jonandnic dot com

The Wise Family Pharmacy

On the plus side, I’m finally feeling like a human being again… On the negative side, this whole week was a complete and utter waste. I slept through 2 solid days, waking up only to take more drugs and wipe off the cold sweat clinging to me. I kept a cup next to my bed — a spittoon, if you will — because swallowing was often too painful to be worth it. I won’t tell you about the alternatives to Kleenex that I invented.

The next two days I watched an inordinate amount of children’s television with Benjamin. Did you know that Sesame Street is still on? Some of the same actors are even still in it. The Cookie Monster still makes me giggle, and Ernie and Bert still make me laugh out loud.

Last night, after washing my hands carefully, I picked up my son for almost the first time in 2 weeks (he and Nicole were gone to camp last week) and man, what a change! The little guy, who used to be a marshmallow, has gotten a lot more wiry. It’s probably his newly discovered mobility skills, finally working off all that baby fat. He can pull himself up to standing now, using… well pretty much anything. But he doesn’t know how to sit back down — which frustrates him to no end. We try to teach him to bend his knees first, but I guess his little body just hasn’t acquired that skill yet. He is coping though. The first couple times he would just let go of whatever he was holding on to and let his body fall backward like a tree. After doing that for awhile, and not very much liking the impact, he’s learned to turn toward the ground and hold his arms out in front of him before he starts falling. It would still go much better for him if he could bend his knees, but he doesn’t seem to mind. It gets him in the right position for crawling — which he loves to do, and can do at an impressive speed now.

As much as I enjoyed my week at home (not) I’m greatly looking forward to getting back in the game. I visited the doctor again today, because my sore throat hasn’t gone away, and my temperature seems to fluctuate wildly, and was given a new battery of drugs to try (including more of those great American painkillers, which I will summarily ignore, and eventually flush) but I’m back at it tomorrow anyway. We have 2 weeks left until the missions trip, and there’s wayy too much to do before then!

PS: The pills aren’t all mine! Some are Ben’s and Nic’s vitamins!

Benjamin’s First Kiss

Scott’s little girl, in the park last Sunday…

Tonsillitis

So this is awesome. I’ve been sick since… I guess Saturday was when I started feeling a little weird. We had a wonderful time hanging out at the park for the Production/Facilities team BBQ after church, but when I got home it really hit me. The slightest breeze from the air conditioner made me wretch.
My temperature was hanging out just shy of 102 for the past 2 days, finally dropping to the 100 range today, but yesterday my throat was really hurting and this morning it felt like it was swollen nearly shut.
I finally went to the walk-in clinic, where both the doctor and the nurse looked down my throat, their faces reflecting something like horror… apparently it looks pretty bad down there.

Anyway, I’m supposed to take the next 2 days off. Not particularly happy about that — but considering they thought it might be mono, I guess it could be worse…

Speak, LORD,

…for your servant is listening

Making a Break for It!

Now that Benjamin is crawling — not his little frog hop either, he can really get around — we had to buy a baby gate to keep him in the living room. It’s a plastic one (for some reason that I’m sure a guy can’t understand, a wooden one wouldn’t do) and its been pretty effective. The only problem is, I don’t know how to put it up.
It’s one of those jobs that expands to cover the width of the doorway. You’re supposed to be able to press some button, expand it, then have it lock into place, tight against the door. There are two buttons on the device, but neither seem to do that.

This morning Benjamin and I decided to give mommy a little extra time in bed, so we got up to hang out in the living room. I set the gate against the doorway, as a sort of psychological deterrent against leaving, while I poked around the Internet on my laptop. This lasted for quite some time. Benjamin would crawl up to the gate, look at it, moan and gurgle in disappointment, then get distracted by his hand, or something else equally fascinating that he HAD to get in his mouth, and forget about getting into the kitchen.

After about an hour, though, the lure of the kitchen was too great. And can you blame him? There’s a dishwasher to bang on, cat food to try to get in his mouth, and chairs to pull himself up on! He became more determined, and decided that he should be able to somehow climb OVER the gate — and my illusion of security fell apart. He put his little hands in the holes in the gate and started pushing off the ground with his feet to try to get up. He wasn’t even high enough to have anywhere to fall, when the gate collapsed downward.

There he was, on his hands and knees, suddenly looking into the promised land! All of that open space before him, and the evil gate turned out to be no problem at all! The pacifier dropped from his mouth when his jaw dropped in what can only be described as baby amazement. And then he got this HUGE grin on his face, and set out to crawl over the fallen gate and on to the cat food bowl.

Of course, daddy then swept in from above and scooped him back up to the living room. I set the gate back up a little bit better than before, and strangely he hasn’t tried it again. Maybe he’s waiting until I’m distracted to make his move — but I’ve got a secret weapon up my sleeve: Baby Einstein! That’ll buy me at least 15 minutes of peace

Nic’s gonna get some video up of him crawling around, because it is quite the site to behold…

In Contrast

I feel a little dirty, after giving Vista a less-than-condescending review, so in penance, I’m going to brag on another computer for a moment.

In our home office (which doubles as our bedroom) we have a sleek, virtually silent computer. It’s connected to a very sharp, 18″LCD monitor, an incredibly useful HP Printer/Scanner/Copier, and a diminutive but powerful little stereo.
It connects to the Mac Mini in our home theater over the wireless network, and plays our library of DVDs and downloaded TV content, which we can control in bed with a little remote control.

It receives and sorts our e-mail, automatically flagging and categorizing different mail right on the server (over IMAP, since the iPhone can’t do any of those advanced features), and syncs with our shared Address Book and Calendars.

Did I mention that it’s 7 years old?

Our office/secondary-media/e-mail-and-chat Mac is a relatively ancient G4 Cube, running at 450Mhz with a slightly pumped up 768MB of RAM, and a new-ish 80GB hard drive. It’s no Mac mini, but we run MPlayer instead of FrontRow, and I picked up a KeySpan remote for $20 on eBay, and its as capable as a much newer machine. It’s running the latest version of OS X, and does so without complaint or lag.

It has a few limitations, and unfortunately was an early model, so has the weaker of the two video cards that the Cube were configured with, and only two USB ports can be annoying. But both problems are easily solved with less than $50 and a visit to eBay. I wouldn’t try running FinalCut on her, but she runs PhotoShop CS without delay.

The thing is on 24/7. When awake you can hear the hard drive spinning, and nothing else. When its asleep, its completely silent. It has no fans, and the whole computer floats elegantly in a glass enclosure that still looks futuristic, despite its age. I had initially picked it up for bragging rights, with the intention of pushing it as far as I could, and then selling it on eBay as a collectors item — I paid less than $200 for it, and figured I could upgrade it with spare parts and make a little money. But I kept pushing it, and it kept outperforming my expectations. It worked its way into useful life as the sexiest, coolest and oldest computer in our array of devices, and even though its “obsolete” it gives the Craptop running Vista a run for its money.

The Ow Starts Now!

I finally broke down and installed Windows Vista on one of my computers!

I actually ran Release Candidate 2 for about 2 days, back before it came out, and had high hopes that it would be a lot less annoying when it was finally released. On hearing that it did not, I vowed to resist the upgrade as long as possible. Alas, certain elements within my organization at work seem to think its important (even though years of experience with our type of customers tells me that it’ll be 2 years before they even consider running it) so I figure we’ll give it another try.

My employer’s Microsoft developer subscription allows me to take my pick of which Microsoft software I want to run, so I selected Vista Home Premium — because the system analysis tool they provide gave my year-old craptop a very low System Performance score, and I didn’t think it would be worth it trying to run Ultimate.

The install was actually quite smooth — the image-based installer seems to be quicker than the classic method, and it felt like I was up and running pretty quickly. My initial impressions were still slanted by the obnoxious User Security option being turned on by default. Moving a file from the desktop into a subfolder showed no less than 3 dialog boxes, requiring me to twice confirm the action I had literally just made. However, once I turned this “feature” off, things got a lot better. Some other impressions, based on my 2 hours of use…

• I dislike that they keep changing the stupid Start Menu — forcing you to re-learn how to find your programs with every version of the OS. A hierarchical menu is not that complicated, stop screwing with it.

• I also dislike the fact that they keep messing with the Control Panel, continuously hiding the things you’d want to do behind “friendly” wizards, and task panels. Again, a control panel is pretty self explanatory — I don’t think anyone was clamoring for them to change it.

• I love the Network Map tool. It had trouble mapping our work network beyond two switches — but I don’t blame it. I have trouble mapping our work network myself. It was also pretty cool when it auto-discovered a co-workers uPnP external hard drive, and browsed his shared music. Almost as cool as iTunes, even.

• I like the pretty, big icons, and the re-sizing of fonts for high-resolution monitors. It works much better than the crappy XP way of changing font-sizes. The icon layout seems very crowded though, and when browsing a well-populated folder in large icon mode, I keep wanting to look for “Clean Up” from the View menu, to make it easier to look at.

• My laptop is not capable of the Glass theme (actually, apparently the hardware is, but ATI refuses to release a new driver for my particular video card, making legions of geeks very angry — but not angry enough to make an open source driver, unfortunately) but I do generally like the new, glossier UI. The contrasts between UI elements aren’t big enough though, and it gives the whole thing sort of a dark feeling. Not quite as nice as Apple’s Aqua theme, but still pretty decent.

• I really like the Sidebar app. I’m sure it has some limitations, and I had a brutal time trying to install new Gadgets, but I find this to be wayy more useful than Apple’s Dashboard. The point of a widget/gadget is to have the information I want on-hand, and the Sidebar does a great job of that. Dashboard is too annoying to use — any time I actually think to hit F12 to look at the weather, Dashboard needs to initialize all the widgets and it takes almost a minute before things start appearing. I could get to a website in a minute, so why would I bother with the stupid F12 key?

I switched over to FireFox and iTunes, and Vista seemed perfectly happy to accommodate me. I was expecting more complaining, since both IE and Windows Media Player seem so integrated into the OS (especially with Media Center being a part of my particular version) but I was pleasantly surprised that integration was only on consistency, and there were no issues with changing the defaults. Microsoft’s obviously learned a lesson or two on this front.

Overall, it doesn’t seem as bad as I thought, once I got it configured. Lucky Nicole gets to be the real guinea pig though. The Craptop got a new keyboard, wireless card, and a RAM boost, but none of that is enough to make me want to supplant my MacBook Pro. So I guess we’ll see what she thinks after a couple weeks of use…

Today

Has been an awkward day…