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Build Your Own Dog Wagon
An anonymous reader writes "Philip Greenspun isn't the only Web-site innovator with an interest in dogs, airplanes, photography, and travel. While Kyler Laird appears to operate on a budget that's a couple of orders of magnitude lower, his description of
adventures in dog-cart development
exhibit the same virtues of technical specificity and lucidity."
Lately, the cool thing to do is to put some nanotech together and build yourself your own DOG :)
Hrm.
Yeah, all those dogs in a RAID array... sure to run fast.
Or reliable.
Or some combination thereof.
While Kyler Laird appears to operate on a budget that's a couple of orders of magnitude lower,
Well, his web server sure doesn't show it.
The coolest voice ever.
it's like he's trying to karma whore -- the trollish kind, that is -- on his own weblog. (Which appears to be down right now. So much for my point.)
Already slashdotted by post #2?
Egads. Its late on a Friday night. I guess only people who have nowhere to be this weekend would be on slashdot.
oh wait....
I can't believe I stayed awake another whole 30 minutes just to see this post. My timing of fresh articles sucks
I knew him back in college. He used to stalk my roommate, and things got so bad that she needed to get a restraining order against him. Eventually, she transferred to a different school...
Me email iz skyewalkerluke at microsoft's free email service.
I was sitting on my front porch and a guy went by "walking" his dog by letting it pull him along on his bicycle. The little lightbulb thingy went off in my head (Ow! Stop it.)
Since that time I've "designed" several variants, also in my head, but I ran into a slight problem on approaching the development phase.
I don't particularly care for dogs.
My cats don't particularly care for the idea of being hitched up to a cart either.
And thus technology is set back decades by the peculiarities of a single man.
Oh, yeah, you can also already buy one commercially, so it's not like it's really a novel idea (mushers use them to keep their dogs in shape during the summer season. My idea is to make an ultralight one specifically tuned for running in the modern urban enviroment. Carbon fiber, racing bicycle wheels, that sort of thing).
Here's an example:
Dog Cart
KFG
You don't need a wagon when your dog is a World War I flyng ace.
Well I once saw a woman being pulled by her dog who was chasing a cat. It seemed to work pretty well so I really don't see the point of using these fancy carts and all. All you need is a cat, a cat-hating dog, a strong leash, an extra thick (on the front) jacket and kneepads.
Looks like his server is running on a chihuahua.
Sorry, let the karma burn...
I've discovered a remarkable proof, but this margin is too small to contain it...
Beo woof woof woof of those.
Since it's slash'd we wouldn't want this degenerating into a Dogs vs Cats thing. My kar doesn't particularly care for cats either....
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
Yeah, I think I saw that at a Joie Chitwood Thrill Show once. It got kinda pathetic when they tried to jump the school busses though.
I'd guess they have to try to talk a new woman into trying it for every performance.
KFG
I'd like to see a beowoof cluster of those!
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
wagon 00
I built "dog wagon 00" in June of 2003 as our oldest dog, Garbo, was losing his battle with osteosarcoma We had amputated the affected leg but while in California we discovered that the cancer had aggressively spread to his lungs. He had been able to get around well on three legs but his decreased lung capacity left him tired after the slightest walk once we returned to Indiana.
We love to take walks in our neighborhood and on the wonderful trails nearby. Leaving Garbo at home during these times was not an option. Carrying him wasn't an option either. (I had a Teeft lift harness with me when he first got tired on a walk but my back still strained from just carrying him under a mile.) I needed a quick solution.
At the same time that Garbo was slowing, our youngest, Grazie, was causing me problems by pulling ahead. She was usually coupled to Garbo during walks so that he could keep her in line and she could bring him when I called. (The girls have great recalls so I couple them to the boys.) With Garbo weakened, I let him walk on his own and tried to control Grazie on her own.
When I found Grazie (~7 years earlier), I decided not to teach her to heel. I wanted her to pull (me on Rollerblades, scooter, sled, ...) without constantly looking back at me like the other dogs did.
Well, now I was paying for it.
My arm ached; I was in quite a bit of pain from being split between her pulling ahead and Garbo dragging behind.
It was during one of these "wishbone moments" that I was inspired to remove myself from this painful balance of force.
My goal in assembling my first wagon was to use readily available parts. I bought the Radio Flyer ATW from Toys 'R' Us and used basic aluminum and miscellaneous parts from local hardware stores. The only delay was getting a Cascade carting harness from Black Ice.
The modification of the wagon for dog pulling is primarily a crudely-bent piece of 3/4" aluminum tubing. It's reinforced by a piece of channel aluminum where it connects instead of the normal wagon handle using a couple of small eyebolts as anchors for the hitch pin. I'd always intended to redo everything much better but the wagon has worked beautifully without modification.
That wagon was a key part of Garbo's final days with us and enabled us to better enjoy those days. We're sure that they also gave us more time with him because we were able to get him off the bed and engaged without tiring him.
After Garbo died in June of 2003, we continued
This reminds me...
Several years ago we got our first dog, an Alaskan Malemute. They're bred to pull sleds, so I decided to "walk" her while wearing my roller blades. The results were exhilarating. The only way for me to stop once she got up to speed was to let go of the leash, fall down, or wait for her to stop/turn. Cats coming into view proved very dangerous.
Who needs roller coasters when you've got a dog and skates?
Even when lost in contemplation of my navel over days of inadequate sleep...I can still tell when the weekend has arrived...thanks to slashdot. With a show of hands, who's seen best in show.
So your third choice should be to get a girlfriend who likes to be tied-up and hitch your ride to her. Then tell here ther'es a Dove bar at the end of the streeet.
I got the darn Starfleet Dress uniform all ready for it and everything, what a waste. What a P'taQ!
There was an episode of Lil' Rascals wherein they made a fire truck (I think). They had a dog on a treadmill as the engine. When they stepped on the "gas" pedal, it lifted the door between the dog and a cat. The dog saw the cat and gave chase, and powered the vehicle.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Since when is being funny the same as being a troll, dickwad?
It's worse- the guy who started photo.net, one of the internet's oldest photography resource sites, hasn't uploaded a photo or posted in almost two years. But he's had time to write a blog almost every day. It reminds me of the "oo, shiny" phenomenon.
For all his talk of ideals, I think he just wanted to make money off it, like every other MIT professor, it seems. When it became clear phoot.net wasn't going to be making him rich with an IPO and all, he bailed- they set up some fruity corporation ("luminal path corporation"? Gimme a break) and he's a member of the board of directors.
Photo.net is rotting; no innovation, nobody's fixing problems with it, the columns are self-promoting drivel...hell, go into the lens database and there's 50 billion different versions of the same exact lens typed slightly differently because people didn't pick from existing lenses, and nobody has gone into the database to clean up the mess. So we have the "EF 50mm/1.8", the "50/1.8", the "50mm EF-S f1.8", etc.
on his own weblog
One does wonder exactly how an MIT CS professor became qualified to have a weblog on Harvard Law's website.
Please help metamoderate.
A dog cart is actually a type of wagon pulled behind a horse.
You'd know that if you read some Sherlock Holmes. They need to call this something else.
I fully believe that he has probably done even worse than stalk some poor girl.
I detect a "trust-fund baby", without any question.
Either that, or a drug smuggler...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Is Techno Trousers to pull them!
it looked like a big wheelchair with a tall back, and outfit the straps to the harness on the dog, and even a doberman can pull it, they're usually used to help the dog build up its strength and muscles.
Fat chicks have mod points, dude.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
For some reason, when scanning the titles, I read this as "Build Your Own Dog Weapon", and had visions of a canon-like device that launched dogs...
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
...Dwarf Dachshund?
How is this of any interest to geeks?
She's a retriever,
not a trace of doubt in my mind.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Bicycle???
My wife just has her own "cycle".......