Guard dog

Yesterday I discovered that there is now version of PixelCat for OS X, and although it doesn't yet have all the features it had before (it will not rotate pictures - that will probably come in a later build), I downloaded it and found it works just fine for what I want. PixelCat is an image viewer. It is very, very small, free, and does only one thing, very quickly: it shows you your pictures. You dump a folder of pictures on it, and there they are, all laid out in thumbnails ready to click and view. I have iPhoto, of course, but it tends to be a bit slow with displaying pictures when I have a lot of them, which I frequently do. It gets cumbersome, and I don't use most of the features. PixelCat is fast, and I can just whiz through the pictures and select the ones I want to be properly displayed/edited/kept, and chuck out the rest.

(Although the PixelCat web page is in Japanese, the program itself is in English. Click on ダウンロード(Ver.0.3) near the bottom of the page to download.)

Yesterday I went through my photos from the trip to Europe last year, and got distracted, which is how most of the afternoon disappeared. But I thought I'd share three pictures that made me laugh.

In France, when I was staying with a friend in the countryside, we went for a walk one day, and as we were going past someone's place we saw a little dog.


We went closer to say hello, and it became suspicious. It looked at us sideways.


And then it decided that we were a CATASTROPHIC ADDITION TO THE NEIGHBOURHOOD and it needed to WARN EVERYBODY WITHIN A TEN KILOMETRE RADIUS.

"OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!" it howled.


And then, to make sure everybody got the message, it did it again.

It was a big noise for a small dog, and we decided it didn't want to be tickled under the chin after all.

If that was a guard dog it was an effective one. We jumped quite high, and I'm sure if we'd had any urge to invade the property we would have rethought our plans. Also, it must be difficult to conduct an effective invasion when you are laughing. I wouldn't want to try it.

ADDENDUM: It has occurred to me that since this was a French dog and I couldn't understand what it was saying, I may have misinterpreted. If we'd hung around a bit longer we might have found out that it was REALLY saying:

"OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!! La la!"