Diary of a Network Geek

Recent events have inspired a new category.
For those few of you who are loyal readers, you may notice that I have added a new category today: Calamity, Cataclysm, and Catastrophe. This is primarily a response to Hurrican Rita, of course, but I wanted a more general category than that. It is possible, after all, that I might move to some similarly endangered area, like, say San Francisco, and have to deal with earthquakes instead of hurricanes. Or, nuclear fallout. Or, invading aliens. Whatever. Something very, very bad, in any case. So, I wanted a general category for large scale bad things beyond my control. Not the occasional bump in the road, like a flat tire or crashed PC, but something of a grander scale, like hurricanes, earthquakes, crashed servers, and other such really big, very bad things.
We’ll see how long I hold to that level of destruction for this category, though. I do get so dramatic.

I wish this was an urban legend.
But, according to Snopes.com, my source for urban legend veracity testing, it is real. Apparently, there is a fairly dangerous flu moving through the domestic dog population. It started as an avian flu, jumped to horses and then to dogs via horse meat being fed to greyhounds. The flu can be transmitted via dog-to-dog contact as well as via shared objects. According to the article, it made the jump to domestic dogs, as opposed to the racing greyhounds, via workers who,unknowingly, brought it home on their hands and clothes. As this is the first of its kind in the dog world, there is no vaccine and little or no resistance in the dog population.
So, watch your dogs and pray.