To counter the somewhat grim health story about my son that precedes this, here’s a photo of this year’s flowers blooming:
They’re thriving. When we first moved into the house, only 2 came up. There are 5-6 stalks each with 3-4 flowers on them this year. As you can see, they’re gorgeous.
Brady was in the emergency room for the second time in his young life, once again for a seizure brought on by a rapid spike in temperature. Last time this happened it was absolutely terrifying. Susan and I spent a horrific 30 minutes driving to the hospital with basically no information aside from ‘he had a seizure.’ This time was sort of the same deal, but with us sitting there thinking ‘man, basically I hope this is the same thing.’
It was. He had a second febrile seizure and the doctors were not particularly concerned. His primary care doctor didn’t even think it necessary to see him the day after the event, they’re so unconcerned, so I’m trying hard to follow their lead.
He and I spent the day together while he recuperated and it was fun, though he did manage to scare me about as badly as I’ve ever been scared. He went down for his nap still with a mild fever. I went up to check on him after 2 hours and he was laying there staring off into space with a blank look. He didn’t react to me entering the room or me saying his name several times, causing me to panic and rush over to him, at which point he sleepily looked up at me and said ‘what, Dad?’
What indeed. This child rearing stuff is tough!
Here’s a little 30 second video taken during one of our family chats via our quadcopter (no audio from the copter), and another one of Brady snowshoeing for the first time. Feedback on playback issues welcome. I’m still tinkering so bear with me – the goal is to be able to do this reliably.
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Go read this:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4781793
It’s a discussion of why copies of large file from windows to macintosh fail, and includes a Windows registry change which fixes the issue. This was driving me nuts for months and had me on a set of wild goose chases (must be the router firmware….must be the mac since this doesn’t fail in other contexts … must be something in windows drivers … must have something to do with the drive mounted via usb where these files were usually headed, on and on). Anyway, 5 minutes after reading this my problem was gone.
… when a job candidate casually mentioned that he had married his husband in New England during an interview. If you had asked me 10 years ago if I would have considered it possible that a candidate for a job would feel confident a remark like this wouldn’t be held against him by one or more of the strangers he was interviewing with (there were 7 of us) I probably would have laughed. This little vignette represents more to me about how far we’ve come than all the states passing ‘gay marriage’ laws – it’s social progress, writ clear and large in the casual way this kind of stuff, reviled in my youth, is now so accepted.
Microsoft introduced a point system for purchases when they introduced the xbox (or 360? I forget when it began), a system that was mostly reviled by gamers. They announced over a year ago that they were ending that system in favor of straight cash purchases for their online stores, just like most everyone else uses (ie Amazon, Apple, Google Play, etc).
Both Sony and Microsoft sell debit cards at retail for making purchases in their online stores, so kids without credit cards can buy games online. Retailers periodically run specials on those cards, especially around the holidays, so you can get $50 for $40 or whatever.
Several Christmases ago, I stocked up on these cards when Target ran a $50 for $30 sale or something along those lines. I added those credits to my respective accounts, and then my Xbox 360 promptly died. My $50 of Microsoft credit has been sitting in limbo ever since, as I had no plans to replace the 360. Imagine me shaking my fist in irritation at Microsoft. Then imagine me bemused to receive an email from Microsoft letting me know that my points have been converted back to actual cash $$$ – I’m now sitting on $49.15 in credit for Microsoft’s stores. Bully for them for doing the right thing and me for getting my funds back.
Next, imagine me shaking my fist in mild irritation again when I discover I can only spend these funds in the Windows 8 and Windows Mobile stores, which I do no business with. 
To my view, Michael Shea was a greatly under-appreciated author. Sadly, he died recently, before the rest of you lot woke up to his talents. He wrote across a number of genres. The works I really enjoyed were fantasy/horror works that are thematically and stylistically similar to the work of Jack Vance and early Tanith Lee. Thanks to Michael for Nifft and the vividly imagined and described worlds he adventured in.
English: Sf author Michael Shea at The Variety Preview Room in San Francisco (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
… in the last 6 months than I have used across the rest of my 46 years. I leave it to your imagination as to the whys of this, but will mention that my children are involved, and that it’s at least several times a week now that I’m reaching for said glue after the kids are in bed. It feels like it’s almost every single day.
This leaves me with my first opinion on brands, having previously relied on tubes of Crazy Glue. Gorilla branded Super Glue is actually superior and is worth the extra expense. It doesn’t dry out in the tube and it’s slightly more viscous, making it easier to work with in most cases.
…’up.’ Of course she’s been communicating with us for months, but this is the first intentional verbalization that she’s consistently using correctly, including when she wants it to happen and when she recognizes it’s about to happen to her. Susan is a bit disappointed that it’s not ‘Mom,’ a word Laura does understand and sometimes use, to counterbalance the fact that Brady’s first word was ‘Dad,’ but it is what it is, the kid wants up 🙂
If you don’t work in web development you may not be aware how far things have come with browsers and especially Javascript. Today’s example demonstrates this while also bringing you some awesome nostalgic first person shooter action. Check out quakejs, which runs the full quake III engine in your modern web browser. It worked great for me on a medium tier Mac running the latest Chrome – your mileage may vary depending on which browser you try it with. Pretty amazing stuff.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 