Dowbrigade

When
dear old Mom informed us that she intended to replace her last cat, the
recently departed Jeema, with a 30-pound wildcat hybrid,
our first though was to check her medication. Mom has a way with animals,
and we always had a few in the house growing up. But she has always been
partial to off-beat, exotic pets, which may explain, in part, why she’s
hung in with the Dowbrigade so long.

Jeema, for example, was one of those completely hairless
cats, with wrinkled, gray elephantine skin, looking like a huge rat
with Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome (premature aging). Indeed, she
recently died
prematurely from
some rare feline blood disease. Personally, we couldn’t imagine getting
warm and cuddly with such a bizarre-looking creature.

We were therefore a little skeptical of the 30-lb cat
plan, until we looked on Google, and found that they do in fact exist.  Called
Savannahs, they are the offspring of a wildcat – the African serval
– and a domestic house
cat. They have been successfully bred and domesticated, and are now commercially
available.

The cats – which can cost from $4,000 to $10,000 -
are visually striking with their long necks and oversized ears, and
they can be intimidating. They look like little leopards and grow to
more
than twice the size of normal cats. They love to leap and splash in
water, and they don’t mind taking long walks on a leash. Some people
describe
them as dogs in cats’ bodies.

This from an
article in the New
York Times.  They
are also illegal to own in New York City and a growing array of jurisdictions
around the country (but not, unfortunately, in Down East Maine, where
Mom lives).

Objections to the Savanna seem to be more on principle
than due to any proven danger from the cats. Still, we are not entirely
comfortable with the idea of dear old Mom living with a half-wild predator.
Plus, there are disturbing
ethical implications:

"Breeders are creating animals for commercial purposes
that would never exist in the natural world," he said. "These
hybrid species are threats to the environment and potentially to the
families who think they are buying a family pet and could be purchasing
a wild animal."

Actually, poor hairless Jima is looking better and better
in retrospect.

from the New York Times

Friday,
May 13 – A Russian woman had her fingers badly bitten when she tried to clean her
son’s fish tank, not realising it was full of piranhas. The woman, from
Saransk, told doctors she thought they were just well fed goldfish and
wanted to do her son a favour.

But as she put her hands in to catch the fish they launched a frenzied
attack on her hand, clamping onto her fingers and not letting go. She only
managed to get the fish off her hand by banging them against the side of
the fish tank, and then called an ambulance to take her to hospital.

Doctors who treated her said she had been lucky not to lose her hand in
the attack and that she needed extensive surgery.

The woman lost most of the flesh from two fingers in the attack, local
media reported. A neighbour said: "She had no idea the pet fish in
the tank were predators."

from Ananova

The
Dowbrigade is going crazy ,again. Doncha just hate it when, unexpectedly,
one of your main work tools alters its behavior, loses abilities, or
makes you change the way you do things due to "updates" or
changed preferences? One of the reasons it bothers us so much is because
we lack the patience or technical acumen to figure out what changed,
or how.

Yes, there was a specific point that prompted this
whine. Since we upgrades to OSX three years ago, our main browser has
been Safari, which we have grown comfortable and accustomed to using
daily, although the machine in our office is running Firefox in an
attempt to diversify and feign hipness.

Anyway, one of the useful features we like about Safari
is that by right-clicking on an image, we get a drop down menu including "Save
image as…" which allows me to rename and place the image in
the folder we desire. It even remembers the last folder we stored something
in, so we can often complete the entire operation in two clicks.

But last week sometime, on our main desktop machine,
that hidden command somehow morphed into "Save image to desktop" which
unceremoniously drops a copy of the image on the desktop, under whatever
long and twisted name the distant designers have given it, from where
it takes upwards of half a dozen clicks to dig it out, rename it, and
stick it in our images folder. Worse, after we have done this
several times, our desktop is so cluttered with image icons that we
cannot tell which one is the one we just downloaded, as the "Save
to desktop" command at no point allows you to see the name of
the image you are saving!

As usual, we ended up questioning our own memory,
sanity and intelligence. But on our trusty iBook, Safari still allows
us to "Save image as…" and to select a name and a place
for each one. What happened to the Safari on our desktop machine?
We have searched the preference panels in vain for an option to turn
this valuable command back on.

We suspect the disappearance is due to the insidious
and silent "upgrades" mandated by Apple’s Automatic Updater.
The only other logical explanation is that we somehow inadvertently
changed a preference setting that we now cannot find in order to change
it back. It wouldn’t be the first time.

This is really bothering us, as we use graphic images
in almost every posting and we have been wasting time and getting frustrated
poking around our desktop looking for the pictures we just saved, trying
to guess what tr_8843.pic.small90738882.jpg depicts without having
to open it up.

Any Mac users out there? Anyone familiar with Safari? Are
we finally going crazy? Has anyone else noticed this change? It the
loss of "Save image as…" an "upgrade" or a "downgrade"?
If it is an upgrade, is there any way to downgrade it back the way
it used to be?

On a related note, if any readers have installed the
new RSS Safari for Tiger, does it have "Save image as…" or "Save
image to desktop"?

Unfortunately it bothers us enough that if we can’t
get "Same image as…" back, we will be doing all our blogging
on the laptop or moving permanently to Firefox (which has other problems
related to blogging in html as we do) May the Software Gods save us
before we drown in desktop debris!

Followup: Sam Kass set us straight and solved the problem – see comment below!

HOUSTON, May 13 – Students attending the University
of Texas at Austin will find something missing from the undergraduate
library this fall.

Books.

By mid-July, the university says, almost all of the
library’s 90,000 volumes will be dispersed to other university collections
to clear
space for a 24-hour
electronic information commons, a fast-spreading phenomenon that is transforming
research and study on campuses around the country.Forum: Ideas on Contemporary
Education

"In this information-seeking America, I can’t think of anyone who would
elect
to build a books-only library," said Fred Heath, vice provost of the University
of Texas Libraries in Austin.

Their new version is to include "software suites" – modules with computers
where students can work collaboratively at all hours – an expanded center for
writing instruction, and a center for computer training, technical assistance
and repair.

As a library lover and alum of UT Austin (Institute
of Latin American Studies, 1978), we read this news with mixed emotions.
The
corner of the UT campus where we spent most of our time contained the Nettie
Lee Benson Collection, featuring the greatest collection of Latin American
manuscripts, maps, original resources and out of print books in the US,
where se spent endless hours researching obscure shamanistic practices
and native American textiles. Right next door was the LBJ
Presidential Library, with all sorts of obscure
remnants and relics of the Great Society and a great place to escape the
100 degree summer heat endemic in Austin. The uniqueness of these collections,
which contain parchment scrolls and maps, notebooks, relics,
gifts
and
historical
artifacts
in addition to rare books, make us dubious as to the wisdom of moving to
all electronic collections.

Scanning and indexing electronic versions of older documents,
books and other printed materials is an important move in preserving and
making available our written heritage, but here’s hoping it never completely
does away with physical, tactile, three-dimensional spaces dedicated to
the preservation of those elusive original items not so easily reduced to
ones and zeros.

from the New York Times

The Dowbrigade is going crazy ,again. Doncha just
hate it when, unexpectedly, one of your main work tools alters its
behavior,
loses
abilities,
or makes
you
change the way you do things due to "updates" or changed preferences?
One of the reasons it bothers us so much is because we lack the patience
or technical acumen to figure out what changed, or how.

Yes, there was a specific point that prompted this whine.
Since we upgrades to OSX three years ago, our main browser has been Safari,
which we have grown comfortable and accustomed to using daily, although
the machine in our office is running Firefox in an attempt to diversify
and feign hipness.

Anyway, one of the useful features we like about Safari
is that by right-clicking on an image, we get a drop down menu including
"Save image as…" which allows me to rename and place the image in the
folder we desire. It even remembers the last folder we stored something
in, so we can often complete the entire operation in two clicks.

But last week sometime, on our main desktop machine,
that hidden command somehow morphed into "Save image to desktop" which
unceremoniously drops a copy of the image on the desktop, under whatever
long and twisted name the distant designers have given it, from where
it takes upwards of half a dozen clicks to dig it out, rename it, and
stick it in our images folder.  Worse, after we have done this several
times, our desktop is so cluttered with image icons that we cannot tell
which one is the one we just downloaded, as the "Save to desktop" command
at no point allows you to see the name of the image you are saving!

As usual, we ended up questioning our own memory, sanity
and intelligence. But on our trusty iBook, Safari still allows us to
"Save image as…" and to select a name and a place for each one.  What
happened to the Safari on our desktop machine? We have searched the preference
panels in vain for an option to turn this valuable command back on.

We suspect the disappearance is due to the insidious
and silent "upgrades" mandated by Apple’s Automatic Updater. The only
other logical explanation is that we somehow inadvertently changed a
preference setting that we now cannot find in order to change it back.  It
wouldn’t be the first time.

This is really bothering us, as we use graphic images
in almost every posting and we have been wasting time and getting frustrated
poking around our desktop looking for the pictures we just saved, trying
to guess what tr_8843.pic.small90738882.jpg depicts without having to
open it up.

Is anyone out there familiar with Safari?  Anyone
else noticed this change? It the loss of "Save image as…" an "upgrade"
or a "downgrade"? Is there any alternative to doing all our blogging
on the laptop or moving permanently to Firefox (which has other problems
related to blogging in html)? Save us before we drown in desktop debris!