Well, I know I posted some pictures of Jazz quite recently, but they didn’t really do her justice. She’s a gorgeous dog, even if she is murder to photograph (just like all black dogs, and white ones too.)
It was really hard getting anything done with Jazz around.
She wasn’t intrusive or rude at all. She was just a constant potential cuddle party, and I could not resist.
Oakland zoo again. They are amazing beasts.
Someday I will visit Africa. Whether there will be any elephants left by that time is, alas, another quesiton.
Honestly, I don’t have the faintest idea what store this is. I didn’t really notice the slightly disturbing dancing … child jester? Not until I was doing a quick edit.
Well, whatever the place is, it can’t be all bad, because it has a cute cat.
I was more than 20 feet from her, but I managed to get her attention through a window for long enough to snap a picture with a zoom lens.
Yes, today is another dog birthday, and this time it’s Kona’s FIRST! He’s officially old enough to know better (although he’s definitely not old enough to care yet.) Happy birthday, Kona! May many belly rubs and cuddles be yours.
Just a little bundle of happy.
Dad just pulled out a treat.
Om nom nom!
The only part of Kona that is ALWAYS blurry is his tail.
I’ve posted Foxy a couple of times before, most recently here but she’s one of the dogs I run into most often, and she’s a really good sport about it (and so’s her owner). And when I saw her lounging like this, I just had to get a couple of shots.
This might be the first good picture I’ve gotten of Foxy’s tail. That little black band and the white ploof right at the tip.
Autumn calls the position ‘bunny butt’, although it looks more like a bunny when it’s a corgi (with no tail) doing it.
Weird, I know I got this guy’s name and age down, but it didn’t stay got. I do know he was less than a year old, and I think (not sure) that he was a he.
Dog-in-a-doggie-bag.
I’m glad he was in the bag, because if he wasn’t I’m not sure I could have stopped him licking my ankles for long enough to get pictures.
He had just gotten a bath at our local dog wash, Wags, so I bet he was still pretty itchy.
I have to admit, the visual image is a little trippy, when you can’t see the bag against the skirt.
Oh man. You all know I think giant schnauzers are awesome as it is, and it’s Zorro’s birthday today, so how could I not post him? He’s six years old, and he was clearly getting excited in the run-up to his birthday… he barked at me a bit, although he settled down and let me pet him after I was there a little while. Happy birthday, Zorro! Here’s to many more years of you schnauzing around and being adorable.
I think Zorro’s the first giant schnauzer I’ve run into that had the traditional haircut, outside of a dog show.
I really need a weekend of dogsitting again. Zorro would be the perfect size dog. We could wrestle! (He would probably win.)
This is Zorro, as his dad put it, wanting to take himself for a walk.
Saw this beastie at the Oakland Zoo.
I… He… I dunno. I got nothin’ tonight.
Well, one of my friends is going to hate me for this (hi Louise!) but I just had to post this kitty. I think she’s gorgeous and glamorous, myself. And I think she is in fact a sphinx, although there are several other kinds of hairless cats that she could be.
I want a bed that glamorous!
Yes. I DO think she’s pretty.
Sorry about the lack of an update last night, but my site (as a couple of you apparently noticed) was down for several hours. You couldn’t get to it, I couldn’t get to it. This was the last straw… I like my provider, I really do, but the specific hosting plan I have with them is pretty bad for any site that wants to actually be up all the time, and the ones that are better-suited are also four to ten times more expensive.
So I finally ordered myself a refurbished Mac mini this morning at 8 AM, and will be sending it off to one of the surprisingly many Mac mini colocation companies once it gets here. Yes, I’ll be back to running my own server, but minis are quite reliable and at any rate it could go down for two hours a week and I’d still be doing better than I am now by a long shot. If I ever need even better uptime, I’ll get a second mini, put it in a different colo, configure some failover, and then I get to blame myself entirely if anything goes wrong.
Seriously, the mini is a really sweet little server, especially the 2012 four-core i7 version. (The latest ones only come in two-core versions, probably because they would have had to have an entirely redesigned motherboard for a four-core version of the latest i7, which is really annoying of Intel to do. I suspect the next version to come out will be two and four, or even four and eight.) Stick 16 gigs of RAM in there, a 1 TB SSD and a 2 TB hard disk for backups and maybe a few high-speed USB3 flash drives RAIDed together as a secondary working drive, and put Mac OS X Server and Virtual Box on there (or even VMware ESXi!), and you have the equivalent of $100 to $200 a month in AWS servers, even if you include only modest use of the unlimited bandwidth that some of the hosting companies offer, for $30 to $50 a month. Plus it’s yours, so if it goes down, it’s your fault. And the hosting companies have licensed Apple techs on site so they can fix it for you, too… under warrantee, even.
Pretty neat. I’ll let you all know when I am set up on there, and we’ll see how it works together.