Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Hello World
Sadie Rose Ellis
Born September 29, 2004, same day as first X-Prize attempt, at 1:59 PM eastern time.
7 lbs 11 oz (not 9 lbs estimated by ultrasound), and 20” long.
Ended up via C-section, as indicated in the previous post. My apologies if the abrupt
nature yet logical end of a progression followed by a lack of instant updates made anyone
anxious.
She’s healthy, happy, beautiful, with a full head of dark hair and mystery blue-ish newborn
eyes. She’s stronger and more coordinated than typical for a newborn, and recognized my
voice as soon as she heard it.
Here are some of the pictures I took today with the digital camera. Displayed is 400 pixels wide. Click the picture for an 800 pixels wide version. Click the text link below for an insanely huge, high resolution version as taken by the camera.
It’s not easy composing a post like this without my normal tools, on the laptop, while taking care of the baby with Deb, who is confined to bed. More eventually… (and we’ll probably put most such things at the baby’s blog instead of here when we update further).
Real Soon Now
Well then… I just hopped back online in time to be “needed in surgery,” as Deb put it.
It must feel funny to have your belly shaved.
Still Waiting
We are still in the labor & delivery room with IVs growinglike weeds around the bed.
Last night they started monitoring the baby directly with an electrode, after breaking through and guaranteeing that one way or another there will be a baby today, not tomorrow. I was already to fall asleep to the soothing sound of Sadie’s heartbeat when they changed to internal monitoring and a annoying beeps instead. I got maybe 2 hours sleep, but that’s better than poor Deb did.
Anywho, this morning first thing the OB we didn’t deal with the whole pregnancy got worried about her blood pressure being on an upward trend. There was some back and forth with the nurse, who knew part of the problem was inaccuracy due to overly small cuff and it being, for the higher readings, on the arm under her (alternating leaning on the left and right sides).
We also learned that it is likely, rather than merely possible, for this to end up C-section. They’re still working on it. There are pretty regular and painful contractions.
So that’s the news so far.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Are We There Yet?
Almost!
This morning we went for what we expected would be the last weekly ultrasound. Lori the ultrasound technician found the fluid extremely low, though all else is superb or as expected. She notified upstairs about the fluid, and they paged the midwife on call and had us go up for a round of the NST monitoring. Oh, weight estimate today was nine pounds. Yikes.
The NST was fine, but Nancy the NST nurse sent us over to the hospital for more monitoring and checking there, where the midwife on call would meet us. What about lunch? Nope, if they induce you, you don’t want to be sick. Snack from the vending machine? Okay.
We went up to labor & delivery in the hospital, did the monitoring with a tech and midwife, checked the cervix, and ended up being admitted. Deb is in the delivery room hooked up to monitors and coolng her heels while they gradually ripen the cervix the rest of the way. It was well underway, but needs more before induction.
Once things were settled, I was sent home - just now - to eat, do this, check e-mail and make sure nothing is falling apart at the office, and grab the laptop and suitcase after making sure the last items are in it. There’s not a big hurry for me to go back. They will call me if I need to rush back.
There’s a chance Sadie could arrive today. There’s a slimmer chance it could be Thursday. Most likely it’ll be tomorrow. We shall see. It could be a nice, historic birthday, with the X-Prize attempt planned then.
I’ll probably post the announcement as soon as we’ve called some of the relatives with the news first. Stay tuned… (I may post otherwise between now and then, but most likely it will be light.)
They’re multiplying!
And that’s a good thing.
There’s a new carnival making the, er, rounds, and its one that you probably won’t want to miss. The medbloggers have put together the first edition of Grand Rounds, which is hosted this week at Blogborygmi. Post range from personal stories to essays on the future of our healthcare system; check it out.
Via Medpundit, who you should also be reading…
Monday, September 27, 2004
Goofy Quiz: How You Should Vote
The previous post was ultimately a result of taking this one, then poking around elsewhere on the site.
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You Should Vote for Michael Badnarik |
 Two Points. Your Libertarian Vote Just Landed in the Trash Can! |
This Made Deb Giggle
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You Know You’re From Fresno When... |
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You have to explain to friends from out of town what animal a “Tri-tip” comes from. You think salsa goes on everything Drivers think a red light is just a suggestion.
Your out-of-town friends start to visit after October, but clear
The best restaurants in town start with “El” or “Los.” You think $400 a month rent is way too high. You know a swamp cooler is not a happy hour drink. People break out coats when the temperature drops below 70. The pool can be warmer than you are. You realize that Valley Fever isn’t a disco dance. You still don’t know your way around downtown. Anywhere “and 99” is too far away. You think you’re better than people from Clovis.
Someone mentions the Fair and your thoughts immediately turn to
You drive just as fast on a sunny day in June as a foggy day in
You have to explain to someone about “G Street.” The whole town shuts down at 11:00.
You complain about how boring Fresno is, but still make fun of
You hadn’t been to Manchester Center in 10 years until the movie
You never knew how you managed before River Park.
Someone from out-of-town talks about how foggy it is and tell
You know not to take Shaw at 8, 12, or 5. You swear there was an orchard there last week, where now there are houses.
You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Fresno.
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Quote of the Day
Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman’s breasts; it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy. --R. A. Heinlein
Music Industry That Might Have Been
Yesterday in Shaw’s Supermarket, Deb got the opportunity to look at me funny when I excitedly exclaimed “they used my idea!”
The proximate cause of the outburst was seeing a phone card rack near the front of the store, and noticing the content was not all phone cards. There were music download cards!
Back in the heyday of Napster and free downloads, I was of the opinion that the music industry was crazy to be a barrier to progress, but at the same time I considered the free and unrestrained trading of songs to be going too far.
I was full of ideas on how the music industry could handle digital music and keep the channel, the record stores, in the loop too. Part of the idea might be something along the lines of iTunes, which of course has happened.
Another part of the idea, great for those lacking or avoiding use of credit cards, was to sell cards or certificates validated for a dollar value of downloads. Record stores could retail them, making them part of the digital channel, and creating marketing opportunities for traditional media while the eyeballs are in the store.
They could even have facilities where people could do the download. Not to mention preview facilities. Get folks into the stores to preview the music, then they could download at home, download at the store, or buy the traditional CD. Perhaps give out discount coupons in the stores applicable to home downloads, providing a way to judge what retailers are generating that way and kick back a cut.
It didn’t happen my way. There were courts and fights against the future instead. Foolish. Shortsighted. While that hasn’t changed, and the music industry remains trapped behind a self-made wall, the downloads for money options have made progress thanks to not the music industry.
Cards similar to those I envisioned, in a supermarket of all places, are another useful step.
One of my management professors loved to make an example of the local shoe industry, formerly huge and glorious, now all but gone, then much of the way gone. The problem? They saw themselves as makers of shoes. They were beaten by the makers of footwear. It was not merely a matter of low cost producer, but of self-perception and market size. Frowning on “sneakers” and perceiving leather shoes as the only way to go left them limited.
The music industry seems to be stuck primarily as makers of physical media, with no ability to conceive of anything else. Yet music is inherently not physical, and they seem to grasp that insofar as the idea of licensing is concerned. They are different; they can sue their prospective customers for wearing sneakers instead of leather shoes, and try to put the makers of sneakers out of business. That’s possibly more dangerous than being a traditional shoe manufacturer at the dawn of the eighties.
Dragging, kicking, and screaming aside, seeing something close to an idea of mine come to pass is one of the coolest feelings. Now all I need is to have one of those ideas to my own benefit, and be willing, able, and bold enough to act upon it.
Additional note:
Looking at the part about in-store downloads and such, for all I know there may be some of that kind of thing going on. I don’t go in record stores or sections much, and haven’t been to a pure record store in years. I perceive the CD prices as too high for my means (some might argue that they are not, more generally), so I don’t put myself into a position to be tempted.
Inching toward the moment…
Last night I had the best bout of false labor yet...contractions strong enough to stop me in my tracks, though not so strong I couldn’t talk through them, 10-12 minutes apart for several hours. Luckily, they decided to taper off right about the time I was ready to go to bed. Still having an occasional one, my back is killing me, bits I don’t really want to talk about are killing me, and I’m really pretty happy about it. Hopefully this won’t drag on too long, and I’ll have a baby to show for all of this trouble soon!
Had a minor breakdown on Saturday when I couldn’t find the instructions for the carseat. Jay just came over to where I was sitting and kissed me. His theory? My losing it is a sign that she’s coming soon. I hope so. I barely held it together yesterday when I had trouble getting a prescription I needed. Seems that anything that goes less than a thousand percent perfectly now has the ability to make me cry.
Not much else going on. My folks got their travel arrangements made. The little one is doing great with all of the testing. Jay is dazzling me with his cooking. The weather is somewhere beyond perfect--I think I’m starting to understand why folks think the weather here is ok. Leaves are starting to change. And I need to wander off and walk around...this chair is terribly uncomfortable anymore. More news when there is any…
September 27 Carnival of the Capitalists Is Up
Evelyn at Crossroads Dispatches did a nice job preparing an extensive set of posts for your biz and econ reading pleasure this week.
Next week is the 52nd Carnival of the Capitalists, which will be hosted at Drakeview. Send your entries to cotcmail -at- gmail -dot- com or, as always, capitalists -at- elhide -dot- com, which forwards to the Gmail address.
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Some Obsessions Are Deeply Rooted
My nephew had a fascination with keys from the time he was a toddler. That’s not necessarily unusual, but it lasted so long that I was sure he’d become a locksmith.
He used to collect all the old keys we might otherwise have discarded or tossed in a drawer. Heck, I probably have a couple dozen such random keys floating around that, had he seen them in my stuff when he was a kid, he would have offered to take off my hands.
When he was in his young teens, I gifted him with a book on lock picking that I bought from Loompanics. It was rather cool. I was trying to encourage and help him along what appeared to be his chosen path. It still seems strange to me he ended up an elevator technician.
I have no idea what’s up with the playing cards, but the part about locks and keys is no surprise at all.
Second Guessing The Experts
I know precisely this feeling, and it’s one of the best write-ups on the sentiment I have ever seen.
Mr. Anderson, I’m Afraid The Ring Is Mine
I actually took the same quiz as Deb, but she got her results posted while mine were still sitting in the editor, waiting for me to stop reading and start publishing.
A stern yet benevolent organizer who often knows best, your wits are keenly fixed on aiding efforts you deem worthy.
Now at this last we must take a hard road, a road unforseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be. To walk into peril to Mordor.
Cross Ian
This morning quizzes we have, hmmmm…
I swear I didn’t cheat. I really didn’t:
Via Ian Hamet.
Saturday, September 25, 2004
Foot Update
It seemed to get a bit better for a day or so. Then it went back and stayed about the same, until it worsened yesterday.
What I described before was gout-like symptoms in the joint where the big toe meets the left foot. Now it’s in the heel, the other toes are stiffer, and pain shoots throughout the foot at times. Lots of feeling stiff, funny as well as painful in the arch, that ind of thing.
Those times are mainly when I first put weight on it. It can get fairly comfortable laying down. Oddly, it helps less than it did simply to sit, or to elevate it on the recliner while sitting there. If I merely sit, it is not as debilitating to stand back up as it is when I have been horizontal. Now when I get up from bed I double over when the foot hits the floor, and I exclaim “oooh, I forgot!”
Ironically, it feels less bad than it did to walk or stand on, once I get started. I can walk around and it’ll feel better than it does right now, sitting at the computer. The toes have a greater range of motion than they did, if I ignore that the big toe hurts like hell to move, and the other toes feel oddly numb. Actually, they do anyway, but more so.
I do believe this means I am past the “let it go away by itself” stage and up to the “beg the doctor’s office for an immediate emergency visit Monday morning” stage.
Update:
Just poked around researching the matter. Googled the symptoms and landed on gout, so that’s probably it. What I described is pretty classic. We just discussed all the possible diet and lifestyle factors. My diet has changed dramatically since I stopped being single. More meat, and in a couple spells recently, far more red meat. We recently went on a “hot dogs sound really good” spell, where Deb had been uninterested and I had barely eaten them as a result. We went off coffee for a while in the summer, and had gone back onto it. Seems like the day this was less bad may have been a coffee-free day.
When I was feeling off some weeks ago, we had been on a regular diet of meat and salad or veggies, with no carb with supper, except on the days when supper was pasta. There was more red meat due to some amazing steak sales ($1.49, $1.89… wow).
Diets heavy in meat can be a trigger. As can dehydration, which is definitely a recent factor. I take less water consumption versus soda consumption to be a negative too, but just before this hit, there were a couple days when I had very little to drink. Ironically, while I take a diuretic, another risk factor, it had recently been halved.
Hypertension is a factor. That’s me.
Excess red blood cells? Not me. My last blood test showed me being mildly anemic. Too mildly for concern, but odd if you ask me. Somewhere in there was an itching all over symptom that wouldn’t seem to make sense, except I had it recently, just preceding and then overlapping the foot. It was driving me crazy for a few days.
Genetics could be a factor. My grandmother has bursitis. My mother retired early with severe arthritis. I have had arthritis symptoms to a modest degree for many years, mainly in my elbows since injuring them, and to some degree in knees and hands. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
The danger in going off and researching this stuff online is how easy it might be to convince yourself you have something you don’t, or make yourself worry. Leukemia? Well I certainly hope not. Sheesh.
The funny thing is that the “low purine diet” list of foods describes the bulk of my former, less healthy diet. Go figure. I was probably unwittingly keeping myself gout-free over the years.
One reason I’m glad I blog baby stuff on a separate page… (UPDATED)
I really hate it when I’m reading along, enjoying a new-to-me blog about something not directly political, and find myself being insulted. I mean, it’s a bit of a shock to be reading along in someone’s adventures in, say, parenting a new baby and suddenly find that I’m a RepubliFuck.
Huh.
No link, because I’m not interested in throwing insults back, and this might well be taken as one. I will say that at least the writer got the bit about how the Republi(Fuck)cans will be winning in November right, even if the poor soul believes that it’s because the nation is largely populated by “scared sheep.”
Sigh.
UPDATE/CLARIFICATION (0000): 1. The link in the comments is not where I got the term from, so please don’t heap abuse on her. Even if that were where I’d come across the term, I don’t condone heaping abuse on anybody. As a matter of fact, I’m strenuously opposed to the idea of heaping abuse on the writer, as said writer is entitled to an opinion.
2. The comment in question was not directed at me. I took it personally because it’s hard not to take these things personally. I have friends who make the blogger I was talking about look like a right-wing nutjob, and we get along just fine without name calling. I suspect we all think each other crazy, but we coexist nicely.
3. This was meant as nothing more than a comment on the tenor of the campaign and the fact that it makes me a little sad. I don’t assume that because someone is a Democrat, I might not want to hear what they have to say about other subjects, but it’s hard to keep an open mind when you run across a usage like that. I have intentionally avoided discussing politics lately because of just this sort of thing, and at this point I’m really rather sorry that I mentioned it.
4. It makes it really hard to maintain that they hate us more than we hate them when y’all’s first instinct is to go on the attack. That’s probably my fault, as I didn’t phrase this post particularly well and it may have seemed that it was a personal thing, which it wasn’t. Just a rant I ran across in the middle of a post about something else.
5. I’ve never pulled a post, but I’ll pull this one if the comments are used for plotting out how to harass the blogger who said this. It’s beneath us, folks. Knock it off. If you’re going to flame somebody, flame me for telling you not to flame anyone. Or for being a bitch in general. Or whatever you like, really. But don’t use my lament over the condition of politcial discourse to drag it even deeper into the gutter.
I come by it honestly.
Really.
My father (who needs a blog, dammit) offers the following observation on the role of Massachusetts in presidential politics:
Massachusetts is an interesting case.
They’re responsible for great American Presidents throughout
history, lately JFK.By producing chump candidates like Dukakis and Kerry they’ve also
given America great presidents.
See what I mean?
Friday, September 24, 2004
Doggies!
Speaking of pets, through sheer chance my father once got one of the coolest dog pictures ever as he approached up the walk to the back door of his old house in Vermont. My stepsister was visiting with all her dogs, so there was an overabundance of Goldens. Well, if there can ever be too many.
I’m posting a small closeup and a somewhat larger one if you click that, then a small version of the full picture, which you can click for larger, and finally, a text link to the full scan. Aren’t they cute? A bit fuzzy in translation, but oh well.
If I have them pegged correctly, from left to right they are Kashmir (Kaz), Jake, Peter, Autumn, Foxy, and Brandy. I am not completely certain of two of them. Sadly, Kaz, Jake and Brandy are no longer with us.
PetPourri
Jeff is planning a fall edition of PetPourri over on Tarazet, his pet blog. Doesn’t your pet deserve to be included?
Not surprising, but worthy of huge congratulations all the same.
We all knew you’d do it! Woo-hoo! Congratulations!
*happy dance*
Carnival of the Recipes Is Up
This week’s Carnival of the Recipes, another excellent collection, is up for your drooling pleasure (much like Erica Durance on Smallville) at Mellow Drama.
Television (Mostly Smallville, Maybe Spoilers)
Wednesday night I caught the premier of Smallville. I used to be a Smallville addict, but drifted away from it last season. Not so much a reflection on the show as on my circumstances, in which I stopped watching everything in favor of the Deb seek-and-marry mission. I went back to Joan of Arcadia, the best show on TV, quickly and got Deb hooked. Smallville never got me back to speak of. Gilmore Girls and West Wing had levels of success in between. Enterprise suffered timeslot foolishness, placing itself opposite something I’d watch first were I watching anything. This season I am far more interested in Enterprise, so they put themselves opposite Joan. Duh! But I digress.
As I was saying, Smallville… woohoo! I liked it. I liked it a lot. They have come a long way from kryptonite mutant of the week episodes in the early days, and seem to be doing a nice job of transitioning from teen Clark to the eventual adult Superman. Even if they have played with the Superman canon to a breathtaking degree.
Erica Durance as Lois Lane had much to do with my enjoyment of the episode. Move over Chloe. She has the right look, the right attitude and sass. Well done.
The story was a little confusing, but I didn’t see the finale last season, but for maybe a few minutes, and not much of several of the other most recent episodes. I had enough background to be able to explain to Deb about the cave, Kryptonian symbols, Dr. Swann, the ship, his Krypton father’s role, and how the characters fit together.
I thought the Superman nods might have been a little heavy handed. “Is it a bird? A plane?” “Fortress of Solitude.” Margot Kidder’s role and some of her dialogue, and so forth. Yet cool at the same time.
The flying. I had just gotten done telling Deb that a widespread theory is that the show will end with the episode in which he flies, going off to become Superman. Then he flies! But as Kal-El, not himself.
The effect of flying was right out of Matrix Reloaded! Which I have one problem with, and it’s not the manner of takeoff or the disturbance of air around him. It’s the ground elasticity. In the Matrix, the ground sinks and rebounds because flying is a disturbance in the coding of the Matrix, an anomaly in an artificial reality. I don’t see a reason for that ground effect in Smallville. Otherwise, way cool. The special effect of flying isn’t what it once was, and it should be interesting to see the new Superman film(s).
We managed to miss the premier of Gilmore Girls, which disappoints me given the way the season ended. Deb saw all and I saw part of ER last night. Too bad about the broken neck kid; he was cool. We were cheering on the exodus of the evil whassername from Carter’s life. Yay, she’s gone! Good riddance. I think they meant the scene to be emotional for the audience, as in sad, not cause for excitement. Oops.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Don’t boil the binkies, and other things I’ve learned today.
OK, that’s the only thing I’ve learned today. But it was a good thing, yes? In my defense, the damned package said to boil them. I told Jay that if they could go to the trouble to cover their asses by including such an instruction, it was the least I could do to cover my own by following it.
Then I ruined the binkies.
Dammit.
In other news, Sadie is rapidly outpacing the ability of my body to provide a healthy environment, but you’d never know it. Fluid is just barely within guidelines now, and even my untrained eyes can see on ultrasound that the poor placenta looks “tired”...but the kid hasn’t slowed down a bit. She seems to be perfectly happy and quite comfortable in there.
Dammit.
Not that I want anything to go wrong--I just want her out. She’s got less than a week to show up voluntarily. Kid needs to get a move on. Crazy thing.
Sadie and Advice for Consumer Product Manufacturers
For those who haven’t been paying attention or looking at the baby blog, Sadie ought to arrive any day now. We’ve been figuring she’ll time it so we miss the season premier of Joan of Arcadia, the best show on TV, which sadly airs on CBS. Speaking of which, I noticed last night that the time on the VCR was inexplicably several hours off, which hardly bodes well for the taping of Joan all programmed and ready.
I anticipate posting a birth announcement from the hospital. No liveblogging the birth though. That would be obsessive or something. I’m almost never obsessive like that.
In preparation, I recently had the pleasure to assemble a Graco Triad Disney Pooh 3 In 1 Bedside Bassinet. It can be configured as a bassinet, complete with canopy, bedside sleeper that secures to the bed, or changing table, which looks remarkably identicle to bedside sleeper apart from location and attachment with respect to the bed. It also switches between rocking and wheeled, with brakes (not breaks, people) on the wheels on one end.
We’re using it as a bassinet. Assembly required…
Hello the manufacturers of things to be assembled! Your attention please!
First, have someone write the instructions who has, you know, actually assembled one of the product in question.
Second, have some tester people put the item together uncoached.
Third, have someone who can, you know, write create the instructions, or at least edit them for readability.
Fourth, some people don’t have magnification vision as a standard bodily feature. Pretend people have to, you know, be able to see the words when designing and printing your instructions.
Fifth, and really, should I have to list so many items? You know how you cater to folks who don’t ne hable pas no dang English? Well, don’t forget your customers who sprechen English and want to be able to see their directions. See also item four, in which smooshing in multiple languages in 6 point font to save paper is no excuse for a lousy customer experience.
I like being able to start in English and end in English, then turn a page and say “ah, the rest of this is en Francais” or whatever. You know how it’s annoying when people haven’t grasped the concept of paragraphs? It’s annoying when the same basic thing happens but the switch is from one language to another.
Large enough type. Language sections separate. If not separate, at least distinct. Paper is cheap. Pulp is a renewable resource. It’s all about the total customer experience. Same as technical products requiring support that doesn’t suck rather than support as an obligatory afterthought.
Sixth, yes, I am still going! The parts should fit as intended.
In this case, the unit comes with “music, vibration and light.” This takes the form of a vibration motor thingie on the underside of the plastic bed support thingie that goes IN the cloth enclosure, not under it as the directions unclearly implied despite the graphic. A cord dangles from that and goes through a couple of grommets described infuriatingly by the directions. A control unit with a light and music hooks to it and brackets onto the foot of the bassinet.
Except it doesn’t. It is physically impossible to mount the bracket as described and pictured. I tried far harder than the feature was worth. What they did is sized the bracket to fit over the bar around the top if bare, but designed everything else such that it is intended to go over cloth and padding. We left that off. She doesn’t need vibrating until she’s much older, and the music is kind of annoying and hair trigger.
It still irks me that the maker was so careless, and that on top of lousy, hard to read, cramped directions. I can see why people would buy something already assembled. $60 seems so reasonable. If you take a theoretical $200 of my time assembling it - assuming I could actually substitute the work for the assembly in a direct way - plus the $60, it’s a different story. No doubt there’s an article in there somewhere; how products have moved so much from fully made or full service to self-assembly or self-service, and the implications thereof.
Sleeeeepy.
But up for the NST this morning. I already can’t wait to get home and take a nap.
Finally managed to sleep a little after 0300. Still getting a contraction here and there but they’re back to being occasional things.
So no real excitement yet...just a sleepy mom and a kicking babe.
Tuning up…
My body feels right now like a large orchestra getting ready to play a symphony. You know that once they’re actually playing, it will be a thing of beauty, but the tuning-up beforehand is almost painful to listen to.
For the last four hours or so, I’ve been enjoying what I can only assume is a bout of false labor. Contractions are irregular and manageable, but there’s no doubt that they’re much closer relatives of the real thing than those Braxton-Hicks jobbies that have been cropping up here and there for months now. We’re talking anywhere from 10-20 minutes apart and just strong enough to force me to pay attention. I know better than to get excited, but I can’t quite sleep between the periodic discomfort, the baby kicking me between the things, and Jay’s extra-loud snoring, courtesy of a sore foot keeping him out of a position where he breathes well. Poor thing…
In any case, I’ll most likely jump in the shower in an effort to relax a bit more. If this, by some miracle, turns out to be a direct prelude to the real thing, I’ll be wanting to have slept at least a little. Right now I feel like I could go all night, but I know that’s an illusion.
Updates will be forthcoming should anything truly exciting happen...and probably if it doesn’t. 
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Predictable
I took that Politopia quiz that’s been floating around. Here are my results:
NW-You would feel most at home in the Northwest region. You advocate a large degree of economic and personal freedom. Your neighbors include folks like Ayn Rand, Jesse Ventura, Milton Friedman, and Drew Carey, and may refer to themselves as “classical liberals,” “libertarians,” “market liberals,” “old whigs,” “objectivists,” “propertarians,” “agorists,” or “anarcho-capitalist.”
Exchange 5.5 Blues
Exchange would crash periodically due to disk space issues, which I finally resolved once and for all. Well, more accurately, for a more extended time.
Naturally I was surprised to be paged yesterday morning when the Exchange server barfed again. I had the manager reboot it, and then I tested to make sure it was processing mail afterward. A while later, I checked out the event logs for signs of what might have happened.
Why lo and behold, something new and completely different! The errors logged included:
Background thread FDoQuotaCheck halted due to error code 0xfaf.
Background thread FDoMaintenance halted due to error code 0xfaf.
Unexpected replication thread error 0xfaf.
FReplAgent
Er… ummm… okay then.
I found something potentially relevant on Exchange 2000, not 5.5, where there is a setting in the registry allocating thread memory. It should be set to 0 to make it unlimited. That setting does not exist for Exchange 5.5, but I naturally begin to wonder if the server needs more memory to handle the load it is under. It’s getting old, and has only 128 MB. I’m trying to nurse it along until next year, when I will be attempting to get them to replace everything.
Figured I’d toss this out here in case anyone has insight into the errors.
Statuary and Stuff
Yep, still haven’t finished posting all the Plymouth pictures that might be worth posting. Today it’s primarily a theme of statues and attractions. Thrilled you are. As usual but not always, click the 400x picture to open an 800x version, and click the text link below the picture for the giant version as it came out of the camera.
First, the obligatory “you are here” sign:
Huge version
Deb pointed out that this is what you do if you don’t want people to sit on the wall:
Huge version
The Mayflower was remarkably small:
Huge version
Some dude named William Bradford:
Huge version
There is never any historical revisionism or mythos building. Yup, and Deb didn’t laugh at the rock’s small size and say “that’s it!?” when she first saw it:
Huge version
This is a funky stainless steel sculpture/statue celebrating the wide range of immigrants that made the area what it is today, or something like that, but to me it looks like a frozen horror movie scene:
Huge version
This statue honors the brave Pilgrim wimmen, but would do that better were it not fronted by a fetid pool of scummy water that has trash in the part not pictured:
Huge version
Last, but not least, the now politically incorrect statue of Massasoit near the wax museum I’ve never been in:
Huge version
The park that includes the Eddy memorial, immigrant statue, and Pilgrim women statue is very nice. It goes from the waterfront, under the main drag in Plymouth, and extends quite a ways into town. When I was in high school, I used to ride my bike to Plymouth with friends, and we would ride through the park.
