le sigh

On my way out the door after realizing the vendor doesnt have my email and the last hour spent waiting for it was wasted

He was not he smartest of dogs… in fact we called him Goober. But he was amoung the sweetest of animals. He loved to lean against you with all of his weight… frequently without warning. Or just walk up and put his head in your lap. And he was not a very kissy dog, but when he did give you a kiss they were small quick kisses that meant to much.

When Dug & I first moved into the house, Dug was in the attic and I heard him shout… I came running and Austin had attempted to climb the ladder and then froze… We had to man handle all 110 pounds of him down off the ladder.

There was a spring door stop in the house. All you had to do was flick it once and Austin woukld come running and start barking and attacking it with pure joy.

After a long illness, the time came yesterday. Lats last night, Dug, Gabriel, Tony, & I gathered at PETS to say good bye. It was hard and had a few amusing and happy moments as Austin’s old self shone through for just a brief last few seconds. And then it was over.

When we got home, I could feel him sitting next to me on the couch.

Good bye big man. You are missed.

More pics of Austin, Aces, and Astrid are here.

This is for for his mention of Operation Acoustic Kitty:

The United States’ OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA) needed a way to guide bombs to sink German ships. Somebody hit upon the inspiration that since cats have such a strong disdain of getting wet and always land on their feet that if you attached a cat to a bomb and drop it in the vicinity of a ship, the cat’s instinct to avoid the water would force it to guide the bomb to the enemy’s deck. It is unclear how the cat was supposed to actually guide a bomb attached to it as it fell from the sky but the plan never got past the testing stages since the cats had a bad habit of becoming unconscious mid-drop.

Taken from 7 Unusual Military Animals

Gacked from

* Leave me a casual comment of no particular significance, like a lyric to your current favorite song, or your favorite kind of sandwich, maybe your favorite game. Any remark, meaningless or not.
* I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
* Update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
* Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in your own post.
* When others respond with a desultory comment, you will ask them five questions.

For the first three people that reply to me and re-post this challenge, I will send you something.

It might be something I’ve made, or something cool from my hidden stash, it might be a mix CD, or a rubber duck, a book I think you will enjoy, or something else that is awesome.

Whatever it is, I promise that I will get it to you in 365 days or less.

The only thing you need to do in order to participate is to be one of the first three to reply to this, AND post this very same thing on YOUR live journal – cause it’s fun to give people stuff.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83) (en francais!)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler’s wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
American gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64) Read some for school but never completed them all
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault’s pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver’s travels (53)
Les misérables (53)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51) The rest of thee books would be italicized…
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela’s ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46) One of the biggest hunks of trash EVER – truly an example of the quote ‘Every writer has one book in them and there it should stay.’
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity’s rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)

I know said he was not familiar with it, so this is posted as a public service:

Try Ou’ “Lazy SMS”
One thing about the LiveJournal engineers is that no matter how busy they are, they’ll still try to find time to hack on cool projects. was always frustrated when he was out and about and encountered something he wanted to look up or read more about, but he didn’t have access to his computer and then later on he’d always forget. Lazy SMS is his solution to that problem.

Here’s how to try it out:

1) Make sure you’re set up for TXTLJ (Read more about TXTLJ)

2) Send “lazy somewordhere” to TXTLJ from your phone (Example: “lazy treasure chests” or “lazy pirate ships”)

3) LJ automatically looks up “somewordhere” in Wikipedia and:

3.1) If an article is found, its contents are automatically posted as a private post to your journal

3.2) If there’s no article, a placeholder is automatically posted privately to remind you to do a search.

This is quite the interesting read.