This is Neil. We named him after Neil Armstrong and his brother is named after Yuri Gagarin. You can click on his picture for a popup window with a larger version.

Night before last he started drooling occasionally. Sometimes he'd yowl, then drool. We thought he might have eaten something bad because he'd also look like he was trying to throw up.

His eyes weren't all dilated and he even had an appetite so we thought we'd keep an eye on him and if he wasn't better by tomorrow we'd take him in to the vet's.

Last night (actually about 12:30am) he had a horrible seizure. We packed him off to the emergency vet and they examined him and took xrays. Turns out he was horribly dehydrated as well as constipated. They thought the dehydration and its consequent electrolyte imbalance was causing the seizures.

They kept him and gave him an IV to re-hydrate him. By this morning at about 8am the vet said that she was "cautiously optimistic" for him because all his bloodwork was coming back normal and he was managing to pass some of his constipation without having an enema.

However, late this afternoon he had another seizure. They ran the blood work again and it was normal. The best they could come up with was to run a series of tests with the upshot being we'd have to give him anti-seizure medicine for the rest of his life, not to mention regular blood tests and other indignities.

We had him put down. We petted him, told him we loved him and told him goodbye. They'd given him some Valium so he was a bit spacy, but I'm sure he recognized us.

He wasn't even quite two years old.

His brother is going around the house looking for him and crying.

I miss him already. I hope he will rest peacefully. We did our best for him.

It really sucks when your best isn't enough.

I found this in Clicked and I'm going to quote most of the entry here...

"If you're traveling at 100 km/h in one direction and you throw a ball 100km/h in the opposite direction, what happens? The results of this video work pretty well except for some extra spin on the ball from the pitching machine."

I'm glad that Will found that the experiment worked "pretty well" but what I found to be just plain weird was that the driver of the pickup truck donned a crash helmet once he got into the cab whereas the fella in the bed of the truck, right out there in the open, didn't.

Yesterday I received this message in my MySpace inbox. Note: I have changed all the names, email addresses and other identifying details to protect the clueless.

Subject: Performing at the Happy Valley Fest

Greetings,

I was looking through some jazz bands on Myspace and came across you and I love it!

My name is Richard Earl and I am the President/Festival Director for Happy Valley Fest. I am also serving as the Entertainment Director this year and would love it if you could play for us this year. I have an open slot on Saturday, June 9, at 6:00PM. I need to tell you up front that we have a very limited budget and cannot pay for entertainers. What budget we do have goes for equipment rental. If you are interested, and please say yes, send me a note at happyvalleyfest@hootmon.com.

Richard Earl

Oh, sure, Dick. I'm going to make a 76 mile round trip for the priviledge of performing at your nearly 60 year old fest. 60 years in which time you haven't figured out a way to make it renumerative enough to pay your entertainers.

Why, it says right here on your web site that there are "75 food/vendor booths, carnival rides and much more." What the fuck are you doing with all the money you're getting from those booths and the carnival rides?

Now, gentle reader, let's just assume for a moment that when ol' Dick isn't planning the fest he's... oh, say a plumber. How do you think he'd react if I contacted him and asked him to drive a couple hours to fix my toilet but, hey!, I didn't have any budget to pay him?

Yeah. That's how I think he'd react too.

Nobody would even dream of asking their plumber to come and work for free like that. Why the fuck do people assume that a professional (or even talented amateur) musician is willing to be taken advantage of in that fashion?

Not to mention how unprofessional it looks to be asking someone to perform 6 days before the show. Yeah, pal. You got it together. What were you doing the other 359 days since the last one? As it happens, I'm scheduled to be in the recording studio laying down demo tracks with the newly expanded version of Snake Suspenderz on the 9th. But even if I wasn't I'd think twice about doing this event.

Great jumpin' jaysus!

Despite what I felt like writing to him, I simply said "thanks for the offer and the kind words, but my minimum fee for summer festivals is $100."

He said he'd be in touch if he got more budget for the next fest.

Oh yeah. I believe that one too.

After thinking about it for way too long I ended up with a free Sunday and decided to go and actually give a shot at busking the Ballard Sunday Market. Ballard is a neighborhood in Seattle. Strongly Scandinavian, yeah, sure, ya betcha.

I live in Ballard, see. And so it's right down the street, maybe a mile or thereabouts.

I ended up futzing about and not getting there until nearly 12:30. I walked through it once (it's only one block long) and spied the Canote Brothers, two buskers I know from the market (Tom the banjo picker and his sweetie who's name, of course, escapes me right now) and a fella on resonator guitar who also looked familiar but I don't know if we've ever actually been introduced.

Apparently the scene there is... stake out a place anywhere that you're not bothering either the vendors or the other buskers. I picked a spot at the SE corner of the thing, sat down and started to play. They were pretty generous (not the best I've ever done but far and away more than the worst).

Plus, I got several dancing babies.

After about an hour there I got up, stretched and had a smoke. Tom and his sweetie came by and said that the doorway spot they were in was empty and I should go grab it.

I did, but after about four songs decided it wasn't going to pan out as well for me so I wandered across to say hi to the Canote Brothers. They too were leaving and offered me their spot.

Again, after four or five songs I thought... heck with it. I was tired, hungry and getting a bit warm. I'm thinking the remaining crowd was a bit on the warm side too. They were just as smiley but didn't seem to want to stop and listen.

So, after about 90 minutes of playing I brought home a bit over $25. Not too bad.

As an added bonus, I asked Jere Canote (whom I've met before but not 'til today did I meet his twin, Greg) if he might have a spare skin for the 8" pot on my banjo uke. Jere makes ukes, including some very whimsical banjo ukes (shaped like fish, amongst other things). He said he just might and he'll email me.

Kewl. I'd like to get my banjo uke up and flying again.

If I get another free Sunday soon I'm going to try again... except I want to start a bit earlier. And invite Dean, the bass player to join me.

A while back I installed a program called sendmail on the laptop because I write stuff for my website (in PHP) that needs to send emails (my contact form, etc.). It worked (that is, it sent the mail) but every time I booted up it would interrupt the process with error messages, stretch the bootup time by a couple minutes and, even though it said in the error messages that it wasn't running, it would still send mail.

I asked around and found out all I needed for my purposes was the executable file itself. I didn't need it to be running as a service. So I went into the "services" section of my admin menu and told it not to start up when I booted.

Hah!

For the last couple months I've been suffering quietly through the extra long bootup, reminding myself that I really should go to the Ubuntu forums and ask how I could tell it to stop.

I finally got around to that today. Being a good forum citizen I searched the existing posts before posting myself. Indeed, I found a thread about the same error message. The takeaway from the posts was, "install postfix instead." Further, I was assured I didn't have to do squat about sendmail. Installing postfix would automagically uninstall sendmail (try that one Windoze!).

Sure enough. I fired up Synaptic Package Manager (the thing that allows you to safely install/uninstall software on Ubuntu) and searched up postfix. I marked it for install and hit the button.

I had to answer two questions during the install, both of which I chose the default for.

Sendmail was trashed. Postfix was installed. I fired up the Apache web server and went to the local copy of my website where I "signed up" for my own mailing list.

All of it worked fine. I didn't even have to go in anywhere and tell PHP that I'd switched mail server software.

Plus, my bootup sequence is back to about a minute.

Yes!

Now I'm twiddling with getting a better way to switch wifi networks, since I finally figured out how to get the wifi at Pike Place Market to work.

This is mo' bettah!

I drove in with the Fallen Angel to the Market today with the intent of busking. Even though I got there pretty early the first set I could get (at the Bridge spot anyways) was around the noon hour. OK, fine. I'm queued up and waiting.

I finally go on and it's murder out there. Barely cleared $10 for my hour and at least one of those was a pity donation.

Feh!

I got back in line for the next available set anyways. It was the 4pm set. This gives me some time to kill, eh?

I had decided I needed some signage. Watching people photograph and video me (sometimes for entire songs) without so much as a dime being dropped in my case was getting on my last good nerve.

So I picked up a cardboard box and traced the outline of my uke's body onto it. I borrowed a pair of shears from one of the flower vendors -- intended to clip flower stems -- and laboriously cut the shape out. I then repaired to Chris and Phineas' apartment (Phineas being a trained African Grey parrot and Chris being his busker buddy) and used his (that is, Chris's) sharpie and a red crayon to make this sign.

It was a qualified success. But we'll get to that in a moment.

My thinking was, hey, some of these people are really coming from Podunk. They're no doubt nice people but they've never heard of busking or, if they have, they've never actually encountered one of us fearsome busker beasties in the flesh.

Maybe if I simply taught them, via a sign, that the proper response was to tip they would behave like most decent humans and want to do the right thing.

Besides making the sign while at Chris's, he showed me several of his very spif collection of oddities. He has also recently scored a buttload of beads and while we were playing about with them I picked out the letter beads to spell ukulele, strung them on a wire and stuck them to my famous paper porkpie hat.

By the time I got back to the bridge I'd decided, "fuck 'em." I was going to have a good time and if I got some money, fine. If I didn't, fine. I was going to have a good time. I played a few songs solo and was getting some chump change but... but then... two people stopped and photographed me. As they walked past my case one of them noticed the sign. I saw them talk for a moment and then they both came back, the guy dropping a dollar and the gal dropping two. See, it does work. So it doesn't work for everybody... that's ok. The sign concept is sound.

After those few tunes Kind Keith showed up with his acoustic bass guitar and wanted to jam with me.

Hmmm... I'd made maybe four or five dollars and could have said "no thanks" and continued plugging away. Sometimes the money doesn't come in until the last 10 or 15 minutes of your set. You never know.

But I was going to have a good time no matter what... so I said, "sure."

Good choice, Hobbit. Pat yourself on the back.

Whoops. Don't strain yourself!

At the end I said screw it to taking out "my" money first. I did take out the seed dollar but I divided the rest evenly. OK. I got one more penny.

I'm handing Keith his share and, being an experienced busker, it looked to him to be more than half of what we earned together. He even said, "I hope that's less than half, as is only proper."

Nope. I had a blast jamming with him. Like I said, we had moments where we swung pretty damn hard. He just got half the money in the case and that's that.

The final take? Seven dollars and some pennies each.

Ah well.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, I'm going to hit whichever "neighborhood festival" is happening for this weekend of "Seafair season" -- I believe it's Georgetown's -- and busk some more.

Maybe the sign will work a bit better.

But I am going to have a good time.

One of the games that uke fanboys and girls like to play is "what famous people play(ed) ukulele?"

Well, you can add Jeff Bridges to the list.

I'm kinda happy about that. I like his work.

The link is to a "teen hollywood" site and they spread a one page article out over eight pages. It's the old "let's see how many page views we can get out of this" game. The uke is specifically mentioned on page 1 and 5 if you don't want to read the rest of the interview. I read it all because, like I said, I like his work.

Iron Man.

Cool.

Or maybe he knows that already.