The Dragon

This is my favorite house. I call it The Dragon because of it's scaly exterior, sharp corners and menacing gaze. The Dragon was built back in 1900 and has undoubtedly seen many changes throughout the years, the rise and fall of the auto industry not least among them. It's within walking distance of Eastern Market, which was only nine years old in 1900. Currently this house sits in a neighborhood with very few neighbors. I imagine the other houses have been demolished or burned over the years. Ironically, this house now seems to be uncrowded and unfettered in a way that a country house might be. It seems to like its new space.

I don't know much else about The Dragon, except that it is occupied and in terrible structural shape. We drive by it on most of our urban adventures, just to take a look.

But we don't get too close to The Dragon.

Dragon Dick Patient

So I got a new app for my iPhone that takes dictation. You speak into the phone and your voice is recorded, then sent up to the cloud where powerful computers transcribe this data into text, which is sent back down to you. Then you can pop this text into emails or text messages. It's much faster than typing, especially if you have much to say.

And it works well in most cases. I'm not sure how to speak the punctuation, but other than that, it's very good. Sure, sometimes it gets a word or two wrong, and in this case it was an unfortunate word or two:

"Hi Heather this is Dave I'm just trying out this new program for the iPhone that will take Dick patient and writes down what you say so that you can type long e-mails easily love you bye"

"Dick patient" was, of course, supposed to be "dictation", a word that one might think this particular program would be very good at recognizing since it is called "Dragon Dictation".

Deepknight

Everyone asks me why my main email id is "deepknight" and why I use it in many other places as well. Well, it's a long story, but the short version is that I am a huge fan of fantasy literature (Lord of The Rings, Conan of Cimmeria, etc...) and a D&D fanatic, and the name of the group of adventurers we played with in D&D was "The Deep Knights". It also has a sort of second meaning, as in "deep, dark night". So it just stuck with me.

This graphic is an early example of my Photoshop craft, made for my website when I owned the domain www.deepknight.com, back in the late 90's. It depicts Brian's character, Branston, holding his glowing Dragonslayer sword. I assembled this from scratch, using bits and pieces of armor and sword pics from all over. I dented them, scratched them, added coats of arms and runes and blood. I did the glowing fire on the sword by hand. The detail I put into this thing was incredible. I was very proud of it. The triangle of stone at the right was the menu of my website, hovering over the triangles would reveal a part of the site navigation.

Alas, the original Photoshop file is gone, lost somewhere in my migration between ten or twelve subsequent computers. All that is left is this web-sized file. But I'm glad I still have it.

Coco "Rotten Tooth" Wild

Coco has been jealous of Jake's horrendous breath I think. Must be, because she has been practicing every day, trying to outperform him. And it's working, she has been spewing some truly horrifying aroma lately. I hope she doesn't have a rotten tooth.

It's like she's prepping herself for Beijing, getting ready to compete in the 200-yard bad breath event.

She'll get the gold for sure.