I’m not saying anything about the content of the ad, but simply the fact that the Democrats seem to take pride in bragging about a negative advertisement really bothers me.

Enough of the sadness of today; what are some of my good Willy memories? In his younger days he loved to lie on his back (with his belly facing up), and have people scratch his stomach. After we scratched it for several minutes he’d roll over to signify that it was time for us to stop.
He also would jump up on the dining-room table (or smaller tables as well), considerable jumps for a smallish dog, to grab tidbits of food left unattended. For example, I remember that at one point we left an entire pizza on the table that we’d ordered from some place, and then left the room for some period of time. When we came back the pizza was gone, and Willy was on the table. A more dangerous version of this scenario was when there were candles on the table as well as food: He’d try to eat the food, but then almost set fire to himself by walking to close to the candles. (Maybe even on top of them at some point; I forget.)
When we first took him home with us from the pet rescue agency, he would spend a lot of time sleeping on our beds. As he grew older and unable to make the jump up to the beds, he would sleep on the floor just beside the beds. I took a nap this evening, after the deed had been done, and then when I awoke found myself subconsciously checking for Willy at the foot of my bed — after all, I wouldn’t want to step on him as I got out of bed… I’ll really miss him! Whenever I (or anyone else in the family for that matter) was visibly sad, he would come over and be with whoever it was. Even when nobody was sad, he would often spontaneously drink lots of extra water from his water bowl so he could have a surplus to lick us with.
You should’ve seen his face (and who knows; you might have). It always resembled to me that of an English gentleman’s, not that I really had any idea what that meant. Really dignified. If you look at most dogs’ faces, they all really have a common shape/look. Willy’s was unique. That face made it really easy to think of him as not just any dog, but a person, odd as that may sound. I know that we still had to feed him dog food etc., and he spoke through barks and growls if at all; but he had a very unique personality.
He was with us for a little over seven years; since roughly February 1999. He became an integral part of the family; and he will be missed.

I just found another interesting Finder “gem”: I was going through /Library/Preferences looking for something else, when I stumbled across com.apple.com.dockfixup.plist. That name seemed a bit curious, so I opened it up and you won’t believe what it is: All it does is keep track of which of the original items that came in my Mac OS X (i.e., that shipped preinstalled with the OS) are still in the Dock. It also keeps track of what version… well, I guess it started keeping track in: The version it’s got for me is 10.3, but I’ve had Mac OS X going back to 10.0. My guess is this is another performance inefficiency of the Finder: It probably looks at this plist every time Finder loads to see what changes it has to make to the default base Dock settings before it can continue the loading the Dock. I guess in a way it’s a good idea on Apple’s part, but there must be some better way to do this…

By the way, comments are welcome. I’ve had this blog running for months now and still have zero comments…

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