He quickly found it in iPhoto, which comes free with Macs, and printed it out on his Epson AcuLaser C1100 – one of the new generation of astonishingly cheap colour laser printers.

When the flyer turned up on Bleeding Edge’s doorstep, we were quite impressed. The quality of the image was very good, for a printer that costs around $700, and three weeks after he’d posted them on various light poles around Caulfield and St Kilda, they were still in surprisingly good condition.

He estimates that it would have cost him $100 to have the brochures printed at Office Works. It cost a lot less than that with the AcuLaser. It prints roughly five colour pages per minute, and 25 black and white, and works with both Macs and Windows PCs.

The fact that it has a USB 2.0 link means that Shrek’s owner has been able to hook it into a print server port on his wireless router, so he can sit anywhere in his house with his laptop, and print colour documents using the Mac’s Bonjour technology, which works with an increasing number of printers. When you add your Mac to a network, Mac OS X automatically discovers and connects to the available Bonjour-enabled printers.

The owner also had a .mac account, which meant that he could put up that blog, and divert it to his .mac address. The domain name cost him a little more than we would have paid at our favourite domain registry, namecheap.com, but it was still less than $15.

He used a free blogging program from Apple called iBlog, and a program called ComicLife, which allows you to use your iPhoto library with various templates to create various comic effects. He used it to give Shrek a “voice” in a comic balloon: “I want to go home”.
In fact, by this time, three days after he’d disappeared, Shrek probably did want to go home. There was no way, however, that he could.

The owner had spent the first 48 hours since his disappearance trawling through the list of vets in Victoria on Google. He used the Mac’s in-built Mail program to send out emails embedded with a photo (a small 20k JPG) of Shrek. In some cases he used a fax. The Mac comes with one of those, too. He located a number of online forums and lost dogs sites where you can put a description of your dog and a picture.

He’d been handing out the flyer to dog walkers, dog washers, and pet suppliers, and he’d registered for a service at Sensis’ online Trading Post, which alerted him to any advertisements for German shepherds.

It wasn’t until a week after Shrek’s disappearance that his owner discovered that the dog was still alive. It was the afternoon of April 14. He got a call from the lost dogs home telling him that a man had walked in, and told them he had picked up the dog, which he identified by giving three letters of his ear tattoo. He spoke to the owner, but it quickly became clear he didn’t want to give the dog back.

He took the owner’s phone number, and left a phone number with the lost dog’s home. But he didn’t call back. When the owner tried to retrieve the number, he found that the lost dogs home keeps its records in a red accountant’s book, and nobody could find any notation about Shrek. (The owner intends to offer them some assistance to computerise their system.)

A day or so later, the man who had found Shrek rang back from an unlisted number. The owner had a copy of AquaMinds Software’s Notetaker (aquaminds.com), which runs on a Mac. It’s a personal note and idea organiser, but much like Microsoft’s OneNote, which does a similar job in Windows, it allows you to keep a voice recording with your notes. That which allowed him to record his end of the conversation, and make notes. He made it clear that he wouldn’t be giving the dog back.

Shrek’s owner reported the matter to the police. They told him they could get authorisation to reveal any unlisted telephone calls to his phone. It would take two weeks, however, and they weren’t sure they could justify the expenditure.

Instead he rang his telephone provider, Optus, and spoke to their Law Enforcement Liaison Unit. They told him they didn’t have to wait for another call. They could identify the number of the previous call, provided the police authorised it. It would take less than an hour on a working day, and it was free.

The police rang the number and had a conversation with the man who answered. It turned out he lived an hour out of Melbourne, and had picked Shrek up while passing through St Kilda. A day later, Shrek was reunited to his owner at the police station. The story is recorded on the blog, and Shrek has become the talk of the dog community of Caulfield Park. These days, Shrek doesn’t go anywhere without a mobile phone. He’s a high-tech dog.