My cat is eating a really decent amount of food now. In fact, I think she might be eating just slightly more than she used to before she got sick. Which is great, because she was down to 7 pounds when I brought her to the hospital for emergency care. They really turned her around. If my scale is to be believed, then she is at 7.5 or 8 pounds now. Nice improvement, but I am hoping she will be at 10 or 11 pounds long before winter gets here. My first thought upon waking up from a nap this afternoon and glancing at her food dish was: I need to make sure she gets some exercise! I guess if she is eating enough that I worry she might soon be starting to put on fat, that she is at least on the right track. I scoped out a couple neat cat climbing/exploring/hiding toys when I was at PetSmart last weekend, buying her some stainless steel dishes, clumping litter, and other stuff. I have a hunch I am being to be getting her one of those sometime this month. She likes playing, and I rarely let her out of doors because she tends to run off at lightspeed and disappear for a couple hours. If she can play actively indoors, I can relax about her getting away and she can get some good aerobic exercise. Or whatever healthy cat exercise is called. I might have to join her. As an inevitable side effect of weighing her I got a reading on my weight, and I managed to add a few pounds the past few months. Apparently, the 4 she lost wound up on me. I am ready to give them back now. P.S. - I just opened a new can over her favorite and she was so anxious to eat it she was falling over herself just to get at it. She then took a bunch of bites out of it immediately after it was out of the can. Yay!

Okay, from the capsule summary of CSI: NY this week, I am going to purposely miss it. There is gross, gratuitously gross, and just way over the top for even that. It sounds like #3.

There was a popular 1980s song that went: "You've got the looks. I've got the brains. Lets make lots of money...!". This is sort of one of those deals, or at least rotated 120 degrees, it is. Google has lots of money - and Google makes lots of money. That is pretty much a constant. Google gets lots of looks at its ads and in its search engine. As for its Google Video feature; I am not sure how often it is looked at. You Tube, on the other hand, I am pretty sure, gets looked at a lot. Good match? Probably so, if video on the web is going to catch on. Personally, I have bought a couple TV shows from iTunes and downloaded a few free episodes as well. Not in that order, of course. I have seen some really funny videos at some of these free website portals. Not commercial grade stuff like I get at iTunes but pretty good, fresh, and original. Desktop video is growing as fast as desktop publishing did twenty years ago. Anyone can get a decent personal computer now that comes with very nice video editing software, DVD burner, etc. It was affordable word processors, laser printers, and LANs that made desktop publishing take off. Desktop video is being driven by affordable video editing software, DV cameras, and WAN & LAN technology advances. Today's computers, networks, and users can handle it. Could not have worked two decades ago but it is working great now. I have a hunch, just as word processing evolved an offshoot - hypertext - which later became the web; video movie making will evolve its own variant. I think it will be going into new genres of games, interactive pages, and infotainment. I also think the textures and sculpted shapes, that form the borders and buttons of today's top quality web site looks will begin to soak up some video/animation themselves. The transition to photo realistic user interfaces is almost here. Next, they will come alive.

Seems like my cat's appetite is back now. I am pretty happy with the rate at which she is eating food now. She has gone through just over one standard-sized can of cat food in the past twenty hours or so, and she just poked her nose into her dish again as I started typing this. I am going to try to coax her into drinking more tonight. It does not look like she drank a lot today. I am going to wash off the other little-sized stainless steel bowl and fill it with water, in case she does not like drinking out of the big stainless steel bowl for some reason (e.g., "eeek, I look just like a caaaat!") She is in better shape each day that goes by, it seems like.

People are starting to get pretty excited about Firefox 2 as its release date draws near. At this point, the new browser is just weeks away. Judging from the previous schedule and the pretty good condition of the browser, for a release candidate - I think Firefox 2 will be out before the end of the month. If it is, there will probably be some cool Halloween sites available for Firefox 2 users this year! Getting the latest Firefox browser is always very easy. All you have to do, is open your web browser, and type: getfirefox That is all there is to it. The browser will add the ".com" on the end, got to the Mozilla site, and take you to the Firefox home page. From there, you just click on the "download" link. If it still says Firefox 1.5, and you already have some version of 1.5 - do not bother clicking the button. Just go to your Firefox web browser Help menu, and execute the Check for Updates command. That will see if you need a newer revision of the current version, and quickly download the newer pieces needed to bring you up-to-date. Once 2.0 comes out, you might want to back up your bookmarks and everything else in your profile(s) - and then download Firefox 2.0. If you use a lot of extensions, you might want to wait a bit to give their authors extra time to finish their ports. It appears the author of the excellent Firefox Web Developer toolbar has already completed his port, though. So this time, you might not have to wait long - if at all. Anyone who runs any version of MS-Windows older than Windows 2000 should absolutely take a look at Firefox. Firefox 1.5 runs on older versions of Windows. In fact, I think they support all the way back to Windows 98. Modern IE support just does not go back that far. Which means, you cannot access modern web pages properly if you use one of those older PC operating systems. Now that the Fall "season of the harvest" is here, you might want to see what web browsers are on the vine - and pick one or two to get you through the Winter!

I got the latest generation iMac a couple weeks ago. It is a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMacs. I got the 20-inch one. The 24-inch one looked absolutely beautiful, but the extra $500 Apple wanted for it over the 20 inch model seemed slightly too much. I think as a potential HDTV set, it would have been a good path. However, the Macs I have now, with 20-inch screens will be pretty decent in that regard. Anyway, the point of my post is about WarCraft III. It is one of my favorite games. However, it is four years old and came out for the PowerPC-based Macs. I was not sure it would run on the families Intel-based Macs that started shipping only this year. Well, not only does it run - it runs amazingly well. It is very smooth, fast, beautiful, and sounds great. If there is a way it suffers by running on an Intel CPU, I did not notice it in an hour or two's worth of game play. I have the real game but i was so pessimistic about the game playing at all, I did not even bother to install it on the Intel iMac. So I just installed the demo. Looks like I need not have worried. Anyway, if you have been holding back on getting an Intel iMac this year because you are not sure if they can handle playing the PowerPC-era Macintosh games, you need not worry. I do not think Mac OS 9 is supported anymore, but Mac OS X games seem to run fine.

Looks like my cat has eaten some of her canned cat food. She was just licking the Gravy off it last night. This morning, she was eating it when we both woke up. I have her food on the coffee table, next to the couch you see in that photo. We both slept on that last night because she seems to want to stay with me. She has barely left my side since I brought yer home yesterday evening. Next big hurdle is this evening she has to take her anti-biotic pill. That is difficult. Then, tonight, she has to get the subcutaneous water IV. I am probably going to find that as uncomfortable as she is. It has to get done though. The pet hospital that saved my cat's life is part of the network. I have to say, they are amazing. If you have a dog or cat, I recommend you look at their website, find out where their nearest clinic is - and read up on what their conditions for admission are. For instance, they might require that your animal be refered by their vet in order to be admitted. Even though my cat's condition was critical when I broght her in, they still turned it around and saved her life. Saying they saved her life is almost an understatement. She stilll has some serious conditions. They gave me the supplies to treat those conditions too. It is not cheap, but they were well within their original estimate of what her stay would cost.

My cat has drunk some water, used the litter box, and licked the juice off of her food. I think if she eats, we'll be out of the woods - at least until tomorrow.

I just got home with her a few minutes ago. I am lying on the sofa, typing on the wireless keyboard while she lies on my chest and purrs.

I just got off the phone with a doctor from the pet hospital and they are going to let me bring my cat home this evening. She will still have to go back for tests in a couple of weeks and she needs to be on special medication for a few months. She will probably need hyperthyroidism medication for the rest of her live too, though she may not be starting on that until the current illness is cured. Hopefully, she will be feeling sociable this evening. I really want to keep an eye on her. The good news is, my cat is on the way to getting well.