dogwalk

With a 60 degree day signaling the end of winter, we got back to our dog walks. We didn’t do anything special today, just the walk that we call “The Meadows”:

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I had also been sitting on a few walk tracks from over the winter that I hadn’t posted. Those are now up on the Dog Walks page for posterity’s sake.

After a short respite from our morning walks due to a business trip for Jennifer and stitches for Babbage, we’re back. Nothing fancy today, just the tried and true Bryn Mawr Meadows walk.

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Today, since it’s Saturday, we took a longer walk down the Cedar Lake trail.

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When I got home I went through my usual GPS download ritual and used the new Google Earth (I just had to try out Google Sky yesterday) to create my KML file and uploaded it to the server. However, when I tested it Google Maps kept complaining that it contained an error. No additional info, just that the file had an error. After scratching my head for a while and doing several google searches, I found this. For the impatient, I’ll summarize. The new Google Earth saves KML 2.2 files (the old one saved KML 2.1) but Google Maps doesn’t support KML 2.2. Doh!

The fix is easy though. Just open up the KML file and change the second line from:

<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.2">

to:

<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.1">

Perhaps yesterday’s praise of Google was a little premature.

Google Maps just added a way to embed custom maps in web pages in much the same way you do with YouTube videos. For instance, here’s the walk we took today:

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I think I’ll be having a lot of fun with this feature.

For yesterday’s walk, we took the dogs down to the Walker Sculpture Garden (home to the famous Spoonbridge And Cherry fountain) and Loring Park (an evening home to many otherwise homeless people).

As we walked through Loring Park, we met a man reading the paper on one of the park’s benches. As we approached and Babbage strained at the leash to say hello, the man asked, “Have you gotten your Michael Vick chew toys yet?” There was an article in the paper yesterday about an upcoming St. Paul Saints promotion where they’ll be giving out 2500 chew toys with the Atlanta Falcons’ team colors and Vick’s jersey number. For those of you who have been living under a rock and might be wondering who Michael Vick is, here are a few recent articles.

It has been an interesting time to own our dogs. In the space of a month we’ve gone from local lawmakers raising an alarm and proposing laws to make people like Jen and me criminals because of the type of dogs we own, to an outpouring of sympathy from strangers (not to mention the number of “what beautiful dogs” comments we’ve gotten on our walks). I can’t attribute this change in zeitgeist solely to Mr. Vick, but I’m guessing that seeing news images of dogfighting and reading about these beautiful dogs being electrocuted, drowned, or beaten to death if they don’t fight has subtly moved the focus of the “dangerous dog problem” from the animals to their owners and breeders. That is as it should be.

Now, if they’d just treat overpaid, under performing, prima donna NFL quarter backs the same way Mr. Vick treated his dogs. “I’m sorry Michael, you’ve under-thrown your last pass to a wide-open receiver. Just hold still while I plug in my cattle-prod.”