So what's new? Nothing much, getting used to baby, and that's a hard one. Not that I would give him up for the world, but he's definitely needy. I feel like I've really been neglecting contacting people and whatnot but it's hard when you have a newborn, work and life in the way of everything. So if I haven't e-mailed in a while or given you a call it's not hate in my heart, just missing the free time I had before.

Other than that not much is going on. I have a few more pictures in Sean's Gallery but not a lot of recent ones yet (bad daddy). I hope to have some more this weekend, really all I've added to Sean's pictures now are the ones I've received from Ben and Mom and Dad from around his birth. More to come I promise.

Other than that, not much to report. I guess I've found a new love for Twitter, it's kinda like SMS messaging because it's only 130 characters, and kinda like IM, but also like blogging. You can post little tidbits about yourself and your friends and watch what they're saying as well, it's pretty cool. So check it out and you can find me using the name nochiefs, as I do with many sites.

L8r :D

…amid all our previous experiences with the doctors, yesterday we received the news that the nuchal fold thickening that they had noticed in two previous ultrasounds was in fact normal. This, for us, a huge relief. God willing the supposed issue they found with the baby's heart (more on this later) isn't going to be anything either.

I'm really not a huge believer in ultrasounds at this point. I think every parent should know before they go in for their first ultrasound that an ultrasound IS NOT a diagnostic tool. I owe some readers a little background at this point as I was previously not sure if I should make a post or not, but my feelings have changed at this point and after a little prayer, self-empowerment, and just plain old time, I now think I'm ready. The nuchal fold thickening is one of several markers that can be used by ultrasound technicians to predict possible occurrence of genetic abnormality, mainly Down Syndrome.

So like all good parents we have been receiving pre-natal care for our child. One of the suggested steps is an ultrasound, which at 20 weeks we dutifully took part in and were told that we had a normal happy growing child with no sign of any problem, which, was what we really knew to be, in our hearts, true. For whatever reason, he was tired that morning and very uncooperative with the ultrasound technician so she didn't get all the views of the heart that she would have liked, so we were asked to come back in a month for a better look, so at 24 weeks we went back and were told, to our absolute horror, that the ultrasound technician noticed a slight "thickening" at the base of the neck, which could indicate a genetic abnormality, Down Syndrome for example; but that the technician didn't see anything wrong at 20 weeks and those types of problems don't develop over time, they either are or are not present, please come back in 2 weeks for a Level 2 ultrasound.

This is where everything got really hard to take. I being the calm guy (not to generalize that guy's are always calm and women always worry, but I am not pregnant and don't have the odd hormonal changes that my wife does, so please bear with me ;-) tell my wife what I believe to be true, that nothing is wrong and they're just being cautious, litigation these days is a fact of life and we will have to put up with paranoid Doctors. My wife is upset, understandably, but understanding what I'm saying. Unfortunately I still didn't do any research and empower myself, I think this is routine among parents (which I will come to find out is the truth!).

We go back for the Level 2 ultrasound, which was an experience in itself. Suffice it to say the technician wasn't used to the equipment so there was a small incident where the Dr couldn't see the heart as she thought she was and it was apparent that our child had MAJOR congenital heard defects, at least until they were able to get a technician in that could work the ultrasound properly and get a good view. So we've suffered through this going on right in front of us as if we weren't in the room, and then the doctor concludes that there is indeed a thickening at the base of the neck, called a nuchal fold thickening. We're still basically in the dark so I don't know what questions to ask, like what is the thickening and what is the incidence of this thickening resulting in Down's when diagnosed from an ultrasound at 26 weeks, which I later find they really have no data on; that 26 weeks is too late to really determine if a baby is likely to have Down's, it has to be done at the 20 week ultrasound which for our baby came back normal.

So you can imagine at this point that we're both horrified, my wife is barely able to keep it together, I still feel and know in my hear that everything is OK but how can I console my wife when a doctor, who we rely on to tell us everything when we really don't know anything, has just said there's a problem. On top of that the doctor wants us to have an amniocentesis which (depending on who you ask) has between a 1 in 200 or 1 in 350 chance of causing the mother to miscarry or, at this point in the pregnancy, go into WAY pre-term labor. If a baby at that age even does survive, the likely hood of it having various other problems from sever lung problems to cerebral palsy is much higher than if it's born full term.

At this point I am fed up. I have to have answers. God has told me the baby is fine, but there are things going on with our child that are completely out of our control and it was time to make some decisions. Luckily I work for a university, with easy access to professional journals and of course the Internet. Research, dear parents, research. Once a doctor tells you anything research it. I don't want to seem superior or arrogant, but I am a smart individual, I would venture to say that I am, in all likely hood, of a higher intelligence that all but a few of the doctors out there (albeit less motivated), and I can't take someone making a conclusion without showing me all the supporting evidence. So I research, and I find interesting facts that I think all prospective parents should know. I find that, one, the number of children with false positives for one thing or another, whether diagnosed by blood test, or magically predicted by the ultrasound, is HUGE. Almost every grandparent I or my family spoke to has had this happen to their grandchildren, and several parents we spoke with had similar experiences with their children.

Second, I found that an ultrasound isn't a good tool for diagnosis of genetic disorders at any age past 20 weeks. In fact I found an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that said, in no uncertain terms, that if doctors continue to recommend amniocenteses for ultrasounds showing only one of the seven markers for genetic problems, that perfectly healthy babies would die unnecessarily. This to me screams problem. Why were we asked to submit to an amniocentesis at such a late date for a problem that probably wasn't there?

I have three theories at this time (call me paranoid but just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not after me), the scariest of these theories is that they want our baby to be born early and die so they can have another fetus to test, not aborted and perfectly available for stem cell collection, etc. Unlikely but who really knows? Or, they could have statistical data in mind, because there isn't data to support a nuchal fold thickening in a 24-26 week old fetus and a higher incidence of Down's, why not do an amnio and find out? The last and probably most likely, our insurance pays 100% of preventative medical care, which includes pre-natal care, it come right down to the bottom line.

Oh, before I'm done, the heart thing I mentioned before, his aortal valve and pulmonary valves size ratio (one is supposed to be larger than the other, I just can't remember at this time which is which) is higher than normal, in other words the size difference is larger than normal, so they've sent pictures to the pre-natal cardiologist, but I know everything is OK. His heart's fine.

All in all, I felt jaded, I felt bitter. I felt like I had, and more so for my wife's sake, a month of what should have been a great and happy experience stolen from me, and I will, in the future, warn any and all parents I meet about what doctors may put them through. I certainly would have liked it if someone had told me. But this has also taught me the first lesson of parenthood, that there are times when you feel completely powerless and out of control, because in fact you are. And you have to leave it up to God to guide you through and have faith that in the end, no matter the outcome, everything will be alright. And so I let go, I'm no longer bitter, I feel like I did before like I know my son is fine and everything is fine, and so, I make this post which is dedicated to my unborn son. I know he'll be a perfectly fine little guy, regardless of genetics, and I can't wait to meet you dude!

Dad

…have been underway for about a week now. Mainly unnoticeable for most of you as they are upgrades to the back-end of my site. The main upgrade was to Drupal for our CMS, and we just moved from the 5.x version to the 6.x version. Again, not much you'd notice reading the site but it's made some major improvements to the way the site works and the administration of the site.

I also upgraded Gallery, my excellent photo gallery software, from version 2.2 to the development version. Not something I really would want to do normally but with the 6.x upgrade to Drupal, and its associated Gallery module, the requirement for the software went from the 2.2 version to the development 2.3 version. So far I haven't noticed any issues, hopefully this will continue.

I did have some problems with the site initially, related to the URL rewriting which makes various url which would look like http://azbay.net/node/2342 or http://azbay.net/q=gallery into something that makes sense to humans like http://azbay.net/Improvements_to_the_site or http://azbay.net/gallery. The problem was a new URL rewrite in the Gallery system was interfering with an administration link, so in layman's terms, one URL was pointing to two different locations, or vice versa, causing massive problems when I tried to admin the site.

I'm still loading modules into our new Drupal version, and I'm very excited about one or two that I'll mention; there's a BBCode module that I added that allows easy linking to external sites, and other HTML shortcuts in posts that will make it easier for me to add code snippets, change fonts, text color, add links, e-mail addresses (that are not readable by spam-bots!) and some various other cool things. I have added a few to this post to test it out, and will surely be using them in the future. I've also added several modules that make the site more compliant with standards so external links are marked with icons (as well as e-mail addresses and other file types). And I have added a module which will allow for linking between posts in a Wiki style so I can refer back to old posts if I so choose more easily.

Other than that, I'm still playing, and still determined to make my posting more regular. We'll see how that goes.

The second issue is caused again by the Pearl's small size, to save on space RIM went with a QWERTY layout but two letters per key. So you loose some of the ease in typing… or so you would think. To help out with the obvious problems presented by adding two letters to one key, RIM came up with a system called SureType to help out with figuring out what you're intending to type. The system is remarkably intelligent, it comes with a dictionary that will work for most people out of the box, and for those in law or medicine there are addible dictionaries for specific terms to those areas (as well as many languages other than english). Not only does the system support this static dictionary but it also learns from words you type that it doesn't know already, names in your address book, and text from all your messages (or messages from specific lists of senders if you get spam on your Blackberry). I was not at all looking forward to learning a new typing system, let alone working with the smaller keyboard. I was, to put it lightly, highly impressed with the keyboard and how quickly you could type. After about a day or two typing on the SureType I was able to enter text faster than on my full QWERTY 8703, yes I was actually able to type faster. It seems that the predictive text and my thumbs being much closer together actually makes it easier to type quickly than with the full QWERTY keyboard, go figure.

The last push I'm going to make for this device above the other Blackberry devices is the fact that it has a built in 2.0 megapixel video/camera, and a microSD slot that supports SDHC cards (up to 8GB as far as I know). The 8130 sports the Blackberry OS version 4.2 that has a movie, music player and a lot of other multi-media support.

1. If you're utilizing Stuffit (I'm on version 11.0.2 which I think is the newest version) and you suffer from Finder re-starting or dying after you right-click it is the Stuffit context menu module that's causing the issue. From what I understand there is a fix on the Stuffit web site, but as I never use that Context menu item anyway (I rarely use any that are part of software packages other than Toast's "Toast It" plugin, I just deleted the StuffitCM.plugin from /Library/Contextual Menu Items. I have also heard it can exist in ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items as well, at least that's where the fix I read said to go and it wasn't there so I checked my main Library. You'll have to restart or logout to delete the file from your trash but it's a small price to pay for the most annoying thing I have ever experienced with the Mac. What made it so much worse is that I didn't realize that it was related to right-clicking and then of course the context menu so I've been driving myself nuts for the past 3 months or so googling "finder re-start" or "finder dies" "finder problems" on and on! Alas, it's fixed!
2. I found out today that there's a new version of Remote Desktop Connect (Beta at least) from Microsoft and it's WAY better than the old 1.0.3 version. Definitely an upgrade you want. So what's my tip here? Well occasionally one needs to connect to the console of a terminal server, or if you're doing remote administration sometimes it makes sense to use the console to remotely login. With the new version of RDC they've changed form the text configuration files where you just added a line to a neat new XML pref style configuration file for different logins. This is a good move but how-oh-how do I get it to connect to console? Easy, and I'm sure they'll update this later as it's really dumb not to have it as an option in the preferences, in the connect window you type your host abc.xyz.com and add /console to the end, thus "abc.xyz.com /console" and click connect. Unfortunately they didn't choose to include the functionality of the command-click the connect button, which in the previous version would also allow you to connect to the console (which is much easier than editing the text config file). Anyway, if you save the connection preferences with the /console it will automatically conect to the console when you open that RDC's pref file. Add some aliases to a folder and pull the folder to the Dock near the trash and you have instant access to your RDC connections.

So there ya go! Happy computer tips of the day. Hope they help someone in the future.

[composed and posted with ecto]

Recently, I had noticed that with Parallels Desktop, the Mac VM for running Windows, the performance of my computer began to slip. I had also noticed that when running 10+ applications at once, there was a huge performance decrease. I decided, what the heck, all I need is another 1GB chip and I'll have 2GB and that's only a small investment and it had worked in the past. So, as any computer nerd would, I decided to add two matched chips to the machine (rather than one Samsung chip and one Micron). Anyway, what did this do for the performance? It's back to it's incredibly speedy self. I almost always am running Terminal.app, BBEdit, Photoshop, iPhoto, Mail.app, Safari, iCal, iTunes, ecto and Parallels (yes all of these) at the same time. Since the upgrade even when running Parallels the system is running like a bat outta hell. I had almost given up on having any “good” performance out of Parallels even when running only Safari and Mail.app (which I have to have running, period). It didn't matter how I set the cache settings (for OS X performance or VM performance) Parallels would drag on startup and run at a tolerable level after boot-up. When switching back to an OS X application the system would be pulled to it's knees, without being able to move back and forth between Parallels and OS X what is the use of Parallels anyway, here isn't. So I was about to give up on the whole Parallels experience at this point, but after adding the extra 512MB, for a full, 2GB Parallels not only boots about twice as fast, now I can run multiple applications on top of Parallels.

Anyway, I don't think this is a weakness of Mac OS (and if anyone out there can tell me why, I'd love to hear the ins-and-outs of why OS X likes to have more RAM than Windows to keep a number of programs running and the programs in the foreground running speedier, for all I know it's some flaw in Windows that allows foreground apps more CPU/memory than background applications, I'd love to hear it. I don't have time to do any research to find out for myself, I only have the anecdotal evidence of this post. If I do get time I will try to run some benchmarks to backup my claim. But when I compare to Windows I don't know if I'll be able to demonstrate the issue as I would like or not. We'll See.

[composed and posted with ecto]

[composed and posted with ecto]

From now on, I think I'm going to try my hand at theme customization, and/or building my own theme. I'm sick of having a website that literally any geek with a little time can duplicate. I want something more my own, well OUR own as this site belongs to my wife and I both. I need to practice theme generation anyway as I'm hosting my friend Kyle's site and it's going to take quite a bit of work to get it looking the way he wants it. He had a site that was homegrown and extremely difficult to maintain and edit (I'm sure) and wants the new site I've setup to have a similar look/feel to his old one. The only problem is there is no way to move his old theme that was all done with HTML and Javascript to a modern CSS, XHTML compliant page.

The work will be long and hard, but hopefully I'll be able to learn a few tricks to add rounded buttons and a few other things that I really like to my site, that's a little plainer and easier to use.

Keep your eye out for the changes.

First off, Blackboard support. Jeez where do I start here. They are excellent in most cases, and I do like the TSM's that I've dealt with, but the current problem that we're just in the process of resolving started on February 9, 2006. Resolved, hopefully, by the end of this week. That's 6 months. SIX FRIGGIN' MONTHS! During this time, I have jumped through several hoops, and performed several other feats of mental contortion to arrive back at the root of the problem that I (and Sam Hammond to be fair) said was the problem in late February, IT IS indeed the DATABASE that's the root of the problem. Not our network, not software running on the server, not virtual memory on the server, not any other of the 500 things that Blackboard tried to pin on US as the root of the problem. No it is in fact as we originally contended Blackboard's issue and only one that they can fix.

So I have had sleepless nights, put up with people telling me I was wrong and having to ask other departments to check and recheck things that had absolutely nothing to do with the actual problem, looking like an ass most of the way. I've endured pissed off customers, pissed off supervisors and all for what? A problem that I could have never fixed on my own.

To be fair, the issue sprang from a huge update from our Banner system, a load into our system of ~200,000 entries, 99% of which shouldn't need to be in the Blackboard system, but it's good to have them there anyway.

All is not solved, there are people in that load that may need access to the system so they may have to be re-imported. And you can bet your ass I'm keeping a close eye on those banner imports, I certainly don't want to deal with this again. But live and learn, we now know how to keep everything up and running, even if we do have an extraordinarily large load.

Enough bitching for now, now that this problem is taken care of, I'm in much better spirits and everything should be downhill from here.

We'll see, and I'm sure, Dear Reader, that you will know!