Things have been pretty busy here lately -- I'm lucky if I have time to check e-mail each day. We also had a bit of an accident last week that has kept the mood around the house a little sad...

Last Saturday (the 11th) I took the dogs out to Chatfield State Park to play in the large dog park. Once we were inside the park on the access road, apparently Lucy climbed up on the arm rest on the door with her back legs and squeezed her body through the window opening, which was only really open far enough for her head to stick out -- or so I thought. She lost her balance and fell out of the window on to the roadway. Luckly, I was only driving about 25 MPH or this would be a very sad story.

Lucy had some road rash on her head, nose and front right leg, but no apparent fractures. It's difficult to tell with puppies since their growth plates in their bones don't fuse together until 10 months of age or so, but a comparison to her other front leg didn't show any fractures. When I first stopped the car and ran up to her, although I knew an injured animal might bite me I still reached out to touch her head and comfort her. She bit the crap out of my hand and then realized who I was. She was in shock when I carried her back to the car and drove her to the emergency pet hospital.

Once the vets looked her over they told me there were no fractures but she appeared to have damaged the nerve bundle in the "arm pit" of her right leg. This nerve bundle controls motor function in the leg, and the reason she wasn't putting any weight on the front right paw was because she could not feel it. With nerve damage, there's not a good way to tell how extensive it is and they couldn't tell me if the feeling would come back at all. In fact, they advised me that in many cases the nerves are so badly damaged that they recommend amputation of the leg, since it is just limp and is dragged around. If the limp leg was injured she wouldn't even know it, and at the very least it would atrophy from lack of use.

Clearly, I needed a second opinion on this, so I took Lucy to her vet on the following Monday. The vet seemed to concur with the emergency vets' diagnosis, but she wanted to wait quite a while before we make a decision about amputation.

In the meantime, Lucy doesn't really act hurt at all. She does hop around on three legs, but I have seen real improvement in her leg and she even started reacting to pinches on the "dead" paw. We went back to the vet today and she was happy with Lucy's progress, too, but said she had consulted with a neurologist who said that in most cases if the dog cannot support her weight on the injured leg it would never be useful to her. That's our next milestone, then: to work with Lucy until she can stand with her weight on the front right leg and her rear legs. The vet wants to wait at least a month before we make any other decisions.

The photo above shows a light pole about 25 feet from my parents' house in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Ponca City is not what I would consider a metropolis, or even a large city (wikipedia says the population was about 25,000 in 2000), and there aren't a lot of high-tech businesses -- there are some, mostly related to the petroleum industry. Yet this pole can do something that utility poles in cities with millions more residents and many more high-tech businesses cannot do: it provides free WI-FI internet service.

Imagine my surprise when my mother asked me about an article she had read recently about "free WI-FI" that the city was providing to all of its residents! I was skeptical about such a service, and if it was actually running it probably was over-loaded and very slow. I fired up my iPhone later than night and was surprised when it found a very strong access point named "Ponca City Free WI-FI." I joined the network and noticed it was quite fast. Again, my cranky-old-man hat was firmly on my head as I imagined that a) it was almost midnight and there probably were not a lot of people using it, and b) it was just recently turned on, so perhaps nobody knew about it yet.

I downloaded a movie trailer that averaged about 130 KB/sec (1040 kbps) with a peak of about 190 KB/sec over a ten-minute preiod.

The next day, I worked from my parents' dining room and the laptop reported that during the day (when the kiddos were supposed to be at school) I was getting close to 1 Mbps down and 500-700 Kbps up. That's very, very good for FREE FREE FREE internet service (my folks' DSL line is the el Cheapo SBC special: 756/256 Kbps). My informal testing also showed that the ISP for the service is also SBC -- but I assume for a city-wide network they have more than one pipe out to the net, probably several, and if they were trying to provide a really robust system they would have several different ISPs connected. Nevertheless, I was fairly impressed with the service provided, as none of the things I attempted to access were blocked (IM, video chat, Skype phone calls, e-mail, BitTorrent), and web browsing appeared to be unfiltered, too. I tried YouTube, hulu, and even some porn sites (just to see if the network was filtered) and all loaded normally.

The system is apparently designed as a mesh, so any node that fails can be replaced in the network by adjacent nodes. The mesh also allows the ISP to connect to just a few access points and be shared across the whole city. This saves the cost of running a DSL line to each access point and is likely the only way the network could have been provided. Luckily, the project was approved and budgeted before the Global Economic Meltdown.

In my few driving outings around town, I have seen the access points on light poles all over the city. My testing has shown a good-to-great signal almost everywhere, even in the open space ("park") a block from my parents' house where there are no streets and obviously no light poles, so the signal is coming from the edge of the property.

In a rare move, the network was originally meant for the use of the city only (police, fire, city employees) but was opened up to the citizenry at large. There's more information in this press release:

http://www.myponcacity.com/cms/City-Government/wifi/wifipressrelease.aspx

So, would I move back to Ponca City now that they're on the "cutting edge" of technology and appear to be more progressive than the typical Oklahoma city? Hell no. It does make it a little more palatable to visit, however.

I will post more about this as I spend more time in town this week. I'm curious to see how good the coverage is in the "poorer" parts of town, where this service should be very welcome. Yes, SBC DSL can be had for only $20 per month, but that's on top of a basic phone line. If you could cut up to $75 per month from your budget, why wouldn't you?

Since I work from home, it's not that exciting.

This doesn't seem fair:

Economic Stimulus Payment Calculator

You do not qualify for an economic stimulus payment

According to law, the economic stimulus payment amount that you would otherwise be entitled to receive is reduced by 5% of the amount that your Tax Year 2007 Adjusted Gross Income exceeds $75,000. You would have been eligible for an economic stimulus payment of $600, but your AGI exceeds $75,000 by enough to reduce that amount to zero.

However, if your situation changes during 2008, you may be able to claim an economic stimulus credit on your Tax Year 2008 return.

I guess the administration doesn't want me to stimulate the economy.

Fritz, the Frontier Airlines mountain goat on the way to Kansas City (crappy iPhone photo)

The solution to the nerd problem in the Marriott -- Bushmill's at Pitcher's (seriously, the bar is called Pitcher's!) -- (crappy iPhone photo)

So here I am in Kansas City for a conference. Things that have already annoyed me:

• I am in Kansas City (sorry Eric and Pam)
• The Marriott is under construction and is covered in scaffolding and tarps that make it look like a giant fumigation tent.
• Super Shuttle did not know where the Overland Park Marriott is located. $85 later, a nice taxi driver had delivered me to this part of hell.
• This is a highly-specialized technical conference. I had to leave the bar earlier due to the high number of NERDS that thought they were cool (they were not).

Fabi and I take take frequent breaks out in the front yard. She apparently has decided to consume an entire tree this spring.