Thursday, April 12, 2007
Review: BestMed Digital Temple Thermometer
I was a little skeptical of this device at first. But it has definitely won me over. My daughter has had a little fever the past couple of days. And after several times of using the rectal thermometer, we decided to pick up this digital thermometer. You just push the button, wait 3 seconds while it adjusts to room temperature, then it beeps and you stick it to your (or your child's) temple. About 6 seconds later, it beeps again and you have a reading. I know that these external ones aren't as accurate as rectal or oral, but I have to tell you that the convenience of the immediate reading on an infant without any fuss and undressing a sick baby is amazing. My daughter doesn't seem to mind at all having it on her temple. Our philosophy is that if it shows more than a low-grade temp, we can then use the rectal.
Plus, I've enjoyed just taking my temperature because of how easy it is!
Inara
There are new photos of Inara up at http://redinger.fotki.com
These photos are from January - April. Wow, I can't believe it's been that long since I've uploaded photos of her. We used to do that every month or so.
The last time I wrote about her, she was cruising. Well, no more. She is walking now. And not just little steps and falling. She's walking all over the place. When we bring her outside, she just needs to get down so she can walk. When we bring her to the park, she climbs up the stairs and wanders all around on the playground equipment. It's amazing. And of course, when we chase after her, she picks up speed to get away from us.
We recently installed a couple sheets of rubber flooring on our concrete patio for her. She has a rocking horse out there, and she likes to just wander around. This way, when she falls, she'll hit the rubber, which is much software than the concrete. She has spent the last three days out there as much as we let her. We just leave the patio door open now, and she wanders in and out at will.
Unfortunately, she's also had a fever the past couple days. It never fails, we put her in the nursery on Sunday, by Tuesday she has a cold or something. Other than that she's extremely healthy. Today she seems to have gotten over it, so she's back to her chipper self.
Next week is her big day - first birthday! Amy's parents are flying in, her brothers are driving, and of course my parents live her now. We're inviting a couple of the kids she plays with over and we're going to have a birthday party for her (also provoking us to install the flooring mentioned above.) Looking forward to that. I guess I'll have to post some pictures...
What new baby tricks can she do... We can now ask her how old she is, and she'll hold up one finger. We're trying to teach her to blow out her candle. If we tell her to do it, she'll blow, but when I put a lit candle in front of her, she's mesmerized by it. So, she doesn't blow. But, as soon as I take it away, she blows again. We'll see if she gets it in time. She also recently learned how to blink. We were just making faces at her, and then she started scrunching up her face. Now if we tell her to blink, she'll blink her eyes and make a really cute face. It's adorable (though, impossible to get a picture of.) She loves to clap and dance. If I ask her where her Veggie Tales are, she'll point to them and start clapping and dancing, because she loves the music. This is not really that amazing, until you realize that she only watches 1 Veggie Tales movie a week. And that's all the TV she gets. But she understands that special time.
As I mentioned she has a rocking horse, and she is really good at rocking it. She gets this huge smile on her face and just starts rocking back and forth. I swear it looks like she's going to flip over. Let's hope that doesn't happen.
We're also going to dedicate her at church the week after next. We talked about this for a while, and decided we wanted to make The Journey in Cary our home, and we figured it would be nice to present her to the church on her first birthday.
As for me, I've off from work for a few weeks. It's nice to be home during the day with her, usually I miss her during this time and only get evenings and brief mornings.
So that's the quick overview of our lives. Now, Inara wants you to go enjoy those beautiful baby pictures.
These photos are from January - April. Wow, I can't believe it's been that long since I've uploaded photos of her. We used to do that every month or so.
The last time I wrote about her, she was cruising. Well, no more. She is walking now. And not just little steps and falling. She's walking all over the place. When we bring her outside, she just needs to get down so she can walk. When we bring her to the park, she climbs up the stairs and wanders all around on the playground equipment. It's amazing. And of course, when we chase after her, she picks up speed to get away from us.
We recently installed a couple sheets of rubber flooring on our concrete patio for her. She has a rocking horse out there, and she likes to just wander around. This way, when she falls, she'll hit the rubber, which is much software than the concrete. She has spent the last three days out there as much as we let her. We just leave the patio door open now, and she wanders in and out at will.
Unfortunately, she's also had a fever the past couple days. It never fails, we put her in the nursery on Sunday, by Tuesday she has a cold or something. Other than that she's extremely healthy. Today she seems to have gotten over it, so she's back to her chipper self.
Next week is her big day - first birthday! Amy's parents are flying in, her brothers are driving, and of course my parents live her now. We're inviting a couple of the kids she plays with over and we're going to have a birthday party for her (also provoking us to install the flooring mentioned above.) Looking forward to that. I guess I'll have to post some pictures...
What new baby tricks can she do... We can now ask her how old she is, and she'll hold up one finger. We're trying to teach her to blow out her candle. If we tell her to do it, she'll blow, but when I put a lit candle in front of her, she's mesmerized by it. So, she doesn't blow. But, as soon as I take it away, she blows again. We'll see if she gets it in time. She also recently learned how to blink. We were just making faces at her, and then she started scrunching up her face. Now if we tell her to blink, she'll blink her eyes and make a really cute face. It's adorable (though, impossible to get a picture of.) She loves to clap and dance. If I ask her where her Veggie Tales are, she'll point to them and start clapping and dancing, because she loves the music. This is not really that amazing, until you realize that she only watches 1 Veggie Tales movie a week. And that's all the TV she gets. But she understands that special time.
As I mentioned she has a rocking horse, and she is really good at rocking it. She gets this huge smile on her face and just starts rocking back and forth. I swear it looks like she's going to flip over. Let's hope that doesn't happen.
We're also going to dedicate her at church the week after next. We talked about this for a while, and decided we wanted to make The Journey in Cary our home, and we figured it would be nice to present her to the church on her first birthday.
As for me, I've off from work for a few weeks. It's nice to be home during the day with her, usually I miss her during this time and only get evenings and brief mornings.
So that's the quick overview of our lives. Now, Inara wants you to go enjoy those beautiful baby pictures.
Done with my .Net project
In an interesting turn of events, we got a call from our client that was having us do .Net work asking us to stop. Apparently there's some kind of political movement afoot, and our product was no longer going to be needed. Of course, this happened with one week left to go. So basically we worked out a deal where the client would get some consulting time to make up for the last week of work, and we still got paid.
Overall, I like the .Net framework. I especially loved the GridView stuff. They definitely made it easy to wire in the database and allow you to add/edit/delete (ie: CRUD) with no difficulty whatsoever. Having done that by hand previously, I really appreciated it.
I'd like to do another .Net project if the opportunity came along. Preferably C#, so I could actually use some of the tools like Resharper. I don't feel I've spent enough time with it to make an unbiased decision about how much I like/dislike .Net.
So, now that I've got a few weeks off between gigs, I'm playing with Ruby on Rails. I can say without a doubt, I love RoR.
Overall, I like the .Net framework. I especially loved the GridView stuff. They definitely made it easy to wire in the database and allow you to add/edit/delete (ie: CRUD) with no difficulty whatsoever. Having done that by hand previously, I really appreciated it.
I'd like to do another .Net project if the opportunity came along. Preferably C#, so I could actually use some of the tools like Resharper. I don't feel I've spent enough time with it to make an unbiased decision about how much I like/dislike .Net.
So, now that I've got a few weeks off between gigs, I'm playing with Ruby on Rails. I can say without a doubt, I love RoR.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
.Net again
So, I've been working on this .Net project for about a month now. The thing I've enjoyed writing the most? A ruby rakefile to handle our migrations. I started to use NAnt. But, found it lacking. Particularly, I wanted to be able to get a sorted list of files (so I could store my migrations as 001_something_cool, 002_something_else_cool, etc) But, that was easier said than done without writing C# code. A few minutes later I had a rakefile that would do just what I wanted.
I guess if I had to pick a most enjoyable component that was actually in .Net - it would be the comparer (comparator for the Java folk; you say color, I say colour) that allows us to sort our GridView using reflection. Yeah, I love reflection.
I'm sure this is just because I am familiar with Eclipse, but I have to say Visual Studio IDE blows compared to Eclipse. The code browsing/navigation, refactoring, and code shortcuts that Eclipse provides are just amazing. I've tried Resharper and the DXCore & Refactor! Pro add-ins from Developer Express, but neither of them replace the power I get from Eclipse. And those are CommercialWare! SlickEdit does make a pretty cool add-in called Gadgets that provide some neat utilities. I especially like the CommandSpy that keeps track of all the menu commands you've selected, and shows you the shortcut keys when available.
Another piece of CommercialWare that is disappointing is VisualSVN. This is just basically a front-end for Subversion, but all it seems to do is launch TortoiseSVN and refresh your project when you are done in there. Admittedly, it gives you some menu choices to work on specific files. But, again, Subclipse is free - and much more useful.
Ah well, I'll keep on looking for useful add-ins (especially of the free as in beer variety), but I'd like some suggestions to which ones you find indispensable.
I guess if I had to pick a most enjoyable component that was actually in .Net - it would be the comparer (comparator for the Java folk; you say color, I say colour) that allows us to sort our GridView using reflection. Yeah, I love reflection.
I'm sure this is just because I am familiar with Eclipse, but I have to say Visual Studio IDE blows compared to Eclipse. The code browsing/navigation, refactoring, and code shortcuts that Eclipse provides are just amazing. I've tried Resharper and the DXCore & Refactor! Pro add-ins from Developer Express, but neither of them replace the power I get from Eclipse. And those are CommercialWare! SlickEdit does make a pretty cool add-in called Gadgets that provide some neat utilities. I especially like the CommandSpy that keeps track of all the menu commands you've selected, and shows you the shortcut keys when available.
Another piece of CommercialWare that is disappointing is VisualSVN. This is just basically a front-end for Subversion, but all it seems to do is launch TortoiseSVN and refresh your project when you are done in there. Admittedly, it gives you some menu choices to work on specific files. But, again, Subclipse is free - and much more useful.
Ah well, I'll keep on looking for useful add-ins (especially of the free as in beer variety), but I'd like some suggestions to which ones you find indispensable.
The Google 15
This is a pretty cool little Google widget that you can put on your Google Homepage.
You put in your scale weight every day, and it tracks the moving average for you. I've found it useful, since I use Google as my homepage, everyday I see the widget, reminding me I need to enter my weight. Of course, right now, it's also screaming at me: "Danger! You're heading away from your goal!" So, that reminds me every day that I need to work out. This provides me with a nice little feedback cycle, which is what I need right now.
You put in your scale weight every day, and it tracks the moving average for you. I've found it useful, since I use Google as my homepage, everyday I see the widget, reminding me I need to enter my weight. Of course, right now, it's also screaming at me: "Danger! You're heading away from your goal!" So, that reminds me every day that I need to work out. This provides me with a nice little feedback cycle, which is what I need right now.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Sick Cat
Dale, this is dedicated to you - what good is a blog without a post about a cat?
One of our cats has been pretty sick the past few days. Vomiting-type of sick. This is very unusual for her, we always joke that her stomach is made of iron, because she seems to be able to keep anything down. And she hasn't left my room much lately either. She just sits there on my futon. She doesn't even leave the room to get food, we had to start bringing it in here. It's really quite disheartening.
Of course the first thought, with the recent pet deaths in the news, was that it was related to the pet food recalls. However, we only feed her dry cat food, and it's not one of the ones on the list anyways. So, we brought her to the vet this morning. Renal failure. That didn't come as a huge surprise to us, her and her sister were actually diagnosed with failing kidneys as kittens. But that was more prevalent in her sister, who continually gets bladder infections. So, the surprising part is that it's this one that's having problems now. Way back then the vet didn't give them much time to live, and they are about 9 years old now, so definitely not a bad life for a cat.
She still seems happy, if I go sit by her and pet her, she looks up at
me and purrs. They took some blood and will get back to us on whether or not it's Chronic Renal Failure, or Acute. I guess the acute one is fatal pretty quickly, whereas chronic is more treatable. So, we're just waiting to hear back on that.
For those of you that know our cats, this is the one we lovingly refer to as "the fat one", Eponine.
One of our cats has been pretty sick the past few days. Vomiting-type of sick. This is very unusual for her, we always joke that her stomach is made of iron, because she seems to be able to keep anything down. And she hasn't left my room much lately either. She just sits there on my futon. She doesn't even leave the room to get food, we had to start bringing it in here. It's really quite disheartening.
Of course the first thought, with the recent pet deaths in the news, was that it was related to the pet food recalls. However, we only feed her dry cat food, and it's not one of the ones on the list anyways. So, we brought her to the vet this morning. Renal failure. That didn't come as a huge surprise to us, her and her sister were actually diagnosed with failing kidneys as kittens. But that was more prevalent in her sister, who continually gets bladder infections. So, the surprising part is that it's this one that's having problems now. Way back then the vet didn't give them much time to live, and they are about 9 years old now, so definitely not a bad life for a cat.
She still seems happy, if I go sit by her and pet her, she looks up at
me and purrs. They took some blood and will get back to us on whether or not it's Chronic Renal Failure, or Acute. I guess the acute one is fatal pretty quickly, whereas chronic is more treatable. So, we're just waiting to hear back on that.For those of you that know our cats, this is the one we lovingly refer to as "the fat one", Eponine.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Oracle on Intel Mac
Very disappointing, Oracle. I have been doing Oracle development for the past 7 years. I've finally decided it was time to install it on my beautiful, shiny (literally) Intel Mac; one more nail in the coffin of my Wintel box.
So, I grab Oracle 9i Release 2, Developer Release for Mac OS X. I chose 9i, because that's what my current client is using, so I figured I'd try to be compatible. It installs just fine, then when I go to bring up the server - I get a shared library error. After googling for a while, I determine that running 9i on a Mac is a waste of time.
Okay, how about 10g, release 1, which also has a Mac release? Download that - can't even run the install for that one. Some more googling, and it looks like installing Oracle on the Intel Macs is not supported at this time.
Thankfully, I have Parallels, so now I'm installing Oracle on the Windows side of things, so at least I can get my database up and running.
So, I grab Oracle 9i Release 2, Developer Release for Mac OS X. I chose 9i, because that's what my current client is using, so I figured I'd try to be compatible. It installs just fine, then when I go to bring up the server - I get a shared library error. After googling for a while, I determine that running 9i on a Mac is a waste of time.
Okay, how about 10g, release 1, which also has a Mac release? Download that - can't even run the install for that one. Some more googling, and it looks like installing Oracle on the Intel Macs is not supported at this time.
Thankfully, I have Parallels, so now I'm installing Oracle on the Windows side of things, so at least I can get my database up and running.
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