Friday the 13th of July…I thought I wouldn’t have to go through this range of emotions for a couple more years.

Similar to Will’s post about Harmoni, our Little Tragedy #3, Tiki succumbed to a similar fate. We were watching Tiki for a friend of mine as she prepared to move to Texas. We had him for a couple of weeks and really grew to like him despite his wanting to go outside, several escape attempts and howling in the middle of the night.

He was a thin little guy, but he held his own against our six other kitties. He immediately gained the respect of the others and even tried to put the moves on Patches. It wasn’t too long before he claimed a spot on the bed. I knew things were not good when he started to sleep a lot and had no desire to play outside - it was an all too familiar feeling. I told his owner the night before about his condition and she decided to take him to the emergency vet. Only 3 out of the 7 times that I have visited an emergency vet have I walked back out with my pet. Although Tiki wasn’t mine, he became part of the family and we all grew to love him in that short amount of time. I really wish I had a definitive answer on what the problem was, but that was not my decision to make despite my pleas.

I cannot tell you how much I hate the fact that we have the ability to take a life. I don’t agree with the practice and would rather have the animal pass on its own. When Pooch died last year, she waited until she took her last walk, went to her bed and went to sleep forever. We knew it was a matter of time and she went on her own terms.

For all of you with pets, take care of them up until their last breath. Don’t put your pet down without knowing what exactly was ailing it. It is the least we can do before taking their life.

Tabi’s siblings, Todd and Leila, have come to stay with us for a couple of months. Here is Leila with Nadia, shortly after she came out from hiding behind the couch:

[soapbox]f9c3bc8a-515f-4c56-8191-bea51350f889[/soapbox]

She’s been a mix of happy and pissed. The video shows her happily eating food and being affectionate, but at the same time hissing and growling, even biting me at one point. Her brother is still under the bed, and has been there for the past 24 hours.

On a not-so-related topic, I was invited to the MSN Soapbox beta, Microsoft’s answer to YouTube. I find the interface of the service to be superior to Youtube and Google Video, but not by a lot. Since everyone and their mother uses Youtube, I figured that I’d be different and go with the new service.

Over the past few months at work I’ve been focused on Wordpress, particularly in the area of plugins. As much as I like this CMS, I find it to be terribly limited. Every problem I run across needs a user-contributed plugin to solve it; one of those issues is the inclusion of videos that use Flash-based players like YouTube. I came across an excellent plugin named Viper’s Video Quicktags. This plugin allows for easy insertion of all sorts of video formats, including YouTube and Google Video.

This is the part where I bring these seemingly random topics together: I uploaded Leila’s video to Soapbox, and then realized that the video plugin didn’t support it. I made some minor edits to the plugin to support it, and the above is the result of my work. Now I have to send the source code over to the author. Maybe it could be included in the next version of the plugin.