Hey gang!

Well it has been a CRAZY few weeks and I am well and truly exhausted but having some fun as well. My wife has recently returned to the work force, so I am back on full-time dad duty and won’t be around the PC as much until Corina is back in school. I’ll still be doing my P2L duties and running my shop at www.predatorstuff.com so no worries, I’m definitely around and up to no good!

Mira Foundation Update:

As you may have read previously, we recently became a sponsor family for a Mira puppy, which we keep for a year before he is given back to the foundation for formal training and finally, given to a blind or disabled person.

It’s been 3 weeks and the dog is quite clearly extremely intelligent, it took only 2 weeks to housebreak him and this is with zero crate training or paper/pad technique. So at 2 months old, Simba goes to the door when he needs to “leave presents”, obeys sit and lay down consistently and now we’re working on stay. It’s really quite remarkable how quickly he picks up on these training concepts and we’ve been practising some basic lead work with no choker and even that is already pretty advanced compared to other pups I’ve raised.

The most amusing thing with this guy is that he sleeps… CONSTANTLY! I know very young pups can sleep a good bit, but my last puppy, which was a German Shepherd, didn’t stop moving 24/7. Simba basically sleeps any time he can. In fact, when we go shopping at the mall and stop in a store to quickly browse a clothing rack, he’ll take the 10 seconds to lay down and promptly fall asleep. We took him to his first vaccination an group session yesterday and I had a chance to speak to some of the other owners and this seems to be consistent with all the other owners. Only 1 person said their dog was up constantly.

So at this point I am really happy with Simba, he’s an awesome dog and I’m having a blast! Corina is also getting over her huge fear of dogs and she doesn’t seem to be exhibiting any allergy symptoms so this is all working out quite well. For you single guys, you will be AMAZED at this four legged “babe magnet”. Seriously, I am swarmed by TONS of girls (and kids, senior citizens, adults etc etc) that want a chance to pet him, it’s a riot. Not that I’m saying you should do this for the sake of meeting people, but it’s just CRAZY the attention you get. We have to take him everywhere with us and all you hear are oohs and ahhs and cooing as you walk through the mall, it gets to the point that it’s almost embarrassing because you know everyone is looking at you and your dog. God help you if the dog has an accident in the mall, because you know all eyes are on your when it happens! But so far so good, and we’re having fun. Mira is very well known here in Montreal, so many people recognize the emblem he wears on his scarf and I’ve even had people shake my hand congratulating me on what we’re doing. It’s a great feeling and this is the stuff I will remember when it comes time to giving him back *dread* *dread*

So overall this has been a very pleasing experience so far and I truly love this dog and it’s really amazing to have a puppy around again. My daughter is just so proud of her “baby brother”, it’s awesome. We try to remind her that he’ll have to go next year, but I can already tell this will be a nightmare. Luckily we’ll be going to Disney World right after he goes back, so you can imagine that Disney + 5 year old = bliss. After maybe we’ll get our own dog to keep, although my wife isn’t very keen on having a dog permanently… we’ll have to work on her on that one 😉

Techtuts Launch

Just a heads up that Techtuts is back with a new upgrade and it looks great! This is a tutorial site coded by P2L staff member Adam and hes really quite proud of his new site, so wanted to share with everyone.

There’s a whole bunch of new features, including a new User Control Panel, new Tutorial system and a whole bunch more. You can read the official release notice here on their forums. Congrats Adam, it looks awesome!

Pixel2life v4 Follow-Up:

Well it’s been almost a week since we launched the new version of Pixel2life and it has been a huge success and people definitely love the new changes. There are of course some folks that don’t like certain elements, but that’s to be expected as you can’t lease everyone, especially when you have 30,000 people visiting your site daily. The majority seem pleased, so that’s all you can really hope for. Heck if I listened to the haters, we’d still be on v1 lol! But on a serious note, I still read all the comments be it good or bad and I will address any of the negative points if possible. Obviously things like “Wah everything sucks, where mommy?” type comments can’t really be acted upon as they’re completely useless, but things like people asking that ads be more distinctive so they can be more easily identified among the content will definitely be looked at. We’ve also had some people mentions issues with the dropdown category browser dropping too far off the page, so we’ll be addressing these issues.

Trust me, I value EVERYONE’S opinions, as long as they are constructive and not idiotic ramblings that are from people complaining for the sake of complaining. If there’s anything I’ve learned both from running a large site and working in corporate environments, it’s that people detest change. This is natural and even people that claim they love change really don’t… it’s like saying “I think out of the box”, when you clearly don’t and just do your job and want your pay check at the end of the day. So it’s natural for most people to not like something fairly different, so I tend to get the better comments after folks have had a couple of weeks to use the new system and can offer their thoughts without a gag reflex getting in the way from change-up overload.

Either way, I am REALLY pleased and proud of this release, and Nick, Jamie and Adam all did a kick ass job of putting this together from my design mockups and worked with me all hours to finish this up. Nice going guys, hats off to your hard work! For the the rest of the community, I hope you enjoy the new changes and enjoy what we have coming up in the near future.

Thanks for reading and remember you can post comments using the form below!

Dan