was a harrowing time.

After taking the picture and then perusing the internet, C rushed both dogs to the emergency vet. Where Zoe got to barf, probably even more than she liked. Bear also participated in that part but all evidence suggests he didn’t eat the gum (poor Bear, punished but not even an accomplice).

Does this bandaid make me cuter? I swear I didn't eat the gum.

Does this bandaid make me even cuter?

Zoe did show some of the poisoning signs (low blood sugar) and was in the hospital for 48 hours.  However, thanks to C’s fast action, she was out of the woods pretty quickly and doesn’t show signs of liver damage (yay!). While in the hospital, she wiggled when she shouldn’t have and they broke a needle in her so there is a quarter inch of 30 gauge wire floating around. While that sounds horrible, it is probably not going to harm her.

Harrowing times… but all dogs are home and happy. They haven’t even deserved shaming today. Yet.

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More about George

May 17, 2012

George was a good pet. He ate a lot but took us all over. Here is George, munching.

C and I spent a lot of time in him. Let’s just say it was about 100 hours (7102 miles, we didn’t go 90mph always… there was the occasional construction and some traffic and that hideous 40 minute drive to go 4 miles in Boston).

This is what C looked like for most of that time. (Though this is Donner Pass, toward the end of the trip.)

I did drive some but taking pictures while I drive is dangerous. I planned to get some bloggin done in the car, maybe even some work (I still haven’t started the article due this month or the blog-article due last month, sigh). Thus, this is what I planned to look like:
Actually, though, I mostly stared out the window. That was one of the reasons I tried so hard in the never ending battle against bugs on the window. Even the side windows got gunky eventually; they were still clear in Memphis.

George had a decent sound system so we listened to music and books. He also heated seats (really only useful in Boston) and separate driver/passenger temperature controls (normally set to the same temperature but the first twenty minutes of being in the car were always different so separate controls is a new high-want feature for future cars). We normally put the back seats down but left the front seats up, filled with backpacks, jackets, shoes, small ice chest, snack bag, trash bag, and box of kleenex.

When we had our brother- and sister-in-law in Boston and their travel cases (larger than ours though they were only in Boston for a weekend, I will be teasing someone about that), it was a tight squeeze. But we did all fit ok, probably could have fit one more (small) person (but not their luggage).

We could have slept in George but we never needed to. It was nice to have the backup option. I don’t think we could have slept *comfortably* but that is ok, it was like backup plan S.

With 17 mpg city and 24 mpg highway, George could have been slightly hungrier. Or we could have driven slower to get the highway number more consistently. It is a far cry from our normal Prius milage. Actually, going back to the Prius has been a bit jarring. It is more than ten years old and while a decent non-luxurious car, it doesn’t have much pickup (comparatively, no acceleration) and the cloth seats feel cheap. Of course, it is dusty and needs a tune up (two lights on the dash are on!). And it doesn’t even have a name. Sad.

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