Austin’s E-Collar

Austin had a growth removed from his backside last week. So that he won’t pull the stitches out, he has to wear an e-collar for 11 days. I already had one that I had gotten for Clio, but it was too hard for her to use, so I didn’t make her wear it. Thursday Austin had just come back from the vet and was pretty out of it from the anesthesia, so it wasn’t a big deal. Friday he kept running into things and would get the edge of the cone stuck on door jambs and just stop, waiting for me to get him unstuck. But by Saturday he was wandering around the house like a champ and avoiding (for the most part) running into things. By Saturday night, he actually broke it when I let him outside (I wasn’t supposed to let him out without a leash, but it was the middle of the night, so I just let him out; mistake). I was able to make repairs though and he wore it all day today while I was at work without a problem. I don’t make him wear it all the time, just when I can’t watch him and at night. The vet said a dog can pull the stitches out in a minute, so I don’t want to take any chances.

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He looks kind of miserable in the picture above, but he actually doesn’t mind. The cone attaches to his collar so when I take it off, he gets concerned, just like he does when I normally take his collar off. And then he wants it back on, just like normal. Wikipedia tells me that the E is short for Elizabethan since apparently Queen Elizabeth also could not be trusted not to pull her stitches out.

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Gas Switch

I got a card in the mail from Georgia Natural Gas the other day saying I could switch to them and get natural gas for 99.9 cents per therm for 12 months. I found out that is only a temporary price for new customers and after 12 months it would go up to a more normal rate (though rates have dropped lately and currently the rate is 105.9 cents per therm). I visited Clark Howard’s website and saw an ad to get a $75 gift card from GNG for new customers, but at the 105.9 cent rate. Since I only use 400-500 therms in a year, this still represented some pretty good savings over current Walton EMC Natural Gas prices. However, the small print said the $75 gift card was available from May to December and only available to the first 500 customers. That’s not many.

I called the number (866-665-9464) and asked if that deal was still available. They asked what the promo code was and I gave it to them: GLOC-1-080-000. They said the gift card was still available and I would get it after November 1 when the switch took effect. Additionally they gave me the 99.9 cent rate and also waived the switching fee (I found out later you can switch once a year without a fee as long as you aren’t locked in). Also, this plan has a monthly fee of $3.99 instead of $5.75 at Walton. As long as competing prices elsewhere don’t fall below 85 cents, I should see some savings from this plan.

Speedfactory Down

Because I never was getting much traffic at the iGirder website, I moved my revenue-generating pages back to Speedfactory and, in July renewed the dialup plan for $99 for a year just to take advantage of the free personal website that comes with that. So earlier this month, traffic dropped way, way off and I saw that the Speedfactory server wasn’t working. This happens for a day sometimes, so I wasn’t that worried, but after a few days I wrote to their tech support people to ask what the deal was. I didn’t hear back so I wrote again to a different e-mail address. Still no response. I wrote a third time. Then I called and got to talk to an actual person who said she would have someone call me back. One thing going on is that Speedfactory was bought by Next Phase Wireless a year or so ago. Nobody called me back. At this point it has been a couple of weeks and I am making almost no AdSense revenue and have only 3 orders for the month from Amazon, all during a period when new iPods are being introduced and I could potentially be getting a lot of traffic. Traffic was down from Google was still referring people to the old site until late this week when they must have realized the site was down and started sending people to iGirder, but with my page being way down the first page of results (instead of first; I still have a Page Rank of 3 at iGirder). I called again Thursday. The woman answering the phone asked how long the site had been down. I said a few weeks. She said “And you’re just now calling?” I said well, I had sent three e-mails and called once and no one had gotten back to me. She said “Oh boy.” I could tell she was really horrified. She said she would make sure people got the message and she would call me back either way to give me the status. She did call back later that day and left a message that it was being looked at. Then yesterday a guy called and asked me some questions. He was handling the site from New Jersey (so I’m thinking the local Speed Team quit or was laid off) and wasn’t aware SpeedFactory even offered free webspace but said it might just be a matter of fixing a DNS entry. It still doesn’t work, but it does sound like they are working on it.

Here’s a graph of traffic which includes both Speedfactory and iGirder traffic. Of course after the dropoff, everything is either iGirder or cached versions from the search engines.

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New nano

As mentioned earlier, I ordered a nano 4G and got it earlier this week. I really like it. When I got the 3G, I had a really hard time paring my music collection down to 8 GB, but with 16 GB of storage on the new nano, I can store pretty much everything I would want to listen to on any kind of regular basis. The difference in shape isn’t a big deal, but I think I prefer the narrow shape a little bit. I like the screen being able to reorient to portrait or landscape, but I loaded a bunch of pictures and they didn’t adjust correctly. Then when I turned the nano sideways, they adjusted back to incorrect again. I’m not sure how to fix that. The accelerometers also give the capability to play a kind of neat maze game where you tilt the nano to get a small marble to go through a maze. However, the problem is the screen is very small, so the marble is super tiny and it’s hard to see the maze. This is something I imagine that works a lot better with the larger screen of the iPod Touch.

Unrelated to getting the new nano, I reorganized my iTunes collection. On my desktop PC I had messed up my music collection by trying to rename files to include the track number at the beginning of the file name (I think I did this in order to burn MP3’s to disk so that my car stereo would read them in order). But I did something wrong and deleted a lot of songs and generally messed up the whole collection. Fortunately the laptop still had the collection intact and I was able to bring over all of my iTunes and Amazon song purchases. Then I just had to delete some duplicates, which took some time. Anyway, I’m in much better shape now.

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Mom’s New iPod

I took my 3G nano over to Mom’s house today for her to borrow. I left all of my music on there, but put it back in the original tiny box (I hadn’t even used the headphones since I have my own). I didn’t even have to show her anything except how to use the wheel to scroll through stuff. She just figured stuff out really fast on her own and was soon listening to Randy Newman’s Faust. She said the sound was very good. Then I directed her over to Feist’s music video to show that it could do video and she enjoyed that for a couple of minutes. We decided that rather than set her up with an iTunes installation on her computer, I would just put music on there from my library plus add whatever CD’s of hers she wants me to rip. But she said I could do that later so she could play around with the iPod a little first.