Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   Eleanor starts coughing
Tuesday, April 7 2015
I have a special custom-made development board that allows me to plug in 28-pin Atmel microcontrollers for programming and experimenting. It's a more useful device than an Arduino board, since it has a ZIF socket and I can switch from Arduino mode (where I can upload new sketches and test them electronically) to programming mode (where I can install a new bootloader and change the fuses) with the simple flip of a switch. Today, though, I had trouble getting it to work in Arduino mode. It was performing so poorly that I started replacing the MAX233 serial interface chip and investigating the board for shorts. The problem turned out to simply be faulty bootloaders on the Atmega328s (including on Atmega328s supposedly preloaded with bootloaders that had been shipped to me from Hong Kong). The upshot of this was that I needed to more-clearly delineate the commands that actually work that I've collected in a text file of AVRDude commands called avrdude.txt.

Throughout the day, Eleanor had been having coughing fits, some of which ended with her vomiting up various amounts of foamy stomach contents. At first I just thought she'd eaten something unpleasant, but by this evening she still was doing it and Gretchen had begun to worry that something hard and sharp had lodged somewhere in her gastrointestinal tract. So she called the Hurley vet. Meanwhile I did some research, all of which seemed to suggest that Eleanor was suffering from kennel cough. Where could she have gotten that? From Shaw Dog Park of course! Hundreds of dogs go through that place every day, and if there is a communicable canine disease, that's a perfect place for it to be transferred. Our vet concurred, and he said if Eleanor was still coughing we should bring her in tomorrow. This was turning out a lot better than initially feared; if Eleanor really had something stuck in her throat (such as shards from those clam shells she'd scavenged at New World last night), that probably would have required a trip to the emergency vet.
Meanwhile, Eleanor had gone outside to cough and puke. Eventually she burrowed into the huge mass of pine needles in the dog house. The vet had prescribed a teaspoon of tussin DM to suppress the coughing, which we didn't need to go to the store to get. Gretchen burrowed into the dog house behind Eleanor and somehow managed to spoon some tussin into her mouth despite the close quarters. Over the next several hours, it seemed to help. Dextromethorphan apparently operates on dogs in a manner similar to the way it works on humans.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?150407

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