CarpetDog

Anyone who has pets will really like this. You’ll like it even if you don’t and you may even decide you need one!

Mary and her husband Jim had a dog named ‘Lucky.’ Lucky was a real character. Whenever Mary and Jim had company come for a weekend visit they would warn their friends to not leave their luggage open because Lucky would help himself to whatever struck his fancy. Inevitably, someone would forget and something would come up missing.

Mary or Jim would go to Lucky’s toy box in the basement and there the treasure would be, amid all of Lucky’s other favorite toys. Lucky always stashed his finds in his toy box and he was very particular that his toys stay in the box.

It happened that Mary found out she had breast cancer. Something told her she was going to die of this disease…. in fact, she was just sure it was fatal. She scheduled the double mastectomy, fear riding her shoulders. The night before she was to go to the hospital she cuddled with Lucky.

A thought struck her… what would happen to Lucky? Although the three-year-old dog liked Jim, he was Mary’s dog through and through. If I die, Lucky will be abandoned, Mary thought. He won’t understand that I didn’t want to leave him. The thought made her sadder than thinking of her own death.

The double mastectomy was harder on Mary than her doctors had anticipated and Mary was hospitalized for over two weeks. Jim took Lucky for his evening walk faithfully, but the little dog just drooped, whining and miserable. Finally the day came for Mary to leave the hospital. When she arrived home, Mary was so exhausted she couldn’t even make it up the steps to her bedroom. Jim made his wife comfortable on the couch and left her to nap. Lucky stood watching Mary but he didn’t come to her when she called. It made Mary sad but sleep soon overcame her and she dozed. When Mary woke for a second she couldn’t understand what was wrong.

She couldn’t move her head and her body felt heavy and hot. But panic soon gave way to laughter when Mary realized the problem. She was covered, literally blanketed, with every treasure Lucky owned! While she had slept, the sorrowing dog had made trip after trip to the basement bringing his beloved mistress all his favorite things in life.

He had covered her with his love.

Mary forgot about dying. Instead she and Lucky began living again, walking further and further together every day. It’s been 12 years now and Mary is still cancer-free. Lucky? He still steals treasures and stashes them in his toy box but Mary remains his greatest treasure.

Remember…. live every day to the fullest. Each minute is a blessing from God. And never forget…. the people who make a difference in our lives are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones that care for us.

The Gary Halbert Letter

Here Is A Story For You…

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud toward him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, YSL tie and Ray Ban sunglasses leans out of the window and asks the shepherd, “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”

The shepherd looks at the man who is obviously a Princeton grad, then looks at his grazing flock and calmly answers, “Sure, why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Sony notebook computer, connects to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the Internet where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location. He feeds that data to another NASA satellite which scans the area in an ultra-high resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility located in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an e-mail on his “Palm Pilot” that the image has been processed and the data stored.

He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an e-mail on his “Blackberry” and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP Laser jet printer and turns to the shepherd and states, “You have exactly 1,586 sheep.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep,” says the shepherd.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on, amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the shepherd says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and replies, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a consultant,” says the shepherd.

“Wow! That’s correct,” answers the yuppie. “But how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required. You showed up here even though nobody called you… you want to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question I never asked… and… you don’t know shit about my business.

“Now Give Me Back My Dog!”

I found this fascinating quote today:

It’s a sad day for YouTube users in the United Kingdom. The phenomenally popular video site has starting to pull all copyrighted music clips from its UK website, with most videos expected to be blocked from the site within the next two …CarpetDog in, Today in Music | Music News Review

You should read the whole article.

With all that’s possible with TV & film these days, how is it that we are still in the “next slide please” stone age of image presentation?

This question prompted the guys at Animoto Productions, a bunch of TV/film producers and techies, to lock themselves in a room and nerd-out. Their mission? To make the type of stuff they did while producing shows at MTV, Comedy Central & ABC available to everyone. Their first release, Animoto, does just that.

Animoto users simply choose which images they’d like to display and a song. Animoto then produces a fully customized & unique video to them. Produced in a widescreen format, the result is a video that has the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

Welcome to the end of slideshows.

Best of all, no two videos are ever the same. Ever. Even videos generated with an identical set of images and music selection will each have an entirely distinct set of motion design. Sharing them is easy too, as they can be emailed, downloaded, and embedded on websites including social network sites like Facebook and MySpace. Read the rest of this entry »

The Spoof : Father Christmas Killed in Tragic Sleigh Accident, Say Cash-Strapped Parents

St Nicholas, the jovial and benevolent bearer of Christmas gifts
died when his custom-made sleigh collided with a Jumbo Jet just outside the North Pole, newly-impoverished parents reported to their children yesterday.

The man more commonly known as “Father Christmas” (or “Santa” to the offspring of out-of-work American stockbrokers) was out on one of his regular pre-Christmas reconnaissance missions to check which children have been good this year, when chief reindeer Rudolph “got spooked and steered the sleigh directly into the path of a Toronto-bound 747,” distraught kids were told.

“Come on now Timmy, you have to be strong,” said Brian Gough, a recently-laid-off construction worker from Redditch, as his 6-year-old son’s bottom lip started to wobble. “We must give thanks for his life – not cheapen his name by thinking of ourselves on Christmas Day. I know you were really looking forward to that remote control car
, but sometimes cherished memories can be as rewarding as material gifts.”

Jeremy Davis, a 37-year-old HBOS executive whose five-figure new-year bonus was cancelled due to the credit crunch, gathered his two children solemnly in his study as he broke the news. “I know it’s tough, kids, but your mother and I want to make sure you still have the best Christmas ever – so we will fill your stockings with satsumas, socks and other simple gifts to remind you that only Santa was special enough to have been able to find you a Playstation 3.”

“You should probably still leave out that whiskey and plate of mince pies though as a mark of respect. It’s what he would have wanted”

Brave Lauren Cole, 5, said that children everywhere would do their best to keep the memory of Father Christmas alive. “Mummy told me not to worry about Mrs. Claus or the elves because they have stopped making all those presents, and are now busy building a shrine to Santa in Lapland.”

Lauren concluded that she was “happy” Father Christmas was now in heaven playing party games with the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny, who also perished recently in unrelated incidents involving pillow suffocation and death by chocolate respectively.