Double Ick!

So I was just walking across the living room to pick up my Treo when I saw a huge palmetto bug! Ick! Normally I would jump, squeak, and send the hubby after it. Only he's out of town. So I settled for jump, and get a sneaker to squash it. There was a bug already hiding on the bottom of my shoe! Double ick! I killed both of them, though.

Pollen

I don't know if Karston caught Daddy's cold, or if he has allergies. His nose drips are clear, and he has multiple sneezes at a time, all of which are more characteristic of allergies. So I looked it up, and right now the main allergens are Ragweed, Chenopods, and Grass at a High-Medium (7.9/10) pollen level. I've been sneaking decongestant into his juice, and he seems to feel better or sleep better (doesn't cough himself awake) when I do. I guess time will tell cold from allergies, but in either case, a decongestant should do the trick.

Pregnant Twitter

I have a friend who was pregnant, and at work we were all watching her IM status since she was updating it with baby messages. No updates in several days (she's offline), so I assume that she's in the hospital and that everything is fine. And it made me think, as a blogging mother, is there some other technology, other than IM status, to use to update all of your friends on your status instead? That answer seems obvious: Twitter! To reduce duplication, there's a script to update Twitter with your iChat status message. For a nice Mac application to read and post, there's Twitterrific. But using a Treo is the best way to send an update when you're in the car driving to the hospital, so there's TreoTwit (en). Or web toTwitter2Go for a small-screen-friendly site.

Of course, she's already done (I think), but it's amazing what you find!

First Kick

I felt the first kick, a good solid kick followed a few seconds later by a second kick, this afternoon while showing Karston how to take a nap!

We're just into Week 13, second trimester, too. This is early for the first kick, but it was such a solid kick that there's no doubt.

Heat Wave

OK, so it really was hot last month! According to the weather forecast, this is the first day in twenty days in a row that has a chance not to be over 90 degrees Fahrenheit! Whew. Usually we only get two weeks of beastly, but this year it's three. Plus if we have any more days over 90, and that's highly likely, this year will set the record for number of days over 90.

Slow down, drink more water, and it'll cool off. Today, in fact.

SIP softphones

Everyone's heard of Skype. Personally, I'm not comfortable with their terms of use. These are the same developers as Kazaa; I'd prefer to keep my day job, and that means I should steer clear of the more shady peer-to-peer.

What I prefer for software-based phones is Gizmo: it's F/OSS, it's standards-based (SIP), and it's just as pretty.

The next step is security paranoia, and that's answered with Zfone, which works with Gizmo and is quite secure.

SIP softphones are really coming of age!

filesystem tricks

So there's FUSE, MacFUSE, and MacFusion (the GUI for MacFUSE) with modules for SSH and FTP. Pretty cool! You can even read and write to NTFS (Windows) volumes. Actually, that's really good, and I should start using it more. I especially like the more interesting extensions (meaning non-traditional file systems) like GMailFS and Tagsistent.

What I'm looking at today is libferris, though. Doesn't look like it's coming to OS X ever, but it's in the same vein of using filesystems for everything because they're easy. It's the part where you could use libferris to convert from XML to a database (easily and transparently) that makes my head spin. That's some library!