Friday, July 31, 2009

Sidetracked

I was multi-tasking searching the web for two topics, looking for GFCF recipes and looking for possible causes of Karston's abdominal pain.

From the GFCF recipe search, I ran across mention of a low oxalate diet (LOD) helping severe pediatric abdominal pain! Interesting! So I went looking for LOD and quickly got to the specific carbohydrate diet (SCD) (with recipes). Those might be worth trying, but it's so hard to get Karston to eat anything that I shudder to think about trying to get him to eat from an approved list. On the other hand, maybe tracking his diet for oxalates and carbs while tracking how he feels ...

I found this doctor, and he's not that far away either. Hmm, a specialist ... wouldn't be the first one, but we haven't gotten anywhere yet either.

I suspect either intestinal allergies (sadly, there's no test for these T-cell-mediated allergies, so you just have to associate symptoms with diet) or colitis. Since Cale was diagnosed with colitis and it can run in the family, I think it needs to be considered for Karston. Unfortunately, it looks like differential diagnosis is a current research topic, explaining why it's tough to get medical traction.

So, flipping through Pediatric Gastroenterology, I read up on Colitis and Short Stature. We already tested for Celiac Disease although he hadn't had any wheat that week (should be able test for any wheat in past six weeks, though). I read Cholecystitis, which is interesting since we were worried about possible bilirubin earlier this month (but we think it was artificial color from lollipops). I read Colic, linked to milk protein allergy, and found the differential diagnosis of soy protein intolerance interesting. However, colic weight gain is typical, which doesn't cover Karston falling off the weight charts at 6 months. I read about Crohn Disease (often considered with colitis) and other Malabsorption Syndromes. Protein Intolerance was interesting: "cow's milk proteins are most frequently implicated as a cause of food intolerance during infancy," "only a few of these [intolerances] have a clear allergic immunoglobulin E (IgE)–mediated pathogenesis" and "in children, GI symptoms are generally most common, with a frequency ranging from 50-80%, followed by cutaneous symptoms (20-40%), and respiratory symptoms (4-25%)." Constitutional Growth Delay mentions falling off the growth charts at 3-6 months of age, then resuming growth on the right slope but below the curve. Where have I seen that??? Silver-Russell Syndrome usually starts with low birthweight, which didn't happen. Oh, and your word of the day is borborygmus: tummy rumbles!; can be caused by "incomplete digestion of carbohydrate-containing foods including milk, gluten, fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes, and high-fiber whole grains."

Monday, July 27, 2009

Toilet Worse Than Dishwasher

Our new dishwasher uses just 7 gallons of water for a typical wash. I just flushed our old toilet, the only one in the house that hasn't been replaced yet, and it ran and ran. I had to jiggle the handle four times before it stopped running. I really think that toilet uses more water per flush than our dishwasher does per load! That's sad about the toilet, but at least its replacement will get installed this weekend. On the other hand, that's pretty nice about the new dishwasher!

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Tag Selection

Something weird happened while I was testing some tagging applications. I ended up with a contextual menu item (right-click in the Finder) of "Tag Selection" that didn't do anything. I was going nuts trying to find how it got there, and what I could uninstall to get rid of it. Things that don't work just seem like an invitation to trouble! I had decided somewhere along the line that Tag Folders had gone crazy on me, but its manual is thorough on how to uninstall (hurrah!). I was also wondering about Tagoman since I downloaded it at the same time (no installer, I just left it in my Downloads folder). Well, thanks to AppCleaner and browsing what it listed under Other, I found TagoManCMPlugin.plugin! I removed its symlink from ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items and the contextual menu item also vanished. Whew, mystery solved! I'm certain the reason why Tag Selection didn't do anything is that TagoMan never made it to /Applications, so don't blame it. I just never grok'd its workflow.

Monday, July 20, 2009

OS X Tagging with OpenMeta

So I was following the OpenMetaApplications page, and my current crop of tools to test for file tagging (through OpenMeta so that tags are interoperable) is TagIt (an application to tag or browse the tag cloud), Tagger (looks like QuickLook for adding tags), and s-take's OMSavePanel (an extra window for tagging for every Cocoa Save dialog window) and OMWizard (a "hierarchical" tag browser). We'll see which ones I'm still using later ...

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Out with the old ...

Well, this morning DH pulled out the GE Potscrubber 1425 dishwasher that was built into the house 25 years ago (and hard-wired and hard-plumbed). For a 25-year-old dishwasher, it has features that not all new dishwashers have. The delay start in particular (a feature we love, since we'll set it to start when we plan to be out of the kitchen) really weeded out newer dishwashers. Add in that we wanted a metal tub for the energy savings of the condensation drying (as opposed to forced heating dry), and we were not looking at the low end. Every time we went to the store, we ended up picking a Maytag JetClean II or JetClean III model based on features for the price. (Consumer Reports liked that model too, not that I can find that link anymore.) However, yesterday we went to Lowes for the Build and Grow clinic (where kids build toys, and Karston has a blast), and there was a Bosch on clearance. I picked the Bosch as the model to end the looking because it is rated 51 dBA (quieter than the Maytag's 56 dBA I had in my notes) and it was rated 259 kWh annually (less than the 315 kWh that I remember for the Maytag). I do wish I had seen them side-by-side before picking one, especially since we could have gotten the Maytag for $200 less while it's on sale, but I also know I like quieter and more efficient. So Bosch it will be! Bye-bye Potscrubber 1425!

Friday, July 10, 2009

Snap-in Liners

We're on the last stage of potty training, having crossed the (lack of Toddler) motivation hurdle, and we were headed into this turn, I was wondering why I couldn't just snap in a liner in his underpants to catch the poop that wasn't going in the potty (as has happened all week, hurrah! finally!). I thought about making some, but I don't spend a lot of time sewing anymore ... I seem to be chasing children instead! Wow, snap-in liners are not as common as I would hope!

Almost all snap-in liners only snap in the back, closer to the mess I don't want to touch. Front and back snaps would probably be better based on this experience (with pattern too!). Cloth diapers with snap-in liners are usually called all in two. I understand that fleece can be too drying on Baby's skin, but this is Potty Training and why would I want to wash an entire diaper when I just need to catch and toss the poop? I don't understand pocket diapers, where you stuff a liner inside a pocket so that all pieces need to be washed, compared to the all-in-two, where the outer covers only need washing if something escaped the inner layer.

But here's what I found.

None of those are what I wanted to buy: just the liner, with snaps back and front. I would put matching snaps on his Fruit of the Loom tidy whitey underpants.

So I guess it's a good thing that we've made progress this week after being stalled for so long. He could hold it overnight, go standing up or sitting down, go anywhere not just familiar places. He could even hold it for a long time while we were on a plane! We've been there for quite a while. But poop? Messy cleanup. Until this week! Thank goodness for ring pops and big stickers!

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Timex Commercial

I just learned that it wasn't extemporaneous:

Timex decided to end the torture tests [advertising] campaign in 1977 with a staged failure: an elephant stomped and crushed a watch. "It worked," Swayze quipped to the television audience, "in rehearsal."

I guess I was a gullible kid!

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Basilisk II

It's all about good directions with good pictures. Left on my own, I was very frustrated with Basilisk II because I couldn't get it to run. I started with the Basilisk II Setup Guide at the Macscene Wiki.

The first tip I needed was to use Nigel Pearson's v19 for PPC on my MacBook Pro. I was downloading Intel or Universal versions before.

I added the disk image called Network Access.image, but I actually booted from Starterdisk.hfv [ref] just fine.

But the best part of these directions are the screenshots! A picture is worth a thousand words. I made my settings look almost exactly like these (just added Starterdisk.hfv), and Basilisk II booted into System 7.5.5! Holy dogcow!

Now that I've got all of the emulators working, it's time to retire the old clutter! If I ever need to roll back to Mac II MatLab for unexpected reasons (hey, it happened to me once: I had to revive a IIci on a tight deadline!), I can do it without the hardware. None of my Mac IIci computers want to boot right now anyway.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Fixing SIMBL

I installed SIMBL today so that I could install OMSavePanel. For a while, I thought I might not have installed OMSavePanel properly, so I also installed SafariStand. I like the Stand menu, and when it didn't show up, I knew I had a problem with SIMBL. MacoOSXHints had one on InputManagers with the line I needed:

sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/InputManagers

Now it all works! Look out tags, here I come!

(Adding tags when you save a file is the best time for many reasons. One is that it's fresh on your mind then, but another is that dumb backup programs won't have to check ctime, just mtime, to back up your tags with the file, assuming it supports extended attributes but not ctimes.)