It’s almost two weeks now since we had Pepe killed. Every day there are many moments I’m reminded of him. When I look next to the bed: his crate, where he used to sleep in, albeit quite a while ago since after last summer he almost always slept in our bed. When I open the drawer with the dog collars and leashes: no red harness anymore. When I come home: no jumping and yapping dog that is so exited and happy to see me. When I open the fridge: no can of special soft food. When I load the dishwasher: much less bowls, forks and small spoons, used to prepare his food. When I sit outside on our terrace: his grave next to me.

Memories of him are good and I don’t cringe and tear-up anymore when I realize I won’t ever see him again.

Some of the reminders are quite negative though and I don’t mind that some things have changed. When I sleep: no heat emitting dog in between us, who needs to be carried outside three times a night to pee. Uninterrupted sleep and not nearly as much dog hair in the bed. When I walk in the house: no chance of walking in a puddle of dog piss. When I open the garbage can: no weewee pads, no stinky smell of decaying dog pee. When we go in the car to go for a walk: not howling Pepe in the back.

Poupoune in the mean time, really enjoys Pepe’s demise. She has changed a lot now she is the unchallenged alpha dog again, and is really much happier than before. She is also more affectionate, checking us out all the time: “What am I supposed to do?” It doesn’t help that she is very, very deaf and easily startled. The only thing she really misses is the Pepe-food. She cleaned up after he finished eating, and when she got the chance, emptied his bowl. She hasn’t given up hope, and expects that I will give her some soft food when she stares at me long enough while making complaining noises. I have to disappoint her, until she develops a disease of her own she has to eat her regular kibble.

She also gets more walks, since it’s much less of an expedition to walk just her. The only thing she hates even more than before is when I lock her up in the kitchen when I leave to work at a client. Then she apparently feels really alone, even though her companion was very annoying.

I write this post because I’m procrastinating. I’m working on the update of “Clean My Screen” and after some deliberation I’ve decided to put Pepe in as one of the cleaners, even though he is dead. He has a distinct cleaning style and an enormous long tongue and it has to be preserved. It took me a while but now I can see it as an homage and a monument.

I shot the footage of him licking during his last weekend, but he still looks and acts very healthy. Canned tuna water on a piece of glass does wonders. The video had to be cleaned (removing blemishes and blacking out the background) and I did that last week. It was a bit surreal, staring and retouching images of a dead dog for a couple of days (yes, it’s an elaborate process) but I could handle it by just pretending it was a random Chihuahua. But now i have to dub his licking sounds and that feels kind of spooky. It’s like I’m somehow reviving him by adding sound to the silent video.

However it has to be done, so back to work. The results can be admired soon on an iPhone or iPod touch near you.

I’ve been so busy lately that I totally forgot to announce on logloglog that my iPhone application is no longer a secret. Apple finally approved it and it’s now for sale at an iTunes Store near you. If you are fast you can still get it for free, because I decided to give it away for the first couple of days. Afterwards it will be $0.99 or the equivalent in your local currency.

The star of the application is of course Poupoune. She works under a stage name, as do the other cleaners. That way we can make things up on their weblogs, because these are modern times and all cleaners have weblogs and Twitter accounts.

Here is the website, so you can check it out for yourself. Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod touch you can still watch the demo video, also presented by my favourite dog.

A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into the making of this and I hope you, and a lot of other people, like it. I really hope this is going to be a success since I need to pay a few of people who helped me with this, and it would be nice if I could pay myself a little too for all the hours (many hundreds!) I worked on this.

Oh, and you could really help me if you write a review in iTunes for me. You don’t even need an iPhone or iPod for that.

Not much going on here, and that has several reasons. I have a nasty flu, cold, or whatever that is going on for almost a week and a halve now. (No, it’s very unlikely it is H1N1, if it was I should be dead by now.) 

It gave me a high fever, made me lost my voice and I have terrible coughing fits. Because my voice box is not working (Laryngitis) the coughing sounds I make are very high pitched like they would be when one pokes an adolescent boy with a breaking voice with a burning stick. It doesn’t feel that way, fortunately, but it still is painful.

I can’t go out of the house, since if I do, I might infect others and certainly now, people are extremely worried when they see an overdressed person coughing hysterically while walking on their sidewalks. Any physical activity also just renders me completely exhausted and I cough even more afterwards.

Contacting people by phone is also hard because they can’t hear me and even whispering is bad for my Laryngitis.

So my social life is very dull and boring since all I do is sit in my chair and read the Internet. And I work on my secret iPhone project, with some napping in between. Today I basically finished the project (after nearly 3 months!) and I’m going to submit it to Apple for approval tomorrow. Finally, I was running out of steam a bit…
Even though I can almost feel your curiosity I can’t tell you more about it before it is accepted. Apple might rejected it for some stupid reason, and I don’t want to give my competitors too much of a head-start in their efforts to copy it. Not that it is very likely they are reading logloglog, but you never know.

This application is also the reason for the move to a real domain for logloglog. It is very possible I will get much more traffic on my corporate site soon, and I want to make clear this is my personal weblog. The old loglog goes off-line in a few days. If you have links to loglog in your blogroll please update them.

For the first time this year my friend Paul and I went skiing in the Laurentians. I was a bit worried how my knees would hold out since I had to stop skiing halfway during last winter because it became too painful.

But so far they withstood the beating fairly well. My legs are sore, but that is normal: with cross-country skiing you use muscles you never use the rest of the year. At least I don’t. I’m also out of shape but that too was not entirely unexpected. It was nice though, albeit very cold and the sun only came out from behind the clouds when we left for Montréal.

(I even emailed and twittered from the trail, in the middle of nowhere. But the iPhone keyboard didn’t like the cold and my Twitter message was eaten by the backspace key that came ‘stuck’ en letter for letter erased all I had just typed. Very frustrating, fortunately it was only hundred forty characters or so.)

Made it to Yulblog on my skis. Here they are signing up blogs to be included on the register of Montreal blogs. I had already signed up from home, so this post might show up on their meta-montreal-feed.

A happy New Year to you all!

(And I’ll write more about this photo soon…)

Yup, today I signed my life away.

After my lamenting about the outrageous cost of the iPhone in Canada I thought I would never buy one. Maybe an iPod touch (which is basically an iPhone that can’t make calls) but no iPhone.

But today my eye fell on a leaflet that announced a special deal: a voice plan for only $17.50 per month. It includes 200 minutes per month which is plenty for someone who almost never calls. I asked if I could use that as my iPhone plan, and just add a $30 data plan to it? The sales rep had to ask his superior, but then told me that that was indeed a possibility.

One of the reasons I didn’t use my previous ‘Pay-as-you-Go’ phone is that every call was outrageous expensive. That will change now, because I’ve already paid for those minutes. (I don’t know what will happen when I don’t use all those 200 minutes per month; will they roll over to the next month or are they just gone? I have to look that up.)

Of course Rogers adds some ridiculous fees to it but in total my monthly bill will be less than $65 including all taxes and fees. Over the course of the 3-year contract that will still be more than $2300 but it is substantially less than the $5700 I had calculated previously.

I had some problems setting things up (they sent me an email with a temporary voice mail password that was not correct), and my data connection stopped working after a few hours, so I spent some time on hold with Rogers’ Tech Support, but it works pretty well now. Of course I can spent hours and hours tweaking settings and installing applications (like a Twitter and Facebook client, so I can stay totally in the loop) but I’ll try to spread that out over a couple of days.

[From the photo it’s obvious the camera doesn’t like our yellow walls in low-light.]

Update: All minutes you didn’t use in a month are gone. Use it or lose it. So the 9 cents per minute I pay now, might become 35¢/min when I don’t call a lot. How is that in other countries? How you are supposed to keep track of your minutes is unclear. My iPhone has a usage counter, but it also counts all the long calls to Rogers’ support help line. Four of those calls today, totalling more than one hour. Most of it spent on hold, (yay for speakerphone!) but my call was dropped twice. That seems to be an iPhone problem, hopefully fixable with software. My calls to tech support were about the unused minutes (no mention at all about this on the website), and about visual voicemail (they had sold me the wrong add-on plan; the first month is free, after that I’m going to cancel it anyway but I want to see how it works.)

I installed a lot of apps and deleted some of them after I tried them. The only application I bought was an iPhone version of my ToDo-list application. They talk to eachother to keep things synchronised.

I saved a lot of money today.

For over a year I’ve been eying an iPhone, Apple’s hot touchscreen gadget. Recently it was announced that the iPhone would come to Canada and also that developers would be able to write applications for it. I have some ideas for a couple of cool iPhone games so that would be a reason to justify the purchase.

But today Rogers, the only carrier that has a GSM network in Canada, announced their subscription rates. But their 3-year contract and exuberant high monthly fees would mean that an iPhone would cost me 5700 dollars and that without unlimited use of the Internet, my main reason for getting it. There’s no way I’m going to pay that. No iPhone for me.

But I saved even more money. I planned to go to an outdoor concert of one of my favourite bands, Sigur Rós from Iceland. So this morning I called Admission, the Québec Ticketmaster monopolist, to buy some tickets. My ears fell almost off my head when they told me there was a surcharge of 8 dollars per ticket for their services. Eight dollar for picking up the phone! And 5 dollar on top of that as a fee to pick your tickets up at the box office. So I told them that was ridiculous and hung up. No Sigur Rós for me.

If I’ve the time and inclination I might check tomorrow if I can still buy tickets in a brick-and-mortar music store in town. Support your local businesses.

And I might look into buying a hacked phone when/if they come available but for now the deal is off.

I feel so frugal now.

What do you do when you are in the U.S. and Apple just introduced a new gadget?

You head to the Apple store and let your inner geek out. This photo was taken with an iPhone by myself so it’s a bit wide-anglish. I then mailed it to myself because that is the only way to get stuff of the phone.

iPhone itself is quite impressive. If I was into cell phones, had money to burn and lived in God’s own country, I might have been seriously tempted to buy one. But neither of these pre-requisites are met so I’m safe. But still it was nice to play with the thing for half an hour.

In the store there was a big table with 15 iPhones all logged in to the Wifi network so the connections were fast. The internet browser is absolutely fantastic and I can see you can actually read whole web pages. You can easily zoom in and out and scroll over any webpage just with your finger tip.