I have updated my post about configuring Privoxy to clean up the ads on WorldOfWarcraft.com.  The new user.filter removes most of the white blocks on the wow homepage that Privoxy left behind already.  This also fixes the forum filtering so that the post pages are full width again.  Unfortunately it doesn’t block any of the flash cross-promotion of their products, but it takes care of all the external advertisements at least.

Last Wednesday we took our Pomeranian to the vets to get her teeth cleaned.  She needed one tooth pulled from her upper jaw, and another one came out on it’s own as well.  However, when she woke up from anesthesia she was having a hard time breathing.   Over the past few years her breathing has gotten worse and worse.  Collapsing trachea is a problem that plagues a lot of small breed dogs, and it essentially occurs when the rings in the trachea get too weak to keep it open.  When she gets excited she has a hard time breathing, and starts making a goose-honk noise.   After the dental visit we talked with Dr. Cox a bit about the xrays and then one of the veterinary assistants woke her up and brought her out to the lobby.  She was shaking violently, trying to breath and honking non-stop.  Normally her honking fits last about 10 seconds tops, and this was sustained for over a minute.  Dr. Cox gave her a cortezone shot to help with the inflammation and sent us home with the instructions that if it got worse, or we saw her gum tissue get blue to take her to the Tualatic Emergency Clinic.    Essentially her throat was inflammed from having the tiny air tube they thread down it when they anesthetize the dog to do dental work.

He also gave us the X-rays that they took, and the phone number of a doctor in Beaverton who performs tracheal surgery.   From what Dr. Cox said, it would be around $3,000 for the surgery, but we haven’t called the specialist yet.

Crystal put the x-rays on her lightboard last night and took pictures.  Here is a supine view of our dog.  If you look at the bright white spot at the base of the neck, that is the microchip.  If you look straight down from that, past the spine and ribcage you can see a black lump. That’s the trachea at the thickness it should normally be.  If you follow it all the way up to the left to the throat, you can get a pretty good idea of how collapsed her trachea is.

DJ Supine View

There’s a few other tracheal collapse x-rays from other dogs. I’d say this fits in the ‘severe’ tracheal collapse category.

DJ Top View

I’m only posting this because Crystal is making me. This weekend I unclogged our bathroom sink, which even Draino could not handle. Turns out there was a 3 hit die grey ooze (or possibly some sort of nanobot swarm?) completely clogging the drain pipe. File this under ‘things that take 15mins to fix that you should have done 2 months ago’. Looks like someone was smoking black tar heroin in our bathroom sink again. What happens when toothpaste and makeup go bad… After completing ‘World of Goo‘ last weekend, I ain’t afraid of no slime!

Yes, that P-Trap is totally clogged!

Ooze in move!

Goop!

Ice Ice Jello, Too Cold!

Click here to view the embedded video.

What can I say?

• Yo dawg, we heard you like dromidaries, so we put some camels in your car so you can hump while you drive?
• Armrha: The convenience store clerk misunderstood.  Instead of 2 packs of camels, he got him 2 pack camels : ( 

After two months of dragging my feet, the wordpress squid.org is out the gate here.  My company has been in the process of transitioning servers and sites from our Seattle network operations center down to Portland where we have lower expenses and better control over support.  Squid.org was the first site to make the transition, but even since (HI! <–attack of the killer gf!) moving it down to Portland I have still been dragging my feet on releasing it due to a general unsatisfaction with the design.  Either way, it’s out now.

BlizzCon Countdown!
Other than that, it is about 2 weeks until BlizzCon starts, so I’m looking forward to that.  We have three other folks from the Stonecutters who will be in attendance this year, and it will be my third time attending.  I am probably going to purchase a new digital camera for the trip so that I can take pictures and post pictures of things to various web related stuff again.  I am tied to my work iphone for photography right now, and if there is one thing the iphone doesn’t do well it is take memorable pictures.  In my case, that’s somewhat of a double handicap.

Warhammer Online
I am playing Warhammer: Age of Reckoning on the side, but I think I am too old and closed minded to really adopt a new game these days.  It has been somewhat of a struggle to get used to the clunky implementation of pet controls (I have been playing a White Lion).  But mainly there really is no outstanding option if you want to play a dual wield melee character on the side of order.  For some reason the witch hunter has not been a big draw for me.  Overall, it’s a pretty decent game despite its nits, but it takes a lot to drag me away from WoW for an extended period of time.

Vay iPhone Edition
I downloaded a copy of Vay yesterday for the iphone.  It was around $5 and so far has been a horribly cliche final-fantasy style game.  In the end-all-be-all of fantasy cliches, an enemy kingdom attacks yours, steals your bride and kills your parents.  You then set out to find a wise old man…  stop me if this sounds familiar. Ultimately the production quality is good enough for the price, and the story is expected given the genera.  I don’t feel ripped off, and its nice to have some more options when standing around in the grocery store.

Hunting Bugs in Delta 3

Brian in #ballistic alerted me to this fun little game that is in alpha testing right now.  It’s called Armada Online.  It’s a multi-player online game where you choose a faction a name and an icon to represent yourself and then you jump into a top-down 2d style gameplay where you strafe around alien space crabs and scorpions and blow them up diablo style for fun and profit.  The graphics are all full 3d, the starfield backgrounds are gorgeous and the menus are all very simple and familiar.  Eat hot torpedos scavenger scum!  Space crabs phear my terran payload, yo.

I also rummaged up this link off the Armada forums; It has some more screenshots and some basic information for newbies: http://www.freewebtown.com/brimragenshome/

Did you ever feel like someone should make a bluegrass cover of the Stonecutters theme song?  I know I have! Who keeps the metric system down anyways?

Check out: Pickin’ on Series – We Do (The Stonecutters Theme).

Once the page loads, hit the play button in the upper right corner.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Over the weekend, the countdown timer on Cryptic Studio’s homepage turned into a launch of the new Star Trek Online website.  The gameplay plan for this seems pretty different from what Perpetual Entertainment had in mind.  Instead of serving as a crewmember aboard a ship, you will be either a Federation or Klingon captain with control over your ship which is definitely a step up.  The screenshots on the website are currently lacking crewmembers at the moment; it will be interesting to see some more of the art direction in a few weeks.

“Everything from the elegant domes of Starfleet Academy to the ancient temples of Vulcan, from the towers of Qo’noS to the Fire Caves of Bajor, from the mysterious Mutara Nebula to the unexplored voids of deep space, all will be represented in stunning 3-D graphics. Immerse yourself in the future of the Trek universe as it moves into the 25th century: a time of shifting alliances and new discoveries.”

According to the website they will be unveiling some gameplay footage on August 10th at the Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas.

The only worrisome aspect that I see about this launch is that they plan on supporting the game in console format.  Past experience with console and PC launches generally has meant limited graphics and a dumbed down UI.  It will be nice to see the gameplay video in a couple weeks to aleviate some of my fears here.  Still, the screenshots look fairly acceptable graphically.

The WotlK wiki has some details on activating shadows in the beta: http://wotlkwiki.info/index.php/Graphics_Upgrade

I did some quick cruising around and took a few screenshots with the new terrain shadows activated in the beta client.  These shots are set to Medium (aka #2 of 6), which is “Full environmental and PC/NPC shadows, low-res, med-dist.”