I thought I’d give this a go. I have to admit, it’s a lot harder than I was expecting. Remembering where you’ve “written” is mega hard. I must get into town and do some of these on some city street walls.

… can’t wait to see the results

We phoned seven different agencies to get advice on what we had to do to get her picked up / out in a kennel for strays. On the way home I flagged a passing police van and asked them if they knew of a number to call etc. They told me it was the dog warden who was legally responsible for collecting and kennelling stray dogs.  The dog warden didn’t answer and apparently, from speaking to all the various charities (who couldn’t take the dog due to the legal requirement of going through the “dog warden”) the said dog warden service is a pile of shite. They see it as just a 9-5, Mon-Fri job, with no interest about dog welfare, there’s no out-of-hours contact, even though there’s supposed to be. Out of the seven agencies we contacted it was only the RSPCA who were interested in taking this dog in, because she was so mal-nourished.

She had quite a good demeanour about her once she knew she was in a safe environment and  she knew certain commands like “sit” etc, so it was obvious that she’d been domesticated so she should be easily re-homed. In fact, looking back, this reminds me of a post I wrote a while ago about a dog database. When the RSPCA guy turned up he scanned her for a microchip and she didn’t have one. It’s cases like this, which I’ve now experienced first-hand, when a database / compulsory chipping would be great. To either re-unite with a loving family, or prosecute an abandoner.

At work I’ve been really busy working on a few RHEL (Linux) and AIX (IBM UNIX – read ‘mainframe’) projects for a few of our clients. I actually really enjoyed most of the project work – it’s all really fascinating stuff, for me at least and very good for my career as a whole. All good stuff for the CV! I really feel that I’ve learnt and refined my linux skills quite a lot recently. I’ve got a Google notebook that is stuffed full of really useful tidbits of bash scripting and commands – I keep meaning to write a decent “crib-sheet” post on here for some of the most useful stuff.

Oh! I nearly forgot!! Mimi (our new greyhound) is the one on the right…

This photo has graced the majority of Western media’s front pages today… like this…

But…. this is the original…

The bricks you see were on the roofline of the Crown Buildings but had been blown over by the sheer force of the high winds this afternoon. We stopped at the Dominos to grab some garlic bread for dinner and asked if anyone was hurt but they didn’t know. I’m guessing if anyone was hurt it would’ve been minor injuries based on the location of the fallen bricks (over, and in, the boot of the estate taxi)