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Baby: Testing the limits
Sat, 24 Nov 2007

I think I will write a couple blog entries over the next little while to talk about the hardships of mommying and the usually unmentioned and swept away difficulties of daddying. Crazy stuff really, but perhaps I either need to get it off my chest or its enlightening.. probably more of the former than latter :) Oh and for the neeks out there, I'll post a short how-to on porting code from PSP-Fat to PSP-Slim.

Yes, I know, I should be focusing on Razor (a flashback 'movie' in the new Battlestar Galactica series; I'd not watch it at all except I'm a year behind and well, this fits right into that timeline, so why not?) but alas my time has been so hard pressed and fragmented of late that I cannot focus; I am watching, but will have to take it in again later. Ensign Ro is still an evil wench :) And IKEA still sells BSG merchandise. Oh, I sort of enjoy, but not being hit so heavy wih it, the imagery that on Pegasus they hold the 'phone' upside down, since they only talk into it.. while on Galactica they hold it like a phone, so they can talk and listen too. A not so sublte message. Well done.

The last few days the poor baby has been teething and sick; her nose has been plugged with phlegm and so she cannot sleep very well and thus we spend some large time getting her to sleep, so that she can wake a couple minutes later. Very trying and takes me back to about 8 months ago when she was just a peanut in our hands .. pacing up and down the halls all night long while wishing for her sake she could settle, and for my sake since I .. guilty as it may be, just wanted to sleep for more than a few minutes. Anyway, I noticed something over the last day or two - the poor child has learnt to be afraid of the dark. Our nightlight wasn't sufficient, so with the addition of another one.. my god, she sleeps a little bit more and a little bit easier. The poor girl has suffered so much the last week and a half, it breaks the heart. But this in its own way is cute, and something we can roll with to make her feel better. The other day I spent some 4-5 hours over the night just getting her to sleep. Man.

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Mobile: 2008 will be an interesting year..
Tue, 06 Nov 2007

Its really been a known thing for a few days or a week now, but the official announcement is out -- Goggle has launched Android, its Linux based mobile phone OS platform. This is the foundation with no house on top, but if it proves to be a robust foundation (solid, flexible enough to be ported to many devices, easy to lock down for telcos and easy to develop applications for), it could be a good thing. It'll be fun to watch the next few days as people inevitably compare it to established stacks like Apple's iPhone has (ie: an OS with a relatively complete application suite and a year head start) and the traditional smartphones OSes (Symbian, Palm/ACCESS and Windows offerings.)

As usual, Michael Mace has a very good article on things here -- I really love the closing lines:

It's going to use open source and alliances to suck the profitability out of anybody who creates a proprietary island that it can't target.
It'll be interesting to see if and how Google applies this principle to the upcoming frequency auction in the US.
Or to anyone else who gets in its way.

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Literature: Pale Gray For Guilt
Tue, 06 Nov 2007

So many topics have come to mind the last few weeks, but just as easily drifted away. On the rough nughts when the baby is gnashing through her growth spurts and clawing her way through the rising waves of inputs, time goes quickly as we cheer her. On the easy nights when she plays away and giggles with fascination at her new found skills, what stone-hearted scoundrel could avoid playing with hose tiny probing fingers? So either way the days tumble by, rocks in a slide. (Last night was a funky night, so I will cop out on the rest of this posting :)

A very good friend of mine who had comforting thoughts a year ago when they were welcomed, resent an excerpt from a novel that was timely then. It is excellent stuff, clear and precise and binding. So I rcord it here for when it might be needed again, and as a mini review .. I've not read the novel but I think I must based on these few paragraphs. Perhaps they will entice you as well. (And if not, go read some Neal Stephenson. He'll mess you up.)

...too many others were gone, and I sought chill comfort in an analogy of death that has been with me for years. It doesn't explain or justify. It just seems to remind me how things are.

Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger ones stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.

Your time, the time of all your contemporaries, schoolmates, your loves and your adversaries, is that part of the shifting bar on which you stand. And it is crowded at first. You can see the way it thins out, upstream from you. The old ones are washed away and their bodies go swiftly by, like logs in the current. Downstream where the younger ones stand thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash away. Always there is more room where you stand, but always the swift water grows deeper, and you feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under your feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for a safer place can nudge you off balance, and you are gone. Someone who has stood beside you for a long time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to catch their hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are gone. There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the roar of the water, the shifting, gritty sound of sand and gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries of despair as the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken by the current. Some old ones who stand on a good place, well braced, understanding currents and balance, last a long time. A Churchill, fat cigar atilt, sourly amused at his own endurance and, in the end, indifferent to rivers and the rage of waters. Far downstream from you are the thin, startled cries of the ones who never got planted, never got set, never quite understood the message of the torrent.

-- John D. MacDonald, _Pale Gray For Guilt_

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