Dogs 'n Thoughts

2008-02-21T10:43:00.000-08:00

Privacy: Scary and Weird Stuff

Database information collection behind the scenes is something most of us rarely think about, and when we do our reaction seems to be "what, me worry?". Well I got a promotion from Yahoo marketing yesterday that brought to the front how much is going on behind the scenes.

The card was addressed to my Post Office box. But it wasn't addressed to me. It was addressed to the General Manager of an employer of almost 10 years ago. They used his correct business title. They used MY business name, which is in no way related to my former employer's business.

While it has been nearly ten years I can't imagine why I would ever have received any mail for that organization at that Post Office box. And I can say with 99.9999% certainty that HIS name would not have been connected with it if I had. However, through my professional association I did order publications, which I might have had go through that PO, at the time I was employed there. But all such orders always came in my name. So clearly there has been collection and cross-referencing of records to come up with this rather bizarre hodge-podge of information.

Oh yeah, doesn't make me very confident in Yahoo! either. Sheesh.

2006-11-21T11:26:00.000-08:00

I'm on a roll recently. The creative juices have been flowing, and along with them the energy to do something. So I've created a number of new designs recently. My personal favorite is See the Wag. It is the first time I can remember a design selling less than 24 hours after I created it. I've created another using the same wagging tail image. . Funny thing about blogging; I don't have time for it. Blogging is more like a newspaper - the subject should be topical. But most of the information I want to share is more static. It does better on a web page. Of course I DO have a webpage. OK, I don't have a web page - I've got a thousand or so web pages on a handful of web sites. I have DogPlay, DogPlay Shops, Dragonshire, and TutorTanith. I also maintain Friendship Foundation, SMART Dogs and Westside Agility. DogPlay (actually both DogPlay and Dog-Play) has hundreds of pages and is my oldest site. It turned 10 this year.

Today I started this blog because I was writing a piece for TutorTanith on creating affiliate links in a blog. But in addition to keeping those sites up to date I have my CafePress Shop and a couple other accounts here and there that need to be attended to. Then there are the herding and agility discussion groups. Of course I can't forget the most important thing, making time to play with my dogs. About the only time I'm home on a weekend is if it is raining. So even though I'd like to keep a blog up, this is likely to be my last one for a while.

2006-08-24T21:34:00.000-07:00

People keep asking about creating affiliate links so I thought I'd show how it is done. I really do like Angi's stuff. So I think I'll start with her shop. I have this blog, and I'd like to make a commission for selling Angi's stuff. So first I go find a place in her shop to link to. I've copied the address of the section. Now I'm going to create a link to "Funny Things Dogs Do and Think."

Notice that the original URL or web address was http://www.cafepress.com/artbyangi/508083 but I added ?pid=1074121 to it. The ? tells the system to expect an instruction. The pid= tells the system that there is an affiliate id coming. And the number is my affiliate id. That is all there is to it. When someone clicks on the link they get a cookie with my pid. If they buy something from the shop the system knows that the original link came from me. So I get the credit.

How much credit do I get? 20% of the retail price - what the customer paid.

I can create a link to the affiliate program too.

2006-07-13T20:18:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm convinced, I'm a geek ... or something like that. I dunno. Life working for a software company is a life of change. Recently they took the team I'd been working with and split us up; 3 of us to one group; eight to another. My new manager was originally my manager's manager. You'd think going up a level would be a promotion, but no. At first I thought the plan was for me to work on the web user interface for a support tool, something that would be fine with me.

But it turned out that the manager thought that I could script. Um I can pretend to script but I'm not really a coder. I've taken a beginner's class in PERL and in javascript so I know things like "oops, that line is missing a semi colon" and "ah here is where they declare the variable" But I don't have the feel for it. Every script I have to tinker with is a struggle and there is much that is just beyond my knowledge level. But more to the point, while I enjoy problem solving, I don't enjoy scripting.

However, I can understand their confusion. I'ma very good problem solver. I'm good at seeing the whole picture, and picking out patterns. And I'm good at extrapolation. And I've really quick to learn new software.

So today I was talking to a co-worker from another group. They gave her a task, but didn't tell her how to accomplish it. "Have you ever used this program before?" she asked.

"Well, no," I said "I've dabbled a bit in a related type."

Her face fell in disappointment.

"So what's the problem?"

She explained that she was supposed to give commands from the command line, but didn't know how. And she had a nice little helper tool that COULD do the job - if only it didn't have an 80 character limit.

?80 character limit? That sounded strange to me.

I asked her to show me. She opened the helper tool, and showed me that she could paste in her commands but they truncated at 80 characters on the line.

Hmmm, I grabbed her mouse. Clicked tools - found something like a configure or preferences option. Found an entry that said 80 characters. Changed it to 200.

"Oh, but that didn't work, the margin rule is still there" Back into the menu, find another menu option, change THAT to 200 characters. Poof, problem solved. I do that kind of thing fairly frequently. I remember when I first started at this place within a week I was explaining the application we were using to people who had been there over a year. "I don't know why it does that" She'd say.

"Well, I do I'd respond. And then I'd explain the functionality of the application. I do that a lot too. I'm not good at taking "it can't do that" as an answer. Sometimes it really can't but a little out of the box thinking often reveals a way to accomplish the goal.

I think that is the key to my success. I focus more on the goal, than on the means.

2006-02-02T20:43:00.000-08:00

One of the first challenges in creating designs for T-shirts is grokking the difference between the way stuff prints and the way it looks on screen. Monitors emit light, and things like t-shirts reflect light. Because of this difference the available colors are different. There is some over lap, but not even neon paint can quite "glow" the way something made of light can glow.

There are other two factors that make it harder for the designer to really "get" the difference. The first is the variability of the computer displays. Our brains are really good at adjusting to expected colors. We tend, for example, not to really notice the yellowish cast created by our incandescent light. I've had the opportunity to look at exactly the same image on multiple displays and can see that in one a color might be definetly blue, while in the other it might have an obvious violet hue.

It is very common for designers to complain that their colors weren't printed correctly. However unless they have actually calibrated their monitor for color there is a better than even chance that the designer wasn't seeing the color correctly on the display. So what got printed was actually the way it was designed, just not the way they were seeing it.

The second factor is the brain breaker if one thinks about it too much. You are looking at a light source to interpret a non-light source image. Generally this isn't a huge factor in the actual design process, it just makes it harder for people to grasp that color generated out of the display really is of a different quality than color appearing on a printed product. With all this in mind I created some color charts to help me keep an eye on my designing.

The coolest thing to arrive at CafePress is the much awaited BLACK T-shirt. Woo woo.So I ordered a couple and got a reminder of the difference light sources can make in the way things looked. In my dimly lit house I was a bit disappointed in one shirt. But when I took it outside to photograph it I discovered it was much better than I thought. Sure, I can, and I did, work on the color to improve the indoor appearance. But that misses the point which is that the light source can significantly influence the way light reflects and thus perceived color. And the new shirts introduced new design challenges. So back I went to my color charts. I wanted to create a test chart so that I could see the behavior of colors on the black t-shirts. But I didn't want to pay for a boring bunch of squares. So I created a more interesting test pattern. Now I can actually look forward to wearing my test subject. Fun and learning on the same slate - what a concept.

2006-01-22T15:39:00.000-08:00

My Hebrew teacher used to say "Without the rain, you'd never appreciate the sun." Of course he meant it as a metaphore but there is some literal reality to that as well. Lately I've had a little too much appreciation for the sun.

The last time we got any good herding in was at the beginning of the year. I took the two dogs into the 60 mph winds and we drove out the the California coastline. We were attending a herding trial. I sent the entry in too late to get a place for Tsuki, but Freeway was entered in Junior Herding Dog. There were reports of flooding all over. Our drive was not too eventful, one road was flooding when I went in. We had to leave the back way to go around it at the end of the day. But Freeway did make two successful runs and so he starts his new year as Dogplay's Roadside Rescue, JHD.

After that, however, the arenas have been just too muddy for training. So I've been spening my time on my new Dog Play Mall. I'm really married to the concept. The idea is that there are a lot of people like me, sharing our lives with mixed breed dogs, but a huge percentage of dog related products assume your dog is some identifiable breed. It is really frustrating to have to dig through all those breeds in the hopes of finding something that is really friendly to MY dogs. And I really hate those "If it isn't a [breed name], it's just a dog" Ha ha ha I'm supposed to be laughing, I guess. But I'm no more in favor of breedism than I am in favor of racism. Of course some breeds are better at some things than other breeds. That is the point of breeds - to get specialized superior abilities for some specific purposes. But why does pride in one's breed require being snobby about other breeds. And this whole thing of people relating to dog by reference to what the breed is, stinks similarly. That is what sets people up to pay absurd amounts of money for a dog. They pay for the label, not the care in breeding.

What's that? You aren't understanding? What I'm saying is that the real value in breeds is careful selection according to identifiable characteristics. When this selection begins to have consistent reliable predictable results in reproducing those characteristics you have a breed. But some people are more interested in simply the closed gene pool than in concerning themselves about the selection process. So people pay large amounts of money for a dog that is geneticially full of problems. Arrrgh

2005-10-05T20:22:00.000-07:00

Yes, it has been over a month since my last visit here. I've thought of a lot of stuff I wanted to share. However, I have been thoroughly schooled into being careful about what is written down, especially publicly. I thought a lot about following up on my first blog, then realized that I had put links to my blog on my web site. And I naturally point people to my website, including my employer. So, I thought, what if my employer reads it. What will they see in it?

So now I'm struggling with what to write.

2005-08-26T17:27:00.000-07:00

He looked at me and pursed his lips "And they pay you for that?" He inquired.
"Yes, they do." I answered. He looked at my shirt again, almost tapping his fingers on the logo. "Internet Technology, They pay you for that?" he repeated, "You work for them?" "Yes." I responded. He shook his head, then reached down to pet Freeway.

Freeway was why I was there. Well OK the old man was why I was there too. You never know who you are going to meet when taking a dog on a "visiting pets" program. A lot of the people we visit are barely mentally competent, but quite a few are merely old. This guy was plenty sharp. I'm not quite sure why he was so surprised that I would get paid for doing something related with "Internet Technology." On later reflection I wonder if he thought that the company logo I was wearing was related to our visit. It wasn't, but in the earlier years of the company it could have been. When I first started working there I took my dog Oso on visiting pet visits during the work day with the knowledge and support of my manager. But things have changed and now it was just a convenient clean shirt.

Several times a month Freeway and I go to a hospital, convalescent home or other care facility. A lot of people would call Freeway a "therapy dog" and often I do as well because that is the common usage. Organizations such as the Delta Society prefer a rather narrower use of the term. In their terminology the dog and handler team is assigned to work with a specific individual, with a planned interaction intended to assist that individual. The interaction and how it progresses toward the goal are usually noted and recorded. Very few of the visits I have done fall into that range. Most of what we do is "meet and greet". It is purely a social interaction, mostly between the dog and the person we are visiting.

Even if there is no specific therapeutic protocol involved these visits can be very meaningful to the people we visit. Still it is important that the volunteers not get too full of themselves and puffed up with "do-gooderness". Not everyone we visit appreciates the visits. We try hard to never impose our dogs on someone. Even if it isn't their "home" we are still visitors in their world. They have so little control over what happens in their world. We give each individual as much "say-so" as we can. Sometimes we have a fine line to walk.

On this same visit, for example, there was a woman in the day room who was afraid of the dogs. While we couldn't allow her desires to override those of the others in the room (she was competent to leave if she chose), we could and did take care not to place the dog near her. We did not allow the dogs to focus on her. We did what we could to show respect for her wishes and concerns.

Our visit style can vary quite a bit from one facility to another. At one hospital almost all the visits are in individual patient rooms. Sometimes we go to a day room, a kind of social gathering spot. Sometimes we spend half an hour in one place, sometimes we do shorter visits in a number of locations throughout the facility. For the most part we don't develop much individual rapport with the people we visit. There are other styles of visits where a person might spend as much as an hour with a single individual. The nature of the interaction between the visiting team and those visited can vary. No rules written in stone.

People often ask what kind of dog makes a good therapy dog. I have a nice long written answer. But here is a button I created with the short answer.

When I first started doing visiting with my dog I read a book by Kathy Diamond Davis. Then I started looking around on the web. At the time (1996) there was very little information about therapy dogs on the web. In looking I discovered a lot of interesting dog activities, but no site covered them all. So that is what I set out to do. I created Dog-Play (now also Dog Play) to be a kind of serendipity introduction to dog related activities. And I made a specific focus on visiting dogs and therapy dogs. I've collected book resources, discussion groups, web sites, and groups to join. I've collected much more than that. And you know what? The lazy sog will write me to ask for information rather than looking for what I've spent so much time collecting. Oh well, that's people for you.

2005-08-18T23:34:00.000-07:00

He's balancing, he's balancing! Yes, Freeway is balancing to the sheep. Heh - dog sports can come up with some really strange terminology. In herding "balance" refers to the dog's ability to shift its position to hold the sheep in relationship to something else. Typically it is the handler, but it might be an opening in a fence, or chute or ...

This Sunday when we were practicing herding Freeway started compensating for my position relative to the sheep. When I moved left, he moved left i.e. away from me and around the sheep. And if I suddenly changed to move to the right, he started moving to the right. The general idea is for the dog to keep the sheep to the handler. So in the open where the sheep have no particular preferred direction it is handler at 12 o'clock, dog a 6 o'clock - on opposite side with sheep in between. If the sheep have a "draw" then the dog should shift to keep the sheep from heading that way, and keep the sheep with the handler.

This "balancing" movement is a huge improvement for him. Just last week if I shifted position I found myself standing right next to my dog. He wasn't responding to my change in position. This week he seemed to be getting it. This is the fun thing about herding, watching the instincts in the dog develop and emerge.

When we started Freeway was very one sided. One sided refers to a preference for moving in one direction - either clockwise or counter-clockwise. He prefers counter-clockwise. At first he was working very hard at not going the way I wanted. But last week he seemed more comfortable going both ways. This week he shifted without much effort. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens on Saturday.

2005-08-17T23:02:00.000-07:00

Dogs and cats: watching them is great for keeping a sense of perspective.

Freeway and Tsuki had a great play this morning. They played bitey face and smack down. The interesting thing about the game of bitey face is that neither tries to "dominate" the other. Mostly the entire game is played lying down. It consists of much noise and "growling" and groaning, and swinging open mouths back and forth. I have no idea what the rules are and there don't seem to be winners or losers.

Freeway started herdng training in April. He did not look like an exciting herding prospect. But he is actually coming along fairly well. Oh I don't expect him to be high in trial, but I think he will do a respectable job ... maybe. At least he is a little more interested in obeying me than Tsuki is.

Tsuki ... what can I say. Being a sheepdog is in his blood. I have to be careful with him because he won't tell me when he is hurting. He konws I'll take him off the sheep. Last week he wore holes in his pads and I didn't even notice. I only ended up checking his feet because he was slower than normal in agility practice. Agility doesn't hold quite that high level of interest. So this time when we went out to herd I dug out his booties. He didn't mind them at all. I think he may have been grateful for them. Anyway he certainly was smiling as we practiced putting the sheep through panels and into pens.

2005-08-16T01:56:00.000-07:00

I sense a change coming on in the winds of my life. Not a big change But I've been drifting with the tide for some time now. It is time for me to set sail and chart a course that might actually go somewhere. Ok, maybe I don't want to go anywhere in particular. But since I seem to be going I may as well select the destination.

The metaphors I have chosen carry special irony as I've never liked to sail. I like a kayak on quiet waters. I love to snooze in a row boat and listen to the slap, slap, slap of wavelets against the sides. But I've never felt a desperate need to go somewhere.

A little over seven years ago a friend of mine listened to my grumblings about my then current job and suggested I might be a good fit for the team she was on. She was right. It was a company of like minded folks. Even the CEO shared my passion for dogs. Our pets were allowed in the office. I found there a niche that appreciated my form of being "anal". Everyone on the team was that way. That is what made us good. Our primary task was to take technical information and to make it available to non-technical people. Most of this information related to using software and computer hardware.

The job perfectly fit my technical orientation coupled with a long history of teaching science to the general public. When I started that job I had literally never seen any Windows version about 3.1. Supporting Windows 95 was my new job. And supporting hardware. No one else really wanted it. I was supposed to be assigned a subject matter expert who would review my documentation and ensure that it was accurate. Well it turned out that the folks assigned felt they had a lot more interesting/important things to do. Getting information from them was difficult enough, but getting them to review the information after I had written it up was almost impossible. So I became my own subject matter expert, and a darned good one at that.

I remember that after collecting about 3 months worth of documents yet to be approved I prevailed upon my manager to allow me to publish them without the approvals. I presented her with some statistics I collected from the tickets the support analysts handled. I said they needed the information sooner rather than later, there was nothing risky in it, and darn it, I wanted to produce something for all this money they were paying me. I got the approval to go and a new chapter in history was written.

As time went on my co-workers became increasingly comfortable with my technical orientation. Soon they were coming to me for problem solving. At first this amazed me, I was the new kid on the block. But over time I realized that we each had different strengths and mine ... Well I grok technology. Extrapolation and a willingness, even a desire, to experiment have served me especially well.

Another thing that was a foundation to my success at this new job was my experience in running an information oriented web site, and participating in Usenet with the goal of educating the clueless. In 1996 I first created my Dog-Play web site. I had surveyed the web and I found lots of sites about dogs, but nothing explaining the activities I found mentioned here and there. I had become involved with taking my dog to convalescent homes to cheer people up, and I found little on the web about that activity. So I decided to create a web site that would introduce people to these activities. In doing that I learned HTML, web design, and some very good practices that have served me well in my current endeavors. I also participated in the dogs groups in Usenet. I deliberately chose to participate to improve my skills at tactful education. It was difficult at times because I feel so strongly about things. That activity was key to honing my skills of persuasion. Taken together, the HTML skills, and the tactful education skills, proved to be the basis on which I made our technical knowledge more accessible to everyone.

Everything changes, and big software companies change more than most things. So it wasn't too long before the company lost its standing in the top 100 best places to work. Still I found the work a challenge, and I had a great team to work with so I kept drifting along. And naturally I continued to develop my technical skills. I found that beyond the job I was hired to do I was often solving technical problems, like how to make a change to 2500 documents, or how to analyze our web logs in a meaningful way. One co-worker and I became well known as excellent testers for software roll-outs because we could break things in nothing flat. As technical as I am I also can think like, and behave like, an ordinary user. And that is how I tested stuff. Plunking around and clicking this and that and not reading instructions.

My lastest tack on the ocean of life came when the company got swallowed by a bigger fish. I didn't want to commute to the new HQ, and I felt that I didn't want to commit myself to accepting a position with a company I knew only by rumor. As I explained to one co-worker "If I stay on for transition with a termination date and we like each other we can negotiate. And if I don't like them I have my severance and a graceful way out". Well, just about the very first thing I did was solve a problem my new manager said was impossible. When I listened to the situation I couldn't believe it would be that difficult to solve. I didn't know their system, it just wasn't very logical that the task would be "impossible." Of course they didn't mean literally impossible, just that it couldn't be done with a reasonable investment of time and effort, but still .... So I asked them to please send me the file so "I can see the magnitude of the problem" It took them almost a week to get it to me. When I got it I opened it, took one look, shook my head. 3 hours later I had the problem solved.

Well now I've impressed the heck out of them and they want me to stay. I've agreed, but honestly I have my doubts. So I've got the scope out, searching the horizons, seeing if there are any likely new waters.