Cassie likes feet. There’s no getting around this rather odd penchant of hers for all things feety. When we lived in our previous house she wasn’t allowed to access the area where we kept our shoes (and, by association, socks stuffed inside shoes). Every now and then she’d manage to get there and the first thing she would aim for as soon as she got past The Forbidden Door was my dad’s shoes, where there were guaranteed to be a pair of socks. She’d pick them up and not let them go without quite a lot of coercion. She’s also ruined a few pairs of slippers by carrying them around and playing with them (I think she likes to put her nose into them and wear them like some sort of muzzle).

Anyway, the other day I wasn’t paying all that much attention and I left my flip-flops within easy reach of her. Of course, she spent the next ten minutes biting and licking and pulling at them as if she would somehow evoke some sort of reaction from the poor flip-flop. She even got angry with me when I tried to take them away from her! I decided to leave her to her worrying and take a few photos of the spectacle (which isn’t easy with a manual focus lens and a crazy dog).

Week three already, and I’ve fallen behind. My lateness (which I hope won’t become a recurring theme) is due to a combination of working nights at the end of last week, being away last weekend, and getting a new iPhone. As a testimony to that, here’s a photo rather hastily taken on my iPhone just now which shows that Mr Bear has had the opportunity to play with my D40 now that I’m spending lots of time playing with the new phone. The novelty has yet to wear off!

Continuing on the theme of week one, I arrived home at the end of this weekend to discover that my mother had bought a new toy for Cassie (this is not an infrequent occurrence). What was unusual, however, was that this new toy bears a startling resemblance to Mr Bear who, as you may well remember, had a mildly distressing incident wherein he became Cassie’s toy. I protested that we might teach Cassie a bad habit (viz that all bears can be considered hers) but this seems to have fallen on deaf ears. At any rate, she seems happy with the new addition to her playthings :-).

As part of a bid to improve my photography this year, I’ve decided to start a “photo a week” project. Whilst I admire the the resolution with which many attempt a “photo a day” project, the unpredictable nature of my schedule means that I’d likely fall at a very early hurdle. I shall therefore endeavour to post a photo at the end of every week this year that I took during the week; some may be playful, some may be poignant, some will likely be mundane. With any luck, the ratio of the the first two the the last will improve as the year marches on. I’ll post the photo to my flickr photostream with a link back to a weblog post with some remarks about the photo.

So to start off the year, I’ll introduce two characters who will probably return throughout the year. In the foreground we have Mr Bear, a Cambridge University bear that the lovely Tara presented to me when I graduated from that university in June 2008. In the background we have Cassie (in particular, this photo), the six month old puppy that we now have in the house. She’s a rather adorable handful of a Westie who loves soft things (especially socks). She was running around my room earlier this week when she made her way onto the bed, and before I knew it had carried Mr Bear off in her mouth to play with elsewhere. Needless to say, it took quite a lot of coaxing and tickling to convince her to give up her newfound friend. Mr Bear is now a little bit scared of her, and is in need of a wash before he is allowed back into the bed!

Rather similar to the previous link

A detailed look at CSS3’s @font-face

A detailed tutorial on RAID6 in Linux

Andrew Goldacre’s fantastic column for The Guardian.

Implementing OPIE in Debian turns out to be surprisingly easy.

A great PDF and accomanying source file of what you can do with the enumitem package.