It’s the peak of the hurricane season here on the east coast and the first major storm of the year to come near the mainland U.S. is close at hand. The following article has just appeared thehorse.com. Additional information can also be found here on the American Association of Equine Practitioners website. This storm is expected to stay just off of our area and we’ll probably see tropical storm force winds. Doesn’t much more serious than some nor’easters during the winter, but you just never know.
Aug 262010
This article recently appeared in the New York Times about air bag vests for riders. Worn over protective vests they seem to offer added protection to the spine and internal organs. The article discusses how rotational accidents occur and these vests may not help if the horse flips over and lands on top of the rider. So what’s next…ROPS (Roll Over Protection Structure) for horses? I think not. It’s time to stop asking horses to jump impossibly difficult fences for no other reason than for competition. What do you think?
According to a post on the Official Google Blog Google has fully implemented their new indexing system named Caffeine. What does that mean to all of us poor small scale website designers? I’m not sure it’s going to be good for many of us.
To start, we build a site for a client and upload it. Most of the time these are small businesses working hard to make ends meet. They want a website or a makeover of their existing site to help them generate more business. The new Google finds it quickly and indexes it fast so the client will be thrilled when his new site ranks high in the search results.
Then, the trouble begins. The happy client doesn’t have anything else to add to his site and the designer can’t be an expert on everything so he can’t add anything new either. Google is meanwhile indexing other pages with newer content and the once happy website owner is seeing his site’s ranking dropping. Sales maybe dropping off or calls and emails have stopped coming in and now the client is questioning our SEO experience and starting to wonder if he made a mistake trusting us to build business for them. What are we going to do now they ask?
Well, lately I have been suggesting a WordPress blog for them. It’s easy to update and sometimes they can do it themselves if they want. But to satisfy the craving for fresh content that Google Caffeine seems to have they’ll have a hard job. A lot are pressed for time working; short-handed at their business trying to make a living. Now, with Google Caffeine at work, they’ll have to update their website or blog and update their status on Facebook while tweeting on Twitter.
What’s a small business owner to do? The same thing I’m doing right now. Writing aimlessly, trying to use all the right words so that when Googlebot crawls this post it will be indexed as new and move my site up in page rank. I hope this works.
The Horse Show Blog had an interesting post about hand feeding your horse. You can read it here as well as my comment ( I’m Laurie). I have always given my horses treats by hand after a workout and always taught my students the safe way to do it. So far, I’ve never had an overly aggressive horse because of it. If they were aggressive it was for other reasons.
I agree with Rick Lamb
“How do you get your horse to respect your space? First, you have to claim your space as your own and never, ever allow your horse to enter it uninvited. You must defend your space with whatever amount of energy is required to get the point across. And this is important: you have to be consistent. If crowding into your space is wrong today, it has to be wrong tomorrow and every day after that. There must be a negative instant consequence (a NIC, in Monty Roberts’s words) to that behavior every single time.”
He is absolutely correct about your space is yours. In the herd a horse only lets another horse into his space if the other horse is higher in the pecking order. A person in my opinion always has to be the highest in the pecking order. There is no other way.
He also is right about consistency. I always call it persistent and consistent. We can’t give up when we make a request and we have to always ask the same way.
Jul 142010
A Skystream 3.7 wind turbine generates a portion of the farm’s electricity.
Wind Turbine Generating a Portion of the Farm's Electricity
Jul 102010
The CHA has a excellent video showing the proper guidelines for fitting a helmet. Watch it here. After all, what good will a helmet do in a fall if it hits the ground before the rider does.
Jul 032010
Tri-State Engineering of Maryland’s website has been updated. They are an excellent machine shop and super nice folks to deal with too.
