So I posted this the other day kind of flippantly. I wasn't looking for the response I got but I really found the whole math of the mod system pretty amusing. It got modded up a few times as insightful (when it shouldn't have) and then modded as over rated and then finally as troll. Kind of funny.
Has anyone been reading Dilbert this last week?
I am beginning to think the conservative media theory really does exist, they have been surpressing the riots by all of the Christians. There can be no other explaination.
Much to my delight the little guy is starting to walk. Compared to learning to crawl he has taken his sweet time, which was a bit concerning. Every parent wants to brag about the exploits of their children, but when yours seem behind the curve you worry and fret. When he was crawling at 5 1/2 months my wife and I were amazed at how advanced he seemed, and for the last couple months I've been worried that he was stalled for some reason. Well, it seems from what I have been reading an early crawler will often be behind on the walking curve since they have learned how to move to where they wish to go, walking seems only to be an inpediment.
Saturday my wife was in the living room with the little guy and he wanted to be picked up. Usually he will crawl up to you and then start climbing up your legs into a standing position and then wave his hands over his head. Well this time instead of grabbing her legs he just stood up in front of and waved his hands. Well, that ofcourse had to be rewarded with a big congratulations and a picking up.
He also managed to walk the full distance between the recliner and the couch later that day. He slid off my wife's lap in the recliner and fussed some, as is one of his favorite pastimes now. Well, instead of letting him continue to fuss at her I gave him a call and he turned around to me on the couch and judge the distance and then started awkwardly taking one step at a time. About half way there he seemed to lose his balance but was able to keep up the momentum to get to me, basically lunging at me into my arms. This also was rewarded with a lot of love and affection.
So now we have ourselves a toddler (or in mmorpg terms: DING!
Feeding him is still a bit stressful. Some things go worse than others, as he is still unable to eat from our plates. Chunky things will throw him for a loop and cause him to gag and usually vomit. And then there is the cleanup time involved afterwards. He is good with crunchy things now though, like grahmcrackers and "crunchers". He is able to chew those with out issue usually.
Compared to a year ago at this point life with the little guy is wonderful. Last year we were a bit overwhelmed and still learning how to fit him into our lives, and wondering what a number to a good chiroprator was and how much he charged! While he really enjoys being carried around (I'm not sure he ever won't enjoy being carried) he is content to be on the floor and explore, or play with some of his toys. God has upheld us through this entire adventure so far and will continue to bless us through him.
The photo album from 12-15 months is up on our website. The two with Misha and the one with me are from Thanksgiving (prior to 12 months, but the other album was closed at that point).
And onto the list:
1. We have a tupperware drawer^Wfloor in the kitchen.
2. While I didn't see a tail at birth, I am sure it was removed when I wasn't looking.
3. I still want a bumper sticker that says, "My child was raised by Bob and Larry."
4. Baths are great, but dad, can you not pour water on my head.
5. Okey dad, new game. You push the vaccum towards me and I'll touch it before you can draw it back.
6. Correct, drill used to be scarey, now I don't care. Tablesaws were never scarey.
7. Dad, why did you have to close that door!?!
8. Dad, I was trying to close that door!
9. (Bottles, spoons, lego bricks, random item on the floor) does not get filed with the marriage license, taxes, or identification.
10. You are doing it wrong, the blocks only stack to three or four, then you knock them down. Learn to play.
It appears even being famous and sleeping with little boys doesn't protect you from all of the foreclosures happening now.
Anyone have a few interesting javascript links they'd be willing to share? I'm looking for a few shortcuts on how to gray out a page (like idle.slashdot does when you click on the watch link) as well as some nice css/html tricks for onmousover events.
Update: A few interesting variations of the gray out page concept;
http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/
http://jquery.com/demo/thickbox/
http://www.eight.nl/files/leightbox/
1. Tell you why I befriended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a color, a photo, etc..
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
7. In return, you must post this in your Journal/Blag/whatever.
Just doing my part since I finally responded to one of these.
I am about to become the manager of the help-desk for a company with about 200 users. I want to implement help-desk management software from day 1, and I want to keep it open-source and free (as in speech). I have a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP5) server available to me (Debian etch stable). Any recommendations?
$ uptime
3:43PM up 1000 days, 16:40, 2 users, load averages: 0.27, 0.06, 0.02
It's an ancient Pentium 166 MMX running FreeBSD 3.3 (OLD!) but has had all services touching the net up to date. The machine is well firewalled off and all packets hitting it are scrubbed with pf.
Look at all that disk space:
$ df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/wd0s1a 119055 34449 75082 31%/
/dev/wd0s1f 2887188 2118030 538183 80%/usr
/dev/wd0s1e 992239 162634 750226 18%/var
procfs 4 4 0 100%/proc
This machine was at an uptime of 683 days but a power failure which lasted long enough that the UPS failed happened 1000 days ago today.
When we moved our offices in the house around I carried this computer while Kim carried the chirping UPS along. Anything to keep the uptime...
Funny, other machines I have get upgraded every 6 months (OpenBSD) or every day (Windows) and I don't care about reboots. I also have a newer machine which is ready to drop into service when this one chokes but this old crapbox has a lot of nostalgic value for me. I have no idea why. It's weird to think that this has been running since well before we talked about having kids (our daughter is 18.5 months old now).
What's your lame uptime story? What have you done to keep the uptime going? We all have a story like this to own up to...
This was in an email from my wife. It is odd how we find the good in something as unpleasent as your child vomitting. The last week has had things exiting this child from both ends at various velocities.
Lunch was terribly fun. I fed him some pinapple with ham and rice along with some veggies and a container of pear blueberry oat. About halfway through the meal, he vomited right into the overalls he was wearing. Talk about a mess. That was gross.
On Monday night I bathed the little guy and was getting him ready for bed. I set him on a couple towels on our bed usually and dry him off then put lotion on him and a diaper and PJs. Well, after setting him down and reaching for the lotion I hear the warning sounds from his bottem. Sure enough a stream of diarrea is shooting from him directly at dear old dad. I almost managed to dive out of the way.
Then from about Wednesday last week until Sunday we were able to see pretty much every meal he ate multiple times. Once going in, and another time covering him and our cloths. The poor boy has been terribly sick for the last week. We had him down to just soy milk for a number of days as that was the only thing that he seemed to be able to hold down.
Today's incident (from the email) is not likely that he is sick anymore. This actually is probably because he has an over active gag reflex. It can be terribly frustrating for all involved. He goes to a speech therapist for this once a week now, but there has not been much for progress. He is slowly improving and able to eat things that have more texture, but the last week has been a huge step backwards.
1. Being a father is easy. Being a good father is a bit tougher. I suppose it'll take more than a year to know if I managed the good part.
Well, getting to be a father wasn't too hard, and quite fun infact. I'm sure mom's out there will object and say certain parts of becoming a mom are not fun though, such as the whole birth thing. Being a good father is certainly challenging. I think of things daily of how I could have handled a situation better, or see things that might cause harm, or a dozen other things that concern me as a parent which never would have been brought to my mind otherwise. In the end, when I am dying, I hope to hear my son say, "You raised me well dad," more than anything else.
2. Bath time. Well, bath time can only be properly enjoyed at the time of the bath. Though the high speed setting on the camera helps.
I think "bath time" is one of the few phrases that my boy understands now. I can take the gate off the bathroom door and give a holler and he will come crawling. Usually I'll hand him off to mom to stip him down and bring him to me, but sometimes he'll hear me getting the bath ready and come crawling along. He'll holler and yell and splash like a wild man in the tub. It is so much run to see him enjoying himself during a bath. One of his favorite parts is after I've washed him up and drained the tub I will then count to three before I turn the water on to rinse. Sometimes I'll Monty Python is and do, "One, two,
3. No means no. But no has nothing to do with squirming when the diaper is being changed.
Changing time can range from pleasent and quick to unpleasent and wrestling a poopy baby for 5 minutes trying to protect oneself from errant dirty legs and arms. It also happens to be where he hears the word no more often than anywhere else. He is very strong willed, but isn't every little kid, but usually after a little restraint and repetition of the word no he seems to get the idea dad is going to change the diaper whether or not he likes it and settles down.
4. Front facing car seats are way better than rear facing car seats. At least when driving around. They are not nearly as convient for getting a kid out of the car.
Af first he didn't like the car seat facing forward much. I think this is partly because he could see on coming traffic and that kinda scared him. But now he thinks it is great. The old car seat is getting too small, so he has more space in the new one. And the old one also let the sun shine in his face a lot more, especially when the sun was behind us. Also, he can see much more now. The only disadvantage is that sleeping in this one is a bit harder since his body is more upright.
5. 13 hours to grandma and grandpa's and 13 hours home do not make a happy baby the next day. Other than falling asleep and waking every time I'd have to stop after dark he was great in the car though.
The drive out to grandma and grandpa's went well. We made decent time until we went backwards for an hour outside Buffalo. Who knew there was a tollway on the south west side? Anyways, it was a bit longer of a trip by about an hour and half then, which made our arrival a bit later and way past the little boy's bed time. But he held out like a trooper. The next day was probably one of his worst though. A foreign crib, house, and people were very confusing for him. He slept terribly, and was in a foul mood the whole day. After that though he was fine the remainder of the stay. When we got home he was a little upset the day after getting home, but not as bad. I suppose he remember his own home and bed.
6. One might think the stinkiest things come out the back end of a baby. One probably has not had to deal with baby yogurt puke.
There are some mighty foul things in this world. And a baby puking up yogurt is somewhere near the top of the list. And I live not too far from a dairy farm. We had just finished feeding him and eating dinner at a sandwich shop and were about to hit a store to see about picking up a new car seat. Mom says, "I think he's gagging on something." Then the smell. Thankfully nothing soaked into the car seat, but cleaning the stuff out of the seat was miserable. I can only feel sorry for mom and him riding home in the car together. I had to take the truck home since we met at the sandwich shop that day.
7. If the doctor isn't worried, well, why should I worry. Granted it isn't his kid.
The little guy has a weak tongue and we've known about it for quite a while. But the doctors just finally got around to seeing him about it in the last couple weeks. It seems that there is nothing too bad about it, so we try not to worry. I took him in to a neurologist who checked him out and asks, "Are you worried about this?" Um, yeah, kinda, I'm here with my kid who seems to have an issue with a weak tongue. But he is like, it doesn't seem to be anything neurological, so don't worry. Okey, we'll give it a shot.
8. When people who see babies every day remark on how incredible your son's eyes are, you start to wonder if they really are that amazing.
Everyone, even the neurologist above, remarks on his eyes. We are still considering setting up a website ethanfanclub.com and selling t-shirts. There are a couple girls at church who I am pretty sure will wind up waiting 18 years just to marry him, so they better hope he likes older women. Everywhere we go, the first thing people say about him is how amazing his eyes are and what a great looking kid. Un-surprisingly though his height and weight are in the 5th and 10th his head is in the 50th, everyone fawning over him is giving him a big head.
9. When posed with 4 buttons on a car, the one that is closest to music will be the one pushed.
I believe I am cursed to raise a son who is going to wind up with a BA in music. Mom and dad both have BS in computer science, love all things logical and geekish. But somehow there is a gene in me that will make my son a liberal arts major. I blame my dad though, as he originally wanted to be a musician. Anyways, he absolutely loves music. One of his favorites is the intro music for shows, like Buffy and Angel. But even the A-Team will do. He will stop whatever he is doing and crawl up so he can hear the music play where ever he is. He found this car at the doctor office whch had 4 buttons. The first three he pushed played car noises, like revving engines and horns and stuff. The last button he pressed played some sort of music. The other buttons must have felt very lonely once he discovered the music button.
10. Dad, you know nothing about how to play a keyboard. Those white and black buttons are dumb. The little green one makes all the music.
Related to the previous, one of his grandmas had a kids keyboard from one of her previous grandkids that she let us have. He at first liked the beat on the keys and make noise with those. Then he discovered these green buttons that play preprogrammed music. There hardly goes a minute with that thing in his sight that he isn't playing with the green buttons. I personally wish it didn't have the preprogrammed music as I think it'd be better for him to try playing the keyboard instead of just having music play for him.
BONUS. If it doesn't have a tail, its not a monkey. Its an ape.
Veggietales is wonderful. A mixture of music, biblical stories (not Bible stories), and humor for the parents. We started our Veggietales library before the little guy was even born, but since we have collected even more. He loves to watch them (though we keep it to only one a day unless he is really cranky, which is rare). Junior Asparagus seems to be his favorite we are pretty sure. Personally I am a big fan of Larry the Cucumber as he reminds me of myself too much.
Tomorrow it will be one year since Ethan has been born. Without a doubt this has been the hardest year of my life. There were so many rough points like when we were worried that he would never sleep or eat when he was just born, the night spent in the ER when he wound up with hives, and the days after his immunizations, and the random days where all he would do was cry and fuss. It has all been worth it though. When he figures something out, like how to crawl or cruise. Or get off the couch without diving head first. Or even how to eat a cracker all by himself. Or raise the sippy cup up and drink from it. Or stack blocks.
Each night was give thanks to God for blessing us with such a wonderful child. We pray for him, that he will grow strong, healthy, and wise. We pray God would touch his heart and lead him all the days of his life. We pray that Ethan will seek God as he grows older and in more understanding. And also that God would grand us wisdom and patience as parents to raise and teach him correctly.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Rock 'n' Roll metal health specialist Kevin Dubrow was found dead in his Las Vegas home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Rock 'n' Roll community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
This weeks Instructables newsletter has a great hack for a Blu Ray Star Trek Phaser. Way cool hack! This one will cost about $100 to build but the coolness/geekiness/trekkie factor is way up there. I'd rate this one a 10 out of 10.
Some people will mod down those they disagree with, marking the post as Troll or Over Rated just because they disagree--without regard for the quality of the post.
THIS IS WRONG!
Consider the post by tomstdenis at http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=346867&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=flat&cid=21195239
Tomstdenis is my foe, but I moderated that comment as Insightful. Some others caled that Over Rated, and some IDIOTS called it a Troll.
Come on people! Get some integrity!
I demand we as a nation stop imposing our beliefs upon those who wish to live peacefully while committing piracy on the high seas. There is no reasonable reason to have our military protecting even our enemies freighters which have been legitimately commandeered by pirates. This is just another example of our imperialistic behavior and forcing our culture of freedom upon the world.
Testing can show the presense of bugs, but not their absence. -- Dijkstra
