This page is devoted to answering all those questions about Charlie and the CharlieCam that are frequently asked. Or that would be frequently asked, if anyone actually ever asked any questions. Which they don't. Not out loud, anyway. But they are thinking them, just like you.
Q. Who is Charlie?
A. Charlie is the younger of our two adopted greyhounds. We brought him home in October of 2005 when he was just 16 months old. Or perhaps 18 months old. That age part isn't clear due to some murkiness in his past, and unlike a tree we can't count his rings.
Q. What do you mean by "murky past"?
A. We know surprisingly little about Charlie, and he came from a general dog rescue and not a greyhound rescue or track. What we know for sure:
Q. That's a pretty short list.
A. That's not a question.
Q. Humor me and speculate.
A. That's not a question, either, but sure, why not? There are several mysteries in the Universe of Charlie. For one, he's had his dew claws removed, but he's not tattooed. So, he's never been registered to race in the NGA but may have been considered as a coursing dog. His back legs are pigeon-toed, however, so he probably wouldn't have done well in either scenario. He was probably 16 to 18 months when we adopted him. He likes to whine. He likes to poop. He has moderate to severe separation anxiety, though it's tending more towards moderate as time goes on.
Q. What cool trivia can you tell me about Charlie?
A. He appears to be slightly hermaphroditic. We could determine that for sure with a blood test, but it's expensive and we have other things to spend money on.
Q. Why is he in a kennel?
A. Separation anxiety. In Charlie's case, it occasionally manifests itself as poop. I don't like picking up poop from our area rugs, so we fence him on the laminate floors and provide a kennel as a sleeping place. This gives him enough territory to not be cooped up but not enough to get into trouble.
Q. Where can I see better photos of Charlie?
There are a couple of photos here from the day he came home, and you can find some pictures of him (and our other greys) in our back yard here.
Q. Where is he?
A. Right there in the kennel, probably. The quality of webcams is hardly anything worth writing home about, so he can be hard to spot. He's sort of a light-tan brindle, somewhere between fawn and white but closer to white with black. Or, we might have let him out and the camera recorded an empty crate.
Q. Why isn't he moving?
A. He's a greyhound.
Q. Why doesn't your camera run longer/24x7/more often?
A. Because he's not in his kennel when we're home (would you be?)
Q. Is there a live video feed? How about audio?
A. There's no video feed because our bandwidth is too precious. There's no audio because there's really nothing to listen to and it's not worth the trouble to set it up.
Q. When was the picture last updated?
A. Each picture has a timestamp indicating the last update.
Q. Why isn't it updating? It's between the times you say it should be running.
A. If the cam isn't up it means one of us had the day off or it's not a work day or we're home for some other reason. It could also mean that the upload is failing or the camera machine crashed (it's running Windows, so that happens).