Less attitude; more bike paths, mountains and beer.

Webster’s defines a patriot as “one who loves his or her country and supports its authority and interests”. But with a country this divided, the term almost has no validity anymore. I mean, our country’s “authority and interests” are presently defined by the Bush administration. Therefore, our country’s so-called authority is bogus, stolen, abused, misused and illegally expanded. Our interests? Hegemony and Looking Out for Number One. Sure as hell, I don’t support those. Am I not a patriot?

The first patriots were revolutionaries. Maybe it’s time to restore the original definition.

A former co-worker just IM’ed me to let me know that a project I worked on has received two Lumen Awards for exemplary lighting/daylighting design. I am pretty psyched, since to date these are my first two Lumens in my 15 year career in lighting.

Awards are stupid, until you win one. Yay!

Looking back, it’s interesting because this was the project that finally got me to get over the learning curve of Radiance, as the tools I had been using were simply not up to the job of simulating the daylight and electric lighting in this complex space. This project forced me to learn Radiance, made me jump back to the Apple Macintosh world (because of OSX’s superior UNIX environment), and, ultimately, those skills landed me my current job in beautiful Boulder, Colorado—and now, a couple of industry awards to boot.

Yay!

Clinton(s) suck, Obama is our best hope at the moment.

Hillary, you are a hawk in a dress, and your move to New York to become a Senator and wage this campaign was sad, sorry and obvious, and you only feed the right wing machine. You have nothing to offer, yet take in millions (in big chunks) to spread your hollow messages about experience and how much you care about and have done for Texas and Ohio (at the moment). You suck, I hate you, and I have donated money to a political campaign for the first time in my life (obviously not for your sorry, smug ass) because I sincerely hope that Obama’s momentum continues to roll right over your pathetic campaign machine, you cunt.

The right and I saw you coming since 2003, and I think it’s very sad that I still have to listen to you and help Obama’s campaign defeat you. You suck. Go away.

Still here? Read this article.

An editorial in today’s Daily Camera mentions a recent judge’s recent order to “disable” the domain name of wikileaks.org, a site that purportedly offers up Standard Operating Procedures for American troops in Iraq, Gitmo, and other evidence of corporate wrongdoing. Potentially interesting reading, and protected under the First Amendment for chrissakes.

Luckily the judge is an idiot, and does not understand the domain naming system too well. Here’s the IP address: http://88.80.13.160. As the editorial says, visit the site today. Do it to honor the First Amendment.

Sheldon Brown is dead; he passed away today following a massive heart attack. The cycling world—particularly the bicycle mechanic world—has suffered a huge loss.

Sheldon Brown’s cycling/technical pages are loaded with excellent information, and I refer to it (and other people to it) often.

Bummer.

Sitting here reading Bark Magazine (which I realize outs me as an insane dog lover more than any of my previous admissions), I came across a quote:

“A mutt is a dog. He is the stuff of dogginess, a creature allied to species, not breed, and untrammeled by human hand or preference. A mutt knows that you have chosen him for himself, and not because he is of the type you set out to get.”

Well put. Yesterday, Brenda & I (and Hooper) watched the Eukanuba dog show and couldn’t help but feel a bit of a slight, knowing that as great a dog as Hooper is, we could never show him in such an event because he’s not a purebred. But I would argue that while there is almost certainly a breed for every purpose, thousands of years of evolution led to a single mating of what is most likely a Border Collie and a Black Labrador Retriever and produced a perfect specimen for Brenda & I.

Hooper is almost exactly fifty pounds, the weight limit our condo association has arbitrarily imposed on dogs in the complex; his coat is low maintenance; he is friendly, almost to a fault; he is handsome; he loves to go hiking; he loves fetch; he loves soccer; he loves learning new tricks; he is smart, and yet he is also stupid, at all the right times.

The AKC doesn’t recognize Hooper because we can’t show papers that trace his lineage along some lines of doggie purity, but I would argue that Hooper represents something even greater. Hooper is our dog. He was sitting there in the kennel, the day I picked up Emma’s ashes, and he held the promise of being everything I ever wanted in a dog, complete with all the high expectations and idealization that comes with twenty plus years of longing for the chance to raise a puppy.

And when Hooper trots up to me in the ballfield, looking into my eyes with a ball in his mouth, timing his drop and velocity such that the ball rolls right to my feet stopping an inch from my toes, and he looks to me to make that blessed ball fly through the air once again, I know, I know, that this animal is the perfect amalgam of DNA; the end result of thousands of years of evolution, strict breeding, and errant screws in untold alleys that led to this precise genetic glop that is Hooper. He is perfect. The AKC says otherwise, but they are wrong.

I encourage you to read the full article that the above quote came from; it’s very entertaining, especially if you love dogs and hate purebreed dogma.

Today is Hooper’s birthday, making Hooper one year old! In truth, we brought him home at six months of age, and he was picked up as a stray in Utah sometime before that, so unfortunately we really don’t know the exact circumstances or conditions of his conception, birth and early development. The vet guessed he was six months old, based on his teeth, when we took him in or his first checkup in early August. So we counted back from there and picked Groundhog Day as his “birthday”. In truth we’ll never know, and we don’t care. Just as we’ll never really know his genetic makeup. He’s Hooper the Dog, he’s ours, he’s one today, and we love him. So we took him out for a hike.

Up past Jamestown there’s a trail that meanders through the tall trees and it seemed as good as any for a winter hike. Hooper seems to love the hiking, the snow, the altitude, the adventure, as much as all of us. Once out of the car, he starts whimpering if we don’t get on with the business of plodding through the snow in a timely fashion. He’s generally uninterested in drinking water because that would involve stopping. Instead, he snags chunks of snow and ice on the fly, and keeps on marching.

Today’s hike led to a vague trail hidden by snow, and Brenda eventually became more interested in scaling a boulder for the view at the top than continuing to the summit. Hooper & I ventured onward, but he kept looking back at Brenda and I lost all sight of anything recognizable as a trail, so we headed back to join her. We snapped a few pics, headed back to town and picked up new treats and toys for the birthday boy. He’s cached out on his bed now, amidst the debris of yet another destroyed stuffed toy. Life is good.

Hooper is a soccer wunderkind. Like all of his other traits/habits/skills, we discovered this over time.

It started with a yellow “utility ball” we found in the snow in November, a forgotten castaway from an Aurora 7 Elementary School recess. Upon discovering the lost ball languishing on top of the fresh snow at the schoolyard after one of the first snowfalls of the season here in Boulder, I kicked it toward the ballfield and Hooper immediately recognized the potential. We ran toward the ballfield gate, kicking the ball along, and once we got inside, a game of keep-away/get-the-ball-past-the-dog ensued, for far longer than it should have.

Since that time, a number of balls (soccer balls, utility balls, baseballs… balls!) have turned up in the ballfields where we take our dogs—in various states of disrepair and deflation—and recently a particular soccer ball has become the apple in Hooper’s eye.

I left work early today to make a doctor’s appointment, so Hooper & I ended up at the ballfield earlier than usual. With no other dog action going on, we resorted to a good old fashioned game of one-on-one fetch. But returning from the second throw of the day, Hooper discovered a pathetic, half-deflated, chewed-up soccer ball to his left and dropped the baseball he was bringing back to me and darted off towards the soccer ball. He jumped on it, bit it, and bounced back a foot or so and nosed at the ball, then looked at me, tail wagging.

Game on.

Soccer with Hooper is simple; make the ball go. But there are evolutionary, hard-wired layers to the game that I find interesting. Hooper’s Border Collie DNA makes this a game of Get in Front of the Ball, Herd the Ball, more than anything else. All it takes to put Hooper in motion is to simply put your body between ball and dog; he circles around and positions himself in front of the ball and you with precision. You can keep moving around the ball and he will follow suit, making sure that ball has no “out”.

The main game is to put the ball in motion though, and this clearly makes Hooper’s day. cutting left and right, Hooper eyes the ball, my feet, my hips and my eyes, as if the end result of my getting past him with the ball decides the World Cup Championship Match. And so I oblige, until I am out of breath. We cut left and right, kick-dribbling and running, Hooper’s tongue hanging out, his big brown eyes tracking my every move. The best part is when we get a certain momentum going in one direction and I open up enough distance between ourselves that I can give the ball a good whack, sending the ball arcing just over Hooper’s head in a dead run; Hooper springs up into the air, all four paws off the ground, and he throws a single snap of the teeth towards the ball, missing, and then scampers off to tackle the errant ball. He pounces, shakes it a few times like it owes him money, drops it, backs up a few steps, and looks at me and wags his tail. How does one resist this plea?

We played this game for a full hour in the ballpark tonight, with no other dogs joining us. I even gave up early and sat on the dugout bench, holding the leash. Hooper came up to me and dropped the ball at my feet, which I rewarded with another ten minutes of World Cup Doggie Soccer. Afterward, we walked home and I made him another batch of homemade dog treats; I think I love this animal.

With my new website layout came a nifty rotating masthead image capability, so I created a gallery page that shows them all, with descriptions, in case anyone cares.

Check it out: rumblestrip Masthead Image Gallery

Well, it’s official. I am fucking crazy.

At the ballfield tonight, exercising the dog, my neighbor Jeannie whipped out some treats for Hooper and her dog Joplin. She mentioned they were homemade. Instead of saying “take your homemade, organic, fair trade dog treats and your sixties-icon-named-after dog and get the hell out of here, hippie”, I said “oh really? That sounds like a good idea, all-natural and all”. Still not totally convinced this was anything I wanted to get involved in, I went home and did as she instructed, and Googled “homemade dog treats”. After perusing a few that seemed like more trouble than they were worth, I stumbled across these little babies, called Bacon Bites.

In other words, bacon cookies. Imagine my delight!

And so I convinced Brenda when she got home that BLTs were on the menu tonight, and the extra bacon could go into the treats (OK, OK, there’s never extra bacon when I make BLTs, but I thought this was a way to divert some of the fat to another stomach). And so, this guy who doesn’t bake, who doesn’t really like cookies at all, poured bacon fat and crumbled crispy bacon into a bowl with flour and egg (and garlic powder!) and actually rolled it out and cut it into little cookie nips. They are baking right now, at three twenty five, for thirty five to forty minutes. I am baking cookies for my dog. I am fucking insane. What’s sadder is that I fully plan to sample the cookies, and I’m not a little scared that I will actually like them and start fighting with Hooper over them. I mean, they’re bacon cookies, after all. Bacon… COOKIES! Am I wrong!?

Just before I started rolling out the dough, I walked over to Hooper with the dough (who was nicely draped over his bed, by the way) and let him have a sniff; two whiffs and he opened wide and tried to take the whole glob. So, I think he’s gonna like ‘em.