So my wife has started to blog on a regular basis. I really enjoy reading her stuff and will probably ping back to it here in the future when she pulls out one of her unique gems. I guess this could be a new years resolution to blog more. I really enjoy it, I may do more on the technical side of my life, little nuggets of knowledge about problems that I’ve come across and hopefully some good answers to them.
Going by the mantra that a goal that is not written down is just a wish, I’m going to take a moment to write them down here.
Blog more often.
Lose some weight
Finish paying off the Credit Card Debt
Budget better
Take Lunch to work instead of eating the the cafeteria
PS. There is a secondary reason for this blog. I want to test out a new twitter plug-in. Hope it works.
On Sept 17, 2009 at 5:36 AM Kaelum Mark Gardner joined our little family. Here’s his story.
My wife, Chesnye, called me at work about 4:30 PM. “I think my water broke.” after a short explanation it really did sound like her water had broke and it was not simply the baby had kicked her bladder and caused a “leak”. I told her I needed to go tell my boss that I was leaving and needed to check on my wife. I also told her that I would call her when I was on my way home. My boss, Mr. Watson, was excited that he had not yet been knocked out of the baby pool; then promptly ejected me from his office with instructions to go take care of my wife.
The drive home was interesting, Chesnye would have killed me had she known how fast I was driving in parts. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the speedometer until I saw another car pulled over and decided a speeding ticket would only slow me down. Chesnye was waiting for me on the couch downstairs when I got home. All I had to do was put the dog in the kennel and grab the bag she had packed. We then started the 15 min drive to the hospital (albeit much slower and calmer).
The check-in process at Liberty Hospital is very easy, they have you pre-register a few weeks in advance, so the only thing you have to do when you get here is sign the “Consent to Treat” form. We had called ahead on our way and they had secured us the last room. I felt a little bad for the couple behind us, she was having contractions, and they were scrambling to get a room clean for her. The first nurse that saw us checked Chesnye with a PH strip and confirmed that her water had broke, we were going to be here for the duration. They hooked up the fetal monitors an took her vitals. Everything to this point was going great. Except that she was not contracting very strongly. The fetal monitor was pretty neat, you could tell when the baby kicked because there would be a little spike on the graph.
At 5:30 Dr Morris decided that it was time to help the contractions along and started an IV with Pitocin. The poor nurse couldn’t find Chesnye’s small veins. Luckily, after she dug around in both arms(ouch) finally found a suitable vein in her right hand and placed the IV.
Chesnye’s contractions got continually stronger. She was showing a good contraction pattern, they were getting stronger. At 10:00 PM her back labor got so bad she asked for some IV drugs. The IV drugs worked for about an hour. I was able to catch a few minutes of sleep; Chesnye, however, was not able to sleep but was able to relax for the hour and catch a breather. She’d close her eyes but the contractions kept waking her up. After the drug wore off, the contractions got really intense. She asked for her epidural and Dr. Fox came around 11:00 and placed it. He did an awesome job! We were both able to sleep for a little bit.
The next six hours were pretty uneventful, the nurses increased the Pitocin dosage and her contractions went on at full strength. At 5:00 AM Dr. Morris came in to check on Chesnye. She was not dilating. The decision was made to do a C-Section before the baby were to go into any serious distress. They prepped Chesnye and gave me a set of scrubs to change into and took her to the Operating Room. They said they would come get me when everything was ready to go. Holy crap was that a long wait ( I don’t really think it was that long, just seemed really long).
When I walked into the OR with the nurse it was a little scary, there were blue sterile fields everywhere. The nurse pointed to a stool near Chesnye’s head, that was my spot, I wasn’t to touch anything. The operation began, from my perspective all I could hear was hushed muttering from the OR Doc, and the Nurses. I chatted with the Anesthesiologist, and the Nurse in charge of monitoring all the vitals for a little while. Chesnye was a little out of it and didn’t make for good conversation.
At 5:35 there was a bustle on the other side of the sterile field, nurses were handing instruments around pretty fast, there was a lot of shuffling and at 5:36 a little cry. I never thought that such a little noise could bring such big emotions to the surface. The nurse next to me asked for my camera and snapped some pictures of the doctor cutting the cord. I won’t post those here, those are only for my family’s collection. They took him and cleaned him up a little, cleared out his lungs, and did his measurements. He did not like to be cold. I still think the first thing I noticed is that his brow furrows when he’s mad in the exact same way Chesnye’s does when she’s mad at me.
They got him all wrapped up and handed him to me. I then took him over to my stool and let him meet Chesnye. The rest of the operation took about an hour. All I could do was smile under my mask. My jaw hurt for hours afterward. They got Chesnye all patched up. In the mean time they took a picture, did a slick sheet (footprints) and gave wristbands to baby, me, and Chesnye.
I’ve been looking around at hosting providers for a little while. I love Bluehost, and have been very happy with them. I found a sister company (I even think they use the same data center in Utah) called HostMonster. They were running a deal for 3.95 a month with all the bluehost bells and whistles. So I signed up. So far the only difference has been hostmonster machines seem to be a little more responsive.
I just had a random recollection of one of my most embarrassing moments.
I was in college and was trying to date a girl from my physics class. I had ridden my bike to campus and physics was our last class of the day. I decided to try and earn brownie points and walk her home. We both walked and had a good time chatting all the way to her apartment. I waked her to her door and said I’d call her later.
Her window overlooked the parking lot where I had parked my bike. I knew she was watching me so I tried to show off by jumping the curb. I missed and crashed right into the curb. I had my laptop in my backpack and was worried about breaking it so I twisted as to not land on my back. The result was me landing on my face. All while this girl was watching.
I picked up my bike an broken pride and went home. We never really dated much after that.
I was in the market for a Waterproof Digital Camera that my wife and I could take on our vacation to Hawaii at the end of August. I came across techondigital.com. I found the page from a google search for Olympus 1030 SW. This was the URL for the Ad: http://www.lowpricedigital.com/item.asp?item_Id=161557
They had a 5 star “Trusted” Rating so I proceeded to make the order. I was called back soon thereafter by them and was told that I needed to buy a battery for the camera. This was the first red flag. Why would a reputable company like Olympus sell a mid-range camera with no battery? The sales person then clarified that there was actually a battery but it was a stater battery that was only good for about 15 – 20 pictures. What the sales person didn’t know is that I was already planning on purchasing a second battery for the camera and had found a battery on another site for about $30. So you can imagine my shock when he told be the battery would cost $89! WTF!?
I politely declined his offer and asked if there was anything Else I needed to know about the camera. He said there was. And…..? As it turns out this camera was an “Gray Market” camera from Japan, all of the markings and instructions would be in Japanese. And If I wanted, I could upgrade to the US Model for an additional $179, which put the price way above what I could by the camera for locally here in town plus an extra battery. When I called him on the price of the battery and the fact the model number on the website was for the US Model and told him this sounded like a bait and switch he asked if I would like to cancel my order. He did and I was send a confirmation email the next day saying my order was canceled.
This is when I started to do some more research into this company.
The ratings company that had given this merchant a 5 star rating has its reviews listed here: http://www.lowpricedigital.com/merchant.asp?merchant_id=20, as you can see each and every review has only a pro comment, very generic, and no cons. Not a single negative review I don’t care who you are, you don’t get 200 reviews that don’t have a single negative comment, or con for the product. Also there is no place to add your own review…. hmmm very fishy.
Checked out other websites that had linked this company to many others with similar practices. It all came together when I found this site. http://donwiss.com/pictures/brooklynstores/
There are a dozen or so of these companies operating in New York that are on the same street. Again, very fishy, many of them are even in the same building.
From what I can gather I believe that all these companies are inter-related.
Broadway family
Broadway Photo LLC
BwayPhoto.com
A&M Photo World LLC
AMPhotoWorld.com
DigitalLiquidators.com
RegalCamera.com
CameraTopia.com
Preferred Photo
Preferredphoto.com
preferedphoto.com
wilddigital.com
Milleniumcamerera.com
Time 2 Envy
stores.ebay.com/Time2Envy
Camera Addict, LLC
cameraAddict.com
Prestige Lamera, LLC d.b.a Prestige Camera.com
dBuys.com
iBuyDigital.com
iBuyPlasma.com
RealDealShop.com
DigitalMegaStore.com
CentralDigital.com
Time2Envy.com
Quest 4 Cameras
Quest4Cameras.com
For those of you who are wondering I ended up buying the camera from NewEgg.com. Best price I found, I even got a 2yr Accidental Damage Warranty (Trust me I’ll probably use it twice) and an XD photocard.
Thanks to my reader (to this day I think I only have 1) I found a much better website warning the consumer of these jerks. http://www.broadway-photo-warning.com
I set out on a mission this week to find the perfect wiki, I had been completely on finding a dozen or so wikis and installing them in various fashions and trying out a feature/wish list hoping that I would find one that suited all my needs and as many Wants as I could get. I fell in love with mediawiki when I was in school to document all my projects, and keep track of my thoughts. But the lack of ACLs has sent me back to the great cloud to seek out an alternative.
Here were my requirements
Needs
Open Source – This particular project had a budget of 0 dollars. Preferably some GPL or LGPL project.
Written in PHP – I already have a LAMP infrastructure so Python/Java/Perl were out.
Flat File or MySQL page storage
ACLs – Must be able to make some pages readable but not editable by certain groups.
LDAP Authentication – Own Database ok but would prefer to centralize passwords
Page Versioning – Must be able to roll back changes
Search – Page Titles
Syntax Highlighting – Trust me, its just better that way.
Wants
Easy to setup – I know a pipe dream but there’s always hope.
Page Versioning – Be able to diff pages between all versions
Search – Full text
Syntax similar to MediaWiki – Its what I’m used to
Tagging – Have be able to order/organize the pages someway.
Then as I started my search I found a little site that took all the fun out of it.
http://www.wikimatrix.org/
The search feature quickly narrowed my search down to these few wikis. I threw MediaWIki into the works just to keep a baseline for features I would gain or lose.