Qwerty video from Modified Toy Orchestra on Vimeo.

We like this in our house. We like it a very great deal.

So here's what happened ...

The cat spent the night sleeping in her usual place on Daniel's bed. Waking at around five, perhaps disturbed by Daniel rolling over, she, as so many of us do, got up and headed off for her morning constitutional.

She heads downstairs, but the kitchen door is closed and she cannot get to the cat flap and the vast cat-toilet outside in the garden. She rattles the door, in the process waking the dog. He is excited that the cat wants to see him, because he loves her. He loves her so much he can't, with his limited dog vocabulary, properly express it. The cat rattles and pokes and scratches and meowls but all the people in the house are still asleep, so there's nobody with an opposable thumb around who can open the door for her. She gives up and goes off to seek an alternative toiletting venue.

For the dog this is all highly exciting. In his now agitated state, he's in the mood to do something silly. In fact he must, he must do something silly because it's the only way to calm down. He pops his front paws up on the kitchen counter looking for something, anything, to chew on. Well, almost anything. For reasons that only make sense to a dog he ignores the tasty packet of bagels, opting instead for an unopened packet of ibuprofen. While lacking the skills to open a door, he's able to open the box and extract all the tablets from the plastic and foil wrapper. Calmer, but now seized with guilt, he settles back down on his mat.

The cat, having expressed her displeasure in the Lego basket, heads back upstairs to Daniel's bed. She hops up and gives him a good paws-and-claws massage as a prelude to curling up. Under this prickly onslaught he awakes, sits up, and looks blearily at the clock. To his sleepclouded eyes, he misreads half past five as half past six. Half past six? They day's a-wasting. He rises and stumps downstairs. Arriving in the kitchen, he sees the dog, he sees the empty box, and is now sufficiently awake to realise something's amiss. The alarm is duly raised.

In short order, the dog and I are on the way to the out-of-hours emergency vets. Ibuprofen, while relatively harmless to humans, is really quite toxic to dogs, leading to stomach ulcers, kidney failure, and, if untreated, death. The vets admit him in order to administer an emetic, run blood tests, and put him on intravenous fluids. I head home.

The Lego goes into the washing machine.

Pausing at home long enough to piece together the clues and have a piece of toast, I head back to the emergency vets to collect the dog and transfer him to our usual vets round the corner. You might think Solihull was too refined to have a rush hour, but you'd be wrong.

Back at the emergency vets, I outline my theory to the vetinary nurse and speculate that the emetic did the business. "Oh yes! Oooooh yes!" she replies. From his Tardis-like innards he has vomitted massively, producing a pill-speckled bucketful of the previous evening's dognosh. Am relieved.

Dog delighted and excited to see me because this is, after all, a massive adventure. I pay the bill - a smidge over two hundred quid. We crawl back through the rush hour to our vets, where they admit him for more fluids and to run more blood tests.

Dog is declared fit to come home at the end of the afternoon. I pay this bill - another two hundred quid. Dog appears to be of a mind that is thoroughly worth it.

He had a really brilliant and exciting day.

From: Daniel
Subject: Re: Youtube

Contextual notes:

• Monty is our dog.
• Daniel had uploaded a video when he came home from school.
• I was out on site for the day and would be back late.
• I thought it would be amusing to email him.
• This is the video in question
  

I've had a 3G dongle for a while now. It works well enough, but can be a little fiddly. You have to install a driver, of course, and it also has its own dialer program. That's fine, except that dialer doesn't always recognise that you've plugged the dongle in. I discovered by accident that the Windows built-in stuff is perfectly happy to dial for you, but it's still a minor pain. On a whim this afternoon, I popped the dongle into my Ubuntu Linux laptop. It picked up the dongle immediately, whipped me though setting it up for my provider, and that was that. Fab.

My fancy-pants HTC Desire phone offers USB tethering, so it too can act as a 3G dongle. I'd never tried it, but spurred on by my exciting little success, I plugged into my Windows laptop. It whirred away and installed a driver, rebooted the phone (!) and, ..., well nothing as far as I could see. I had a half-hearted poke around, but to no effect. Plugged phone into Linux laptop and it immediately connected. Turned off tethering. Turned it on again - reconnected straightaway. Magic.

I'm not a particularly unhappy Windows user, but it's really getting its arse kicked in this little corner of the user-convenience space.

• A chewed up ibuprofen box on the kitchen floor.
• Daniel got out of bed at 5:30.
• A fresh cat poo in the kid's lego basket.
• The dog looks guilty.

None of the events are usual, and they are all linked.

What has happened? What are the consequences?