December 2006 archive

Tubes

Early this morning we took Reece to the hospital to get the surgery for tubes in his ears. We had to leave by 5:30 am to get there on time for pre-op check in and such. His surgery was at 7:30. Since he had to go under general anesthesia, he couldn’t nurse or eat for at least 4 hours before the surgery. It was so hard not to nurse him since that is how I usually comfort him. oh well, we survived.

It was an easy surgery and really short, but he did wake up capital M-A-D. When they brought us back to him after the surgery we could hear him screaming from way down the hall! Poor guy. He didn’t calm down for almost 40 minutes. They say that anesthesia can make you grumpy and boy do I believe it! Once he finally calmed enough to nurse and fall asleep they said he could go home. Because they didn’t want everyone to hear him screaming again, they actually let him go home in his hospital gown! Baby gowns are much cuter than adult ones in case you are wondering.

I hope this helps with the ear infections. 6 before 6 months of age is a lot! Let’s hope we don’t get any more.

Posted by Ily on December 28, 2006 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

Donkey Konga 2

We love games. I have resisted video games for a long time because of their power to suck you in and never let go. However, I finally gave in. We got a Nintendo Game Cube for Isaac this year with a hope that it wouldn’t take over our lives. It probably will, but it has been fun.

Last night Bryan and I actually stayed up till 10:30 (ok, so that is really early actually) and played Donkey Konga 2. So fun! It is a game where you play the bongos for songs and they give you the rhythms to play. It is kinda like DDR only drumming. And just as addicting. The boys wouldn’t let us take turns so we had to wait until they were spending the night at a friends’ house to get our turn! It was so worth the wait. I can foresee lots of wasted time in the future playing video games after the boys go to bed!

Posted by Ily on December 27, 2006 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

Nice Fonts for Emacs

If you use emacs on windows you have seen how nice it can look, especially if you used the cool windows emacs installer (go with the patched version). Today the emacs wiki lead me down the path of nice looking fonts on Linux. I added these lines to my /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://debs.peadrop.com edgy backports
deb-src http://debs.peadrop.com edgy backports

Then I imported the gpg key:

wget http://debs.peadrop.com/DD385D79.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

And then installed emacs-snapshot-gtk¹:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install emacs-snapshot-gtk

Then I changed my default-font, like so:

(set-default-font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-12")

And now I start emacs like so:

emacs-snapshot-gtk --enable-font-backend

Wow, it looks really good. This gets you a pretty recent build from the emacs cvs repository, so there are some bugs. I’ve seen ediff really wig out, but overall it hasn’t been bad at all.

Footnotes

¹I was already running emacs-snapshot-gtk actually, so I only had to do an aptitude upgrade after the update.

References:

http://g33k.wordpress.com/2006/11/06/gnu-emacs-with-xft-goodness/
http://debs.peadrop.com/dists/edgy/backports/

Posted by Bryan on December 18, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

Skiing and GPS Fun

Isaac and I went skiing at Cooper Spur today. We turned the GPS on for the drive and Isaac had fun noticing the highway signs for Interstate 84 both on the roadside, and on the little map on the GPS. This evening after the trip I used gpsman to download the tracklog from the GPS and export it as a GPX file. Then I went to GPS Visualizer and created a Google Earth version of our route. If you right-click and save that link, and then open it with Google Earth you can see the route we took to Cooper Spur (and where the GPS lost signal in a few places). Zoom in a bit (near Mt. Hood) and you can even see the bare patches of the forest where the ski runs are!

It snowed all day yesterday on the mountain, and it was cold and dry today. During Isaac’s lesson I took a couple trips up the short Cooper Spur lift and found some nearly knee-deep powder. Isaac mastered the rope tow and the pizza (what they now call the good ol’ snow plow). I’ll post pictures soon. We also saw the Blackhawk helicopters, the big Chinook helicopter, and the C-130 searching for the lost climbers.

Posted by Bryan on December 17, 2006 | Filed under: Family News Geek | 0 comments

Oil slick

Yesterday was another one of the days where the kids help you learn a new skill whether you want it or not. I was out of the room when this learning situation started, but I sure noticed it quick!

It was 9 am and I had just finished breakfast and needed to get dressed quickly so we could take Isaac to school at 10 so he could join all the kindergarteners for a field trip to the ballet to see the Nutcracker. I had to get everyone ready, which takes almost 45 minutes, which was all I had left. So I go into the kitchen for something and find THE SPILL.

Now this was not spilled milk, nor spilled crayons, or anything that could be taken care of later. It was cooking oil, almost half a gallon of it! I am pretty sure Micah was the culprit who spilled it. The spill was huge, maybe 5 feet in diameter and I couldn’t even get into the kitchen unless I had really long legs to leap over this spill. It blocked the way between the pantry and the peninsula, the only route to the kitchen. Unfortunately, it was all over the floor of the pantry too. Fortunately, everything on the pantry floor was either a can or in a bucket or plastic container of some sort.

Now years ago when Isaac was two, something similar happened. He was helping me clear the table and dropped an entire stick of softened butter on the kitchen floor. We ended up greasing him down and pushing him back an forth across the kitchen. It was fun, but took forever to clean up. Several mop heads later it was still greasy on our floor. Made for a great memory.

This time around I was not as inclined to try to greased child game. It took over an hour to clean up just the one area of the floor. I was working feverishly to get it done so no one would get injured and I could get it done before the next feeding for Reece. At least I have learned that dish soap is the best thing to use. Luckily a nice neighbor took Isaac to school for me with her own child and he made it there on time. I looked like a tornado hit me because I was a total mess, still in my ugly PJ’s, covered in oil, crazy everywhere hair… and when my visiting teacher stopped by around 10:30 I was horrified that she had to see me in this state and panicked that I had forgotten they were coming. She was just dropping of a nice Christmas gift and I think she went home exulting that at least she doesn’t look like I did every morning when she wakes up!

Overall, it was yucky, but it does go down in my book of experiences to laugh about. And there are a few bright sides to the story:

A) my floor hasn’t been this clean in weeks…I dare say we could eat off of it, which no doubt the kids will do anyhow. B) Since all the ingredients for bread were already on the counter (because I cleaned the oil off their containers and had them there to dry), Micah and I got to play with dough and have a great time making bread. C) My hands are nicely moisturized from the oil…

I hope it doesn’t happen again, but we do have another another child that will eventually turn two. And at least the experience gave me something to complain/ laugh about!

Posted by Ily on December 16, 2006 | Filed under: Family News | 2 comments

CVS to Mercurial

After some serious reading, pondering, apt-ing, and command-line hacking, I’ve decided to try mercurial. It was a three-way tie for which of the new-fangled open-source version control programs I was going to commit to really giving a try, between bzr, mercurial, and darcs. They all seem pretty darn similar, but a few things I read (that I can’t find now, of course) and the simple lack of dependencies (darcs required, like, 5 exim packages, what’s up with needing a mail server for revision control?), and more complete documentation than bzr lead me to go with mercurial. To start I decided to convert my simple .emacs cvs repository to mercurial. The instructions for converting repositories on the mercurial wiki are a little confusing, but here’s what I got to work on my Ubuntu Edgy Eft box:

aptitude install mercurial
aptitude install tailor

Then, in the directory where I wanted my mercurial repository (and make sure there isn’t a cvs checkout of the module you are converting there!):

mkdir hg-temp
cd hg-temp
tailor -v --source-kind cvs --target-kind hg --repository /home/bryan/cvsrepositories/dot-emacs --module dot-emacs -r INITIAL > dot-emacs.tailor
emacs dot-emacs.tailor

In the dot-emacs.tailor file, change subdir from . to MODULENAME (which is dot-emacs, in my case), and remove /MODULENAME from root-directory, like the wiki says. Then add the line:

patch-name-format =

at the end of the “project” section¹. Then:

tailor --configfile dot-emacs.tailor

This creates three files, tailor.state.old, tailor.state, and project.log² in the parent directory, as well as a directory called, dot-emacs. This new directory is your hg repository. Change to that directory and type hg log, and then hg log -v to see the preserved cvs history and checkin comments.

UPDATE: I used the search history feature of google and found the revision control comparison that swayed me towards mercurial over bazaar (or bzr). There was also this revision control comparison that slightly discouraged me from using darcs (though the exim requirement was much more discouraging) as it claimed it has some “deep bugs” still. Overall darcs looked quite impressive to me and maybe a little easier to use than the others, just to clarify.

Footnotes

¹At least, that’s what I liked best, 'man tailor’ and search for 'patch-name-format’ for more info on this.

²As far as I know you can blow these files away when you’re done.

Posted by Bryan on December 12, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

FHE Blooper

Hee, Hee. This is a great story to write down for posterity. Tonight we had family night and I asked Isaac if he wanted to choose a topic for the lesson. He chose the story of Samuel the Lamanite from the Book of Mormon to talk about and act out. This is one of his all-time favorite stories. Samuel stands high on the city wall to yell at the Nephites to be good and repent and to prophesy of the birth and death of Jesus and then the Nephites throw rocks at him and try to shoot arrows at him and none of them can hit him because he is protected by the Lord…Yeah, fun to act out. Yelling, throwing, socks and bean bags flying all over the house. It is a hit with the kids. As they are getting older and getting better aim though, I am rethinking whether we shall allow them to keep acting this out.

So on with the story. As Isaac was pretending to be Samuel on the wall (AKA a footstool), Micah was chucking bean bags at him. Micah hit him once (which is not how the game is supposed to go) and shouts in triumph “ I got him!” Before we can tell him he isn’t supposed to actually hit Isaac with the bean bags he chucks another (completely confident in his aim now) and hits Isaac square between the eyes. Again he yells excitedly “I got him Mom!”

If Isaac was Goliath, he would have fallen down dead, but being just Isaac, he stood there stunned at what just happened. It was a miracle that he didn’t cry from the injustice of being hit in the face. Now it is never a good idea for a parent to actually laugh at the actions of their kids in instances like this because that only encourages the kids to do it more. We committed this sin. This game will never be tame again at our house now.

We aren’t sure how spiritually uplifting tonight’s FHE lesson was, but it sure was funny!

Posted by Ily on December 12, 2006 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment