Category: Uncategorized

I was updating some of my web pages and found out that buy.com had lower prices on some items than Amazon. Sometimes the difference was pretty significant so I thought it wouldn’t be right to avoid linking to buy.com just because I get a commission at Amazon. But of course that made me wonder if buy.com had an affiliate program. Turns out they do, but they run it through a third party called Commission Junction. That company has a bunch of other advertisers as well, so you can promote all kinds of different things, but the commissions are lower (3%) than Amazon. I decided to sign up since it is free anyway.

The sign-up was kind of a pain. I had to agree to three different screens of terms and conditions. I don’t think I had anything like that with Amazon. So right off I was a little put out with them. I only link to about three things at buy.com and they aren’t the big sellers that I link to Amazon, so the bottom line is I have only gotten a handful of clicks and no purchases so far. During the same period Amazon has been pretty slack as well, so I will give them a couple of more weeks, but if it doesn’t look like I’m going to make much of anything I think I will get out of the program and link to buy.com products anyway.

Today I took Katie in to have her stitches and staples out. She was very excited that I put her on the leash this morning, but disappointed when we had to get in the car. The doctor said she is right where she should be, using her leg, but not putting a lot of weight on it. This is about where she was before the surgery. In the first entry I said I needed cheese to get Katie to take her medicine but, after buying the cheese, I remembered that isn’t how I get her to take medicine. Instead, I buy Alpo chunk-style canned dog food. I can put a pill completely in one of the large chunks and she eats it without chewing. Clio likes it because she gets chunks too; hers just don’t take as long to prepare.

Anyway, we’re all done with that. The incision is healing up really well. With her other leg it had opened up a little bit due to swelling and her taking a couple of staples out, but this time she didn’t have any problems. Once her fur grows back (her leg is mostly back to being black after being shaved and all white for the surgery) you probably won’t be able to tell she had surgery.

I still can’t take her for walks for another six weeks (I’ve been walking Clio some, but not twice a day like I usually do). Then I take her in for x-rays and hopefully she will get a green light for taking progressively longer walks.

My indoor/outdoor thermometer started giving bad outdoor temperatures a few weeks ago. I decided it was time for a new one and was on the lookout for something on sale. At Target they had thermometers on sale. I could get an Oregon Scientific one with a wire outdoor sensor for $8. But for $10.48 they had one (Model RAR188A) with a wireless outdoor sensor (model THN122N) and it let you add two more sensors which is appealing because I’d kind of like to know how hot or cold the the attic gets. So I bought it. It worked fine (though the first one I had was the best because it not only recorded the low and high temperatures, but the *time* those occurred; I haven’t been able to find one like that since). But I wondered about adding sensors. On Amazon they had compatible outdoor sensors (I couldn’t find the same sensor model sold individually, though I did find out that Radio Shack’s thermometers are the same as Oregon Scientific but with a different brand) but they were $20 and more. I thought it would be cheaper just to buy another $10.48 unit just for its outdoor sensor (the sensor has a switch that can be set to Channel 1, 2, or 3). After thinking about it for a day, I went back up to Target and got another one (in metallic blue; they also had iPod mini colors pink and green). But what I didn’t realize at first was that I could use both indoor units to read both sensors. So I put one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom and they both can read outdoor and attic temperatures. Pretty cool.

Continue reading “Thermometer”

Today as I was watching a Nature program I had recorded, I got a phone call. I answered it and was greeted by a robot voice. Before I could hang up, the robot identified itself as being a fraud alert on my Citibank credit card. It said there had been some suspicious activity on my account and asked me to verify two recent transactions. The first was for $10 at Kroger (which, because robots is so dern stupid, it just called “grocery supermar”). The second was for a couple of thousand dollars at “veterinary specialists” for Katie’s operation. Oooohhhhh . . . I said it was okay, but I’m glad that got their attention.

I was watching an episode of Nature on PBS about animal intelligence. One of the case studies was the Clark’s Nutcracker which lives in the American West (their example bird was at the Grand Canyon, which may be because it made for better scenery). I knew that birds do some amazing things. Migration is no picnic, but there are bower birds that build elaborate houses to attract mates and woodpecker finches in the Galapagos that use sticks to fish out bugs from trees. Anyway, the Clark’s Nutcracker likes to eat pine nuts, but they are only around for three weeks of the year. So apparently it picks as many as it can and then hides them by burying them in the ground and sometimes marking the spot with a small pebble. It seems like it would be easier to store them all in the same place, but it scatters the nuts out over hundreds of square miles, only putting a few in each place. It then has the memory to come back later in the year to retrieve the nut. That’s a good trick, but the amazing part is that during that three week period it will hide as many as 30,000 nuts and retains memory to retrieve 90% of the nuts it hides.

The show was Part 1 of the 3-part series that was done in 2000 but is being shown again. Part 2 is this weekend.