*yawn* Well, I’m back. ]]> http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2012/02/nastinspector-mkii/feed/ 2 http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/11/bob-now-xavier-cat/ http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/11/bob-now-xavier-cat/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:30:59 +0000 SafeTinspector http://www.safetinspector.com/?p=1164

    Tom’s home was foreclosed: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of its vacancy was signed by the bank, the property management company, and the Utica police.

    For a week or more we noticed there was a large dumpster in the driveway of our neighbor’s home and he was nowhere to be seen. Its a tough time in the Detroit area and these things happen. A property management sticker, the housing equivalent of a cadaver’s toe-tag, hung from the front door and the lights started turning on and off with the precision that only a collection of timed switches can provide*.

    Shortly thereafter Heather began noticing a cat. It was jet black, and was normally laying under the tree in the front yard or sitting on the porch. In the days that followed we speculated that, perhaps, this was just a neighborhood cat that Tom had been feeding and it was visiting the home from habit and hope**. The days turned into a week and still the cat watched us coming and going, a black silhouette with moon eyes shining from the porch every evening; the cat had been abandoned.

One morning, waving at the back of Heather’s car as she drove off, I met the gaze of the cat where he sat upright next to his tree. As soon as our eyes met he began rubbing against the tree and pacing back and forth, meowing. I crossed over and as I approached the cat ran to meet me, meow-wowwing pitifully and ramming my legs. The cat was solid, weighty, and pretty strong. There was a wound on his head that needed cleaning.     I knelt and petted him as he desperately rubbed against me, crying from loneliness. My heart, which is never more solid than your average stick of butter in any case, melted.     ”You’re probably hungry, too.”     Rub, rub, “Meow!” With that I went back home, half-expecting the cat to follow me. He did not, and instead stopped at the curb in front of his empty home and sat, his tail curled around his front paws and wide eyes staring after me. I returned with a small margarine tub of cat food and another with clean tap water.     He attacked the food before the tub hit the concrete and purred loudly enough to be heard over the wind. I stroked his back, walked to my car and went to work. The cat didn’t look up from his food as I drove past.     Heather and I discussed the cat’s plight with the other neighbors, several of which hadn’t noticed the animal while others stated that, before Tom left, the cat had always had a collar and a tag. So not only was the cat abandoned, but Tom had removed his tag so no one could track it back to him. I tweeted at the time, “Neighbor lost his house and left his cat. Thanks, jerk-GLAD you lost your house”, a sentiment I still espouse.     Heather and I resolved to first get him checked out by a vet and then to take him to an animal rescue if possible. So, the next day we obtained a large rabbit cage from a friend, fashioned a litter tray from a modded shoebox***, placed the second in the first and the both of them in the garage. We captured him easily with cat food and a pet carrier and the cat, now called “Bob” by Sam and Riley, began his new life near the front wheel of Heather’s Yamaha V-Star. For the next two days we fed the cat, and the girls visited and played with him as often as we’d allow.     The cat was very upbeat, never giving us trouble about going back in the cage, greeting us with a cheerful meow and head-butt, and he spilled his food and water constantly. Such a nice cat he was that I even called my brother, Gerald, who lives alone and hadn’t had a cat in years, and offered the cat to him. Gerald was interested; he’s had a tough couple of years and had been on the fence about getting a pet for a while.     On Friday, Nov 11, Heather brought Bob to the vet for a check-up. Bob was about one year old, was neutered, male, had signs of fleas, tested positive for worms, suffered from a slight ear infection and…. was FIV positive.     Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV) is similar in effect to HIV, which eventually develops into AIDS and death. A cat catches it by either biting or being bitten by another FIV positive cat, and therefore is almost exclusively diagnosed in cats allowed to roam outside the home. Yet another of the many reasons it is NOT a good idea to let your cat wander freely.     The rub is that while FIV can’t be transmitted to any other animal besides cats, and an infected cat may remain symptom free for many years, Bob was now unadoptable. No shelter could take him in, and since we have two cats of our own we couldn’t take him either.     It might not have been so sad had Bob been older, or had been antisocial. Instead, this was a charming, affectionate, healthy looking young cat who was, apparently, doomed to receive the “blue juice****.” The vet gave Heather medicine for his ears, worms and fleas, and Heather took Bob back to our garage so we could carefully consider the next move. Heather’s friend, a veterinary tech who works there, tells us that later on the doctor teared up during a surgical operation and admitted to having been thinking of Bob.     I called and broke the news to my brother, who had been planning to come and see the cat that evening. I told him the cat had an uncertain but definite expiration date, and that he might not want to take Bob after all. Something in the story must’ve touched Jerry, though, because he still wanted to meet Bob.     So Friday night Jerry met Bob and, by the time of his departure, he’d agreed to take Bob in. My daughters were thrilled and we spent Saturday buying house-warming presents for the cat. A large cat tray, a bag of pine litter, cat dishes, a bag of food, scratching post, scratching mat, catnip mice, $81.00; Bob having a home instead of mouldering in a pet pit? -priceless.***** Late last week, after having had Bob in his home for several days, I received the following email: Bob is now Xavier. He is doing great. He seems well adjusted to his new home and is very affectionate.         - Gerry Xavier nee Bob

* It could be very punctual ghosts. Perhaps a murdered efficiency consultant.
** Habit and Hope was, coincidentally, the name of a short-lived mystery drama TV series starring a wacky nun and an aging prostitute solving crimes together. The sub-plots usually revolved around the prostitutes attempts to corrupt the nun. The show was aired on the Oxygen Channel during its inaugural year.
*** If requested, I can provide the step-by-step modding instructions that can allow you to turn a shoe-box into a small litter tray as well. No tools necessary, only four steps. Skill level needed: minimal.
**** Blue Juice is a slang term for sodium phenobarbital, used to euthanize animals.
***** Sometimes a cliche fits because it can be a facile short-hand to express meaning. This may not have been one of those times.

Still, I like to tinker with it once in awhile, and now I’ve added “social share” buttons to the thing.
SafeTinspector is a self-hosted WordPress blog running off of a hacked Buffalo NAS (available for about $100 at Microcenter before the Great Thailand Flood of 2011) and so it is extensible through a library of themes and plugins.

To add social networking functionality I turned to plugins and found a handy one in the form of KUNAL’s excellent, but awkwardly named, “Twitter Facebook Google Plus One Social Share Plugin“. After a quick download, a copy into the plugins folder, and a few clicks in the dashboard, we have buttons allowing the one or two visitors I get a month** to crow about what an fool I be.

The plugin is flexible enough to allow me to turn on or off the various social buttons, control placement of the button bar, coloration, border, etc. (I turned off the border, turned off the background color, and placed the buttons at the bottom of the post)

I tested it by “liking” and “tweeting” some old posts and it seemed to perform as advertised; I provisionally recommend it!

* The majority of the 617 posts I have here are from the late 00′s, when I fancied myself am amateur humorist.
** I’m talking about YOU, DaveCat

This picture is intended to be a metaphor for the struggles of the modern man faced with changed economic circumstances and loss of self-esteem brought on by his altered and diminished role in society due to the ascendancy of the female gender in the North American workplace and in schools of higher education. ]]> http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/09/the-continuing-adventures-of-the-canadien-mounted-police/feed/ 1 http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/09/dance-central-by/ http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/09/dance-central-by/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:27:52 +0000 SafeTinspector http://www.safetinspector.com/?p=1000

Cosmetic use of Audio-cassette Optional     Its common knowledge that someday an element of fatal force or weaponry will be added to one of our socially acceptable sport pursuits.
    Soon after, the newly deadly sport* will become a replacement for war and international diplomacy. Until then, I’m going to continue to be that dick you know who finds the idea of watching sports to be unfathomable and tedious.
    But I do like physical activity, despite being preternaturally gifted with perspiration of epic proportions. You already know I play the Dance Dance Revolution-type games to the point of physical failure, but now I can look even more dorky because I have Dance Central.

* I’m hoping for Ultra Ping Pong or Maxi-Mini Golf ]]> http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/09/dance-central-by/feed/ 0 http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/08/microsoft-av-for-free-sort-of/ http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/08/microsoft-av-for-free-sort-of/#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:16:23 +0000 SafeTinspector http://www.safetinspector.com/?p=1140     Microsoft hasn’t heavily marketed Security Essentials, probably because they don’t want to provoke Symantec, AVG, Eset, Sophos, McAfee, AntiVir, et al.

    But, in case you didn’t already know, Microsoft offers anti-virus/anti-malware product free-of-cost to Windows XP and Windows 7 users in the form of Microsoft Security Essentials. In fact, its been available since late 2009, and the current version is pretty good. Microsoft’s AV technology, acquired in the purchase of the Romanian software company GeCAD way back in June of 2003, is offered in a commercial package as “Forefront Client Security.”

    Now, it isn’t exactly free; if you are using it for business purposes and have more than ten computers, Microsoft requires that you purchase Forefront or use some other solution. Likewise, it isn’t to be used on a Microsoft Windows Server Anything. But, if you use Windows XP or Windows 7 as your primary OS, and aren’t getting an antivirus program through some other means (Comcast subscribers get Norton 360 with their subscription, and perhaps you masochistically enjoy the tender ministrations of Symantec’s bloated offering) then I encourage you to try it out. Microosft Security Essentials (Google search). ]]> http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/08/microsoft-av-for-free-sort-of/feed/ 0 http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/07/headache-again/ http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/07/headache-again/#comments Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:12:04 +0000 SafeTinspector http://www.safetinspector.com/?p=1144     I had a terrible migraine last night and lost my dinner.
This morning I felt as though it had been a miscarriage of my food baby. I mourn a little for my black bean burger.
Bulemics abort their food babies. ]]> http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/07/headache-again/feed/ 1 http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/06/list-of-things-i-dont-believe-in-not-even-a-little/ http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/06/list-of-things-i-dont-believe-in-not-even-a-little/#comments Sun, 05 Jun 2011 21:54:36 +0000 SafeTinspector http://www.safetinspector.com/?p=1142

Big Foot

Ghosts

Loche Ness Monster

Chupacabra

The Fabulous Cities of Gold

Harry Truman

Rush (the prog-rock band)

The Third Season of Buck Rogers

Your Uncle’s first Car

Numbers with leading spaces or non-standard punctuation distributed via caramel mocha trading cards or mimeograph

None of these exist, and if you say otherwise then I also have available for sale a certain bridge to Brooklyn in Florida for sale.

]]> http://www.safetinspector.com/index.php/2011/06/list-of-things-i-dont-believe-in-not-even-a-little/feed/ 0