We're fighting problems with heating in our house at the moment. Sometimes the boiler doesn't work right, and we over-compensate by turning up various radiators. Then the heat kicks in a few hours later and all the rooms that had their radiator turned up start cooking.

 

Our baby monitor has a temperature monitor. At 4am  warned us that Ryan's room was 27 - about 80 F - so I opened his door to cool it down. The poor tyke was a bit unhappy, murmuring in his sleep, and I think the extra motion of me opening his door and leaving woke him up a little.

 

Sometimes when Ryan needs to sleep and is fussy, we turn on a combination nightlight / musicbox / mobile that sits right next to him in the crib, to try and help him sleep. It has four big buttons placed so a presumably older child can turn it on and get some music and light for a few minutes.

 

A few minutes after leaving Ryan's room, I heard the music. Sometimes he flails a bit and accidently turns it on: often the mobile is near his shoulder level in the crib. He seemed to be waking up a bit, so I turned it back off and started edging out of the room. Ryan started making more unhappy noises, and started flailing his arm around on the same side as the music box. Within a few seconds, he'd hit one of the buttons, the music and light came on, and he stopped flailing.

 

That's the objective version. The subjective version is that this little 10-week old baby who doesn't even know what his arms are somehow figured out how to make music when he wants it. Given that he can't roll over, and only just started grasping things sometimes that happen to hit his hands (I don't think he connects it with actually controlling the thing he grabs, I think it's a reflex), I'm mightily impressed. And worried: it certainly bodes ill for keeping him out of trouble later!

 

Babies are amazing...

Well what do you know, it really was labor!

 

Please join me in welcoming Bean to the world!

 

He was born in early morning. As you can see, he was born in a birthing pool. If you're going to have a baby and want to try and do it without an epidural, this is the way to go!

 

Bean is doing great. He's a quiet, even tempered kid, at least so far. His favorite activities are sleeping, pooing, and eating, in that order of preference. I'm sure there's changes on the horizon, but for now it's bliss!

 

His mommy is also doing well. Thanks to delivering without medical 'intervention', she was mobile and alert immediately after delivery, and other than being a little tired (as we'll both be in the months to come) she's in great shape! Bearing and delivering a baby, it should be stressed, is not for the faint of heart.

 

I look at this little boy, and I'm filled with love for him. It's interesting because it's not "this is my progeny" love, but rather "what a beautiful baby." I suspect I've got the parent's equivalent of beer goggles making me think this, but the end result is, he's adorable to me, and I like holding him and talking to him and just looking at him.

 

He's got dark hair and appears to have dark eyes, so I suspect he's going to take much more after his mother than his father.

 

Welcome Bean! It's nice to finally meet you in person :)

 

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but we're expecting a baby soon. The official due-date is in a few weeks. Not that it matters: babies are notorious for ignoring such things, choosing to come before or after as fits their temprement.

 

Last night Salwa had trouble sleeping, and today appears to be having contractions. The timing is all over the place, ranging from a few minutes to nearly 20, so this isn't full labor. But from here, you never know when the real thing will come. Will it be a few hours? A few days? A few weeks? I think we're both hoping for a few hours to a few days.

 

Needless to say, this makes it a little tough to concentrate on non-baby things. So, I am sitting at home, alternating working and playing games, and trying not to feel too useless as whatever happens in her body continues to happen. And imagining how life will be transformed, going from masters of our own destiny to parents of a newborn fully reliant on us for everything from eating to turning over...

 

Exciting times ahead!

 

It's been a year and a half since our trip to India. Time hasn't done much to blur my excitement about the country as a tourist destination, at least the parts I saw. Salwa and I were reminiscing last night about funny things that happened.

 

The trip was logistically complicated, with a couple of nasty airline connections. One of these was in Mumbai, between flying back from Aurangabad and flying out to Udaipur. We had something like six hours between the flights, in the middle of the night. . 

 

Mumbai airport - at least the part we were in - has very little seating, and isn't a great place to stay overnight. Salwa arranged a cheap hotel in Mumbai so we could take a nap and have a shower. As we left the terminal, we ignored the hawkers and went to the official taxi queue. When our turn came, we got a pubescent driver in an ancient taxi that shuddered every time he coaxed it into gear. We told the driver where we were going, and he nodded and off we went.

 

It was getting close to midnight, but we could still see clusters of people here and there sleeping on the sidewalks or walking slowly along. There was still plenty of traffic on the main thoroughfares. Each time we came to a traffic light, the driver would beckon to someone and talk to them. They'd confer briefly, both staring at my wife and I, and then break off as the light turned. The first time this happened we wondered if something sinister was at play, but by the time it because routine, we realized it didn't have anything to do with us, per se.

 

On the back streets, the driver went more and more slowly and then stopped. It turned out he had no idea where our hotel was - or even *what* it was - or where to find it. I'm not even sure he knew where he was either. My wife dug out her maps, but they were of marginal use because the labels were in English. Another half hour of driving lazily around, and the driver did manage to find the place, thanks to the generosity of many other taxi drivers. 

 

As we got our luggage out of the back of the taxi, our driver asked for 720 rupees. His meter read 17 rupees, which was then supposed to be multiplied by a time-based number on the chart mounted next to it, for an actual total of 350 rupees. We laughed out loud, and Salwa made it obvious she knew how the price was supposed to be calculated. We gave him 400 rupees, and ignored his request for another 50 beyond the 50 tip we'd already given. I guess they're used to people who don't realize they don't have to give whatever the drivers ask for.

 

Our hotel was the ISKCON Guest house, at the Hari Rama Hari Krishna Mandeer temple. Hari Krishna's are a constant source of jokes in the US, but the hotel - attached to the temple - had a reputation as being clean and cheap. The lobby was beautifully set out in marble, but the room itself was spartan at best, with rough linen sheets, and a bathroom with basic fittings. The shower, for example, just sprayed onto the floor and drained into the middle of the room. We managed to catch a few hours sleep, and had a cab called to get us back to the airport for our flight to Udaipur, which went much smoother: everyone knows where the airport is.

 

The moral of the story is, sometimes sleeping on an airport floor is a better idea than hoofing it out in the middle of the night when you don't know the language, the area, or the hotel you're going to. Even so, it was an interesting experience.

 

 

Most people have never heard of polyphasic sleep. The idea is, it's possible to condition yourself to sleep in many small chunks rather than one large one.

 

I've seen discussion of three types of polyphasic sleep schedules, each of which requires a daily routine:

 

I'm finally well after fighting a cold for a week. It was one of those cotton-in-the-head colds that keeps you from being able to think. Yeck.

 

To entertain myself, I spent time looking at old videos on YouTube. I have to say, this is one of the things YouTube is best for: I love music videos, and watching some of my favorites from the last 30 years is a great way to burn a few hours!

 

I used to watch Tiny Toons religiously. One of my favorite episodes was a series of small music videos written to tunes performed by 'They Might Be Giants.' The two that I remember the best are Particle Man and Istanbul, check them out if you're a TMBG or a Tiny Toons fan!

 

On the traditional music video front, there's Sensoria by Caberet Voltaire - it's held up surprisingly well. Safety dance doesn't fare quite so well, but is still entertaining. That got me thinking about Scrubs, which brought up the following two Turk segments: Turk doing a bit of safety dance himself, but even better, when Turk follows up The Todd trying out for a hospital music group dancing to Poison.

 

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The internet is my favorite thing ever, the universal library. It's hard to believe the days and nights I spent as a kid waiting to record snippets of my favorite songs from the radio onto cassette. Now literally everything in the world is available online, you can find it instantly, sample it for free, and buy it to keep it. Life is good :)

 

 

 

It's been *ages* since I've written on here. As it's the holidays and I'll have a bit of time on my hands (once I get my computer working again), I hope to remedy that situation.

 

A side note. Most of my blog posts are written with search engines in mind. Sometimes this can work against you. We went to Sharm El Sheikh recently, and I was curious whether our favorite hotel really had broadband yet or not. I searched, hoping to find information about it. Unfortunately, the only relevant article I found was from myself, talking about how I *hoped* they would have broadband soon. Ah, the irony :)

 

I just read an excellent interview with one of my favorite authors, William Gibson. While I can't give him credit for me getting into computers, I can certainly say he helped me think about them in a different way, and to stretch my electronic horizons beyond games. The guy is amazing, and has a quite unique perspective on being human, as well as our near future.

 

If you haven't read any of his books, you might want to give them a try. Certainly no cyberpunk enthusiast can claim to be such without knowing their roots. Neuromancer was the seminal start, but his latest books - although not necessarily sci-fi as such anymore - are also quite engaging.

While not so rabid a Harry Potter fan that I dragged myself out of bed at midnight to get the book, I did have it by 10am the next day. Mostly I wanted to make sure I read it before I tripped across any spoilers in the press or other places. For example, when the last one came out, a nitwit was running around WoW yelling "* dies at the end!" (with a name instead of *). This is no doubt the same sort of fellow who enjoys making people angry in games, griefers they're called.

 

But I digress.

 

No spoilers in this blog entry, out of deference to those who have yet to read the series or this book in particular.

 

The Harry Potter books, for my money, have ranged from very good to excellent. This one definitely weighs in at the 'excellent' end of that scale. Rowling always intended seven books for the series and this is the seventh. It's a fitting conclusion for the Potter series, though I have to say I'm sorry to see it over with. It choked me up more than once. It's always hard saying goodbye to characters and a world you've come to love.

 

The book is as big as any of them - 759 pages in hardcover. It starts strong and stays strong. There were a few hundred pages near the end of the first half where it wasn't as engaging (though still quite good), but I couldn't manage to put it down for the last half. Like the other books before it, despite its size it's quite a quick read.

 

Here's to Harry Potter! If you're into it and haven't already bought a copy, it's well worth full cover price.

It used to be that "made by hand" was a mark of quality. In many ways, for the older generation, I guess it still is. Recently, though, I've come to question whether this is still warranted.

 

As little as 30 years ago, mass production techniques were relatively coarse, with questionable quality control. The marks of mass production were plain on most items: prominent seams on plastic items, off-center joins on assembled pieces, shoddy stamping and finish on metal items. Nothing a bit of post-production finishing couldn't have fixed, but nobody bothered.

 

From my perspective, things have changed quite a bit over the last few years. Even cheap consumer goods appear to be made to a high spec. Even if they're not incredibly robust, they're good looking: they meet the objectives of their assembly.

 

Now, rather than equating "made by hand" with high quality, I tend to read it as "not popular enough to be worth mass producing, your quality may vary." Undoubtedly there are marvellous things being produced by artisans and labelled "made by hand." I'm equally certain that for every one high-quality product, there's a hundred low-quality one whose main selling points are uniqueness and quirkiness rather than quality.

 

I'd argue, however, that even the uniqueness is an artifact of the number of pieces being produced (not many people can have one) instead of an explicit personality imparted to each piece. It's human nature, and certainly capitalistic, to produce goods as quickly and efficiently as possible if you're making many of them. You do this by finding a routine or groove and sticking to it.

 

The next time I see "made by hand" on a label, I'll remain suitably unimpressed, and wish the manufacturer enough success to move to an automated assembly line :)