We met today with the local Bradley Method instructor. We were originally going to be attending a Bradley class, but she needed 3 couples to hold the course. So, instead we were going to have a little mini-tutorial. But then another couple contacted her (today?!?) and signed up. It’s a 12 week course. We have only about 5 weeks left before the due date (assuming the baby is neither tardy nor hasty.) So, we’re having mini-sessions. Today we mostly reviewed a big stack of reading material that she photocopied for us. We reviewed excercises that we have been doing less often than we should. She showed a notebook that her coach (husband) used. It had various affirmations, and relaxations. It seemed like a good idea. It’s yet another thing to do before we go to the hospital, but I think it will make our time there better, and more what we want. We wrote a birth plan recently too. If Carolyn doesn’t mind, I’ll post it once we’ve reviewed it with the midwives (and likely the Bradley instructor and Doula as well.)
I know, not very interesting for an actual entry. I just wanted to set up and test making blog entries from my phone. I suspect it will be my input method from the LDRP room.
This is not a press release; Amazon.com’s “operating agreement”:http://associates.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement/103-7418193-3929441 specifically forbids my issuing a press release. But, this is a blog entry that mentions that I’ve become an amazon “affiliate.” This just means that the links that I make to amazon have some remote chance of earning me a little bit of money. Actually, I’m set up so they’ll earn me amazon gift certificate instead of money.
That I became an Amazon affiliate, I probably wouldn’t mention except that I was amused by the automatically-chosen associate ID. In the application, I needed to enter the “Name” of my site. I figured I’d mainly be linking from blog entries, so I put in the new name of this blog — Choicy White Boy. What I didn’t know is that they’d make me my userid from the name! Like many such IDs of the past, it’s…well, computer-y. I’m choicywhitebo-20. This makes me wonder though. Are there really 19 other Choicy White Boys?
We started the hunt for pediatric care today. Actually, we started a while ago, but we met our first potential pediatrician today — a Dr. Delbaggio with “Blair Medial Associates”:http://www.blairmedicalassociates.com/peds.html. She seemed friendly and competent, but Blair Medial Associates is one of those large medical-industrial complex places. During the course of the interview we learned that we’d be among the 10,000 patients that they currently service. How can you have a personal, caring relationship with 10,000 people?
OK. I’m declaring my blog “done enough” at this point. I’ve re-introduced the Google “AdSense” ads. Which, as I’m sure you know is important to my revenue plans for this site. I’ve earned an average of a little over 43 cents every month since I started Adsense. Of course, they don’t cut a check until you’ve accumulcated a credit of $100. At this rate, I’ll get my first check in 19.2 years. By then a pizza will probably cost about $100. So, Google AdSense will buy my kid a pizza when (s)he’s in college. Worth the trouble? Probably not. But then again, maybe my blog will be “discovered” by tons of people who are drawn in by relevant drywall ads.
I spent far too much of today copying the old blogger entries into wordpress. I suspect it was still faster than writing a parser to scan previous entries and dump them into the mysql database that wordpress uses, though I’m not sure. The main thing that I’ve not done is to move over the image-only posts. Oh, and figure out comments. There were several nice and interesting comments that elaborated on entries that will be lost with the current transition. Oh, and I suspect that references within blog entries to other blog entries will be broken when I move this over into “/journal”. So, still some more work to do. But oddly, blogger support has still not gotten back to me.
Last weekend we spent in West Townshend, VT at the Windham Hill Inn. The occasion was the wedding of my brother-in-law John Fay to Rika Suzuki.
There is a lifestyle that I am impressed with when I get these fleeting glimpses of it. I saw it in a couple of the Newscorp politicos that I worked with when Kesmai was a Newscorp entity. I caught several glimpses of it last weekend. While Robin Leach may not have been overly impressed by this event, I was. I am now remotely related to a man who jet-sets. If he chose to pay in mortgage payments what he pays in rent for his “apartment”, he could own my house in 5 months. He’s smooth, he’s suave, he can dance the hustle. He’s multi-national, he’s multi-racial. Speaking of which, I’m now (even more remotely) related to a black man. Get this: My wife’s brother’s wife’s sister’s husband’s sister’s husband is black. And let me tell you, that man has rhythm! But, I’m getting ahead of myself. The wedding.
I’d been thinking about switching blog tools for a while. I liked blogger, but I wasn’t completely satisfied with it. Mainly, I was missing having categories. Then, I started installing a new machine to act as the primary server for accapehart.com. I got it serving web pages no problem. However, because it has a different SSH host identity, but the same username/password/IP Address, blogger failed to connect to it. So, I wrote to blogger support. Ha! What a waste. You have to navigate past the reasonable help areas before you can write to them. Then, they auto-answer your email with a list of possibly related help areas, and assume you’re done unless they hear back from you. Well, they heard back from me saying I was still having the problem. But I’ve not heard back from them! So, now I’m trying wordpress. I’m uncertain about whether to (or how to) transfer previous blogger entries. And, of course now I’ve got to re-design again.
When the web was infantile, there was no real way to know what was new. During its toddler stage, information about new websites was passed around via email or on USENET. Eventually, there became too many sites being created for this to be a reasonable way to keep up. (A similar issue plagued the single /etc/hosts file, but that’s a different story.)
Finally, there came Yahoo. Now, there was a directory for the web. You wanted to know about the NRAO? You went to Science, then selected Astronomy then Radio Astronomy, finally Observatories, and there you found the link.
I know why we’re in Altoona. I even appreciate it. I like the new friends we’ve made. But I miss the comfort and convenience of old friends. Even some colleagues from Kesmai. There are enough stocky people with dark hair that every now and again I think I see Stuart Holme in the distance. I miss his uncomplicated appreciation of life. I miss my friend Nancy (not a Charlottesvillian) with whom I seem to often have an understanding that exists outside of spoken communication. Of course I miss my Casagatan crew — those who are always there for me. I don’t know exactly why, but it’s particularly poignant today. I suspect Wal*Mart.
