Meet Riot, our golden retriever puppy. I was lucky enough to get one of the Comedians from Gaylan's Comedy Litter. Our little comedian was Mr. Green and he is a doll. When Riot grows up he'll do agility and obedience with Kelly, hopefully some pet therapy, and who knows what else. Chris is hoping he'll have a buddy to watch TV with too.

I drove to New York last weekend to pick him up. Everyone is settling in nicely, it was a rough couple of days but every day we're all getting a little more adjusted.

The weekend before Riot came home, Cisco had a fun filled weekend of agility and probably the most consistent he's been at a trial in a long time. We qualified in 5 of 7 runs for the weekend, and the other two we missed qualifying for by two weave poles and my handling mistake causing a refusal.

Why? Well I mentioned before I really want to change blogging software and haven't gotten around to it. Now I'm sick of dealing with all the comment spam I've been getting. So I'm turning off comments (I'll try to leave them on on this post) and changing software and doing a mini-facelift. Please come back and see me in a month or so.

In the meantime, you can keep up with what I'm doing by following me on twitter, looking at my pictures on flickr, or follow everything in one place using SocialThing! (which AOL just acquired). Or you could always e-mail me -- I might even write back.

Oh and today is my dad's birthday. Happy 70th Birthday Dad!

This weekend Cisco, Berkley and spent at the Blue Ridge Dog Training Club's Agility trial. Cisco qualified in Jumpers on Friday getting his first leg towards his MXJ title and his first three MACH points. Saturday he Q'd in Open Standard finally getting that third leg and getting his OA title. Sunday his very first Excellent Standard run was met with the first time we've seen the zoomies in about 3 years and blowing all of our contacts. Sunday afternoon jumpers was a bit better, but we missed our weave poles and took a off-course jump. But I'm not complaining.

This weekend marked a few significant events for Cisco. As mentioned above there was a bit of zoomies taking place that hasn't been seen in years. He had six runs in three days and not one of them would I describe as pokey -- for the last year or so typically at least one run a day could be described as pokey. I also had a bunch of people come up to me and tell me how good he looked. All of this on the heels of a week that he practically drove us nuts nightly with his wanting to play with toys or be outside.

I think he's feeling better. And we didn't even know he wasn't feeling well. I really thought that my 6½ year old retriever was finally starting to slow down. Apparently not.

We kind of came to the conclusion this past April that maybe he was allergic to something in the food he had been on since September (he had been having hot spot after hot spot -- which even for my allergic dog was not that common). We switched his food and went to the vet where we got medicine to treat the ear infections. A month later, the ears still looked bad and the doses were upped on the medication for the ears. A month after that the ears still looked bad. At this point I decided to call the allergist and see if we could go see him again or we needed another referral from the vet. So off we went to the allergist who put us on different medication and had us restrict his diet (including treats -- no rawhides or even chicken flavored nylabones (the dogs are really missing those I think)). A month later the ears are looking tons better (not quite perfect yet) and we have a different dog.

Last weekend I went with my parents to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. For those of you not familiar with the festival it's a yearly festival downtown on the mall that celebrates the living culture of states and nations. Every year a different nation, state, region or theme is picked. This year is all about Texas (the state), Bhutan (a country in the eastern Himalayas, bordered by China and India), and NASA (who is celebrating 50 years).

I think my mom was a little surprised when I asked if they were going to go this year and if they were, if I could come along. Admittedly it was not one of my favorite things to be dragged to growing up -- I remember it being hot and humid and crowded and boring. The heat, humidity, and the crowds were all the same, but I had more patience for listening and learning than I did growing up and it wasn't nearly as boring as I remember -- they had a ton of activities for kids this year (I don't know if they had the same thing when I was growing up or if I was too shy to want to participate). We had some interesting conversations with monks from Bhutan and engineers from NASA.

This year as part of the festival, the smithsonian has started the 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Documentation Project group on flickr for people to share their photos taken at the festival.

The 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Photo Sharing Project strives to strengthen both the mission of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to promote cultural democracy, visitor participation, and cross-cultural conversation and the Smithsonian Photography Initiative's mission to document how photography plays an integral role in our lives and throughout the Smithsonian.

If you have a chance, check out some of the great pictures being posted to the group on flickr. It's really neat being able to see the festival from so many points of views and perspectives.

The Smithsonian has also joined The Commons project on Flickr. The commons got a brief mention in my blog in my tagging post but deserves a greater mention. As stated on flickr:

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

If you haven't taken some time to explore the commons, you should. There are some great photos reflecting our nation's and our world's past. So much of this content was hidden away or only viewable from a single location. Now it's available to everyone. How great is that?

We are having the floors replaced in our kitchen, hallway, powder room, mud room, and foyer. The laminate, hardwood and carpet has been removed from these areas a tile has been put down.

It's taking forever. Okay, maybe not forever, but much longer than we thought (we were initially told 5 days, we're on day 9 heading into day 10).

While all this has been going on, I've been working from home -- with the exception of three half days, my parents came to watch the workers. So I've been working from the living room, and relaxing from the living room, and pretty much spending all my time keeping me and the two dogs contained in the living room. And while the set-up may seem ideal to some (who wouldn't want a full size fridge sitting next to their TV? :-P), I'm sick of my living room. Fortunately, Chris is staying home tomorrow.

I think it's coming together nicely.

In other news. Chris started back in sort of his old role with his new company last week. He's been swamped getting things back in order and coming up to speed on what's going on.

Not much exciting has happened in the last few months. We've been really busy, but with what, I don't know. Here's a brief re-cap of the highlights.

• Cisco qualified in three runs at the TAG trial my birthday weekend. He got his first Gamblers and Standard legs. And he also got his 3rd Jumpers leg for his Starter's Jumpers title.
• We celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary on the 22nd with dinner out. (Flower's from the "west coast parents" -- which were beautiful.)
• Our friend Robyn (who recently moved back from AZ), had a bunch of us over last Saturday for a BBQ. (On what is probably the best weather on a memorial day we've had in I don't know how long.)
• And Tuesday we had new counter tops installed. (We're getting new floors next week!)

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Tagging is a way or organizing information in a way that's meaningful to the user and others. It's a way of helping people find and re-find information. For example, if you look at my photo library on flickr. There are close to 3,000 photos I have uploaded so far. Let's say I'm looking for a picture of a moose I took in alaska. Looking through nearly 3000 pictures to find a moose, doesn't sound like a lot of fun. I tagged all the pictures I took in Alaska with the tag alaska. That bring the total down to 600. Getting better. But searching for the tags alaska and moose gets me 14 results. From there it's pretty easy to find the shot I was looking for.

Another use for tagging is to group together like information. For instance, last summer at BarCamp DC, signs were hung up to tag asking participants to tag blog posts, photos, etc with barcamp, barcampdc and barcampwashingtondc. Searching for these tags provides a set of results that gives you a pretty comprehensive overview of the day's events from many different perspectives.

I tag for my own find-ability first -- names of people or animals, the event, and anything else there is a chance I might want to find later (a particular toy the dogs are playing with, the quarters Cisco unwrapped one morning, etc.). I usually add some generic tags ("golden retriever" for Cisco) for the benefit of others looking for something. A lot of my research for things is coming from non-traditional sources, videos and photos of products uploaded by average people have weighed into decisions for a few purchases I've made.

If you're not tagging your online content: photos, blog posts, videos, etc., I highly recommend it. If you are, I'm interested to hear how you choose to tag things (and if you ever have the impulse to tag other people's content).

As a somewhat related note. If you haven't seen the Library of Congress photos on flickr, you should check them out. It's neat to be able to view these photos that they've made public. And they are encouraging the public to help with the metadata on the images, making them that much more valuable.

While searching for what could possibly be going on here, I ran into this blog post suggesting a possible fix to JavaScript not working in Safari. Like me, the author has the debug menu enabled in Safari. The suggested fix of clearing out the log messages in the console did not work for me. (Which by the way, I had over 300K JavaScript error messages on a computer that's less than a month old and not used that often.) What seems to have worked is turning off Enable Runaway JavaScript Timer (also located in the debug menu).

For those not familiar with Safari's debug menu, it provides access to a lot of features for developers -- changing user agents, inspecting the DOM, getting access to JavaScript error messages, etc. In order to enable it, quit safari, open a terminal window and type % defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1 chnging the 1 to 0 will disable the menu.

Last weekend was Blue Ridge Dog Training Club's spring trial. Friday I took off of work to play. It was the worst day of our weekend. I made lots of mistakes and didn't do a good job of telling Cisco what to do.

We seemed to get that all out of our system because by Saturday things were falling into place. We started the day with a great Open Standard run where we got third place after getting a refusal called (it was a bad front cross, but I don't think it should have been a refusal). Saturday afternoon, we had a perfect Jumpers run. It was our third Excellent A Jumpers leg which got us our AXJ -- our first excellent title! Berkley came with us on Saturday and Sunday (it's been about 6 months since he's done any agility). Saturday he forgot he actually had to get on the contact obstacles and ran right past the dog walk and a-frame with me.

Sunday Cisco turned in two great runs. Neither was qualifying, but they were still good runs (we had a missed a-frame contact in open standard and one refusal in our first Excellent B jumpers run). Berkley did better on Sunday. We did knock a bar and run across the broad jump, but we did our contact obstacles and our weave poles.

I'm still on an agility high from last weekend and wish we had signed up for something before mid-April.

I've been asking people all last week what they're going to be doing to be awesome, but haven't had an answer in return. I've finally decided what I'm going to do. First, I'm going to write those e-mails I've been meaning to to catch up with people I haven't spoken to in ages. Because it's awesome to to catch up with old friends. The second thing I'm going to do is make donations to the two people I know that are raising money for a good 'cause.

So what is your feat of awesome going to be?

Last Friday I attended the inaugural DC Talks event. DC Talks are the brain child of Jason Garber and Jackson Wilkinson and are a series of one day conferences geared towards the dc web community. This first conference, DC Design Talks was geared towards interactive designers and if this one was any indication, the rest should be a huge success. Next up (this spring) is supposedly the developer talks which I'm eagerly looking forward to. Following that, I think they're talking marketing and strategy.

The design talks brought together some of the great talents in the region as speakers at the event. All nine speakers did an excellent job presenting. While my primary role is not a designer since I'm often working translating the designs to code, I think the conference provided me with great insight into the work of designers and gave me a lot of things to think about when implementing designs. As always, it was great to hang out with members of the dc web/tech community -- an inspiring group.

Congratulations to Jason and Jackson for putting on a successful event!

I've been in a rotten mood all week (especially towards the beginning of the week). Even though it wasn't a great week, it wasn't nearly as bad a my mood and I made it seem. This got me wondering and I decided to check out my biorhythm.

Sure enough my chart shows an emotional and physical low for the beginning of this week. Coincidence? Maybe. It's hard to believe that everyone who shares my birthday has the same rhythmic cycle as I do (biorhythms are based on your birthdate).

I had all but forgotten about this small part of my childhood until sometime last year when I was discussing with a friend over IM our rotten moods. Something triggered my memory and I decided to check it out. Sure enough our charts mirrored our moods. The few times I've checked since then, it's been pretty accurate. I'd be interested to know does your chart reflect you?

Here are a few links to calculators I've found online:

• Month long calculator with secondary rhythms
• Detailed report about a single day
• 2 week Calculator

Next question was what kind of book should I make. Blurb has templates for all sorts of books -- cook books, photo books, portfolio books, blog books, and more. Yup, you can actually import your blog into their software and make a book out of it. Since I have pretty much stopped scrap-booking when I started taking digital photos (way back in 2001), I decided to make a book about our 2007. I added blog posts from 2007 and photos taken from 2007.

The Blurb software was quickly downloaded and installed (even on my mac -- MyPublisher finally has mac software, but it took them a long time to get it). It easily integrated with my Flickr account and I was able to select and add pictures easily. Since I didn't choose a blog book as my book type, I couldn't figure out how to import my blog posts, so they were copy and pasted into the pages. I didn't spend too much time trying to figure that out. As far as the functionality of the software, it seemed to be on par with the others I've used. The software did allow me to use any fonts installed on my computer and they printed without any issues.

What about quality? The quality was decent. The pages aren't as high of a gloss as the other books I've made. The photos appear a bit too dark (which I have read in other reviews). But overall I am very pleased with the results and will probably continue the tradition of throwing together blog posts, photos and other mementos from the year and publishing a yearly book. (If I was smart, I'd work on it though out the year.)

Below are a few pictures of the finished book.

Above is the cover with a selection of photos summarizing the year

One of the first events of the year was Cisco's trip to the vet for stitches in his ear (which was blogged about here).

On the left is my blog entry about my Aunt Marianne. On the right are photos taken with my iPhone while we were in Cleveland with captions under them (one of the template pages available in the Blurb software).

On the left is a page from our Alaska book (which was about 4 times more expensive than the Blurb Book). The right is the same photo in the Blurb book.