i was dogsitting hailey today because my sister was at work and my parents went camping on the cape for a few days. when i first saw her in the kitchen she was so excited to see me she actually urinated a little bit. after letting her out in the backyard, i gave her her lunch, a combination of dog kibbles mixed with warm water. i let her run around the house, as she kept bringing her toys into the living room. half an hour later i took her out front so she could poop. for some reason my sister says she isn't ready for real walking yet so in the meantime she doesn't her business on the lawn surrounding the house. afterwards i stayed with her inside the house, occasionally letting her out if i sensed she needed to go to the bathroom again. half an hour later she sort of disappeared. i thought she was getting herself into some mischief but she actually went to sleep in her dog pen. when she woke up an hour later, i let her out to use the bathroom. she doesn't have fine motor controls yet and will run straight into people. she's also really into biting now, softly most of the time, but occasionally she forgets and bites a little too hard with her sharp puppy teeth. i kept bringing her back inside because she wouldn't stop eating small rocks she'd find in the backyard. i was playing with her but she got so hyper that i had to lock her in the kitchen & sun room. she didn't protested and minutes later when i checked up on her i saw she was back in pen sleeping. when my sister finally got home around 6pm i returned to cambridge.

i did some work today in belmont from my laptop. i guess i'm still used to the idea of laptops being underperforming machines and that for true stability and power (not to mention a bigger screen) nothing beats a desktop computer. but something sort of happened, and i guess i discovered it gradually: my macbook pro is many times more powerful than either my desktop mac or desktop pc. sure the screen is smaller, but 15" at a 1440x900 pixel resolution is a respectable size. added to that the fact that it runs an intel chip and i can toggle between windows and os x makes this the all-purpose work machine. this means i can pretty much work anywhere, but since i often need access to the internet, my choice of locations is still limited.

i started feeling dizzy again today. i wonder if it's an inner ear imbalance? but i only seem to experience it if i lie down and then suddenly stand up. nevertheless, it makes me want to visit a doctor again, if nothing else, just to let me know everything's okay. what's the point of health insurance if i don't use it once in a while?

this morning i did some work plumbing work. i noticed the bathtub faucet was leaking again last night, so i put a plastic container underneath to catch the drops, so i could gauge how much water was leaking. when i saw it this morning, the container had already overfilled. so i shut down the cold water tap and disassembled the cartridge again. the leaking seemed to have stopped now but only time will tell if it comes back again.

my iDE to CF adapter arrived today, fresh from a chinese factory, the export custom stamp on the envelope not yet dry. i copied the m0n0wall image onto an old 16MB compact flash card i had lying around and managed to boot up the PC without any problems. using a normal hard disk running windows XP, the PC used 80 watts of power minimum at idle. with the more energy-efficient compact flash card, it uses 70 watts. still a lot of power though, so now i'm in the market for a low power PC to become my captive portal server, 20 watts or less.