Bonsai Follow

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Unknown I found some work. Its walking a dog for two days. I like the dog plenty, a graying black mutt with happy blue eyes and a big desire to play. I don't like the woman who hired me. She's watching the dog for the owners who are in hospital. I probably would have liked them. The woman described the owners as an "older couple". As in, she couldn't understand why an "older couple" got such a young dog . . . The little thing has to be at least 12. That's not young for a dog, even if the pup is spry and happy. I used the money to buy some household necessities. That felt all right. The woman who hired me left me notes I had to sign and date stamp . . . and there were spies noting my coming and going. I do wonder why they'd spy on me instead of just offering to take the dog out. He's a sweet thing and no trouble at all. I didn't have keys to the house. She left the dog in a pen in the yard. Its a nice pen with plenty of water and shade plus a nice old school dog house. So it doesn't bother me too much that he has to spend time there. She still cried when I left her. This lack of trust was something I hadn't counted on when I started running the ad. Thinking about it there really is no reason to trust me. Although I do think that offering to walk your dog would be a weird way to gain access as a house breaker. Click images for desktop size: "Bonsai" by Le Revant I guess I either have to get to know more people for references or buy a bond or something. Both aren't bad ideas. I'll have to see if I can make more money to justify the bond. If I get enough customers to justify it I probably won't need it (the bond, I mean). I'm tired. More from all the walking. It's like nearly two miles there. I wade it in 20 minutes, which is good but I ended up drenched in sweat by the time I got home. Really harsh big drop soak your shirt sweat. I'll recover. On the home front I hacked the AppleTV. Not as complicated as it sounds. My main reason for doing this was to recover the stuff on the AppleTV that was lost when the PowerBook HD crashed. For whatever reason Apple decided that the AppleTV would only sync one way. I suspect that was to keep people from sharing music and movies. Its the requirement for the iPods so it seems logical. Except the iPod is so ubiquitous that there are plenty of apps to let you recover your music from the iPod (I like Senuti - its free and does the job well and easily. Senuti doesn't even let you accidentally duplicate tracks or overwrite songs with old versions.) Unfortunately there's no software to do the same thing for the AppleTV. So they only solution was to hack the thing. The hack enables SSH communication between the computer and the AppleTV. This is cool because I can now download all the lost music and photo's back to the PowerBook. What isn't cool is that I can't figure out how to copy directories across a network so the files have to be dragged across one at a time, virtually. This is tedious but preferable to losing all that stuff. The hack has a couple of other things I didn''t think I'd care about. One of them is to use SSH to put Xvid files on the AppleTV. It plays them flawlessly! This is handy for those oddball flics I want to see but have no desire to keep. It takes about 3 minutes to upload an Xvid avi to the AppleTV as compared to the four hours needed to convert it to avc. The hack also allows for "Couch Surfing". Which I can't figure out the "why" for. Its a pain to input url's using the virtual keyboard and the Apple remote, but I looked at it anyway. To install the hack was pretty no-brainer stuff. Its just formatting a memory stick, putting it in the USB port of the AppleTV and rebooting it. The best thing is that the hack does nothing to harm the old functions of the AppleTV. I went into this with the attitude of do or die. I'd either get all the stuff of the machine or I'd lose it all. So leaving the data and old functions untouched is a real killer find for me. It looks like the hack does it by Click images for desktop size: "Vampi" by Frank Frazetta setting up a separate directory that leaves everything else untouched. This also means you can play with it pretty safely. I'm happy with it. I'm also happy as I got a very early birthday present. A cell phone. Its a pay as you go. You have to love that an impoverished guy has a cell phone. With my serious iPod addiction I'll probably never hear it ring. Since I usually keep my cell phones in my back pack odds are I'll never feel it vibrate either . . . Most of you are used to me never answering my phone and no matter how frustrated you get with me, you still call. Thanks for that. Now there's a new shiny way for me to be rude to my friends . . . I'm very happy about it and with it.