Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Configuring Canon Pixma MP620

Oh, I was getting so frustrated that I couldn't use my new Canon Pixma MP620 printer with wireless on my Mac! I gave it a static IP address, and went through IP Printing. Crash! from CIJAutoSetupTool, and Console said 12/24/08 10:25:29 PM com.apple.launchd[202] ([0x0-0x1e01e].jp.co.canon.ij.print.cijautosetuptool[294]) Exited with exit code: 255 . Grr! I read this thread, and discovered the answer is to use

System Preferences>Print & Fax>+>More Printers>Canon IJ Network

So when I had IP selected, I was already on the wrong path, because I needed to select More Printers instead. D'oh!

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

New Tricks

Cale's new tricks yesterday ... he's more specific and alert when his eyes are tracking someone walk across the room, he's more cuddly with his hugs, and he's even closer to crawling. He was on all fours, rocking back and forth, and singing the not-quite-crawling-not-quite-frustrated song of a baby about to learn to crawl. He was rock, rock, rocking with a rev, rev, revving, and I'm sure crawling is just around the corner!

Monday, December 22, 2008

BitMemo

I thought I was going to have to find a Leopard replacement to BitMemo since the usual Mac sites had a 404 URL for it, but I found the BitMemo homepage finally!

Not What I Expected To Hear

I work in the same building as most of the Networking group. While I was filling my tea mugs in the break room this morning, I certainly did not expect to hear a modem squeal. Since almost everyone is out today, I took a quick peek to see who would be using such old technology when the people to ask for a gigabit ethernet connection are just down the hall. As it turns out, I'm pretty sure the culprit isn't a person. I remembered that all of the offices have VoIP phones that don't support direct modem connections, but the fax machine has a converter. (The few analog lines are marked, and I was standing next to the closest one, so I know it wasn't being used.) The fax has a loud squeal, loud enough that I would hear it all the way in the break room. After my first fax, I learned that you feed your pages to the beast and run away, retreat from the loud noise until it's time to pick up the transmission report. So at first I thought the modem squeal was completely out of place, but now I'm pretty sure it was that bizarre beast, the facsimile machine.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Reflux and Sleep

At some level, I think we always knew this, but hadn't codified it. Last night at bedtime, Karston said, Tummy still hurting. I don't want to fall asleep. Just like that, he strung together his poor eating with his poor sleeping. I asked a few more questions, and Karston said he didn't want to fall asleep while his tummy was hurting because then he has bad dreams. I'm impressed that he figured out that connection on his own just a few weeks shy of 3.5 years old. This makes me more confident in what was previously just my intuition: fix his eating first, then see if we still need to fix his sleeping.

I just wish I knew where to start! At Cale's 9-month well-child-checkup yesterday, the pediatrician said we can try Zantac with Prevacid. She also gave us a prescription for Nexium to try next, to tide us over with ideas until Karston's specialist appointment on February 25th. Everything we've tried so far gets less and less effective over the course of one month, and it's very disheartening. He's still on Prevacid because it's holding ground to a little better than where he was before treatment; without it, he crashes to new lows.

Monday, December 15, 2008

DNS: dispatch shutting down due to TCP receive error

I finally got annoyed at the "dispatch 0xhexcode: shutting down due to TCP receive errors: connection reset" in the logs on one server, so I asked Google.

The best answer seems to be from SANS ISC, but even the simple "the other end shut down prematurely" is enough to point out it's probably not a problem and it's not on the server's end.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Diaper Count

Well, one of things I can do after a week-long trip with the kids is know how many diapers they go through (a closed system this week; usually they spend some time away from home not going to work with us). The answer is one toddler and one baby went through 52 diapers from Saturday mid-morning until now, the following Saturday evening. So about 7 diapers per day. And about half that for number of wipes. The boys are close enough in size that we just bought Huggies Supreme (they were on sale) size 5. Huggies Supreme seem to run a bit smaller than Pampers Cruisers, but they worked. They don't seem as flexible, and I'm glad to get back to good ol' Pampers. But then again, it's all-around nice to be home again!

Friday, December 12, 2008

Book Review: My Life as a Quant

Another book finished, and I liked My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman too! Derman's description of why he went into physics was dead-on! I felt much the same way when I went into physics, and I suffered the same disappointment about jobs when I left. I thought the book was lucid (quick reading), self-aware (I had similar feelings about physics, yet it was good prep for the future career change), and way more fun to read (for the human aspect) than you'd expect from any description of it.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Book Review: Kitchen Confidential

After a long spell cuddling a baby while not reading books, I finally finished Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain! It's a quick read, despite how long it took me to finish it, and very fun if you enjoy the gonzo writing style. Since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson is one of my very favorites, I enjoyed reading this book, as well as finishing a book, any book!

My favorite quote is

for the first time, I saw how three or four ingredients, as long as they are of the highest and freshest quality, can be combined in a straightforward way to make a truly excellent and occasionally wondrous product.

I'm sure he doesn't mean Alt-Martha but her less-than-five (ingredients) recipes sure are a great start for dorm-room cooking!

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Book Done!

Hey, I finished a book! That's the good part (and what idle time in airports and airplanes can do)! I read Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and overall was not impressed with the conceit of telling the story out of order on about three parallel timelines. It's fine for a "beach book," the unthinking entertainment you might read on the beach. Or on the way to the beach, in my case.