I’m Back
Hello again everydog and loyal reader (yes, both of you). Sorry I’ve been gone for a while without much warning. So that nobody worries, I should tell you now that everyone is fine. The dogs are doing great, and the people are OK too, just a little weird as usual, but what do you expect? I can make up some story about how I discovered a whole other world out there beyond mushing, eating, sleeping, howling and blogging, but that wouldn’t be true. Instead I’ll just say that I’ve been in rehab, for something much more insidious than alcohol and anti-depressants, and if I work up enough courage, I’ll tell you at the end of this blog.

So what happened while I was gone? Well for one thing, people and dogs kept reading the blog reruns and my reader count went above 33,000. Quite an honor, I have to admit. But I kept asking myself, if I had been more diligent with the blog, perhaps we could have gone over 100,000. That certainly would put me in elite company, with people who are much more witty and certainly do a much better job of writing every week. If I did it, if only I did it! Nah, that sounds too much like the title of a book that might never get published.

One other thing that happened – and this is a honest-to-goodness true story that was in the news this week – is that they discovered that the upscale department store Macy’s has been selling winter coats lined with dog hair. They have been advertising the jackets as “faux fur,” but it turned out that the fur in fact came from a dog indigenous to parts of Asia and Siberia, perhaps, you know, like Siberian huskies? This is now making me very suspicious of the people who have been saving bags and bags of my fur in the garage. Here I was thought they were being nice by brushing me and saving the fur to make warm blankets for the children of Katrina (or Darfur, I forgot which), but it now looks like they’ve been selling it to Macy’s. Does it ever cease, the so many ways dogs are exploited? They toil away at blogs, and even their fur is harvested for profit. Just unbelievable.

There is one more thing I should tell you. For Christmas the people bought a nice digital camera. Probably with the Macy’s money, now that I think of it. The camera is a Canon SD800 IS, an superb shiny little thing, very compact so it can be taken everywhere, unlike the 10-year old brick they used to carry. But perhaps the nicest feature of this camera is face detection capability. Basically it scans the picture for faces and automatically adjusts focus and exposure conditions to best capture the subjects, so they don’t come out too dark indoors or too bright when a flash is used. It might sound like a gimmick, but in reality it comes in very handy, and for these people it is just about necessary – until now everyone in their pictures looks remarkably like the unfortunate children of Darfur.

So how does well does this face detection work? It is amazingly effective, I must say. It works best when you look straight at the camera. Using little focus boxes on the LCD screen, it tracks faces when they move or when the camera moves. You can fool it by turning sideways, but partial sideways is still OK, and it kept going even if you put on a hat or headphones. It even works with pictures in magazines and on computer screens. The ultimate test was that it had no trouble detecting doggy faces like mine (naturally. I would have made them return it otherwise), but it failed to recognize our dear great leader George Bush. As I said, an incredible little camera. The people had so much fun playing hide-and-seek with it they almost forgot to take pictures. I had to bite them before they snapped out of it.

OK, so you ask what was the addiction that sent me away for three months? It was thoroughly embarrassing but now is the time to admit it. My name is Woofwoof, and I am a cataholic.
- posted by Woofwoof @ 10:39 PM