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Moby’s measurements at 5 months:

Height: 30.5cm (12 inches) tall at the withers
Weight: 3.8kg (8.3 pounds)

I have a morbid interest in all things North Korea. It is a cult, in the saddest of senses. It is a nation engaged in blackmail. It is a nation lost.

It is 9:00pm GMT on Friday, February 10th… and the Chinese twitter-verse is all a flutter over rumors that Kim Jung Un has been assassinated while visiting Bejing, and that the assassins have in turn been killed by security guards.

It boggles the mind. Is there any truth? If so, who is behind it, and to what end? I can’t help but hope that this is a positive turn of events for the North Korean people. But what if it is the opposite? What if Kim Jung Un was the positive turn of events – a ray of hope and change for North Korea. What if powers content with the way things were have snuffed out the only ray of hope that the North Korean people had ahead of them?

Is it darker days ahead – or bright sunny skies? Steady as she goes? All just a puff of smoke? Only time will tell.

UPDATE: It is now 4am GMT, and it appears that the assassination story was actually a birthday party.

Moby is getting bigger… his measurements at 20 weeks are now as follows:

3.5kg (7.7 pounds)
29.25 cm (11.5 inches) at the withers

The first snowy day is upon us… and it is bound to be a cold one as well.f Just a few flakes so far. Nothing sticking. Moby looks cute with a couple of ice crystals stuck to him.

I reached out to a recruitment firm today and made personal contact – and it was worthwhile. Had a good conversation and think this will be the plan going forward until I am able to find something good.

Time for a coffee.

Moby has hit the 4 month mark, and I thought I would capture his details.

Height at the withers: 9 3/4 inches – 24.5 cm
Weight: 2.75 kg – 6 pounds
It is hard to find any sort of lookup charts to track his size. He is a maltese / poodle cross, and there is a lot of possible variability that comes with crosses. I would be a lot more informed if I had a chance to meet his parents. My thoughts are as follows:

• He is already (just about) taller than the breed standard for a toy poodle, so assuming he is a miniature poodle
• He is slightly below the growth curve for a miniature poodle, I think that has to do with his Maltese side
• He is close to the top end of the Maltese on the breed standard size scale

Miniature Poodle breed standards for size are:

Maltese breed standards for size are:

Taking that into consideration, I am going to guess that Moby will wind up:

He is certainly bound to be a small dog… but I am optimistic that he is growing up a happy, healthy, confident and well balanced boy that enjoys some running and romping, can handle a long walk or hike, and (hopefully) has no issues playing with larger and smaller dogs.

It has been an incredible first week.

Potty training is coming along quite nicely. We don’t even have to leave out puppy pads for him. Relatively accident free. I wake up a couple of times a night to take him out… I have been cautiously listening for him to fidget or wake in the night… and if he does, I whisk him out back to the garden. Last night, one trip was all that was needed. I am looking forward to when he can go all night.

We have started going on walks, which has made me aware of that some things that I take for granted are quite unnerving to a young puppy setting out in London. Cars, for one thing. Cars are spooky for a little guy – and he hears them coming a lot further away then I do. Each time he hears a car, we pause, and wait to make sure it is going to pass by safely. It makes sense, really… but also slows down progress, especially during high traffic times. Our first couple of ventures would be more aptly referred to as “stops” than “walks”, as we were doing more of the former than the latter.

Last night was his first night out on the town. Hayley and I took Moby to a local pub – the Ferry Boat Inn in Tottenham. He did great – say patiently and just cuddled up. Sitting in a pub next to a fire with a dog is really nice.
I feel that he has grown a bit in the last week – he seems taller to me. His puppy belly is not quite as pronounced after he finishes eating as well. It will be interesting to see Hayley’s reaction to his size when she comes home from Switzerland next week. She will be away for five days… and I am going to assume that there will be a detectable difference in Moby in that time.

On Monday, we will be going to a puppy training / socialization session in Chingford. I am really looking forward to seeing how he reacts / interacts with the other dogs. I am really looking forward to just seeing the other puppies in general. I am guessing that there will be quite a number of puppies in attendance, given the holiday season.

I made some puppy training sheet to hang on our fridge, to help in the puppy housebreaking process. I am going to laminate the paper, and use small round button magnets to hold the numbers / markers in place. The round puppy paw prints are going to be glued to the tops of the button magnets, and will be the markers for the timeline table.
Download the PDF of the PuppyTrainingSheet:

Feel free to use and enjoy. Released under creative commons license.

Puppy Training Sheet by Ultrasupergenius.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at ultrasupergenius.com.

The Duke of Poop has arrived. What a cutie. So far, he has proven himself to be an incredible eater and drinker – I have been blown away by his appetite and the amount of water he will drink down in a sitting. Along with those comes pooping and peeing – and he has a 100% accuracy rating on hitting his puppy pad so far. Good man! He loves his security blanket – I rubbed down his litter-mate friend with it (a little Westie that he grew up with – Moby was the only pup in his litter). He has the cutest puppy eyes, an affinty for chewing buttons… and really seems drawn to any cord, power cord, or rope. Also has his eyes on Hayley’s new Christmas slippers.

He really enjoys his new bed. He likes his rope bone. But most of all, he seems to love his Mr. Sheepytime blanket (his security blanket has a sheep on the top).

He is a scruffy little monster, with long legs and an incredibly fat little belly. He has a really thin whispy coat that I think will thicken up as he gets older. His underbelly is quite bald, as are a few spots on the back of his legs.

He is up at 11 pm tonight – after a couple of puppy naps. He will have a special rules night tonight in terms of settling in… but puppy pre-school starts tomorrow, and we will start to get him used to his new routine and rules.

He has been described as a malti-poo… but looking at images, I don’t think this can be entirely correct. He seems to have some terrier in him. Not a lot of maltipoos are entirely black either.

I am being drawn like a moth to a flame about reports surrounding the E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer), which is a Low Energy Nuclear Reactor, but is often labelled as a Cold Fusion device by the few reports I have seen.

I want to believe, but find myself waiting for the punch-line. Something along the lines of “It turns out that Rossi made the protective case and structural components out of 9 volt batteries” or another whacky revelation to that effect.

Could we be on the brink of a new energy source capable of providing nearly limitless electricity? Or the unravelling of an amazing web of lies and deceit? My assumption is naturally the latter, and I find myself waiting for the inevitable awkward moment when we all find out that it doesn’t work, it will never work, and the reports of success to date have been based on falsified and fictional data.

For the uninitiated, Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi, working out of the University of Bologna, claim to have developed a series of working models that produce useable electric energy in a novel way. The concept is to take Nickel, Hydrogen and some initial quantity of electricity as inputs, and produce copper and heat as outputs – the heat being sufficient to drive steam turbines for the purpose of generating electricity. The claim is that there is a net gain of electricity in the process. Presumably energy stored at an atomic level is being released from the nickel and hydrogen reaction – although I make no claims to having an understanding of how or if that is possible.

I am reminded of the “Bigfoot found” story that turned out to be an incredibly shallow and awkward hoax. Quite some time back, there was a story that a Georgia Police Officer and his friend had gone searching for a Sasquatch that was rumored to have been shot by a hunter in the wilds of Georgia. They were successful in finding the deceased creature, and made announcements of their discovery. Somewhat inexplicably, the pair decided to freeze the creature in a solid block of ice for preservation – rather than just keeping it stored in a frozen state (hint, hint). After a mass of press releases and buildup, they delivered the ‘beast’ to a third party for an exorbitant fee. They apparently but did not anticipate that this third party would have brought hundreds of thousands of BTUs worth of heaters to the “reveal” event, and it took hours rather than several days for their ‘Sasquatch’ to be revealed as nothing more than a Gorilla suit purchased on the internet stuffed with deer guts and discarded venison.

Will Rossi’s E-CAT turn out to be a boondoggle of similar proportions? Is this latest chapter in the cold fusion story going to turn out just as ugly, awkward, and smelly as the Georgian gorilla suit filled with deer guts and organs roasting furiously under propane jet heaters? I can only imagine.

A few background sources that are worth a gander if you have any interest:

Wikipedia – Presumably Neutral

Wired – Presumably Neutral but banging the drum passionately

E-Cat World – the PR Machine for E-Cat

Thank you Steve Jobs. You have had a tremendous impact on my life. I still remember the Christmas when Apple entered my life, in the form of an Apple IIe. I remember the game with the rabbit in a maze, and using the arrow keys to get the rabbit to the carrot (part of the ‘Apple presents Apple IIe’ disk). I remember the beeps and clicks, and steady whirling of the Apple IIe as it fired up.

I remember waiting for my iPod 40gb. I stayed home from work, and kept hitting refresh over and over on the FedEx delivery site waiting for information on when it would arrive. When I saw the delivery man from the balcony, I ran out to him and just about tackled him to get my hands on that amazing bit of technology. That was back in the summer of 2004 – and it is still alive and well. What an amazing device.

My MacBook is a treasure. My iPod nano is a delight. Even though I choose Android over iPhone – I know the device has been made possible and made better in no small way by your constant and relentless efforts to advance both software and hardware.

Your work has indirectly touched my life in many ways, and my life is richer from your efforts.

Thank you, Steve Jobs.