Gadget musings

I seem to have lots of good thoughts while I'm in the kitchen. At least, I think they're good. Here's a sampling from this AM:

• Why can't phones have more peaceful ring sounds/tones? We just bought a new AT&T cordless for our kitchen, and while we love the speakerphone features and the fact that the caller ID screen actually works, the ringers were just too damn loud and woke up the baby. Same goes for cell phones - I found exactly one ring tone on mine that was acceptable for when I want it to ring out loud, and it sort of resembles a doorbell with a treble edge. Usually I just set it to vibrate, though, because I can't stand the sound of a ringing cell phone. So my question is, why can't all phones, cell and land, have more peaceful, ambient ring tones as choices? I'm thinking about sounds like a fancy mantle clock chime, or a church bell, or the tones that play overhead in nice department stores where each specific tone pattern denotes a department. Obviously these aren't for everyone, noisy households in particular, but for those who have relative calm and quiet, this would be a major win. Just as the department store employees learn to listen for those soft tones overhead while other shoppers tune them out completely, you could train yourself to hear the soft ring and not have the shit whacked out of you by some killer bird song. Why must devices horn in on my peace?


• I was untaping a muffin box from the bakery, not without some effort, and I thought about the book I just read, Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age", an awesomely creative book which takes nanotech's potential and extrapolates. Wouldn't it be cool to have tape that just released itself automatically with some sort of special touch or command? Sticky one second, unstuck the next, but no danger of it becoming unstuck at the wrong time because the command, or perhaps the touch sequence, is highly unlikely to happen accidentally. Nanotape would make getting into all sorts of packaging much more enjoyable (ever been lacerated by a sealed, clear, hard plastic bubble? I have.)


• So what comes next for the Mac Mini? In the next redesign, how much more mini will it get? What about the rev after that? What's stopping the iPod from being the next Mini form factor? A few things I can think of:
  
  
  
  1. Hard drives: Unless they go to one of those CompactFlash drives or solid state flash memory, the laptop hard drive that's in the Mini now is the limit. Maybe the iPod drive is a touch smaller, I dunno, but if so it's not by much. Where's the holographic memory when you need it?
  
  
  2. Ports: They pack a lot into the Mini now. 2 USB, 1 FW400, 1 DVI (which could be mini-DVI like the Powerbooks), power port (already proprietary and smallish), and audio out. Try squeezing all that onto the side of the iPod case. I suppose they could use the USB device sized USB ports (4-pin?), but I'm guessing that doesn't carry power the way the standard size does.
  
  
  3. Optical drive: This is one that's really going to have to shrink to change anything - it's the limiting factor in the Mini's width right now, clearly. DVD's are getting more and more high-capacity, but is there a smaller form factor optical disc on the horizon? Do we bank on SD or xD cards or memory sticks or other forms of flash media instead?
  
  I have no doubt that Apple is addressing these issues right now - they're famous for taking leaps into hitherto unexplored territory when it comes to their consumer products. Remember no floppy drive and USB ports only on the iMac? It was a gamble that was correct...

U-ku, LAY lay

You must watch this (and you must have Quicktime):

While my ukulele gently weeps

Sent to me by my mother-in-law, of all people. One of the more amazing pieces I've ever heard. Seriously.

Lumpenlogocracy

You may note that there's a new blog linked on the right, Lumpenlogocracy. For those of you who went to school with us, this is the blog of H.S. (Thirdpartydreamer) and her fiancé B.H. (Ambivalent_Maybe) and their family and friends. Thirdpartydreamer is actually visiting us this weekend, which is really nice because we haven't seen her in quite some time (since my wife's first day of residency, actually, so three years plus). They're getting married in Philly next week and going to China in the fall for a year. She got a fellowship in Beijing, and he is being good enough to follow her over there. We can only hope they can blog from afar so we can share in their sino-adventures. I haven't read many of their posts, but given the average level of education amongst them it can't be anything but erudite and interesting, and from the posts I have read this expectation is entirely borne out. Look for MacDoug comments in your future, lumpenbloggers! And don't laugh at my simple-minded lumpenviews...

Right on, Billy baby

Frist reverses himself on stem cells, sort of

Up until now I was pretty embarrassed to share an alma mater with Bill Frist, but his latest reversal on stem cell research gives me hope that there's a human being beneath all that Christian Right pandering. While it may fall short of a complete endorsement of all stem cell research, it's still quite something that he defied the White House and (apparently) voted his conscience on the issue. Or perhaps his pollsters told him that the Republican center was making a comeback and looked to be the group to court for the '08 nomination, if you want to be cynical about it. Which I'm somewhat inclined to be. Whatever the case, and even if the dunce in the Oval Office vetoes it, it's still an event that this once-loyal party player decided to go his own way for a change. Perhaps it's a sign that the center is gaining influence in the Republican party and the hard right is losing ground a bit. I certainly hope so, for the sake of the country.

It's kind of baffling that the far right has chosen the issues it stands for so dogmatically. Abortion and anti-gay everything, that's basically what they're about. To my mind they've fabricated these elaborate theories and suppositions about how abortion and gays in general erode the "moral fabric" of the country, theories that when you actually look around the real world are very hard actually verify with this thing I like to call "evidence." I mean, I'm totally in favor of gay marriage, gay rights, and essentially legislating away any legal differences between gay or lesbian people and myself (save for hate crime legislation). How does this make me a contributor to the moral decline of our nation, or to the "institution" of marriage? I happen to be happily married, with a little baby and a two-career household, a fine citizen and taxpayer who abides by the law and is basically as straight an arrow as you can find. I just believe in people's right to find love and be happy, and that includes people who prefer the same sex. I find it in no way threatening to my way of life, and I really struggle to understand those who do.

I'm also in favor of personal choice for abortions, though this does not in any way translate to an instant willingness to encourage a woman carrying my unwanted offspring to actually have an abortion. (That woman would in all cases be my wife, in case you were wondering.) It's an important distinction - a person may be personally horrified by the idea of aborting a fetus while still acknowledging other peoples' right to make their own decision about having one. It comes down to this: Please, pretty please with sugar and a sledgehammer on top, do not force your own personal morality onto me, or anyone else for that matter. You simply haven't the right.

My point is that for those who are so staunchly moral and about preserving "family values," they are remarkably anti-family if the "family" in questions lies outside their narrow definition of it. Does it do a family any good to bring an unwanted child into the world? That child brings financial hardship, emotion stress, possible career disruptions, and more health care costs, if he/she is kept in the family at all. We all know the foster care system is unbelievably broken - my wife sees evidence of this all the time in the adolescent psych unit - and that's where some of the luckier unwanted kids end up.

And by the way, don't allow same-sex couples to legally come together and nurture children and form a family or anything. That's just obviously a breeding ground for deviance and perversion. Because we all know that there are no stable, employed, caring, well-adjusted gays out there - they're all just a bunch of messed up, disgusting folks who don't care about anything but sex and want to make everyone else around them gay and perverted as well. No way they could ever contribute to society in a positive way. Don't get me started. Wait, I'm already there.

How about this: increase funding to education, increase proper sex education and inform kids early with the truth about sex and sexual behaviors, and keep all talk of specific moralities out of school altogether. Respect everyone's right to believe whatever they like, as long as it doesn't hurt or obstruct other people's lives and ambitions. Encourage your children to find healthy, satisfying love wherever they want to seek it out, and don't judge others for doing the same.

End rant.

The Right, sometimes right?

So I was thinking as I made breast pump soup tonight that I spend a lot of time reading fairly liberal media sources like the NYT and the New Yorker - okay, I mainly read those two - and that while I vehemently agree with them most of the time, I should probably test the waters of the right-wing writers and see what kind of stuff they say, just to be fair.

Then I remembered that one conservative writer, Ramesh Ponnuru, is a person I actually know, sort of. I shared a bathroom with him in college - good old Holder Hall, back then nearly all the bathrooms were in the basement - and I remember him as a bit of a loudmouth prick in a skinny body. So I searched him out. Turns out he's a senior editor at the National Review - dude's done pretty well, all things considered. All of his articles are bunched on one page, and I started to read through them.

I was stymied by two things:

1. The NR still insists on trying to make money from their site, so they only print the beginning of most articles and make you pay to read the rest. Hard to evaluate a piece when one can only read the first half or so, especially when the author likes to hear himself talk so much that he barely gets to the point until two-thirds of the way down.


2. I actually agreed with the first few paragraphs I read.

I quote from ""Ask Not (8/8/05)":

it would apparently be wrong for senators to ask him how he would exercise this vast power. In our current political order, elections for the Senate may turn on the candidates’ positions on abortion even though senators do not set abortion policy. But the people who do set abortion policy are not to be asked how they will rule. It is permissible to interview a candidate for the job of Supreme Court justice. But the hirers are not to ask for the answers they most want to know.

That position, however absurd it may sound, has been embraced by the Republican party.

Damn that guy, he's making some sense! Now again, the article doesn't finish unless you pony up (if you subscribe many times, are you an NR pioneer?), so I can't judge it completely, but hey, guy went to Princeton. Guy's got a head on his shoulders. Go Ramesh.

But I read a bit further. "Surely he's a fire-breathing conservative spouting ridiculous rants," I presumed. Goddamn guy did it again, this time in "Tax Cuts for the Poor (5/20/05):

Over the last few years, a new bit of orthodoxy has formed on the Right: that it is dangerous to take poor people off the income-tax rolls. The concern has been that people who don't pay income tax will think that they are getting big government for free, will therefore want more of it, and will vote accordingly....I am beginning to think that my worry was unfounded.

He goes on to say that his, and other conservative thinkers', worries were based on "plausible suppositions" that turn out to not be true. He even calls it the "estate tax", not the "death tax", which makes his stock rise a few points in my book for not succumbing to the Republican language Nazis.

So I'll be reading him a bit more, because it's always enjoyable to read the writings of a smart person who disagrees with you ideologically. Rah Rah Ramesh!

I'd still not recommend sharing a bathroom with him.

Will email follow snailmail into oblivion?

Today on Slashdot:

Email is for Old People

From the Reuters story:

E-mail is for grown-ups and U.S. teenagers now prefer instant messaging to communicate with each other online, according to a survey released on Wednesday.
Internet users from 12 to 17 years old say e-mail is best for talking to parents or institutions, but they are more likely to fire up IM when talking with each other, the nonprofit Pew Internet and American Life Project found.

I've definitely noticed this among my students - very few of them actually publicize their email addresses in their profiles, if they have them at all, and nobody talks about emailing their friends. It's all IM.

Still, I don't think this means that their email use will be less than ours, necessarily, once they're in college or in the business world. It just means their IM use will be vastly increased, especially since one can carry IM in a purse or on a belt (ahem, DT96) so easily these days. (For that matter, you can carry email with you too - at least, in short text msgs.)

What this really means is that it will be interesting to study how these kids use email as opposed to IM when they come to need asynchronous communication more in their lives. Email could become a sort of rite of passage into adulthood - when you have important enough business to transact (emailing HS teachers, college professors, parents from school, loan officers, etc.) that's another way to tell you're growing up! But IM is for friends, at least for now.

Imagine when it's open season for IM, though? What if IM becomes the next email and some other form of more instantaneous, intimate communication opens up. What then?

The latest Cringely, on MS and Intel

When Elephants Dance

Very interesting stuff. A sample:

Microsoft has known for a long time that the PC as a platform is dying. The trends it sees for successor technologies are clear: mobility and gaming. Mobility means some combination of a handheld computer and a mobile phone. Gaming means xBox 360 and all that it can be -- a game system, a home media platform, a more-than-rudimentary Internet device and home PC.

If this is really true, then from an Apple perspective, it's half good and half bad. Mobility we've got, in spades, but gaming? Apple has only begun to warm up to it in the past few years. And I'm almost positive Jobs would never think of stooping to an Apple gaming console. If he did, though, you can bet it would smash the paradigm. Kind of cool to contemplate.

Some more Cringely:

Redmond has chosen IBM as its xBox hardware partner, so Intel must plot its revenge. This is not so much Paul Otellini taking out Bill Gates with an ice pick as it is Intel as an ongoing business trying to survive. The only way Intel can do that is by beating Microsoft on content delivery and networking, and by giving Microsoft something to worry about on the desktop, which was the basis of my original Apple/Intel theory. A theory I continue to believe, by the way.

So where Intel had been Microsoft's lap dog on so many previous technical initiatives, I'm sure we'll see some divergence, like Intel's partnering in the new Apple movie download service, which someone told me this week will be called iVideo.

Cringely sees nothing less than a seismic shift in power throughout the PC industry. I'm not sure this is happening anytime soon, but it's interesting to ponder. iVideo is a natural outgrowth of the iTunes Music Store, and I'm hoping as a shareholder that it will be huge, but I'm wondering who exactly they're targeting as an audience. I mean, I'm not downloading movies to watch on TV, am I? Are these videos that can be burned to DVD? Or are they just music videos and other random, personally posted clips (vidcasting?) for my brief viewing pleasure? Of course they'll have to go on the iPod as well, which directly contradicts Steve's assertions from a while back. What's changed? Why is a vPod so much more attractive now? The screen had better be 16:9 and larger, is all I gotta say. And I'm sure it will.
One more clip:

A year from now, it will be interesting to see whether Microsoft does the obvious and tries to move some version of xBox technology onto business desktops. After a decade of messing around, thin client computing is almost inevitable for businesses. Not only are existing computers too darned hard to service, support, and keep virus-free, but all the new legal requirements for protecting and preserving corporate data (Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, GLBA, FERC and so many others) pretty much demand some central data repository.

The xBox 360 would fit nicely into this niche, sold as a stripped-down model without the optical drive. Imagine the adrenalin rush in that Redomond confernece room: "Hey, we can save money by removing some of the game-playing components, then charge businesses MORE for an xBox that won't play games!" Of course, this would upset Intel and all the hardware OEMs, so Microsoft would let them sell Office xBox's, too, though with Microsoft still making most of the profit, again doing nothing for Intel. At that point the median desktop computer will sell for $300.

Wow. I am still not sold on the thin client, but maybe he's seeing something I'm not. It just takes too much coordination and hardware to be viable except on a large, large scale. Government, perhaps. But can you see smaller non-profits going this direction? I can't. Not unless some industry-standard protocol comes along that allows me to mix and match the central server with whichever company's thin client I want. I refuse to buy Windows Thick Server 2007 and be locked into the WindowPane client for life.

If MS does try to market some version of the xBox hardware to the business world, the attempts to cover up the fact that the product has xBox heritage will be damn interesting. It's not going to be called "B-Box", that's fer damn sure.

Frank Rich, you rule

Eight Days in July

My favorite quote:

It was during that pre-Fitzgerald honeymoon that Scott McClellan declared that both Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, had personally told him they were "not involved in this" - neither leaking any classified information nor even telling any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. Matt Cooper has now written in Time that it was through his "conversation with Rove" that he "learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A." Maybe it all depends on what the meaning of "telling," "involved" or "this" is. If these people were similarly cute with F.B.I. agents and the grand jury, they've got an obstruction-of-justice problem possibly more grave than the hard-to-prosecute original charge of knowingly outing a covert agent.

I'm so glad this story has legs.

Breast RSS Feeding

So I know that many of you out there are probably in the pre-baby phase of life, and as one who has crossed over I was thinking last night of some advice I could pass along. Number a, babies are amazing. Letter 2, definitely try breast feeding, but be prepared for it to be tough.

For starters, it took us about 4-6 weeks for baby to be even somewhat good at breast-feeding, which caused a lot of anxiety, most of it unnecessary. Some babies just don't get it for a while, and according to our recovery nurse, boys are worse. My wife suffered through many failed attempts, as baby screamed and screamed (sounding remarkably, and painfully, like the Nazgul in LOTR), and usually I took over and fed him expressed milk with a medicine dropper. Good times. We've already forgotten how long and tough those first two weeks were, and I'm sure our families were like "Why the hell are you still trying to breast feed?" (Come to think of it, my mother-in-law is still saying that.) But we stuck with it, and the payoff has been tremendous. Baby is now the 50th percentile for weight, up from the 10th at birth, and that's really something. We celebrate every little fat roll on his chubby body. Elbow dimples make us beam. Never a sentence I thought I'd write, by the way.

But the follow-up to successful breast-feeding, at least for the mom who needs to return to work, is the pumping. They don't really tell you about pumping in the romanticized baby literature, and certainly the cultish La Leche League wouldn't recommend it because they believe in having your baby surgically welded to the breast, but pumping is a fact of life for the breast-feeding working mom. Pumps come in many types and packages, from the industrial strength, hospital-grade pumps to the backpack variety that we bought. There are even super-fancy models with LCD displays and programmable pumping sequences, for the same people who won't buy a Ford Explosion unless it's the Eddie Bauer Extremely, Unbelievably Limited Edition Silly Headlight Cover model. Our works beautifully, but now that she's back at work, every night I have to:

• Sterilize all equipment that touches milk: the pump bottles, the feeding bottles, the nipple shields, the membranes, the tubing, and the milk storage cups. This involves boiling it for 3 minutes and/or steam-cleaning it in a special bag in the microwave, then taking it out to cool and drying it off, piece by piece.
  
• Put the cooler pack in the freezer so it's cold for the next day's work pumping.
  
• Convert expressed milk to cubes in the special "boob cube" trays, if there's enough.
  
• Transfer frozen cubes to freezer baggies and put them in the deep freeze. Frozen cubes with that much fat in them are odd to handle, let me tell you.
  
• Assemble the pump with bottles and shields and tubing and take it upstairs for the nighttime pumping.
  

It's become a daily chore that I refer to as "making breast pump soup", as I stir the bubbling cauldron of plastic on the stove. Some people, including our friends A and C, parents of our goddaughter, stopped sterilizing after a while because it was too much work, but we're a bit more neurotic and worried about infections and things (hmm, wonder why?). I'm sure at some point I'll back off sterilizing everything every day - you can also put them in the dishwasher, but we don't run it every night.

So future breast-feeders, be sure to make time for pumping and pump cleaning in your day. It's worth it when you see that chubby little package.

Last week

Holy cats. It's been a while since I've been able to post here, but now that the baby is asleep, I'll take a crack at relating last week's events more completely.

The long and the short of it is that my wife had dystentery. It wasn't pretty. In fact, it was one of the worst weeks we've had together as a couple in terms of suffering and hardship, and that counts the car accident and other bad stuff. I'll give a day-by-day account:

Sunday
About mid-afternoon, my wife says that her stomach is bothering her, and she's in the bathroom more than once, in a bit of pain. You can imagine. (You'll have to.) We end up canceling a walk with our friends, which I'm annoyed about and say as much. She's none too amused, as her "episodes" seem to be something more than just a one-time IBS thing like we're accustomed to. We chalk it up to a 24-hr. bug and get some sleep. Well, I get some sleep - she's up every 2-3 hours in the bathroom, writhing in pain.

Monday
It's now clear that this is some sort of gastro bug (or so we thought). She can't eat very much at all, or drink anything for that matter, because anything that goes in triggers gut spasms that ultimately send her back to the bathroom. Food and drink become powerfully and negatively associated with pain, and she's understandably reluctant to even have a few sips of water. Problem is, throughout all of this she's still breast-feeding, which compounds the dehydration a bit. She gets weaker, and still the cramps and episodes continue. Nursing the baby becomes an exercise in timing and positioning, because if she's sits upright too much or nurses him too long after an episode, she has to break it off in the middle and hit the head, which neither she nor baby are too happy about. To complicate things even more, the house is getting a "deep cleaning" today from the cleaners we've hired, so we keep having to switch floors to stay out of their way. She's a champ and soldiers on, but she's not happy.
We go to sleep early, the house ultra-clean but our routine ultra-wacko, and still the episodes continue. It's now clear this is no 24-hr. bug, but something stronger. Sometime in the night, I think, as we both lie awake and she's feeling terribly dehydrated, we resolve to go to the Urgent Care Clinic first thing in the morning to have her checked out and get her rehydrated.

Tuesday
We hit the Urgent Care at 7 AM sharp, and are second in line to go in. She's pretty weak, and once they take her back they pretty quickly ascertain that she needs fluids and hook her up to an IV of saline. This helps, and baby is breast-feeding on the actual cot as she's getting fluid. It's a day I'm supposed to be at work, and I'm already late, so we call her parents and they come and take over for me so I can drive in. They take her home, but not after she gives a stool sample to be cultured. (I wouldn't normally mention that, but it's crucial to a later bit of the story.) She's still weak and having episodes, but the dehydration is better for now. Still nursing the noodle. I come home fairly early. Around this point I go into doctor-finding mode. Her old GP left the practice some months ago, and we've been meaning to find a new doctor closer to home. Not the best circumstances under which to meet a new doc, but it seems like the best choice. I finally find someone who's willing to see her on Thursday at 1:30, which is way sooner than most, and it's a woman doctor. So now we only have to get through another day and a half, and we're there. Her parents take off, having done yeoman's work and really saving us from a lot of stress, and we have another looong night.

Wednesday
More of the same. We resolve to try and make it through this day and see if she starts feeling better. All this time we've been thinking it will pass, it can't last - must be a particularly nasty virus, but things will start looking up soon. I mean, apart from cholera and dysentery, no kind of painful gut bouts last this long, do they? Hoo boy, we were wrong. By afternoon we're fairly certain that she's not only not better, but also still extremely dehydrated, so we head back to the clinic. We try to call her parents, but they're out somewhere, so we leave a message. Fortunately, it's her Mom's birthday so her sister is coming down for a surprise visit. We intercept her in transit and ask if she can come to the clinic to look after Baby. She does, like a champ, and helps out with his feeding while my wife is in the back getting two more bags of fluid. I walk Baby around, once he's cheerful and fed, and we look at magazines and things while she talks to another doctor. We're there until about 7:30 or so, and while the fluids do make her feel better again, they tell us that if we need to come back for more, we should go to the ER instead, which is sensible. Her blood tests show that her potassium is up a bit from yesterday, and her white blood cells are down, so if it's an infection it's getting better, just slowly. We head home, and this is where I wrote the last entry - baby to bed by myself, wife in bathroom, another rough, rough night. By now she dreads the pain and feels desperate and scared when it comes, and her moans and fears about this being something worse than just an infection are really hard to bear. We're worried that with her history of IBS this could be something chronic, like Crohn's Disease or Ulcerative Colitis. I feel very helpless, and beginning to feel more hopeless too. Needless to say, looking forward to the GP in the AM.

Thursday
Damn this is a saga, eh? And I know I'm not remembering half the details. The in-laws come again Thursday AM to help with baby, and meanwhile in gutville, nothing has changed. I get the doctor's appointment moved up to noon, though it can't happen soon enough for my mother-in-law, who would have called the state police by now to escort her to the best gastroenterologist in the country regardless of whether we had an appointment. Not our style. We see the GP, who is incredibly nice and sensible, and she says that without the culture results from the Urgent Care lab, there's not much we can do. She determines that my wife is still really dehydrated, but unfortunately doesn't have the equipment to "hang a bag" on her in the office. But she's totally sympathetic to the breast-feeding issues, relating stories of her own children and how she went through tough times with them too. It's really, really nice to find someone who understands and sympathizes and talks to my wife as a patient, but also as a peer, a fellow doctor, even though she can't do much of anything. At my wife's desperate request, the doc gives my her an anti-spasmodic to relieve some of the cramping, which she promptly takes. It means no breast-feeding, but we're willing to deal with that if the pain can be relieved. We go home, and I run to CVS to stock up on rehydration stuff and her prescription. On my way I call our friend "M", a teacher, who is home, to ask if she can come and take over for the in-laws. She immediately says yes, bless her, because when I get home it becomes clear that they have reached their anxiety limit and need to be gone. My wife tells me later that my mother-in-law was spewing anxiety all over the place, and her back was suddenly hurting her again - mysterious onset, eh? Apparently she'd said "I just want to kill someone right now," because she was so angry at how her daughters had been having health problems. Yeah. Good coping there, mom.
So our friend takes over, and my in-laws leave as if being chased by a rabid weasel. I can barely get out of them how long the baby had napped for. But they're gone, and the wife is still suffering. Around mid-afternoon, we finally decide to cut bait and go to the ER. We decide upon The Miriam, as it's smaller, closer, and less crowded. At about 4:30 we leave baby in the capable hands of M, who now has serious presents in her future, and we hit the ER. Our other friend, C, who is M's husband, swings by to check on us (he knew we were there because we called him first to ask his opinion on which ER to go to. Go go gadget doctor network!) He's sympathetic and concerned, which helps. (Hello, proper coping mechanisms...) We go back around 7:30 and pretty soon my wife has a saline IV hooked up, which seems all too familiar. The nurse is nice, and sympathetic as well, and she takes some blood and stuff. Then the resident arrives - Dr. Kobayashi, who unfortunately has the word "Maru" appended to his name forever after - and does a thorough history. He's an anxious sort, kind of jumpy and a nervous talker, but clearly bright and decisive. He talks about the various IBD possibilities, which we're of course all too aware of, and decides to order a CAT scan to look for ulcers or any kind of sign of that.
So I go outside to call M and C at our house to tell them that we're in for a long night of testing, possibly not coming home until 1 AM or even possibly getting admitted, depending upon the CAT scan results. Not good news, but what are you gonna do? We're at the ER, they're treating us well and giving us more advanced tests, ones that are, with any luck, going to lead to a resolution to this nightmare. Thank God for western medicine, no? C and M take it in stride, and prepare for baby's bedtime (the poor saps) and staying the night in our still ultra-clean guest room.
But when I head back in to rejoin cramping beauty, there's good news! Apparently the stool culture results have partially come back from the clinic, and they indicate that she's positive for Campylobacter! I tell you, never has anyone been so happy to be diagnosed with that bug before. Oh, but we were pleased. This meant that a) the CAT scan was off (but not before she'd drunk a cup of iced barium sulfate), and b) a simple course of antibiotics would knock the bad bugs out and stop the painful episodes. Sweet relief! The only downsides were that the barium sulfate in her system meant no breast-feeding for 48 hours, and the antibiotic, erythromycin, has side effects that include diarrhea and stomach cramps. Sweet irony! Still, we have a diagnosis and a cure, and we're unspeakably relieved that it's not IBD of any kind. There's an end to the nightmare!

The rest is is basically denouement, but suffice it to say that after one or two more painful bouts the erythromycin took hold, and she's been on the mend ever since. Baby and I had to do a couple nights and days of bottle-feeding, but that wasn't terrible. My wife is still not back to normal, even today, exactly a week after the ER visit. She's tired and has dropped about 6 pounds from her pre-illness weight, which is a lot on a 102 lb. body! Oh, and where did this bug come from, you might ask? None other than the site of our fifth anniversary dinner, Chez Pascal, the first place we'd gone out alone since the baby was born, exactly a week before the ER visit. (Ironically, C and M watched him that night, too). Turns out campylobacter has an incubation period of 2-7 days or so, and it can be found in undercooked poultry, most commonly chicken. My wife had the paté plate that night, which includes chicken livers, and since we haven't gone anywhere else in the past four months and always eat the same food when we're home, it's pretty much case closed. I called the restaurant from the ER to let them know, and talked to the owner/chef the next day. He was apologetic without admitting any guilt at all, and he actually said "The thing is, if you cook those chicken livers too long they don't taste good." Um, yeah, jerk, but if you don't cook them long enough you make my wife's life a living hell for 5 days and disrupt our entire family! He also implied that he couldn't be sure if I was scamming him or not, which wasn't the brightest thing to do. I hung up with him and called the Health Department. Just today we received an apologetic letter and what amounts to hush money from the restaurant - a full refund of our check for that evening and, get this, a $100 gift certificate to none other than... Chez Pascal! As if we're going back there? And how can we in good conscience give it to anyone else? Bizarre.

OK, entry done. Damn. Thanks for reading, if you got this far.

Bob the builder - an injured tool?

Tiptoeing around

It's been a surreal week in our household - first my wife comes down with some gastro bug that's now lasted 4 straight days (!) without cessation. She's miserable and in tons of pain, and we've been to the clinic twice to rehydrate her and get blood drawn. So that's been one thing, and a huge one, because it leaves me to take care of the house, baby, and work chores, which takes a ton of time and energy. Fortunately my in-laws came through like champs and helped with the baby a bit, as did my sister-in-law.

Second, we had the house "deep cleaned" on Monday, which means that my wife's illness and all the surreality that it threw the house into was happening in an ultra-clean house, which only served to make it more surreal. It didn't help that the cleaning ladies accidentally set not one, but two alarm clocks to go off in the middle of the fucking night Monday night, right when baby was waking up to feed and when wife was waking up to poop her poor guts out.

Third, baby was supposed to start daycare on Tuesday, which totally didn't happen because of wife's illness. So all the prep work I did Monday night was for naught, and the bag with blankets, outfits, photos, diapers, and everything has just been sitting by the door all week, like a reminder that everything was interrupted mid-stream. And it's sitting there amidst...nothing, because the house is so damn clean everything got put away somewhere. Eerie.

And now I'm typing this in the dark, while both my loved ones are sleeping peacefully in their respective rooms. I put the baby to bed completely by myself tonight for the first time ever, because wife was in the bathroom moaning in pain and unable to even breastfeed him to sleep. Not to worry - he was so wiped that even with the bottle he dropped off within minutes. (We stayed past his bedtime at the clinic this afternoon, while the wife got two bags of fluid dripped into her and confirmed that she is indeed getting better, regardless of the cramping. So he was overdue for a night crashing.)

And now I hear my cell phone buzzing. Must to go. When will life normalize?

The boy @ home

This was originally my first moblog, but then Manuel Cuffs overwrote it. Damn Manuel. Always taking American posts for less pay.

Cute baby, no?

Interview With MacSoft's Phil Sulak

Interview With MacSoft's Phil Sulak

This guy, who is obviously a major reason that the Mac has as many cool games as it does, says some interesting things about the state of Mac gaming and what the Intel switch means. For example:

"Suppose Microsoft decided to bundle a new piece of software with Windows. Let's say for the sake of argument that they add a 'super-cool MP3 player with a built-in music store to purchase and download songs.' If the Intel Macs can easily run Windows and Windows apps, then suddenly there's competition for the iTunes Music Store on Apple's own hardware. This would clearly be a bad thing from Apple's standpoint."

Yes and no. With any dual-boot machine, I'd guess that most users (even those who are savvy enough to set up a dual-boot system in the first place) end up using one system more than the other. If it's a Mac, this would probably be the OS X system in most cases (otherwise the owner would have bought a PC case, unless they're a design freak). So would one or two quasi-killer Windows apps really pose a threat to the user who boots into OS X most of the time? I tend to doubt it.

Another interesting quote:

"...console development budgets are spiraling out of control. While a relatively small group of PC developers can still make an 'A' title for just a few million dollars, budgets in the tens of millions are becoming commonplace in the console world. In fact, some "AAA" console budgets are approaching the levels of Hollywood features. So it's much harder to be assured of a decent ROI on the console side of the fence."

This is music to my ears! I'm sick of hearing about how PC games are dying and consoles are the future of video games. Feh! Let's have the resurgence of low-budget, awesome PC games now. Anytime.

Still waiting...

Who is this Manuel Cuffs fellow?

Taken @ the Cumberland Urgent Care clinic.

Rove's revelations

I think it might finally be happening - the major scandal that rocks the Bush administration and exposes them for the lying, scheming, untrustworthy scumbags that they are. I've always believed that since the Republicans hold power so firmly at the moment, they must be doing some pretty dastardly things to exploit it. This is only human nature - Dems would most likely abuse this kind of power if they had it - but what's particularly sinister about this administration is the way it's tried to manipulate the press. I mean, it smacks of totalitarianism - planting false reporters, creating and circulating unattributed "news" reports, hiring active journalists to spread propaganda, blatantly contradicting reality in every press conference and presidential speech - the list goes on, folks, and the scary thing is that the country is not really cluing in.

Well, they just might now. Recall that Rove's name was connected to the Valerie Plame leak early on in the story a couple of years ago, but only recently Newsweek made it official - it was Rove who spoke with Cooper just before Plame was outed as CIA. The fact that Rove "never mentioned Plame by name" but is still the source seems to mean that Cooper had sniffed out this info from somewhere else and simply asked Rove to cough or give a non-denial to confirm it over the phone.

The sheer arrogance of this act is stunning. Joseph Wilson writes an op-ed piece stating the truth about the supposed uranium "purchase" attempt by Saddam's regine, which of course contradicts the lies that the administration was peddling up until that point, and the administration (read: Bush, Cheney, Rove) is so incensed at this interference with their lies and obfuscations that they commit treason in retaliation. And endanger an active CIA agent besides, not to mention ruin her field career.

Mark my words, if this doesn't turn into the scandal that cracks this festering, rotten administration, something else will. And it may not happen during Bush's term as President, but this whole 8 years is going to be a huge black mark on the U.S. for generations. History will not be kind to them. Nor to the Dems of this time, for that matter, for being spineless and bickering and nasty as all get-out. If I weren't so frightened of what Bush's regime will try to control next, I'd be completely detached from politics altogether. This is without a doubt the most arrogant, terrifying group of men and women to come to power in this country in a very, very long time. Possibly ever.

The Mac is History, the iPod is the future

I have to admit a bit of a sinking feeling about this latest column by Jon "Hannibal" Stokes at Ars Technica:

Inside the big switch: the iPod and the future of Apple Computer

Being the fan of Macs that I am, anytime anyone says anything that seems to cast them in a dying light gets my dander up. What he says is: "The cold, hard reality here is that the Mac is Apple's past and the iPod is Apple's future, in the same way that the "PC" is the industry's past and the post-PC gadget is industry's future." He goes on to clarify that smaller gadgets are where the trends are going in the computing industry, but that the PC/Mac will stick around as the hub of all these devices.

He's right, of course, and Apple is forward-looking enough to know this as well. But all of this is in service of the article's bigger point, which is that the Intel switch was driven more by economies of scale than CPU performance or IBM's broken promises. If Apple were to switch all their hardware to Intel chips, including the iPod, they could receive major discounts from Intel and save a bundle, which may or may not be passed onto their customers in the form of lower prices (depends on where they set their profit margin targets for each line - historically, Apple loves fat margins.)

Seems that Apple is well-known as a difficult customer in the chip market, so much so that they may have forced this switch by making outrageous demands of IBM for a small run of custom chips, requesting too few of said chips for product launches, then making IBM look like the bad guy for not having enough chips to meet demand. Stokes claims to have inside info that verifies this hypothesis, and quotes a poster on Groklaw about the situation. (In fact, the article from which the post was taken is worth reading, if you have time.)

It's not a picture of Apple that We the Faithful like to see, but I can totally believe it. Business is dirty - Bill Gates didn't get to where he is without playing hardball, and neither did Steve Jobs. But Apple is in a bit more tenuous position even now than Microsoft has been in a long, long time, and trying to throw their weight around in the desktop/laptop chip manufacturing department (where the Apple brand and profits aren't nearly as market-dominant as the iPod) may have finally forced IBM to give them the finger.

So be it. A chip is a chip. Let the Intel invasion begin. Maybe they chose Intel over AMD because Intel has a special color PDA chip that would be perfect for the iPod video (Stokes points this out too).

The Boy

We call these "Preppie Safari" and "The Dog Pharaoh". Cute, no?

Hint: Ignore this hint

The end of school means the beginning of lots of technological hustling for us, since we have to execute a change-over between the school's computer layout and accounts and the summer program's needs. Part of the logistical challenge for us was that we were also upgrading to Mac OS X Tiger, which we had just acquired the licenses for.

So in creating the "master image" for our Tiger desktops, I "discovered" that Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner still wasn't Tiger-approved, and that his NetRestore Helper tool also crapped out on me when I tried to use it to make an image. So I took what I thought was the only way around and used Apple's Disk Util, working up a very roundabout way of creating the image and prepping it for installation over the network.

Once this was all done, I proudly wrote up the process and submitted it to MacOSXHints.com. They didn't post it that day, or even that week, but it showed up last week and I was totally chuffed.

Until the comments started.

They weren't savage at all, or even rude, they just helpfully pointed out that a) CCC does in fact work if you run it as root in Tiger (or run it from a Panther system, and b) there are other cloning utils out there, like Super Duper, which I hadn't even heard of. End result? My "hint" is the worst, most labor-intensive, unnecessarily time-consuming way of creating a Tiger image the world has ever known. I admitted as much in the comments. So much for my moment of glory.

For the record, my master image works perfectly and we've cloned dozens of machines using it. I love, love, love NetRestore!

Dvorak rides again

I read Slashdot religiously, but I rarely post anymore. My karma is maxed, but my interested and time are not. Imagine my surprise and pleasure, then, when I happened upon a story that is completely relevant to me, a Dvorak-keyboard user from way back!

Here's the story:

Ask Slashdot: Back and Forth Between Qwerty and Dvorak?

And here's my reply:

You can be bi-keyboardish

We'll see how that puppy gets modded. I'm so damn verbose...

IBM, Apple, and Intel: Not a love triangle

Gizmodo has a very funny blurb about IBM's new PowerPC chip:

IBM Launches Dual-Core PowerPC 970 Chip

What's funny is how IBM and Intel each characterized their relationships with Apple. IBM downplayed it: "Oh, Apple's only a small percentage of our business, not important to us, no great loss. We've got bigger things in the hopper for the PowerPC line anyhow." While Intel was all, "We've coveted the Apple account for some time now, we would have done anything to get this, what a huge win for us." Truth is, Apple is a brand that tech companies want to be associated with, especialw. The iPod is still hot, the company is majorly in the black, and their OS technology is on the rise since the Windows security problems really started kicking in and Tiger made it out of the gates way ahead of Longhorn. IBM may not need the business from Apple, but they sure need the prestige that being associated with such a premium brand creates. Who knows if their PowerPC line would have been picked up by so many other vendors had it not been available to developers in the Mac?

To me, the most interesting thing is that Apple, while doing better business than ever on the strength of the iPod and Mac OS X, decided to switch horses mid-race. It's the kind of move you might associate with desperation, but clearly they're not that desperate, at least not financially. Where they were most likely despairing is in the road map for the PowerPC chips and how it wasn't taking them where they wanted to go, not only in the laptop line but perhaps all over the place. (How do you cram a big, hot G5 into the Mini?) Despite IBM's announcement of the lower-power PowerPC 970 (G5) chips, it was obviously too little too late for Apple's game plan. I only hope they have a solid road map from Intel going forward - we can only trust that they did their homework on this one before they took the plunge. A year from now should be a very interesting start to the transition...

Oh, the pressure

I was going to write, "Here we go, yet another blog I'm not going to follow up on." But maybe this one will be different. For one, it can be a log of the baby Emmett's progress through life (he's four months old today). For another, I can wax poetical on all sorts of things Mac-related, as I tend to do via email. It's kind of a milestone day - first week of staying home with baby, fifth anniversary was yesterday, four-month Emmett birthday today - so why not make it Start-Yer-Blog day as well? Lame name, I know, but that takes us back to the subject - I couldn't stand the pressure to come up with a clever nickname. Now I'm stuck with MacDoug, which I've used before but fortunately nobody had claimed here yet. Be ye happy with it, or be ye gone.

Just finished mowing half the lawn, because I refuse to mow it all in a single day. Too much effort. For the record, I think lawns are the tyranny of suburbia and I hate tending them. Love it when they look good, though.

Blogs I found today:
Yankeefog.com - Jacob Sager Weinstein's blog, a guy I sort of barely knew at college.
taking me seriously - Matthew Brozik's blog, a guy I did actually know and live with for a summer at college. His blog is quintessentially him - good to know some things don't change. Hi Matthew!

More on the way, I'm sure, as I peruse other Amazon Wish Lists in search of...

-Doug