Technology

Small Miracles

rmiles7721February 26, 2007Parenting/Family, Photography, Technology

When Pete was born in October of 1997 it was a real shocker. Not that she was born, but all that we had to go through.

We had gone in to the doctor’s office to get the wife an ultrasound, and they noticed some weird stuff on it, so wanted us to go down to Northside and have one there. Originally we had planned on birthing with a midwife in Carrollton rather than being in a big hospital.

We got down there and they wanted to do an internal ultrasound. Apparently there was way too much fluid. Long story short, it broke her water. The wife ended up giving birth the Pete at Northside hospital, and apparently things weren’t looking too good. For awhile they weren’t even sure that she was going to live or not. It was all pretty damned scary.

Some of the details are pretty fuzzy now, but that could be that I just woke up too. I may add to this when I get home from work this evening. My wife has posted about tthis before and probably remembers much more.

Anyway, They decided that the thing to do was move her to Scottish Rite, which is across the street from Northside. Had the wife’s water not broken at Northside Hospital and given birth to my daughter there, if they had moved her at all, it would have been to send her down to Columbus. It is extremely unlikely that she would have lived at all.

If I remember correctly, the surgery itself too somewhere around eight hours. We were on pins and needles all day. I don’t remember ever having been so scared or worried at any point prior or since then.

A portion of her small intestine had never opened up, so everything was trying to go back the other way. She was full of myconium. They ended up taking out about ten centimeters of it, and they moved some stuff around that was in the wrong place.

She ended up being in Scottish rite in the ICU for 40 days or so. When we brought her home, it was still on monitors. We had to feed her every couple of hours, as the amounts she was getting were so small. She still had tubes and whatnot hanging out of her when we brought her home as well. It is just amazing to me that she is living a normal healthy life.

In 1998

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This is her at one or so.

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With her NEW little sister (at that time)

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Halloween 2002

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2006 Softball Season. She is playing again this year. Practice has already started but I think we have a couple of weeks before the first game.

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The Scurvy Dogs!

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Spam Post #482,567

rmiles7721February 24, 2007Technology

What’s up with the spam? It goes through periods of time where I am receiving one thing, and then another. I just deleted about 50 emails that were “returned” from other servers for contain ‘viruses’. I have seen these before. Usually it will last for a week or so, then go to something else. I hate email spam.

Shutdown Day!

rmiles7721February 24, 2007Technology

I ran across this on someone’s blog first thing this morning, and I cannot remember where. If you had it posted, leave me a comment and I will put your link here. What can I say, sometimes I’m a dumbass. Memory’s the second thing to go, so they say. I can’t remember what the first one is though.

The point.

Oh yeah. The point is Shutdown Day is March 24th. Can you do it? Can I do it? I am certainly going to try. I think that is right smack in the middle of my vacation, so I can spend the day doing yard work. Or sleeping. Maybe sleeping a 24 hour drug induced sleep is the answer. That’s about the only way I can do without my computer for a 24 hour period. Even hanging on the beach down at the Redneck Riviera I carry my camera, cell phone, and iPaq so that I can blog. No blogging. No gaming. No posting ads. No nothing. Living life because I can.

Damn, it really sounds sucky. I’ll be on the computer until 12 AM the night before and back online at 12 AM the next morning probably.

It could be worse. I could be in China receiving electric shock therapy to ‘cure’ me.

Updated 3:47 PM – Now I remember. I saw it over at Michelle Malkin’s site.


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Monitoring the Kids Online

rmiles7721February 24, 2007Parenting/Family, Technology

One thing I set up when the Boy was first starting to get online was a watchdog program so that I could monitor his Internet usage. There are just too many pedophiles and other bad folks out there not to, not to mention the fact that just going to his game sites he can pretty much access any type of porn he wants.

It is particularly important for me to watch what the girls are doing. RePete is still young enough that the only thing even remotely close to computers she gets is playing on my iPaq, but Pete is online quite a bit, at least an hour a day and I want to be able to track what she is doing, but not be intrusive about it.

One way for me to take care of the internet monitoring is with SpectorSoft computer monitoring. It allows me to know every single thing that they do on the computer. Spector Pro records emails, chats, MySpace activity recording, even key logging. That way if they join a site without my permission, I have the passwords and can get in and see what is going on.

My children’s safety is just too important for me to leave to chance, and if I have to feel like I am spying on them to make sure that they are safe, so be it.

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rmiles7721February 23, 2007Blogging, Parenting/Family, Technology

Just woke up from my nap. I managed to get about an hour between phone calls and Pete getting home and asking if she could go out and play. My wife calls the girls Pete and RePete, and I am tired of calling them “the oldest girl” so am adopting it. RePete is still sleep, but I will be getting her up shortly so that she will sleep tonight.

I fixed the code at the bottom of each entry that shows the time of my posts. It is supposed to say “Posted xx minutes/days ago by Richard”. Half the time it works, half the time it says 31 days ago, and in the case of the one that I have dated for 11:59 PM tonight it says 30 days ago. It’s a big pain in the butt is what it is. I just used the code from the default movabletype template for that.

Tech Support

rmiles7721February 22, 2007Technology

I don’t know what it is, but once you have been in ANY kind of tech job, you are the free tech support person EVERYONE wants to be friends with. I actually did tech support for a few months in between running restaurants and working in our corporate office for a provider that contracted out to about 35 different ISPs. I also spent three and a half years in support for about 300 desktop users and about 850 remote locations. Four of us worked in the IT department. Every once in a while that could really become a headache.

Last week one of my waitresses that has worked with me for several years was asking me a question about her computer, one of the others was in there with her husband. They quickly asked “Do you work on computers?”. “Yes, but I charge $50 an hour”. They quickly shut up. Hell, $50 an hour is CHEAP. A couple of minutes later the husband asked if I could look at his TV. Now how the hell would I know anything about televisions. Mine quits working, I buy a new one. There’s the fix for that little problem.

Anyway, one of the other managers called me up a few minutes ago. He is an end user with no clue. That’s OK, sometimes they are easier to deal with than the guy that THINKS he has a clue and doesn’t want to listen to you. His Internet connection to Bellsouth is down, so I walked him through checking a couple of sites, then pinging a couple, as well as himself just to make sure TCP/IP was installed then ended up telling him to reset his modem, router, and computer and if it didn’t work to call Bellsouth since that’s what he is paying them for. I don’t mind helping out, but once that ten minute mark hits I start getting frustrated and they need to deal with someone else that they are paying, not me.

That was weird…

rmiles7721February 22, 2007Technology

…my computer just rebooted in the middle of doing the last post. Luckily Zoundry auto saves the posts, at least through the last complete sentence or something. When the system came back up I got one of those “Microsoft Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown” messages. The details were:

Problem signature:

Problem Event Name: BlueScreen

OS Version: 6.0.6000.2.0.0.256.1

Locale ID: 1033

Which I though was funny. No BSOD, just a message that tells me that I got one. I will have to run a scan of my hard drives while I am at work. That hasn’t happened before, so I am not really sure what is up.

Don’t forget, submit some questions today and I will do the webcast tomorrow. I have split my off days up, have to work this morning and evening, but I will be home again tomorrow.

Why Am I Still Awake?…

rmiles7721February 21, 2007Parenting/Family, Technology

…at 2:30 AM. 22 Hours after I got out of bed last.

Good question and one which doesn’t have a real clear answer other than the fact that sometimes I am a dumb ass of the third degree. Actually I have a black belt in dumbassery.

I got up at the usual time yesterday, about 4:30 AM or so. Surfed the web, posted a little bullshit, a couple of paid ads, drank coffee. Normally I will hit the shower between 5:30 and 6:00. Since I work so much closer to home now it has more often than not been closer to 6 AM. Then I go to work, getting there by 6:30. I was pretty worn out by the time the first shift was over so I locked everything up, picked up the four year old and came home. I attempted to nap for awhile, but was only partially successful.

I had to go back to work at 8:30 to oversee the next shift change and finish the paperwork that I had locked in the office earlier in the day. Count all of the food in the restaurant, count the money, make up my bank deposit so I could drop it at the bank on the way home. Deal with 100 stupid things that needed to be dealt with. It was around midnight when I finally got home. Very rarely can I just come home from work and go to bed. I have to have a bit of wind down time. Normally that’s spent on the computer. I posted some more, and surfed for a few minutes.

Unfortunately the four year old is developing a pretty nasty cough. I took her to the doctor late last week and they said she was coming down with a cold, so we have been fighting that. I am letting her sleep on the couch tonight, she is pretty congested and will sleep better reclining than being flat on her back. That I guess is the main reason I am still up listening to her cough. She’s had some medicine now though, hopefully she will start sleeping a little better, because I am getting pretty droopy here. Nodding off and making all sorts of typing errors. Thank god for spell check. Now if it could just check my grammar and post for me too, all would be well in my world.

I was going to keep her home Friday and spend tomorrow sleeping in, but I may reverse that and keep her here tomorrow. I have someone’s laptop to fix, and taxes to do for one of my waitresses, as well as a couple of netflix DVDs that I still need to copy and send back, so that I can watch them later. I don’t guess I will be getting much in the way of rest tomorrow. One can only hope that they let me sleep in for at least a little while. Since the girl is sick, if she stays home she may sleep in as well. I damn sure am keeping my fingers crossed.

Oh, and one more thing before I go…

rmiles7721February 17, 2007Technology

…a couple of posts ago I gave a link to Dreamscapes or whatever it’s called. It lets you use ANY mpeg as your desktop background. Right now I have it set to use the one where my daughter is chasing me with an ax at Wal-Mart. Pretty shitty video for that big of a screen since it came from my cell phone, but that gives an idea of what it’s capable of. I will have to fool around a little bit more with this. I have some video that I imported from my Sony video player that I might want to use as my background. Very cool, but it is fairly distracting too.


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Cool Desktop Bling

rmiles7721February 16, 2007Technology

Microsoft just released the Windows Dreamscene Preview as part of the Windows Ultimate Extras that you get if you are running ultimate. In conjunction, Stardock released Dreamscapes. If you have a decent video card (and you pretty much have to if you are running Vista Ultimate) then you can have animated wallpaper, and all the work is done by the video card, so it’s not using much of your cpu resources. I am running it here, and was going to take a video and upload it to youtube, but it looks like Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock, already has. Here is the video, it kind of gives you an idea of what it does.

It’s a very cool program You can download it at stardock.com and find some cool free backgrounds over at wincustomize.com


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