Housekeeping and the Blue Screen of Death

Ricky is still working through Challenge #6, which involves 2 touches to get food.  He is getting better at watching for the lights, and in his typical frugal manner of expending energy, he has figured out he only needs to tip his nose down and back to see over it rather than bouncing back and forth like you might see from videos of other users. He still gets a bit ambitious and occasionally holds his nose in place as, on a random basis, he has a 1/3 chance that the light right under his nose will be the one to light up.  He also still plays it a bit like a keyboard while waiting for the lights to alert, again, probably due to the odd occasion when this has resulted in faster reward due to the chance circumstance of the light under his nose going off. Check out his progress here

Our progress has been slowed this week by a couple of key learnings on my part.  Number 1--the importance of good housekeeping!  We have had a few occasions where a light doesn't seem to respond to being touched. A good clean up of the light board seems to set it right, so it appears the aberrant device responses were due to a build up of nose drippies (as Ricky doesn't really slobber) on the light pads.  I have heard of other users on the forum I follow experiencing aberrances in the device's responses associated with excess wetting/drool. So we will be instituting a strict regime of wiping it down with a damp cloth twice daily.  Easy to remember--whenever Ricky gets his twice daily heart meds, his machine gets it's twice daily wipe-down to keep his happy heart entertained.
Our second complicating factor this week has been the "blue screen of death".  Much akin to this event when it happens on our own desktop computers, when the dark blue/indigo light shows up, it means we're having internet connection issues and the device has fallen into off-line mode and is minimally functional.  The high winds have been jostling our internet antennae a bit, and good connection can be challenging enough on a fine day on our rural internet connection.  So I have had to do a fair bit of resetting of the device, and one day even just had to put it away for most of the day as our internet was playing up quite badly--that was the day I had to do mobile tethering to get internet connection on our desktop!  We hope for better internet access options in the future, although that may be fairly distant as the fiber cable currently runs down behind our neighbour's dairy farm.