So in addition to riding shotgun with the wife in her car a few times, what else did I do?

Hit the link to find out!

Well you are enjoying one thing right now. I got gretchen working again. Man was that a nightmare.

To give you a short version, FreeBSD has two packages that provide supporting libraries for OpenSSL (the foundation library for a whole slew of encryption and security apps). A “baked in” version that comes on the install disk, and an updated version that you can download. The updated version from the internet has bugs when built on the hardware gretchen uses (Sun UltraSparc architecture specifically). Pretty big ones. When I updated that package, I also updated a few packages that linked against this supporting library.

The bugs inside the OpenSSL library leaked instability into the apps that were linked against it. And removing the OpenSSL library required also rebuilding all the apps that depended on it. So what does this mean from a practical stand point?

Rebuilding a large chunk of the software on gretchen.

So that was fun. But I got it done and now gretchen is back and working again.

What else… Oh! We took the puppy to her second round of classes. She didn’t quite do as well this time as last time. She started the class wound up a bit, which didn’t set her up very well to learn.

She did however get over her rambunctious episode relatively quickly, much to our relief. We learned something called the “passive restraint” method of… training isn’t quite the right word… bonding with the dog? Something.

Basically it amounts to holding and restraining the dog bodily, so that it can’t escape, and the dogs movement is drastically limited. The first half of this technique involves something that I can only describe as mounting the dog. You kneel over the dog on your knees with the sitting dog nestled between your thighs, and your arms draped over the shoulders of the dog and restraining it by its chest. If the dog tries to bite, you hold a flat hand under its chin and force it to sit there and look you in the eye.

The second form has you sitting on your butt, with your legs straight in front of you. You have the dog on its back in between your legs, with its lower half away from you, and its shoulders sitting on top of your thighs. Again you are restraining the dogs chest with your hands, from on top of its legs so the dog can’t push your arms away.

The key to this technique is that the more the dog squirms, the more you restrain and constrain its movement. No re-assurance should be given, even if the dog whines. This includes coddling and reassurance that “everything is going to be ok.” This is because to the dog, this is just reinforcing and rewarding this acting up behavior. The dog has no idea what you are saying, only that you are paying attention to it when it whines. If it works, then it is more likely the human lowering its anxiety level, and that influencing the dog.

I was initially skeptical, and a to be honest worried about how this might affect my relationship with the still-impressionable pup. So far it hasn’t done anything bad (I don’t think). Long term, I am curious what it will do. I don’t have a control group to test against, so I can’t make an informed comparison, but thus far the results are this:

• The dog pays much closer attention to me when we are training things like Sit, Lay Down, Roll Over etc.
• I have a way to almost instantly calm the dog down.
• The dog has started responding to leash etiquette better

I can’t support much besides that, so I won’t list anything else.

To stay on the dog subject, we gave her a bath. That was entertaining. Our new shower head works reasonably well as a dog washing attachment. We have a huge shower that Cassandra and I can very comfortably share, yet some how a 10lb dog can make it feel damn small.

Man is she losing an astonishing amount of undercoat at the moment. Looking at pictures from when we first brought her home to now is astounding. She is turning into an actual dog, and is starting to look it. Her hair is getting more wirey and wavy. It is darkening up a bit as well. Her face and muzzle is getting narrower, and her muscles are firming up. Crazy.

I am sure there is a ton I am forgetting that we did this weekend. If I think of it I guess I can put some more down. That’s the fun of a personal blog eh?

TTFN