Oh Wow

It's a pretty day this afternoon, and we won't have many more pretty days before we have to push through several months of unmitigated winter. So we ate lunch outside on the deck! Lunch was a bit late, which makes me gassy. Today it made me really gassy. But you know, I was outside, so I decided to be comfortable. After three impressively loud farts in a row, my 16-month-old toddler with very few words in his repertoire looked at me and said Oh wow. Needless to say, we cracked up! Yeah, he's probably right.

Toddler

Treo Recovery

Karston played with my Treo after dinner today, and then I couldn't find it. I went through the whole house carefully, at toddler height. I checked the box where he had unpacked the box, dropped in my office keys, and then put everything back. Finally I went back to the stand-by, Where did you definitely see it last? Daddy had seen it (for sure) later than I was sure I had seen it, so I started there. He saw Karston grab it from the coffee table. So I walked all around the living room on my knees, and looked under the couch. No phone. We called my phone, but Karston's learned to turn off the phone function, and yes, my phone was off the air. So finally I lifted couch cushions, and found it under the second one I checked. Whew! I didn't even know Karston hid things there!

The new trick I learned by accident on my Treo is that you can dim the screen for a session by pressing OPTION (the black blob) and MENU. Press that combination again, and the screen goes back to normal brightness. I use this when I want to enter some tasks at night (so I can clear my brain and then fall asleep), when the screen seems so bright at the lowest setting. This extra-dim setting is also good for playing solitaire (Klondike in Patience) during a midnight nursing. (I then use it as my very expensive flashlight so I can get back in bed without tripping on something otherwise unseen.)

Sleeping

A study on sleep/wake patterns of breast-fed infants in the first 2 years of life indicates Karston should sleep less than his non-breast-fed counterparts and not sleep through the night. Oh well! I think he already knows that, and I'm the one coming to grips with it. I would daydream about the time I get to sleep on my own schedule again, but I'm too close to zombie to daydream. Still, some day I am sure I will be allowed to have a regular sleep schedule of my own. And I think all those times when I thought we were "almost there" were cases of wishful thinking. Come on, I've been thinking Karston was close to sleeping through the night without us since he was six months old, and here he is about to pass sixteen months of age without a full week of full sleep. I just need to accept that I have a happy, healthy child who doesn't need as much sleep as I'd like. The important phrase is "happy, healthy child," and I'll just deal with the rest. Now if he would give up what he did way too early Wednesday morning (cry from 1:30 AM to 5:30 AM), that would be great!

dead keyboard

Well, one thing about mobile toddlers is more accidents. This time the accident was tipping my almost-empty water onto my laptop's keyboard. I shut down as fast as I could, let it dry a couple days ... but the keyboard didn't survive. I can't use seven keys on the right-hand side, including the letter 'i' and the '-' hyphen symbol (and shifted versions) as well as well as the ever-useful space bar and return key. I couldn't figure out how to log in at first, but then I remembered that I could (duh) use an external USB keyboard. No space and no return really slows down typing.

So this evening, I ordered a new keyboard from iFixIt since they have the right keyboard in stock, a reputation for good service, and detailed take-apart directions. Here's hoping!

Easy Thunderbird Growl

I'm trying to like Apple's Mail.app on my work laptop, but I still use good ol' Thunderbird at home. I do like the Growl integration with Mail.app, so I had to find a way to add Thunderbird to Growl. Turns out, it's very easy with Growl New Message Notification. I followed the directions (download it, open extensions manager, and tell the extensions manager to use the download) and, well, it works. It's hardly exciting, although it does spare me a trip to my email client for less-urgent messages. I guess I'm mentioning it because it's so much easier than other Growl and Thunderbird tips I've seen. Plus transparent notification means that my email is much less disruptive to my time while still being central to my work. That's cool!

Unresponsive Script

I finally got tired of seeing "Warning: unresponsive script" while running d3 TiddlyWiki for GTD in Camino. So I looked up a fix, and it's easy. You point your Gecko browser to about:config, you search for dom.max_script_run_time, and you bump that up to 20 or so. I won't miss that dialog box!

authPriv fails, authNoPriv works

I've been fighting an intermittent problem with one of our network management applications (it started in June), where authPriv stops working. But at least authNoPriv works then, so I can always get out of the woods. Sometimes it went away after a reboot, but not since last month's application upgrade. So. Annoying. But then I saw a post about another SNMP application with the same problem, and that made me look for other ideas. If there's a common base, it's net-snmp, so what if it has a bug with authPriv?

I found a net-snmp bug that sounds like it might be relevant. And even better, the patch may already exist (read whole thread)! We'll find out, but I felt like I was on top of the world, or at least on top of the problem. Ahh. Here's hoping!