Callie lost an eye early in life, and is purported to have seizures that we're treating with Phenobarbital. Bailey and Callie get along well with our cat and dogs.

Whoever ends up as their forever parents will be very lucky indeed!

The prime variable in this, however, is that we are now a canine foster household. Even that is not of as much import as the usual procedure is to pick up the fosters from the vets after they've been thorougly checked out, bathed, and given Frontline or equivalent.

Oh well - so two weeks later, our dogs start showing flea infestation, even though they had been frontlined three weeks earlier.

On advise from our vet, we dosed the three dogs and the cat again. The next day, we packed all three dogs and the cat in the car, set off 7 flea bombs in the house, and drove around on errands while the house was fumigating.

When we returned, we covered our mouths and noses, running around the house opening windows and turning all the fans back on, and then sat out on the deck with some beers waiting for the fumes to clear out.

We gave the dogs Capstar tablets, which are supposed to be 90% effective within 30 minutes at killing adult fleas.

Natty, our cat, however, even having her Capstar pill wrapped in Tuna, decided she didn't want to ingest the anti-flea medicine.

Oh well - bottom line is that everyone slept peacefully that night.

The one exception to the success story was me forgetting to turn the main refrigerator back on and having Jude call me on the road to say there was water all over the kitchen floor.

Luckily, all the fridge goods were still intact.

*sigh*

She's the result of a difficult divorce where nobody wanted her. She is a 30-poundish inside dog who is happiest curled at a human foot. Her first fosters found her barky, but we are able to manage that.

We think she's precious. And we testify to her getting along with other dogs and cats; we've been told she is great with kids too.

Before Grooming:

After Grooming:

I'm not sure the grooming was an improvement, although she feels much cooler now. :)

She is a sweetheart.

Jude and I, after doing some research, were a bit wary of Huskies, since they are fence climbers, diggers, escape artists in general, and love to chase cats.

We decided to check her out as we dropped our first foster, Belle, off at the Vets, and after seeing she was more of a German Shepherd mix than Husky, and how sweet and gentle she is, we decided to go give her a try. She still needed to be chipped, so I returned the next day to bring her home. Her name, interestingly enough, is Bella.

I'm pretty sure we'll be able to place her fairly quickly.

We had always planned to be involved in Pug and Schnauzer rescue, and fostering, but the recent case of the Nicholson L&D Puppy Mill indictments have pushed us to starting early.

The next day, I brought Belle to an adoption day at Traditions Animal Hospital in Houchton, and she was a big hit.

The next week, we received a call from a woman named Melinda from Alabama, who, seeing Belle on Petfinders, was sure that Belle was the dog for her. She had an older Lab and thought Belle would be a great companion dog. She drove from Alabama on Friday, April 25th, to pick up Belle and take her home.

Natty, a rescue from Athens Humane Society, has joined the family, and incredibly, has (somewhat) endeared herself to the Schnauzers and Pug.

Creating a VOB file from the Tivo file:

1) Using TyTool, connect to your Tivo and hit the Refresh button for the Now Playing list

2) Hightlight the files you want grab and hit Get.

3) After you've grabbed the .ty files, go to File -> Multiplex Mode and then File -> VOB-Mux (files), select the file(s), click Add, then click Process.

Editing out commercial breaks from your VOB file:

1) Using VideoReDo, open the VOB file

2) Set markers at the beginning and end of commercials using the Sel. Start, Sel. End, and Cut Selection buttons. This program is the easiest to use I've found, and as it works with raw VOB files, much easier than having to demux/transcode files.

3) When you've added markers for all the commercials, click the Save As button and save the edited VOB file.

I like to set 2.5 or 5 min. chapters for standard DVDs where I'm not intending on creating Menus.

Creating chapter intervals:

1) Using WinAVI, click on the DVD button. (Even though you're taking a VOB file as input, WinAVI will do just fine, creating a DVD folder structure with associated IFOs, BUPs, and VOB files.)

2) Select the VOB file you saved

3) Put your target folder in the Output Directory field

4) For Select Output Format, pick DVD and click the Advanced button

5) In the DVD tab, you can adjust quality as you wish, but on the lower left, I check the Set Chapter Length box, and set it for 150 for 2.5 minutes or 300 seconds for 5 minutes

(If anyone knows of a simpler, quicker auto-chapter creator, please let me know)

Burning your DVD:

You can use any number of apps for this -- I use DVDShrink, point it to the WinAVI created VIDEO_TS folder and burn it to DVD.

http://www.tkexe.de/kalender_download/index.htm

1) Load file into VirtualDub http://www.virtualdub.org/ or NanDub http://ndub.sourceforge.net/
2) Set "Video" to "Direct Stream Copying"
3) Set "Audio" to "Full Processing Mode"
4) From the "Audio" dropdown menu, select "Compression"
5) Select, for example, 44,100Hz
6) From the "Audio" dropdown menu, select "Conversion"
7) If necessary, put a checkmark next to "Display all formats"
8) Select your preferred sampling rate from amongst the, for example, 44,100Hz .MP3 rates listed
9) Click on "OK"
10) Save with a new filename"

This will re-encode the audio streams with a common sampling rate alowing you to subsequently merge the AVIs.

My favorite Merger is "AVI MPEG RM WMV Joiner" from Boilsoft http://www.boilsoft.com/.

Creating a Playable DVD with loose VOB files
Let's say you have 3 clips, and they are named: VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_02_1.VOB and VTS_03_1.VOB.

1. Rename these 3 files to following order:
VTS_01_001.VOB
VTS_01_002.VOB ----- NOTE Double Zeros
VTS_01_003.VOB

2. Open the first VOB file (VTS_01_001.VOB) with VobEdit, and choose the Menu: 'Edit -> Join Clips' A filedialog will apear, where you have to specify a destination directory for the final VOB file-set.

A second dialog will pop up, where you have to specify a starting VOB-ID. Usually you will enter here a '1' to let the TitleSet start with VOB-ID 1.

But if already have a TitleSet, and you want to create now a second, and later you want to append it to the first one, then you should choose a higher VOB-ID number.

But I'll explan that in detail later. So just enter here now a 1 - Joining begins now. VobEdit is now looking for the first VOB-ID in the first VOB file, and exchanges it against our First-VOB-ID that we've specified.

For every new VOB file, the VOB-ID gets increased by 1.

When this is finished, you will have a new VOB file: VTS_01_1.VOB, or if you have joined more files you will have a Title-Set from VTS_01_1.VOB - VTS_01_n.VOB.

Now just use IfoEdit to create new IFO files for this new Title-Set, and then you can burn this to DVD-R.

Some of the latest extensions I've started using with Firefox have made my life much easier.

For example, the Adblock, Flashblock, and Cooliris Previews extensions alone make surfing infinitely more efficient for me. The first two for their ability to filter most Ad-related components on web sites and Cooliris Previews which lets me stay on a single page of links and with a simple mouse-over, pre-fetch the pages in a floating window.

Adblock kills standard Ads, while Flashblock replaces those ever- increasing-in-number Flash script ads with a simple Flash button.

Cooliris Previews is great for checking out hits from Google without having to open new Tabs or Windows. What I'd like to see the CoolIris folks do is let subsequent mouse-overs on the floating window bring up yet another child window -- sort of like the Spring-Loaded Folder feature of the Mac.

I'll admit I'm probably not the 'average' Firefox user, since I've installed so many extensions I'm using probably 30% of my screen real estate with Toolbars (another reason to get an even *bigger* monitor) and a few are just plain fun, such as StumbleUpon, Torrent Search Bar, FoxyTunes and VideoDownloader

Neither Jude nor I could dislodge the food in her throat in time to save her.

We only wish she could have gotten some more time in her new wheelchair -- to join Jude on her morning walks.

I will miss her terribly.

She seems to be taking to it pretty fast, although she's having to learn not to take her corners too sharply. :)

For a DVD-5 1 hr. DVD, it generally takes about an hour to import the clip, setup and title the chapters, and arrange the background menus and create the DVD folder.

I've done a couple straight to DVD, but creating the folder is a smarter route so if something needs to be edited after the fact, it's doable.