Mizblog

It’s Tuesday again. Maintenance day. Yesterday Joel installed and configured phpBugTracker on our lab server. This involved hours and hours of puzzling over why Apache wasn’t responding to changes in its config file (answer: there were two versions of apache installed and guess which one wasn’t running), wondering why php pages were being served raw and unprocessed (answer: php wasn’t installed), struggling to get phpBugTracker to connect to the database (surprisingly, MySQL wasn’t installed either) and a long list of more trivial disconnections and missing dependencies. At the end of the day, it turned out that several hours of hacks and soft links and reinstalls could have been replaced by three config file adjustments. That’s computers for you.

It’s been getting colder. Seems like I write more blog entries during times like this. The dropping temperature seems to put me in a morose, contemplative mood. Watching the world begin to die.

My daughter is fussing in the next room. My wife just walked out of that room and went back in with a tool of some kind. My sense of self preservation is keeping me from inquiring further.

This morning was rough.

It started early with a trip to the pediatrician. With our regular pediatrician on vacation, there was some mixup as to who would see our girl, how we would pay for it, what her name was, how to spell her name (Sangeeta still can’t spell it), and what the name of the substitute doctor was. I almost screamed.

It turns out that Saranya shrank half an inch and gained 3 pounds since last time we visited. Needless to say, they aren’t too careful when they weigh and measure the babies. Oh yeah, and this time they didn’t make us strip her nekkid so she was wearing a diaper, onesie, sweater, and pants-with-built-in-socks to help with her ballast. In the end she got three shots and did a whole lot of crying. And she has wax in her ear.

Then I tried to get my foot X-rayed, but my doctor had failed to fill out the paperwork so the X-ray tech wouldn’t do the job.

Article adjectivy pluralnouns verbed adverbly preposition the noun. Pluralpronouns verbed adjectively.

Pronoun verb adverb interjection!

What’s the difference between forgetting something and never having known it in the first place?

I’ve been diagnosed with plantar fascitis. It’s been disabling me for months and I had no idea what was going on, except that my foot kept hurting for no good reason. I suspect the blame for it can be laid upon my old worn-out shoes, which I replaced a month after symptoms occurred. That was back in March though, and it’s been half a year since then. So now I’m doing stretches and exercises in addition to taking ibuprofen in large doses.

It’s time to get back into writing a regular blog.

Saranya is getting bigger and better developed. This morning she rolled over onto her tummy (with a little help) and held her upper body off the ground by resting on her elbows! Before today she’d just lie on her face with her arms lying limp at her sides, and she’d kick her feet and arch her back to lift her head off the ground a bit. This was a big step for her.

Work is going pretty well. Today I finally converted my main coding project from VC6 to VC8 and got it to work! I’m finally using a modern compiler again.

We’re about to get a new contract with a major corporation. I’m not supposed to talk about the details, but it’s going to keep us quite busy for some time. Mainly me, since I’m doing all the programming. I’m going to need a new computer system soon though, since VC8 doesn’t run on my old work computer (Win2k). I’d better get shopping.

I swear it was my Jr. High home-ec classroom, but it was also our home. The freezer was full of ham, bacon, and other pork products, as well as large amounts of candy. Sangeeta wanted to eat the candy but I was arguing that we should wait until Christmas because that’s how we do things in our culture.

Then the dream changed. There was a pretty Russian girl who was naked and rolling around on the ground. She was completely encrusted with dirt and gravel though, so she might as well have been fully clothed. She was doing some erotic dance or something, and then she got up and went over to sit on a nearby log. She lit a match off of a rock on the ground, put the flame up to her mouth, and breathed out orange fire. Then a retarded girl came up to her and she breathed the fire into the retarded girl’s hair, which ignited and burned. The retarded girl just sat there and watched herself be consumed by the flames. It was especially ironic as she calmly watched her eyeballs burn. At the end there was nothing left except charred bone, and the Russian girl complimented her on the wonderful BBQ aroma.

Having a baby is hard. I don’t just mean giving birth to the baby, I mean keeping the baby alive and comfortable and quiet and happy. It’s not easy work. First off, babies need lots of attention. They sleep a lot, but not necessarily for long periods of time. They have no patience whatsoever, and no empathy or sympathy. But what they lack in maturity they make up for in volume. To all you prospective parents out there, I have this advice: get used to the sound of a baby crying – it’s going to be with you every day of your life for quite a while.

I guess I should get over the generalities and get down to the particulars, huh? Saranya (my daughter) is going to be 3 months old this Friday, and she’s already as big as an average 5 month old baby. She’s a giant! But she sure is cute. Here’s a picture of her at 6 weeks of age:

There’s a new girl in the world. Her stats and contact info are as follows:

• Name: Saranya Milan Rai-Burke
• Born: Friday May 19th, 8:08am
• Weight: 7 pounds 2 ounces
• Length: 19.5 inches
• Favorite food: mom
• Likes: swaddling, bouncing, fine dining
• Dislikes: having diapers changed, nudity

Her head shots and glamour photos are on the web at

http://www.mizerai.com/Saranya

There have been a couple of commercials on TV lately that have been bothering me. I’d like to share my thoughts with you.

First there’s the Sprint “Fair and Flexible” commercials. This is where unlimited calling starts at 7pm. “7pm?!? That’s…that’s…” “Let’s spin the wheel of adjectives.” Okay, that’s not so bad. It used to be that you only got like 10,000 “nights and weekends” minutes per month, but now they’ve upped it to unlimited. Big whoop. The kicker though is when they tell you “So you control your plan; it doesn’t control you.” What?!? I don’t see how having to wait until 7pm to call people can be construed as “controlling your plan”.

Anyway, the other one is a beer commercial. “I’m just here for the Bud Light.” Now maybe it’s just me, but the message I receive from these commercials is that if you have Bud Light, no-talent jerks will come and crash your party and steal your beer. I guess they’re targeting no-talent jerks as the primary consumers of their product, so this might not be stupid on thier part. It just bothers me, that’s all.