All the Agility Course Maps You Could Want--Eventually

SUMMARY: New site--visit, download, contribute.

Team Fernandez-Lopez emailed me a week or so ago about a cool new site that they were in the process of implementing. I got to be among the first lucky non-TFL persons to play with it and to upload a few course maps. TFL was pretty excited about the idea and spent a ton of hours on it in the first few days, and from the looks of it, since then as well.

Check out AgilityCourseMaps.com.

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My Browser Life is Complete

SUMMARY: Gotta love my browser's auto-completion feature: Easy access to all things dog agility! And--ahem, yes--important things like work.

Maybe all your browsers have this feature--autocompletion of a URL based on the the first character(s) you type and the frequency of your past accesses. So I can type:

"b" to get Bay Team, my local agility club (where I'm also webmaster).

"e" to get the english-language version of Wikipedia, where I initially signed on so that I could create an article on dog agility, which at the time was sadly absent.

"f" to get facebook, to which I was lured by a bunch of agility friends and bloggers, and where 60% of my FB friends are agility friends.

"fi" to get my own personal calendar of all my weekend plans for the next year or so, primarily agility.

"m" to get mapquest, which tells me how long it will take me to drive to whatever agility event I'm off to this next weekend.

"g" for Google. For everything! For Taj MuttHall, when I talk about how hot or cold it is, for my non-American friends I like to give the C as well as the F. So I can go to google, type "95F in C" in the search bar, and it tells me. Is that so totally rad or what?

"o" for Onelook dictionary search, which peruses a bunch of different dictionaries to find possible meanings for a word.

"p" for Power Paws, where I take agility classes with my dogs.

"r" for Google Reader, where I've subscribed to all my favorite blogs and can see any updates in one page; very convenient! At the moment, includes 13 agility-related blogs and 3 others. (I don't put my favorite LiveJournal blogs in here, although I could, because those I can sign up for permanent email notification as soon as someone posts something.)

"s" for Snopes, the urban legends reference page, which I check *constantly* to verify those emails about 20 beagle puppies who are about to be put to sleep because they can't find homes, or the parody of My Favorite Things sung by Julie Andrews, or a photo of a tsunami frozen to ice in an instant, or SO many things that come through the mail-- (Have used them for years, and they do display some advertising to pay for their site, which is fine; lately they seem to have some ads that open windows that do crappy things to my browser. Not always, but sometimes. But I haven't found a better reference site for this material.)

I type "t" to get Team Small Dog, my daily dose of dog-and-agility-related laughter or sober thought or brain-twisting set of analogies.

"ta" to get Taj MuttHall (here--although I don't have to type it often because it is also my home page).

"w" for Weatherbug, which is cool because you can see exactly where the station is that's reporting your time and temperature, and (if one is available) choose one closer to you or to the site of your agility trial this coming weekend.

"x" for the company that employs me so that I can do dog agility.

"y" for youtube. (Surprised me when I just checked it--I'd have thought Yahoo, which it was for a long time, but I guess all those agility videos have skewed it a bit...

"z" for my photo site on Smugmug--and the only way I can explain the "z" is because all the galleries are coded with random character-string names, and "z" must be pretty common. Lots of photos from dog agility trials and the nationals there, among other things.

Probably more with 2-letter combos that I'm not thinking of at the moment.

Do you detect certain themes? Perhaps themes starting with the letter "a" or "d"?

Perhaps it's time to get off the computer and go for a long hike with the dogs in Risk's memory.

Hug your dogs, your cats, your children, your siblings, your parents [parents--hope you're enjoying your 50th-anniversary oregon trip; here's your virtual hug: (( ))]. There might not be a tomorrow to do it in. And I don't have to browse the web to know that up close and personal.

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World Good. Facebook Good.

SUMMARY: Tika gets a vet appointment through facebook.

Facebook is interesting. It gets a lot of flack for the banal things that people post. But, for the most part, the people I know post interesting things. And I find out stuff that I wouldn't have known otherwise. Like, a distant friend's mother-in-law died. Like, another distant friend just had an operation. Like, who among my facebook friends are at the AKC nationals this week. Who got a new puppy. Who lost a dog. Who's working on running contacts.

Anyway.

Yesterday, I posted this in my status:

Tika is in so much pain (tbd what exactly--arthritis?) that Ellen has scratched both Tika and Boost (technically still in rehab) from the whole 4 days of Haute TRACS. [sags despondently]

I got plenty of sympathetic comments. One person asked when she'd be seeing the vet. I replied:

Scheduled vet for Monday. Regular vet gone this week, so only one vet in office, already overbooked, said I could come sit and wait however long it took until a few minutes opened up and I decided it's not that much of an emergency. I hope.

Another of my facebook friends just happens to have the same vet that we do. And she just happened to have an appointment for this afternoon. And she just happened to decide that she could wait until next week and offered the spot to us. And I accepted with pleasure.

This would never have happened without facebook.

Tika is feeling above average today; running around like normal, just sometimes forgets and does something forceful or twisty with her front parts and yelps. Not completely debilitated like she was Wednesday. Hopefully we can pinpoint where the problem is and then decide where to go from there.

I'm floored and grateful for the gift of a vet appointment 3 days earlier. It doesn't cost her anything except time to set up the changed appointments, but it feels wonderful and it feels like a huge gift. I know how hard it is sometimes to get appointments at times that are convenient. All is right with the world.

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Earthquake Reporting

SUMMARY: Fun dynamic data. In color! Dogs are useless!

Whenever you feel an earthquake, you can report it at this USGS site. Then you can watch the responses pour in from thousands and thousands of people who feel even weak earthquakes, and very quickly get a picture of how weak and minor it was--and be amazed at how widely people feel them. I love watching the picture grow in the minutes after a quake.

My renter came downstairs at 9:00 and said, "Did you feel it?" I didn't! Drat! Usually if I'm sitting at my computer, I do, but not this time. Online, the quake hadn't even come up on the various web sites yet, but within a couple of minutes, it did: Reported as a 4.1 near Alamo (about 45 minutes from here by freeway). So we filled in his impressions of the quake and hit Submit. At that time, we were among the first 25 responders. Within 15 minutes, there were 2500 responses; 5 minutes later, there were over 3000. It'll probably slack off considerably now.

But think what an amazing tool the Internet is for collecting that kind of info! Just astonishing.

See the map of this quake.

Meanwhile, I got no tips from my dogs (as usual) that anything was going on. But then, there are zillions of little quakes every day (see all from the last week) that they probably feel more than we do and just dismiss out of hand. I know I would if I were a dog.

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More Photos Than You Can Shake A Rope Toy At

SUMMARY: Finally.

I've been wanting to do this for a lonnnng time. Herewith:

Taj MuttHall photo album, all the photos ever uploaded to this blog or used in any of my finchester.org dog pages anywhere.

(Disclaimers: Very basic HTML pages, nothing fancy. Lots of photos per page, so I hope they don't croak your browser. No captions, and occasional random text comments that might look to you as if they don't line up with anything.)

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TajMuttHall.org

SUMMARY: Cheap URLs. (Like cheap thrills, only more acronymic.)

I finally did it--registered the tajmutthall.org domain name.

You can continue to point to finchester.org/dogs/dog_diary/, as that's where it'll probably stay forever, but now you don't have to remember that when you're out on the road and desperate for your Taj MuttHall fix! Just go to tajmutthall.org, and Bingo, there you are.

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Internet, Club Members, Big USDAA, and Dreams

SUMMARY: Site's been down, where Bay Teamers live, upcoming Haute TRACS four-day trial, and how ABOUT all them Border Collies?

• Internet: Finchester.org has been mostly down for a week. I hope that they've finally got their server fixed. Since I've spent 10 years (maybe more) trying to convince the entire universe to use finchester.org for my email address, I have been cut off from a large part of the universe since last friday. It has been frustrating for me and probably even more so (and very confusing) for the rest of the universe. Well, there ya go, universes are easily confused by daily trials and tribulations.


• Club member locations: My agility club (of which I am Webmaster For Life, past President, past Member-at-Large, past Archivist, blah blah) has roughly 150 members spread mostly around the San Francisco Bay area. View a map with our distribution, each box has a number per city saying how many members are there. (For some reason it doesn't display full size--but my Mac's cursor automatically turns into a magnifying glass to enlarge it. Don't know what Window does or what other browsers do.)


• Big USDAA trial in a week: The annual Haute TRACS 4-day USDAA trial starts next Thursday. Once again, I signed up for only 3 days, which means that if either of my dogs Q in Steeplechase (which I'm hoping fervently for), I'd have to stick around all day Sunday with nothing to do but work to get our chance to run in Round 2 for money and glory. Don't know whether I'd do that. And we haven't managed to Q at Haute TRACS the last 2 years, so who knows.
  
  (Note: Technically, this is two trials; one is Thurs/Fri hosted by Haute Dawgs and one is Sat/Sun hosted by TRACS; they just happen to be consecutive, which allows dogs to move up between trials.)
  
  This is one of the biggest trials out here because it offers double or more of everything AND offers qualifiers for all three National Tournament Events (Steeplechase, Grand Prix, and Team). People come from all over. Mostly California north and south, but we also have entrants from Canada, Colorado, Oregon, Arizona, Washington, Utah, Nevada, Mississippi, and New Mexico. If you want to see all the stats, including how many by breed, dog name, level, class, and so on, see this PDF. (Full trial info here.)


• Dreams: I woke from a dream Wednesday night that left me disquieted: I was at an agility trial, and for some odd dreamlike reason all the competing dogs had to be with their owners, on leash, out on the field at the same time. There must have been 300 dogs all together, a veritable sea of canine agilitage surrounding me and my blue merle Boost. And they were, with only a half dozen reddish brown or yellowish exceptions, black and white border colies. An ocean of black and white border collies. A vast plethoric assemblage of black and white border collies. And my thought was, "Oh, no, it's all over, no one does agility with anything but black and white border collies any more." It was a strong enough disappointment to wake me.
  Interesting that this was immediately after class wherein we celebrated Luka the little black Pyrenean Shepherd's victory at the AKC Nationals and Breed Invitational. And also where I found out that FCI has apparently banned all dogs with dockings or croppings from World Team events. More in a separate post.

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Dog-related Medical/ Bereavement Web Sites

SUMMARY: Assorted useful dog-related URLs.

These are the URLs that I found in a magazine in the waiting room the first night that Jake was in the emergency room.

• Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement
• Ani-Med.org: The magazine said that this is the ASPCA's pet medical care site, but I don't see "ASPCA" on the site anywhere. Still, looks like lots of useful info on care and health. The only bad thing is that I don't see a search function (at least not in Netscape on the Mac).
• Dog Age calculator; apparently you have to register to use the calculator, which I haven't done.
• Petco.com care info: This site seems to have a lot of helpful articles on care and medical issues.

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