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Laurie Niles

i-Dog blog

July 14, 2008 at 6:41 PM

I have found a new soulmate, someone who responds to his (or is it her?) environment in the same way I do:

Photo

Actually "Blue's Clues" is my daughter's i-Dog, given to her for her 11th birthday last week.

Blue feeds on music; music is the sole mover of his moods. Yes, Blue has moods; I read that in the User's Guide. He shows his moods by a series of Morse-code-like flashing dots on his snout, and they have quite a range: ecstatic, excited, happy, normal, bored, lonely and sick. If you leave the i-Dog alone too long in silence, it will "cry" and play sad music. If it is constantly begging for music and attention, you can tap its tail to shut it up for five minutes, but this will make the i-Dog angry. Really, you need to keep feeding it happy music and patting its nose; then it will nod its head and flick its ears and its snout will light up in sync with your tunage. And it will be happy, excited, even ecstatic.

What I love is that the i-Dog blink code for "happy" is short and sweet, while "lonely" is a long, complex series of 12 color blink patterns. If you're happy, you're just happy. If you're sad, there's some long, complex story behind it. Like Tolstoy wrote: "Happy i-Dogs are all alike; every unhappy i-Dog is unhappy in its own way." Something like that.

Just feed me music!

From Stephen Brivati
Posted on July 14, 2008 at 11:47 PM
Greetings,
somewhat similar to the Tamagotchi phenomenon in Japan a few years back. Kids actually had to nurture an electronic egg, chick over time or it would die.
Bring back the Dixie Chicks,
Buri
From Rosalind Porter
Posted on July 15, 2008 at 12:10 AM
How does it react to Bach?

(I can see that Mom has commandeered this birthday present...!)

From Laurie Niles
Posted on July 15, 2008 at 5:00 PM
I have not yet fed it Bach; it's been busy with my daughter's Disney-crowd pop tunes! I will experiment and report back....
From Pauline Lerner
Posted on July 16, 2008 at 4:03 AM
That's a great toy, Laurie. Thanks for telling us about it. I, too, would like to know how it reacts to Bach -- and the Carnival of the Animals.
From Bart Meijer
Posted on July 16, 2008 at 7:17 PM
An i-dog probably isn't capable of sleeping with the governess -- that's a good thing.

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