Day 379

I have a confession to make. For almost a week there has been a large box sitting in the hallway containing a new computer. I've been very reluctant to open this box, because a box containing a new computer is just about as close to the proverbial Pandora's Box as you're going to get in this world. As soon as you open the box you can expect an avalanche of problems you never expected. All that being said, today I opened the box. Now, setting up a Macintosh is so easy my dogs could do it. The hard part is getting the terabyte of information from the old computer moved over to the new one. That's a little more difficult. I made the mistake of opening the Apple Migration Assistant and hitting go before giving serious thought to how big a terabyte actually is. Both the old and new computers seemed to totally freeze. I watched things for a couple of hours and absolutely nothing seemed to be happening. Then I did a Google search on my iPad and started reading horror stories about other people who had spent three days transferring their files, only to discover that the transfer didn't work. Unfortunately, the Migration Assistant doesn't have a cancel button once the transfer has started. To avoid having things tied up for three days or more, I had to unplug the computer right in the middle of the transfer, clean the mess I'd made off the hard drive and reinstall the system. As you might expect, I'm still writing the blog on the old computer.

Dog class didn't go very smoothly tonight either. Dot and Dash both started jumping the gun and coming to us before we called them during the recall excercises. Dash wanted to play with the other dogs and wouldn't listen to anything I said. It didn't rain this evening, but the ground was still very wet. At the end of the evening, everyone was muddy.

You may notice a new ad for a product called Twhistler over on the left hand column. I'm running this ad because I actually like the Twhistler. What it does is automate the entire process of using Twitter to drive traffic to your blog. You just create the messages you want to send and decide where they should link back to on your blog. Then the application takes care of the rest. Twhistler monitors your Tweets to determine which messages are the most popular and then tracks everything over time to determine the best time of day to send them. I've been experimenting with this to see if I can drive traffic to my business website and was amazed to see that within a week, visitors to some pages almost doubled. Pretty cool. Especially for someone who never really understood what to do with Twitter anyway.

The Dalmatians got another Paypal donation too. That's twice in two days. Thanks Richie!

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day