chuck.goolsbee.org

I ask because I’m pretty sure what I saw this morning was a fox.

Our family dog, a Welsh Corgi named “Major” was behaving a tad odd this morning when I went out to the barn. He usually greets me at the fence and after a bit of petting wanders back to his usual spot under the deck. Instead he followed me around, looking nervous. I didn’t think much of it. I did some normal weekend chores out there and occasionally heard him barking, which is also unusual as he’s a pretty quiet dog. I pulled the pickup truck out of the barn and brought it around to the back of the house for some other weekend chores and I saw what I thought was Major at the back corner of our property. There are some horses that live in the pasture back there and occasionally he makes some odd Corgi attempt at herding them despite the fence in the way. But this animal was obviously not Major on second glance. First of all it had a big bushy tail, something our Corgi lacks! Its nose was very pointy as well. It looked back at me as I got out of the pickup, easily 60 yards away and went into a panic. Major was standing near the house and barking at the animal. It raced back and forth along the fence, like … well a trapped animal. As I looked at it my mind tried to comprehend it. Too short and with a far too bushy coat to be a Coyote. I see and hear plenty of Coyotes around here and this was certainly not one of those, unless perhaps it was a pup? Its coat was a dark, dusky grey, not the dirty blonde/mixed grey/brown you usually associate with Coyotes. It glanced back at me a couple of times and the nose and ears had a distinct Fox look. It was much larger than the red-colored Foxes I’ve seen in the UK, or in the North Woods of the Midwest.

I gathered up the dog and got him out of the backyard. The animal, whatever it is, vanished into our pastures on the east side of the property.

I went inside, grabbed my camera, and let Sue know what was going on. I opened the gate on the west side of our property along the wooded side of the driveway. I then looped around the house to the north and east and entered the fenced area around the barn. I planned to flush it out of the pastures and towards the gate so it could be free of the fenced part and into the woods. I never did see it again, but found a place where it dug its way under the fence along the southwest fence line.

Any Naturalists or Zoologists out there care to inform me as to what species of animal I saw?

It is the first week in August in Seattle, so that must mean … FLYING SEAMEN!

Yes, the Blue Angels are in town, buzzing my office window.

(Sorry for the bad pun. Bill Dickson from digital.forest says bad punsters will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.)

So I finally had some time to drag WordPress up to v2.X.X tonight… (thanks to Mr. Quimby for the super-simple mySQL assist!) FTP’ing all mys stuff as a backup took much longer than the actual upgrade. WP is awesome code.

Feel free to report any errors or problems logging in.

–chuck

I’m by no means all that interested in my orbital position in the “blogosphere”… at all. I don’t really consider this a “blog” so much as an extension of the website I started way back in 1997. That site’s original purpose, to share with our friends photos and text of my family’s life while we were overseas, has remained true. Though we’ve been back in the USA now for over eight years, and my family has opted out of participating (for the most part. Sue watches WAY TOO MUCH TV and has bought into the whole “Internet is rife with stalkers and ID thieves!” paranoia that the news media espouses CONSTANTLY) so the site is more about sharing my photos and text with my friends.

There are a bunch of you who participate right here, via the comments. There is an even larger bunch of you, who just email me directly, maintaining a sort of asynchronous communication channel, me outbound via HTTP and you inbound via SMTP. I’m OK with that too. The majority of folks in that latter category are the folks I’ve been communicating with for a LONG time. Old habits die hard I guess.

As it is, I figure that I have about 30 to 50 people, that I know personally who view this site on a regular basis. I’ve even “met” some people via this website, but none of them “face to face” so far. There are likely a few hundred folks who wander by, one offs… compulsive link followers who get here via clicking my name in another website’s comments area probably. You can measure my hits in the thousands… so I’m not cultivating a following, a technorati ranking, or any sort of revenue. If you EVER see advertising on this site, even google ads, you know it has been hijacked or something! I just can’t lower myself to “monetize” my friends. I really do see this as a form of personal communication.

So where am I going with this?

Today I was helping my staff work on deploying a frequently requested technology, and we were using this server as a guinea pig. I wondered how I, or more specifically our customers, would be able to gather data on this so I peeked at my stats. The image above snapped my head back a bit. SOMETHING I posted this month got a BUNCH of traffic. Since I do not have my stats tweaked to show granular data (remember, I really don’t care about them mostly) it took some digging and postulating to figure out what.

So it looks like the torrent of traffic started on the 14th. Looking back, the ONLY thing I can see that started that was my “William Fucking Shatner” story.

Must be the word “fucking” in there because I don’t see any incoming links for that page. So here is a hint for all you traffic whores (that means YOU John! ) use the word “fucking” a lot. heh.

NASA - Stereo Eclipse

That is the Moon, transiting the Sun, as seen from a million miles further out than Earth, via the STEREO-A spacecraft.

Beautiful.

I was just moderating comments when I noted I’ve had three new users sign up today. That in itself is not that unusual, but all three of these people are named “Aaron”…

I already have several users namd Aaron.

Can there be too many Aarons?

RatcliffeBlog—Mitch’s Open Notebook
“Then, there has been an absurd line of reporting about Saddam’s dedication to Joe Stalin. Now, he may have been an ardent admirer of another murderous monster, but when commentators appear on air suggesting that Saddam, the egomaniacal despot, had his statues made to look more like Stalin than himself, you have to wonder about the sanity of the producers. Saddam’s interest in Stalin as a model is an meaningful anecdote, but not the important explanation of Saddam’s rise to power.Why is there not coverage of the meeting between Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam in 1983, when the United States and Iraq agreed they shared many common interests? This was, of course, after the genocide for which he was sentenced to die. Joe Stalin had less direct influence on Saddam than the Reagan Administration and Don Rumsfeld, who cleared the way for sales of weapons to Iraq throughout the 1980s. President Reagan released a national security directive (NSDD 139) that codified our support of the Saddam Hussein regime in 1984.Saddam was a monster, but let’s be realistic about this. He was our monster, not Stalin’s, not Russia’s, not even Islam’s monster. Saddam was an instrument of U.S. policy toward Iran while he cemented his power in Iraq and, like many strongmen we’ve supported in the past, it backfired.

I read that on Mitch Ratcliffe’s blog this morning and it rung so very true. I remember those days… I was in my 20’s and in college, reading in Time & Newsweek how Iraq was or friend and bulwark against the Iranian regime.

The Iranians are still there, we’re sinking into a quagmire in Iraq, and we just provided the “insurgents” with a martyr.

And the best part: George W. Bush will retire and leave the whole mess… “his legacy” to some other poor bastard to try and clean up. What do you want to bet the GOP moves to control Congress and cede the White House to the Dems for ‘08. Turn the next guy into “Carter II, the Sequel.”

sigh… I hate politics.