The Ruffles Report

{note: This post was originally drafted in October but updated in June of 2010 and finally published. Hence the backdating.}

I feel like every time I sit down to bang out a post, I have to start off by first apologizing for not posting more. I have excuses though, and this time good ones. Last month I was stricken with an illness that is all too common for us four-legs. Kennel Cough. The hacking, the wheezing, the licking up my own phlegm. I was not pleasant to be around. I had a pretty mild case but it really stuck with me, I just could not shake it.

So then my two-legs (technically the skirted-one) took me to the V-E-T. Yeah, they spelled it out to try to trick me, but I am smart enough to form simple sounds into words. I do have a brain. Anyway, that involved some booster shots, some probing, some sitting on a cold metal table while a strange two-legs examined me. The one silver lining is that it was confirmed that I am no longer a fattie. Hooray for being average weight! The icing on the cake is that big-little-bro is actually now the fattie. He could stand to lose about 5 lbs. Ha! Fattie.

For the past couple weeks I have honestly been too stressed to do much of anything. It all started mid August when my two-legs left me with a stranger for a few days. Then, when they came back my two-legs never left the house. He was just puttering around the house. Cleaning stuff, sometimes putting things into boxes. Something was definitely happening, but I just could not put my paw on it. Suddenly, in a flurry of activity this past weekend, our beautiful home was suddenly picked up an boxed away. They even tried to but me in a box!

I do not deserve this kind of treatment.

Every time they left the apartment it felt like it would be for the last time. I cried and cried. And pooped on the carpet (they did not appreciate that).  Then, two big burly two-legs came and took everything. All my toys, all my bones, the comfy couch, the bed, everything! The apartment was empty except for the skirted-one, my two-legs, and two sad, worried puppies (and tonnes of big-little-bro’s fur. Just look at the contrast where the bed was):

That dark stuff? Dirt and fur. Puppies are messy.

And then, we all left. Separately. My two-legs and I went to his car and the skirted-one and big-little-bro to theirs. I would not see them again for days.

This is all getting too emotional and I will have to break the post here. I will finish up the exciting conclusion in Part Two: It is Not the Journey.

My humblest apologies for the lack of updates. But I have a great excuse… and pictures to boot!

I used to get spoiled before I lived with my two-legs. I could anything I wanted. But now I have to scrounge. I only get his hand me downs. Take my computer for instance. You would think a hip young pup like myself would be rocking a MacBook Air or something. I do have an Apple computer, I suppose I should be happy about that. But being forced to this this jury-rigged computer is just sad:

A beatup PowerBook G4. My window to the world

My two-legs has had this since before I even existed. Both of the hinges have broken off so the screen just flops around like a dead fish. He “fixed” it by adding decorative string and gaffers tape to hold the screen up. Classy eh?

What’s more, his rigging put serious stress on the screen power cords. Now, every few minutes the screen shuts off. I then have to close the lid and reopen it, hoping it will come back on. If not, I close and reopen. Repeat ad nauseum. I think the power brick cord has a short in it… I keep burning my little paws.

Ugh! Forced to use inferior products.

So I have been pouting, and dealing. You have no idea how long it takes to get stuff done when you have to constantly open and close your laptop, are only surfing the Internet with Wireless B speeds, and have to download photos with a USB 1.1 speed port. Slooooooooow let me tell you.

I have a new system in place though. I just log on to my two-legs nice computer when he is at work. Ha! Suck on that two-legs.

Stay tuned for more of TheRufflesReport!

OK, I am really going to nerd out here a bit. So if you were looking for a cute story about me napping or harassing big-little-bro you will just have to come back in a couple days.

My two-legs is a huge nerd, and having lived around him for a few years his nerdiness has begun to rub off. I asked him to set up Google webmaster account for my domain. It has some cool referral stuff, and shows where your page is ranking in searches (there is much more cool stuff in there but I have not figured out what it is for yet). Page ranking is a tricky business. Companies spent untold amounts of money trying to get their web pages ranked number one on the various search engines. I know personally that I never go beyond the first page of Google results. If it did not come up at the top, I probably did not define my search properly. Page ranking also varies on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You may be king for a while, but someone else is always trying to knock you down. Let us see how TRR ranks with the Google:

You can try these out, none really worked for me.

These are results from the last 7 days (there are even weirder ones further back). I tried most of these links, and could not find my little corner of the web. *Sigh*
One that was very interesting (and for whatever reason not shown here) is I rank in the top 10ish for “what is ruffles” and of course, number 1 for “the ruffles report.”
But, are people honestly going to be searching for me? Like one day they think, “oh, I wonder if any dogs named ruffles are blogging about themselves” No. They are probably going to find me via referrals (or “friends”).

The two-legs’ web host has some decent tracking tools, one of which is the referral URL (how people got to my site). The top referrer is… *drumroll* … valria.wordpress.com! She has sent me a whooping 85 unique visits for the past year. I have no idea if they stayed to read anything, but I like to believe they did… I can hope.

Suck it Bing!

Here is some of the other data (because I know everyone loves to look at stats). Pretty standard stuff, except for the flux of people who found me via domaintools.com using a whois search… I guess therufflesreport.com is more valuable than previously thought. Hooray for land grabs.

And just for the fun of it, let us look at the number of unique visits to my little blog here:

Check out July, thanks for the support in my sad times!

So, why all this talk of visitors and referrers and other things you probably do not care about. Well, I was checking out the tumblarity of some two-legs I know (no, my two-legs does not tumble) and lately I have just been thinking about blogging, and internet popularity and all that jazz. I honestly do not know what to make of it all.

Hmmm, I honestly thought I would be able to come up with something more profound than all that, some sort of all all encompassing nugget of wisdom. I have thought on it a great deal (after all, I do nap and think every hour of every day) and I have not reached a definitive conclusion on anything.

“The internet is frickin’ awesome.” (I think we all can agree on that one) There is a great deal of noise though. “But we can generally filter the noise and only get what we want.” But there is just so much content out there. “True but so much of it is just rehashing of previous content and/or junk; so we rank the content.” But who does the ranking? “The crowds.” Hrmmmm. Do we trust the crowd? “Well, we can start with friends and family, see what they like, who they follow, and then build our own little internet crowd.” So, like a clique in high school? “Yes like a clique… no, no, no. It’s better. Cuz they are like, our friends, but we don’t really know them, but they post funny or interesting or insightful stuff, that we like.”  Do you happen to know what an echo chamber is (metaphorically)? “It’s not an echo chamber, it’s fun, and I like it, and shut up.”

The preceding was a conversation I had with myself the other day while looking introspectively at my own internet habits. I spend a fair amount of time surfing the intertubes. Not too much, just enough I would say. Certainly I could be on it more. There are some core sites I visit, I live by my feed reader. Some comics, some tech stuff. I do not really follow any two-legs directly, or any four-legs directly. To be quite honest, there is simply too much stuff out there. To many bloggers, too many tumblrs, two many twitterers, way too much stuff on youtube, quite frankly I just try to block it all out.

But there is a trap there, if I do not follow people, does that conversely mean people will not follow me? If I do not make my web presence known through blog rings, and referrals, and ranking, and search engine optimization, and re-tweeting, and re-tumblring, and generally being part of the Internet community, will I be left blog alone in my own little corner. Is a blog with no readers truly a blog?

My two-legs leaves me alone for a week for big-little-bro and the skirted one. He comes home, things are great. We have a nice weekend together, life seems good.

Last week, he might as well have been out of town. I never saw him. He would leave the house early, the skirted one would still be sleeping, I would be nestled in my little bed. He would just get up, shower, and walk out. We were all still asleep. Sometimes he would not even pet me goodbye. How rude!

I would have to sit at home all day, napping and dealing with big-little-bro. He would stumble in with the skirted one at 2000 or 2100. Then we would take a quick jaunt around the block. Then he would go back to bed. Is that lame or what? If I was lucky he would pet me for 20 or 30 minutes before going to sleep, but those days were few and far between.

On the weekend, which is supposed to be our time, he mostly just slept. No 4-legs park. No long walks. No nothing.

Yesterday he was all grumpy because a hard drive of his failed. I do not care if lost tons of data. I want to go for a long walk dammit! (He apparently had most of it backed up somewhere, but not everything. Always backup your data, and never buy Maxtor drives.)

Today he left early again. I can only hope this trend does not continue. I am in dire need of attention.

I know, I know, I have not posted in almost a week. It was just so boring around here. I made a promise to myself not bore you with the standard, everyday stuff (Well, not all the time at least). Things have started to pick up around here though, which is where my story begins…

My two-legs and the skirted-one have been acting odder than usual. I first noticed this on Monday. The skirted one was actually cleaning! She put away all of our toys and picked up stuff that had been sitting around for months. Odd, I thought, but not totally out of the norm. Then my two-legs comes home and dusts everything. Like June Cleaver or something. Ridiculous.

Tuesday was worse. I really started to get suspicious on Tuesday. He scrubbed the entire bathroom. Normally I would not have noticed as I hate going in there (except for water, which they insist on keeping next to the toilet, the other water bowl) but I started to smell some odd fumes pouring out of there. It was a completely new smell in there when he was done… smelled fresh. I think that is the first time it has smelled like that in there. Then he vacuumed. Boy did he vacuum. Everything. The floors, the beds, the couches, the chairs. There was no escape from the howling cylinder. Big-little-bro had some kind of ‘Nam flashback and started barking in nipping at it. Pretty entertaining to watch, good for a laugh (whilst I was cowering behind the skirted-one)

Then it came. Wednesday. What is traditionally an ordinary day, turned into something extraordinary. We had intruders guests. New two-legs came into our house and brought with them their new smells and willingness to pet us for hours. I am pretty sure they are big-little-bro’s grandparents. The skirted-one calls them “Ma” and “Pa”. They came late Wednesday and stayed up eating chips and drinking beers. They gave us rubs. I got to sit with “Pa.” Big-little-bro kept trying to give them kisses. It was wonderful.

This morning it was more of the same. Scratches, lounging, playing. They even took us to the puppy park this morning. And it is not even Saturday yet. Hooray! It was so nice. And then everyone left us… and it is so nice outside… And I am stuck here, not getting petted, not getting attention, not getting loved.

I am going to sit on the coffee table. That’ll show ‘em.

Yep, I am just going to sit here till they come home.