January 23, 2005

It's a good thing he's not going to remember any of this

Imagine: you're sitting there quietly sipping your drink, and a hand the size of your torso comes out of nowhere, snatches it out of your mouth and grabs you by the jaw. You're pulled forward into a sort of bent-over squatting position, and another hand, also the size of your torso, starts thumping you rhythmically on the back, shaking your internal organs.

This happens a couple dozen times a day.

Or you wake up hungry, start casting around for food, and somebody shoves a hunk of rubber the size of your fist and covered in stale saliva into your mouth. When you do eat, it's with the heedless desperation of the truly starving.

And just when you're settled, those same hands pick you up and strip you half-naked. They take liberties with your private parts and a cloth doused in cold water, and then dress you again in a bulky, ill-fitting undergarment.

Whoever depicts infancy as a peaceful time filled with happy gurgling and quiet warmth has to be crazy.

Posted by wallich at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2005

Today we have washing of parts

And tomorrow, and tomorrow...

It goes like this:

  • Unscrew the collection bottle from the manifold, pull back the receiver membrane to drain into the bottle, and then pour the milk into a clean container.
  • Detach the cone from the manifold.
  • Place your thumb on the front (gridded side) of the receiver, slipping it underneath the edge of the membrane, and your forefinger on the back. Twist to remove the receiver from the manifold.
  • Carefully pull on membrane near tab to remove it from the receiver.
  • Put the manifold, receiver, membrane, cone and collection bottle into the dishpan with warm soapy water.
  • Repeat for second collection assembly.
  • Wash gently, and rinse until no soap bubbles persist. The membranes will no longer feel slick to the touch.
  • Reassemble, with the fronts of the receivers facing away from the cones.

    • Repeat eight times a day.

    Posted by wallich at 03:17 PM | Comments (2)

    January 09, 2005

    Not a bad view

    charlietable.jpg

    Yep, we're home, Charlie is still breathing, and you can look out at the back yard from the changing table. That prototype wide windowsill I installed for the cats does nicely to hold miscellaneous meds, wipes, syringes and so forth.

    (And thanks to Julie's call for an emergency oil delivery -- Agway cancelled the scheduled tank-filling without notice for reasons that still aren't entirely clear to me -- we even have heat.) Whee!

    Posted by wallich at 11:52 PM | Comments (2)

    January 05, 2005

    Some advice on administering a wireless network

    I've complained before about the really lousy wireless network at our hotel. We only pay $3.99 for it, but my guess is that at either of our billing rates we've spent maybe a hundred times that in hours of phone calls to tech support, screwing around with wireless settings getting the connection to come back up when it drops out, waiting for the network's login page to load, running pings and traces to figure out exactly which part of the hotel network is screwed up this time, and so on.

    That was last year. This year, things have changed. For the worse, it seems. It was a bad sign on new years's day when the front desk didn't have the new password (they change monthyl) and gave us an unfamiliar number for tech support -- I reached a not-too-friendly fellow somewhere on the other side of the world who needed some convincing that southern Connecticut was not a suburb of Chicago, and then could only repeat a scripted line about the local hotel node being down -- clearly why it was telling me I had the wrong password -- and that the system administrators would no doubt fix it when they learned of the problem, albeit he had no idea when that might be.

    Then the front desk called headquarters and got the new password, and all was well. Until this morning. The DHCP server was giving out a whole different range of addresses (when it was answering at all), and talking to the outside world was out of the question).

    So we went to feed Charlie and see a movie, and when we got home, the network was displaying this for a login page:

    " tinyproxy 1.6.2

    The page you requested was unavailable. The error code is listed below. In addition, the HTML file which has been configured as the page to be displayed when an error of this type was unavailable, with the error code 14 (Bad address). Please contact your administrator."

    Gives you a warm feeling.

    After another half hour or so, a working page started to come up (only took about ten minutes to load, most of that time looking for internal network servers) and we finally got to the outside world.

    So, about that advice:

    Don't change your network configuration and your tech support contractor on the same day, especially if the new contractor has no familiarity with your installation.
    Don't turn off the old network-access system until the new one has been tested and proven to be running.
    Strongly consider installing a set of access points that provide a clean, usable signal to all parts of the site you claim to serve.

    Whee.

    Posted by wallich at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)

    January 03, 2005

    Arithmetical Reflection

    If Charlie eats on a four-hour schedule, and it takes fifteen minutes to prepare the bottle, wake him up and change his diaper, and an hour to feed, burp and settle him, that leaves two hours and 45 minutes to sleep. So getting eight hours of sleep a day means a whole eight hours left over for doing anything else.

    Posted by wallich at 10:14 PM | Comments (2)