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F-sharp

Bruno

We’ve been training Bruno, our puppy, to be quiet while being confined in his playpen. The training involves getting him to start whining (which doesn’t take much – just diverting our attention from him for a few moments) and giving him a “Quiet!” command. As soon as he stops barking, even for a few seconds, coming to him and giving some reward – a treat, a pet on the head, etc. It seems to be working, but the difficult part is consistency. I find that Bruno is particularly clinging and wants my attention when I really need to focus on something else.

A few days ago I was trying to practice violin-playing, while Bruno was sitting in the next room. I had an electronic tuner clipped to my music stand. It has a microphone and a display that shows the note being played. I noticed that Bruno’s whining spans an entire octave, from A to G#. The funny thing is that at one point I muttered a curse at him for not giving me a chance to play. I didn’t quite say what I wanted to, but the machine rather appropriately showed “F#” on the screen. Is it a sign of an AI?

F-sharp

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Ballet bun

Ballet

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been learning quite a bit about dance through my involvement in dance photography at my daughter’s dance school. Few weeks ago, I was shooting a demo video on how to make a ballet bun ahead of the year-end show. I realized that stage hairstyling is one of the skills that I never thought I’d ever be interested in. Yet nowadays, because of my daughter, ballet bun-making is quite high on my list of essential things to master – for those days when mom cannot make it to practice.

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Storytelling challenge

MT-09 engine

I am finding that telling a story in a form of a daily motovlog is quite challenging, when limite by a single point-of-view of a GoPro camera and the absence of any voice commentary. At the same time, there is something to be said in favour of about these self-imposed limitations. I might experiment with including a secondary view from another camera at some point, but the reality is that even now it is difficult to keep up with the footage I generate on my short rides in terms of editing.

Evidently, there is not much drama in my short bike commutes (which is probably a good thing), but that is beside the point. The exercise for me is to practice storytelling by highlighting small details that normally go unnoticed. And it is indeed fun to focus attention on the mundane things. For instance, while scrolling through the GoPro footage, I noticed how the framing rate creates optical illusions with the wheels of the moving cars – one of the things that a human eye normally doesn’t do.

Here is the second video in the series.

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Riding with a GoPro

MT-09

When my old motorbike got knocked over by a car on a parking lot, my daughter’s first reaction was: “Yay! Dad is going to have a new bike!” Although I didn’t share her enthusiasm at the moment, the bike hit all the expensive parts as it fell, and the insurance company wrote it off as a total loss. So it turned out my daughter was right, I now have a brand new Yamaha MT-09. I’ve been enjoying riding it everywhere for the past week.

Suzuki down

While looking around online for bike reviews, etc., I came across a motovlog by Royal Jordanian, who has a very particular style: he rides round London and uses very little commentary to complement his GoPro footage. It’s counter-intuitive that movies like this would be interesting, but they are, in a strange way. This inspired me to try a variation of this blogging while I ride around. Granted, Victoria traffic doesn’t offer the entertainment value of London’s jams, and filtering between lanes (a main feature of RJ’s rides) is illegal in Canada anyway. Still, I remember the time when, before moving to Victoria, I was looking for anything related to the city – webcams, blogs, videos – to make a mental model of the place that was going to be my new home. I would have certainly liked to see the city from the perspective of someone on a motorbike.

MT-09 is a naked bike, so I didn’t want to spoil its look and feel by installing any luggage racks. Likewise, I didn’t want to mount a GoPro camera on my new helmet. My current compromise is carrying a backpack (it is a bit of an adjustment to minimize the amount of stuff I am used to lugging around on a daily basis) and mount the GoPro on a chest harness.

So here is the result. Maybe, the first video in this series.

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Pelmeni-ravioli

Pelmeni

During the last long weekend, we finally tried a culinary experiment that was on the back of our minds for a while. A friend of ours has an industrial-grade Italian pasta-making machine, and we used it to make Russian-style dumplings called pelmeni. They are similar to Italian ravioli, but stuffed with raw ground meat that is cooked at the same time as its pasta cover.

I always thought that making dumplings by hand was a special social tradition for our family. It turns out that high-output ravioli production line is even more fun and socially engaging. The ravioli machine crunched 5 kg of ingredients into long strips of dumplings. My seven-year-old daughter enormously enjoyed peeling off the dumplings from a fast-moving band and setting them on drying trays.

The verdict is that the result of the culinary experiment was a complete success. The dumplings turned out to be quite different from both Italian ravioli and Russian pelmeni, but both Russians and Italians among us liked them.

Another success was that Bruno, our four-months-old puppy, stayed home alone for more than three hours without a bathroom accident and was completely content when we came back. Small victories are so sweet!

Pasta

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Plein air

Over the golf course

Over the past weekend, we finally had the perfect weather to get out and enjoy the outdoors. I cannot blame only the weather for putting on hold golf and other fun hobbies during the last school term, though. With a combination of teaching a new course and the usual flow of research projects, I was struggling to keep up. So getting out to the driving range literally felt like a breath of fresh air.

Bruno, the Lagotto puppy, could not join us on the range, but he enjoyed hiking in the hills overlooking the golf course, with my wife and I taking turns to keep him company. After all this walking, Bruno still had enough energy to run a few sprints with my daughter in our backyard. Eventually, he did get sufficiently tired to give her a few quiet moments to do some plein air drawing.

Running with puppy

Artist and her dog

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Puppy age

Puppy toy

When we brought home Bruno, the puppy, one of my concerns was that his and my 7-years-old daughter’s bubbling energies would resonate and cause some kind of cataclysm. Nothing that dramatic happened so far. In fact, she apparently enjoys the responsibility of showing an example of calm composure. The success is a bit mixed, but I’ll take it.

Still, my daughter and Bruno are close to each other “in dog years”, so she has a surprising insight into how he thinks and what he likes. The other day, she picked up a giant bone-shaped sheepskin stuffy for him. I was quite sure sceptical, because the toy was larger than Bruno himself. I thought that if I was a dog it wouldn’t have interested me at all. I was wrong. He was absolutely delighted, and so was my daughter for having read the puppy’s thoughts.

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Meet Bruno

Bruno

Bruno is a Lagotto Romagnolo puppy. We brought him home today, and he is my seven-year-old’s daughter’s first dog. In the morning, she told us: “Today is going be the most memorable day of my life!” I believe she is likely right. For me personally, the days of bringing home my first dog and, many years later, our African Grey Parrot named Zorro are right up there in my memory along with the birth day of my daughter herself. Truly, our pets become members of our family. Glad to have met you, Bruno!

I have always been interested in dogs, but I haven’t heard about this breed until earlier this year, when we firmly decided to have puppy. This is ironic, because based on the description it is a perfect intersection of what my daughter, my wife and I were had been looking for in a dog. It is still quite rare in North America, but we were lucky to find Bruno, along with an incredible support from his breeder practically in our backyard. Well, actually, it is a 2-hour drive away, which proved to be no problem whatsoever for Bruno (no, as incredible as Lagotti are, he was not driving).

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Positive reinforcement

We are bringing home a new puppy this weekend. It has been my daughter’s dream, and we all are incredibly excited. I used to have a dog long time ago, but things have changed since then in nearly all aspects of dog ownership, from food to training approaches to the amount of information available. I’ve been enjoying the period of waiting for the puppy to grow old enough to be taken home by making most of it and reading the book I wanted to read even before we were considering taking a puppy – “Don’t Shoot the Dog” by Karen Prior. As with many great books, this one goes beyond dog training to a much wider context of shaping behaviours by positive reinforcement. It is uncanny how similar training of humans (indeed, education) is to that of animals. The book is so direct in making these analogies that it even took me aback a little bit: “I get it that it’s effective, but is it really alright to treat kids and loved ones like dogs?” I am over exaggerating the moral dilemma, but there is an unsettling aspect of whether behaviour shaping is too manipulative, at least when applied to human relationships.

I rationalize the issue for myself  by shifting my perspective to that of the trainee (e.g., the dog). This is beautifully illustrated by Jane Killion her “Puppy Culture” video, which was recommended by  our breeder. Take for example an exercise of taking a bone away from a dog and rewarding him with a higher-value treat for giving up the bone. On the one hand, this is, essentially, imposing your view of the social structure and overriding a perfectly natural canine behaviour (resource guarding). But on the other hand, you are enabling the dog to use his behaviour to manipulate the environment (your giving him a treat). So who is manipulating whom is a matter of perspective.


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Pizza day

Our daughter’s school is moving in the right direction, in our opinion, by introducing a “hot lunch day” in addition to a “pizza day”, which that already have. We really liked the school lunch menu that was offered in Milan, where we were on sabbatical two years ago. It was one thing we really missed when we came back to Canada. But even two days a week is better than none.

The pizza days are a big hit with the kids, but they don’t start until the third week in the school term. Last week, our daughter was looking forward to it so much that we could not wait and decided to have our own pizza night at home. Helping with cooking made it even more special.