January 18

[Henrietta]

QotD: I don't have today off as a holiday, but I'm home sick. Although, that means I had time to write my next SF entry this morning, yea me. It's supposed to be in the mid-60s at my house today, so Frankie & I are gonna lounge around out in the back yard for awhile, me thinks. (Frankie is in front, her sister Ortiz belongs to my buddy John....)

[fluffy]

DRC: I've been working on a side-project related to SongFight but not related to music making.

Hey, that's cool. A few years back I tried making karaoke versions of a couple of my songs and quickly ran into the "CD+G is a crappy and poorly-documented format with no readily-available tools" issue too, and I didn't have the inclination to make my own tools (so instead I did it as an MPEG video, which only kinda-sorta worked with the system at the place I did karaoke at).

[Billy's Little Trip]

QotD: I don't have today off as a holiday, but I'm home sick. Although, that means I had time to write my next SF entry this morning, yea me. It's supposed to be in the mid-60s at my house today, so Frankie & I are gonna lounge around out in the back yard for awhile, me thinks. (Frankie is in front, her sister Ortiz belongs to my buddy John....)

Beautiful blue merle Australian shepherds. I miss mine. I love the herding group. My sheltie died about a year ago. I now have a Queensland heeler (Australian cattle dog) named Blaze. She's a red.

[Henrietta]

I'm sorry about your sheltie. :/ This is my first herding dog, and she's been great. She's got some blue heeler in her too, but her coat is definitely more shepherd-y.

[mrbeany]

DRC: I've been working on a side-project related to SongFight but not related to music making.

Hey, that's cool. A few years back I tried making karaoke versions of a couple of my songs and quickly ran into the "CD+G is a crappy and poorly-documented format with no readily-available tools" issue too, and I didn't have the inclination to make my own tools (so instead I did it as an MPEG video, which only kinda-sorta worked with the system at the place I did karaoke at).

Yeah, the only real benefit of CD+G is universal support in karaoke devices.

I've made enough progress to know that it will work, and that it can look better than some commercial karaoke CDs. There's a difference between working well enough to make a usable CD+G file, and being easy to make a CD+G file. With the super-crappy nature of the format, there's quite a bit of room to work at making things easier.

Basically anything that tries to stay close to the native format is just going to be way too painful to work with.

[I wanted to add for those unaware. What I'm working on is truly cross-platform, so when it is done it'll be possible for someone running Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and more to create the "CDG" files used with the MP3+G karaoke format. From there it is a matter of having software to burn MP3+G to disc and you'll have a real live CD+G that works with any karaoke device.]

[HeuristicsInc]

Frankie & I are gonna lounge around out in the back yard for awhile, me thinks.

Frankie Dog Face?
-bill

[Billy's Little Trip]

Frankie & I are gonna lounge around out in the back yard for awhile, me thinks.

Frankie Dog Face?
-bill

Good one, Bill.

[Niveous]

QotD: I'm a fed, so I had the day off.

I enjoyed it by getting a lot of work done on projects including my late GOM song, my Nivfilm project and my top 200 of SF page. It's funny, lately I have been saying to myself "Boy, it's been a while since I've posted", yet at the same time I'm super involved in things SF-wise. Weird.

[Caravan Ray]

QotD: I don't have today off as a holiday, but I'm home sick. Although, that means I had time to write my next SF entry this morning, yea me. It's supposed to be in the mid-60s at my house today, so Frankie & I are gonna lounge around out in the back yard for awhile, me thinks. (Frankie is in front, her sister Ortiz belongs to my buddy John....)

Beautiful blue merle Australian shepherds. I miss mine. I love the herding group. My sheltie died about a year ago. I now have a Queensland heeler (Australian cattle dog) named Blaze. She's a red.

You know Australian shepherds are not very common in Australia. I don't think I have ever seen one as a proper working dog. And very rarely as pets too. I've only ever seen them at dog shows.

Cattle dogs are very popular though -both as pets and working dogs. Most working dogs are either cattle dogs or kelpies.

...or in the case of my dog, The Chief - a maremma sheepdog, who is retired now but was our stock guardian when we had our alpaca farm:

*(Note: this is not actually The Chief - but a stock photo off the internet. It is a dead-ringer for him though)

[Henrietta]

What a nice looking dog! I've never seen one before.

[Billy's Little Trip]

I have seen them because my niece had a Maremma for many years. Awesome dogs and very protective of their pack and family. She had many other animals and if any stranger or other dog came around, it would become very intimidating and stand between the outsider and the fam. But a very good memory. I hardy ever go to her house to visit, but it knows me immediately and comes up waging. But if he doesn't recognize you, you're screwed if my niece doesn't give approval first. Once she does, he's your best friend. He would let their cats hiss at him and chase him off or let her daughter ride him and pull his ears. Very docile to the family, but very protective.

Here's my clan.

[Caravan Ray]

I have seen them because my niece had a Maremma for many years. Awesome dogs and very protective of their pack and family. She had many other animals and if any stranger or other dog came around, it would become very intimidating and stand between the outsider and the fam. But a very good memory. I hardy ever go to her house to visit, but it knows me immediately and comes up waging. But if he doesn't recognize you, you're screwed if my niece doesn't give approval first. Once she does, he's your best friend. He would let their cats hiss at him and chase him off or let her daughter ride him and pull his ears. Very docile to the family, but very protective.

Yep - that sounds like Chiefy.
He used to let a family of magpies hop around and eat food out of his bowl - but when a red-bellied black snake came too close to our house once, he tore its head off.

One weird thing I noticed with him - as you say "if he doesn't recognize you, you're screwed". Our gate was a long way from the house - and he would always let you know if someone he didn't know was calling. But, on the first times he met my dad and my brother - he let them in the gate without a sound. He seemed to be able to "smell" my close relatives!

Also amazing was when we had an orphaned alpaca baby. He seemed to know exactly what to do and never left the baby's side.