The vet who first saw Maddy after we found the first lump just phoned with Maddy’s lab results. Dear little Madeline had an Eosinophilic Granuloma. You can google that if you’re really curious, but the short version is that it’s an unusual auto-immune system reaction often brought on by an insect or spider bite. She may be prone to these in the future, but if we find them early enough they can probably be treated with cortisone.
We are greatly relieved, needless to say.
We bought a cheap digital scale recently for weighing Zed. Zed’s on a weight-reducing diet and we wanted a means to verify that it’s actually working. The scale came with a better-than-average instruction manual (better than the average instruction manual for a cheap Chinese-made product, that is) which contains one very strange paragraph, which I will reproduce here verbatim without sprinking it with the “[sic]”s that it merits:
CALIBRATION
When to calibrate – calibration is almost never required.
Wow, yesterday was a doozy for unpleasant news. In reverse order of the arrival of the news:
Michael Jackson died. Okay, yes, the guy turned out to be pretty weird, but he was one talented guy–maybe the most talented guy in pop music/entertainment, ever. He could sing, he could write songs, and man could he dance. As entertainment icons go he was as big as they get, then or since. I suppose if you are younger than about 40 you don’t remember what it was like at the peak of his career, when Thriller was busting records and Michael Jackson essentially defined pop music at the time. Consider that Thriller is still the best-selling album ever, which means it has outsold any album by The Beatles, Elvis, U2, or anybody else. It’s particularly sad that he died just when things were starting to look up for him: he had 50 sold-out concerts lined up.
There’s a rather gorgeous time-lapse video of my favorite city here by a fellow named Samuel Cockedey. He has a website here which has a number of gorgeous photos from Japan. His “Streets” collection makes me–well, homesick isn’t exactly the right word, but it’s the one that comes to mind. There’s also another time-lapse video on his site here using music which is *cough cough* borrowed from the Solaris soundtrack by Cliff Martinez, my favorite film composer.
I just posted a dozen photos of flowers from our yard here. These photos span a month or so and hence include both early iris and more recent peonies.
Yes, sooner or later I’ll get around to posting something other than videos of cats. I’m afraid that’s not going to happen today, however.
By popular demand:
Chris brought this very cool video to my attention. I know nothing about Festo or why they make what they make, but they make pretty cool stuff, it seems.
I’m pleased (as always) to announce the release of Audio Damage’s latest product. It’s called Eos; it’s a high-quality algorithmic reverb plug-in. By “algorithmic” I mean that it uses real-time processes involving delay lines and filters and stuff rather than the convolution-based approach that has become popular in recent years. By “high-quality” I mean that, in direct comparisons with some rather expensive hardware (naming no names) it can hold its own. It also has a CPU load low enough that using several instances at once won’t be a problem on any reasonably current computer. All this for $49. Yes, it’s a real deal. Click that big picture up there to got to the Audio Damage product page where you can listen to audio samples and buy yourself a copy.