Things have settled down a bit around here. The night before last, we had some nasty wind. Nasty enough to knock our power out for a couple of hours. We weren’t alone, as something like 15,000 homes went dark (and not in protest of SOPA, either). Fortunately, ours was back on by about 12:30-1:00 AM, because, between the warm weather and rain of the previous day or two and the melting snow we got before that, my sump pumps were running yesterday. Just one more thing to worry about, I guess.

The real thing to worry about is my dog, Siggy. I mentioned his “face” thing a couple weeks back, and, other than it’s pretty nasty to look at, it really hasn’t gotten and worse. Unfortunately, about the same time, he developed a bit of a limp (not unusual, what with him getting to be an oldtimer, and his little brother Fritz lacking any respect and running him over all the time; Fritz has never seemed to understand the whole Alpha dog concept), which has steadily gotten worse.

Things were pretty bad Tuesday. I didn’t get any sleep Tuesday night, and took yesterday off to get him to the vet (which in itself is a hassle, as he can’t get in and out of the car very well). To be honest, I didn’t know if he’d be coming back home.

The vet suspects that there’s some calcification in his spine, causing it to become like a solid rod, making him stiff and in pain. The cold weather isn’t helping, either. So, now he’s got some stuff for the pain, which is hopefully making him feel better. He seemed to sleep through the night, so that’s good. But it’s hard to watch him limp around. I’m not expecting any miracles, and I know how this eventually ends, try as I might not to think about it. At this point, I’m hoping he can have another summer to lie around in the sun.

I just wish I could stay home with him.

Anyhow, if you haven’t signed a petition or contacted your congresscritter to tell them you’re sick of them taking bribes from the likes of the MPAA and RIAA and you want them to kill these ridiculous SOPA and PIPA bills, you should go and do that.

The problem with the people in Congress is that they are greedy and ignorant. SOPA would give the right to, say, the NY Times to erase the DNS entry in all the US-based DNS servers for this website because somebody posted an excerpt from one of their news stories here. This, in effect, would remove it from the Internet speed dial list. If you happened to know the IP address, you could still get here (in reality, probably not, because cheapo web hosting used shared IP addresses and host headers to direct traffic to different websites, though if you knew the directory structure, you could figure it out).

This would break the way the Internet works, and would spark a rise in “alternative” DNS servers (located outside the US). So you could switch your settings to use a different DNS server. Except, while that DNS server might have the entry you’re looking for, it might also resolve, say, amazon.com to someplace that looks very much like Amazon, but in effect is actually a site set up to steal your Amazon password. Or install a rootkit on your computer. Or any number of other unpleasant things.

And then people will quit buying shit online, quit using online banking, and only go to official, corporate-approved websites (or not go online at all).

So that would suck.

Happy 89 to Jean Stapleton. That old LaSalle really did run great.