I stumbled on Lifehacker from a slashdot reference. It’s pretty neat as it has all sorts of geeky techy stuff for doing stuff the Steve^TM way, but this time it’s in an article so I can point to it and say, “see!? Other people do things like this too!”

Ame will still roll her eyes, but there’s validation in it, you see!

There’s now a handy dandy link to it on the sidebar too. How awesome is that?

I’ve made a convert out of Jason. Ever since he learned of my own public journal here, he devoured just about every post I’ve got, commented on a few, and felt hungry for more blog. I pointed him over to wordpress.com, and now he’s got his own corner on the Internet.

Jason’s a co-worker here and we regularly chat about this and that, many times worth discussing with the wide world. So go check it out, already! It’s also over on the list of links on the side for your consumption later.

I need to post more, and I can cheat by using the articles I read on Slashdot to fill content. This is really cool though.

I didn’t read the original article the Slashdot summary links to (this is standard fare for Slashdot – only newbs actually read the articles), but my takeaway from the summary is a robot came up with a hypothesis, predicted the result, experimented, and observed & recorded data. This is capital H-u-g-e Huge.

Is this robot artificially or synthetically intelligent though? My vote is ‘artificial’ as it has not proven its own awareness, but this is a gigantic leap in the field.

Snickers is a loveable dog, he really is. He just does things that are gross. Most notably, he eats his own and the cat’s poop. Whenever I take him outside to do his doggie-business, it’s a race to the finish with him. The apartment complex management puts out little doodie kiosks from which cheap plastic bags are dispensed, complete with trash cans at their base after business has concluded. I almost have to dive in for the kill with one of these flimsy bags to get to the poop before the dog does.

This is ridiculous!

Why should I have to fight the dog for his poop. Obviously I’m only reinforcing the behavior by acting so excitable when he poops. This tells him that the poop is worth something, and, being a dog, he then must have to have it more than anyone else! He performs, what I call the poop-whirlwind. Snickers doesn’t poop in one place. He’ll pop a squat and then meander around, still in a squatting position. This poop-whirlwind allows him to lay a circular pattern of droppings and continue to poop, all while he eats it. To bolster the technique’s effectiveness, he spins with his butt away from me so I cannot see what he leaves, if anything. I have to assume he has, so I investigate. All the while he has already (*) left another prize for himself in which he will happily partake.

Fortunately for me, I firmly believe my sense of sight is better than this poor dog’s sense of smell – and I wear glasses. It’s sad though really. I think it’s an effect of his upbringing, and it’s all here and the links therefrom. Ame attributes his poop-eating habit to the conditions of his life before living with us, but I know better: He’s a dog. I digress, but I can see six feet away, even in the dark, better than he can sniff out his quarry from mere inches.

The best is when I defeat him and get all the nuggets he leaves. Bad is when I know he beats me to one or more. The worst is when I’m not sure if he gets any or not. I shiver in disgust as I write this, but would you want a dog with maybe-poop on his tongue? At least when I know he gets one I know to tell Ame, “don’t let the dog lick you!” Sometimes she’ll ask me and all I can say is “I dunno…”

Another similar and fun (read: gross) thing he does is eats the cat’s poop. Eris poops in a litter-box like most indoor cats, and when nobody’s looking and the laundry room is accessible, Snickers usually pilfers some litter-covered poop. The latest few times I’ve caught him, he just digs out the turds and places them in cachés. For later I guess? Who knows…

* It was at this point – not before, no no! – I realized I was making a post all about a dog who eats his own shit. Not in the planning phases, not in the ‘twinkle-in-my-eye’ phase… No. During.