Paying Peter Back

Tweets of the day - all rolled up into a tasty roll

My fading daily thoughts…

• 11:43 Hubble was let go today for the last time ever. #hubble #
• 07:44 Watched video last night of Atlantis letting Hubble go. We can go anywhere and see anything but we will never see Hubble again in person #
• 07:52 is in a rut #
• 07:55 Can Microsoft Catch how amazingly witty this comment is and pay me for being a comedic genius? No. God I hate trends! I take cash or check. #
• 08:19 Watching video replays from Solid Rocket Booster cams. Some seriously cool stuff. It’s on NASA TV #
• 08:38 Sometimes hates being a grownup. #

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Tweets of the day - all rolled up into a tasty roll

My fading daily thoughts…

• 13:11 #hubble servicing nearly complete. astronauts are in the process of concluding the final spacewalk. #
• 14:07 Great job NASA and the crew of STS-125. Can’t wait to see what Hubble sends back! #
• 14:19 Hubble High Gain Antennas re-deploying #
• 14:32 <- Twoob - n. Twitter Noob #
• 14:41 Twit-r-done: When Larry the Cable Guy tweets. #
• 14:58 Joomla! is nice. #
• 09:40 The New Moon poster is out. It’s out-acting them all. #

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define the title you want

This is the TEST shipment you asked for

• 07:19 Didn’t tweet all weekend. Not a tweekender. har har. Gotta keep feet on the ground. #
• 07:27 Final EVA underway at 8:20AM EST #
• 08:04 Think of how different "You can’t touch this" would be if Hammer said "STOP, Planck Time - 1.351×10^-43 sec." It’d probably kill the vibe… #
• 08:05 Ok, so far this site is VERY cool and fun to play with. Some things don’t work quite right yet but still - www.wolframalpha.com #
• 09:04 Life isn’t throwing curveballs. I can hit a curveball. Its more like 200mph knuckleballs - with spit on them - and they’re aimed AT me. #
• 09:40 What is with the # words? #

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Tech Failures

This article titled “The 10 Biggest Tech Failures of the Last Decade” is just a tad deceiving.

I really expected to read about products that had failed in terms of their technology, not financially.  So, “Top 10 financial busts of the past decade” might fit better?

It just got my attention since I run Vista64, on a Gateway and own a Zune.  All three are on the list.  10 Years ago Gateway was huge but it the cows eventually did come home.  I opted for the 64bit OS because it where everything will go eventually.  I’ve had hardly a problem running anything on my machine.

Lastly the Zune.  I love my Zune.  I know it hasn’t cut into the iPod market.  Apple users, the hardcore ones, are like zombies.  Zombies eat only brains and stuff.  Apple users only use apple.  Trying to feed a zombie a banana will just get your face gnawed on.  You can’t sell a Zune to an iPod user.  You can’t sell Microsoft to a Mac user.  You just can’t!  So while it financially didn’t hit the mark, the product is, IMO, nicer.

Are you going to call Apple a failure because their share of the OS market is, while growing, still so small?  Didn’t think so.

Three weeks of confusion

We finally seemed to have gotten a proper and accurate diagnosis of what was ailing our youngest. After weeks of random “illness” we became quite concerned. When a child throws up you almost instantly think of an infection, usually viral. That’s how it all started but it seemed suspicious even then.

He appeared to have a fever one evening, the became ill. He slept the night with no incident, which was odd. He awoke, had a bottle and became ill again. Afterwards he proceeded to run around the house like a madman. This child wasn’t “sick” so off to daycare he went.

The week went by without incident, until Friday.

The daycare calls around late morning and he is vomiting. By the time I got to him he’d done it again and while picking him up he became ill yet again. This went on for hours. I believe I counted at least 10 times that he got sick to his stomach. He looked bad, lethargic and just laid on the bed, not moving, except to get sick.

If you’re a parent and you’ve experienced the feeling of helplessness when your child is ill, it’s an experience like none other. We hurt when they hurt.

I was angry at whatever was causing this. All I could do was shake my fist in the air and curse. It didn’t help my son though. I finally took him into the pediatrician late that afternoon. I had a towel with me at all times but amazingly enough he did not become ill in our visit.

They poked and prodded him but were dumbfounded, as was I. They said he had slight fever but the whole time he felt somewhat cool to the touch. He didn’t feel feverish though he sort of acted it. Usually a sign of viral infection in children are the “fun” diapers. His only symptoms were vomiting and lethargy with sporadic (days apart) bad diapers. That should have keyed us in but I’ll get to that. I left with the loose diagnosis of it being a virus but no one was sure. That wasn’t a good feeling.

Yes, I know, talking about vomit and poo aren’t exactly glamorous but it’s been a long ordeal and I am going to blog about it!

He seemed to recover from that Friday ordeal and we went nearly another week without incident. Then early this past Saturday it all started up again. Uncontrollable vomiting, lethargy, etc. He exhibited the same exact symptoms as the previous Friday. This was no virus but what was it?

We took him in to the doc again and they agreed, finally. Though instead of ordering some tests to confirm anything we still felt left in the dark. Dammit I want some tests run! The whole weekend he acted weird.

Sunday afternoon he became ill again… (Happy Mother’s Day!)

Then Monday evening he became ill, yet again….

Finally Tuesday morning he was ill and we decided it was time for a second opinion. We called up our old pediatrician that the oldest went to (he is now 6, the youngest is nearly 2, btw). They said to bring him in, no question about it, something wasn’t right. I was at work and anxiously awaited an answer.

They ran a few tests which came back with nothing unusual. Then they ordered the X-Ray and at last, we may have found the answer. Our kid was constipated.

Whoa, whoa… say what? I got the call from my wife and I was actually shocked. How could it be so simple? Then the symptoms all made sense. The doctor listened to everything and indeed everything pointed to that.

Why the throwing up? There was no room in him! It wasn’t a complete blockage which explained why it seemed to come and go but it was enough to be prolonged. More was going in than coming out, that’s the bottom line. So now we have him on a few things to help move things along and we’re going to watch his diet more closely.

He seems to have improved over the past two days though we’re still watching him. I’m just glad the initial diagnosis was something simple.

We now end our poo broadcast.

Falling off the “cooter”

Yesterday our oldest is outside playing with the neighbor friend and they’re riding those little three wheel scooter things. Both are about the same age. We call the neighbor kid J, though I’m not sure what his real name is. Anyhow, he has a habit of leaving the first letter off of certain words and it makes for some interesting comments.

Our son, J and another neighborhood kid walk up yesterday and we notice our son has bloodied knees. He’s cool about it though and just wants some bandaging up.

We take him inside and J follows. We’re fixing his knees up and J informs us as to how it happened. He says, quote:

“He just fell off the cooter”.

Now, how many people get scraped knees when falling off the “cooter”, eh?

PeterTweets

Look! No, I mean over there in the right column. See that section called PeterTweets? That’s where my tweets show up. Pretty nice little plug-in there. I don’t write a blog everyday but I tweet fairly regularly so you can see my random thoughts there. You can also click the title and it’ll take you straight to my twitter page. It’s a silly place. Not as silly as Camelot though.

I called it PeterTweets because it sounds funny on many levels. Maybe PeterPEWPEWPEW? Nah.

Hubble Space Telescope - One Last Time

Monday, May 11, 2009, Space Shuttle Atlantis will embark on a mission to give Hubble one last upgrade and servicing. Missions STS-125 is a veteran crew and a special mission in many ways. If you’ve followed this mission, then you know it’s the first since Columbia was lost (STS-107) that an orbiter will not be going to the ISS. This is special in that if a problem develops on Atlantis, the crew will need to be rescued as the ISS will not be available. Endeavour is on standby as a rescue vehicle, should it be needed. You will never see two space shuttles on the launchpad at the same time, ever again.

The mission will be intense as the Hubble is old and stubborn. The crew wants no surprises but they train for them. Many eyes will be upon them as they replace cameras, gyros and other various electronics vital to its operation.

It is still hard to believe that it was initially one of NASA’s greatest embarrassments. Now Hubble is synonymous with success and wonder. After an incredibly difficult emergency servicing mission in 1993, the Hubble’s vision was corrected. Our understanding of the Universe from that day forward has never been the same.

A few Hubble facts:

• Astronomers have used Hubble data to publish more than 7,500 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built. In 2007 scientists published more than 700 journal articles based on Hubble data.
• Hubble’s 18 years’ worth of observations have produced about 32 terabytes of data, equaling the content of about 9,600 digital feature-length films.
• Hubble is nearly the size of a large school bus. It is 43.5 ft (13.2 m) in length and weighs 24,500 lb (11,110 kg).
• In its 18-year lifetime, the telescope has made more than 100,000 trips around our planet. As a result, Hubble has racked up plenty of frequent-flier miles, about 2.5 billion. This distance is equivalent to traveling from Saturn to the Sun and back.
• In its 18 years of observing the universe, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has made about 870,000 observations resulting in more than 560,000 images of celestial objects.

So I wish the crew of Atlantis Godspeed. Make Hubble able to bring us more breathtaking images and data. After the crew leaves, it’s likely no human hands will ever touch her again. It would be nice though, if one day, she was retrieved.

If I could one day take my grandchildren to a museum and say “that’s the Hubble telescope, your dad was named after Edwin Hubble” now that would be cool.

Atlantis is set to lift off on May 11, 2009 at 2:01pm EDT. For more info on this mission go here

Buy us a new car

We’ve paid ours off and it’s been worked on 3 times in the past year.

*angry face*

Way off base

This blog originally started as a means of sort of holding ourselves accountable. We’ve done ‘ok’ the past year and a half but we could stand to do better. I’ve mostly turned this blog into rants of this or that. So it went from ‘personal feel good’ blog to ‘hear me b*tch about this’ blog. That’s not the idea I had envisioned.

So, hold on kids, I’m turning this blog around!