The importance of a good backup strategy...

The day after uploading our Christmas pictures (and deleting them from the camera), M called me at work.

"The Mac is frozen up," she said. "The cursor moves, but nothing else is working."

"Go ahead and power it off," I said, "and then power it back on."

Fifteen minutes later, she called again. "It is showing a gray screen with a spinning icon."

"That just means it is checking the disk for errors. Let it finish and it will be fine."

Two hours later, when I got home, it was still "checking" itself. Not good. Some command-line trickery later, it had fsck'ed itself multiple times and declared that all was well, yet it still would not boot. Apple hardware diagnostics showed no problems, and then, mysteriously, the drive failed to show up at all. MicroCenter to the rescue!

Using step-by-step disassembly directions from www.ifixit.com, I put in a new 500 GB caviar blue drive, installed Tiger, then upgraded to Snow Leopard. In the meantime, I put the ailing drive in a SATA dock and ran DiskWarrior on it, which rebuilt the directory (and DiskWarrior warned, "Recovery slowed due to drive malfunction"). Tonight, I will see how effective my backup via Time Machine/Time Capsule has been.

Having all your music, video and pictures in a digital format is awesome, but it carries with it certain risks. What if our house burned? Our backups are in our house. You could try backing up "to the cloud," but who is going to push 50+ gigs of data and pay a monthly fee to house it?

Another option--hang an eSATA/USB 2.0 dock off of the Time Capsule, and archive backups to a standard SATA drive quarterly. Put that drive somewhere safe and offsite, like a safety deposit box, or in a car trunk.

She's fancy

Words Emmie can say

At 16+ months, she just learned her name. In addition:
Yes, no, please, up, down, more, bath, shoes, socks, walk, ball, Mama, Dada, hi, bye, one, two, duck, elbow, back, toes, teeth, blue, horse, turtle, poopoo, me, tutu, thank you (sorta), baby

Hackintosh

Yes, that is a Dell Mini 9. Yes, it is running OS X 10.5.8

No, sleep doesn't work. Everything else does. It weighs 2.2 lbs.

I am Darticus!

And so is my wife (name that cinematic joke for bonus geek cred). Not
me in the pic, that is team captain, Larrold

All I had to do was post....

and the doctor's office called. ALL of Emerson's tests came back negative. She is, in our pediatrician's own words, just a "skinny little girl. Like her parents." I didn't make that second part up, either.

Clearly our pediatrician has not seen me in my Speedo.

The waiting game

For those of you who have come along with us on the Day-carousel of Infectious Diseases, we had a little bit of a scare when Emerson was in for her 15th month checkup. Her weight had actually dropped since her 1 year checkup, which dropped her off the growth charts for weight (but she was still at the 40th percentile for height). This triggered a fair amount of medical paranoia and ass-covering, so the doctor ordered several batteries of tests to be carried out. These were to rule out some pretty scary things, including Cystic Fibrosis, celiac disease (gluten allergy), thyroid dysfunction, etc.

We took Emmie to Children's Hospital where they put electrodes on her and took blood. We are still waiting for results, but hopefully will have them soon. In the meantime, she has been eating like a champ and gaining weight. Our scale puts her a bit over 19 lbs now. That's on the charts, barely.

I'm an uncle (again)!

Congratulations to Zach and Kathleen, who brought Roguen Wallace Brown into the world around 11pm on 9-15-09.

By all accounts, mom and baby are happy and healthy. We are *thrilled* for them and anxious to meet our new nephew!

Emmie is grateful

I am a punctual person

It pains me to be late. I view it as the height of arrogance, the
assumption that my time is somehow more valuable than that of the
people with whom I am supposed to meet.

I just misse the first flight connection of my life. I was ON the
plane already. We deplaned, against my will, because of a desire to
stretch legs, use a regular bathroom, and feed the baby. Marantha was
convinced the fligt reboarded at 6:42. I was convinced that it left at
6:42. She was more convinced than me.

So we are dinner and changed the baby. And got back to the gate at
6:45. Flight was still there. But they wouldn't let us on, because
they started boarding 20 minutes earlier.

Our bags--including baby paraphenalia--were in our seats. This is
going to be a long night. We were able to get onto the 8:40 flight.

My screenplay

I'm working on a screenplay. It is tentatively titled, "What OSHA has to say about Birkenstocks" with a subtitle of, "Why hippies don't work in machine shops."

The plot centers around a guy who is finishing up a woodworking project for a buddy, and thoughtlessly goes down to his shop wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. While in the shop, he accidentally drops a 4 1/2" steel C-clamp on his little toe.

I'm shooting for an NC-17 language based on violence and adult language.

I've got one thing to say to you...

Emerson has started saying things. The trouble is, she says them once--
enough to get whomever is in earshot good and excited--then
steadfastly refuses to say them again. In the last 24 hours, she has
said "Teddy" while pointing at her stuffed bear, and "juice" when I
packed up her juice for daycare. I guess she has decided that it is
easier to point at things.

Baby signing time

Her vocabulary of signs now includes more, all done, milk, dog, hungry/
food, and cracker.

I have tried, in vain so far, to get her to sign "crazy cracker"

This is the reward--Saltines--for her request of "more cracker". In
retrospect, maybe she just wanted to server to come back.

It's been a tough few days

For those of you that follow me on Twitter (@philgrad) or Facebook, you've seen the status updates and tweets (grr) coming in about Emerson. We've been riding the wave of illness in this house since last Friday. Short story: everyone is fine. It all takes place against the backdrop of my first attempt at a "staycation", taking a Friday/Monday combo off so I'd have a nice, long weekend.

It initially appeared to be a low grade fever, just under 100. This, we thought, could be due to the three molars she is working on simultaneously. Friday morning she woke up and was much more feverish, around 101.5. Marantha, too, was sick, sporting a nasty cold and pink eye (for the third time). Good times.

The fever got worse, although Emmie was a trooper. She hit mid-103s a few times on Friday, so we got her in to the pediatrician on Saturday as soon as we could (although we couldn't get in to see our regular doc). After a negative strep test, they surmised that it was a viral infection, so the typical 72 hours should suffice for fever, and we should just keep an eye. Any fever under 103, Emmie was acting almost normal. She was eating, drinking, and playing. Then things got worse. We saw the fever hit 104.8 on Saturday and Sunday, and she started to not want to eat. She got listless. Sunday was pretty bad.

On Monday we took her back to the pediatrician--our own this time--who did a urine culture (negative) to rule out a UTI, then sent us to Children's Hospital. There they did a CBC and chest X-Rays. Both were negative, so no pneumonia, and no bacterial infection. So we were back at the viral diagnosis, although now we'd had 5 days of fevers, most of which were 103+. Scary stuff. The best guess was roseola, which presents with high fevers and few if any other symptoms. After the fever breaks, you get a nice red rash (non-itchy, thankfully). Now we have no fever, and no rash.

It's good to see her smile again.

Mexican night!

Emmie likes the pool

G'pa and Emmie

Buying a car

Emmie is helping. Really!

Cap'n Ron?

With friends at Osage Beach

Birthday cake!

Mmmm...chocolate

First birthday presents

She likes success, and will sort the red block over and over.

Emmie's first camping trip

We took Emerson--just days shy of her first birthday--to Hawn State Park for an overnight camping trip. We improvised a 'baby containment system' that consisted of a moderately sized inflatable kids pool.

Once escape was thwarted repeatedly, Emerson grew frustrated with this arrangement.

Clyde took it all in stride. However, he is a little bit on the "short bus" end of the intelligence spectrum when it comes to exploring by himself while on a long tether.

Swinging helped calm Emerson down. It was all we could do to keep Marantha off the swings herself.

Wheee!

She's extra fancy

Emerson's pre-birthday

We had the good fortune to spend this weekend in KC with my sister-in-law, and with the assembly of multiple Beattys we decided to have a birthday party for Emerson (OK, it was a week early, but still...)

She got nice loot, and enjoyed a delicious vanilla cupcake from our neighborhood bakery, SweetArt (who also supplied my delicious birthday cake this year).

Swimming

Emerson's first time swimming. Dig the Garbo shades.

Our Japanese garden

Because nothing says "Japanese" like vinyl garage siding.

Grillin and chillin

Enjoying some perfect weather in the 'Lou. Clyde agrees.

It's Official...an SVP is me!

This year marks my fifth year in the 'Lou, and my fifth year with Fleishman-Hillard. To commemorate the occasion, they promoted me to Senior Vice President (that's 3 promos in 5 years if anyone is keeping score).

A friend helpfully pointed out that "SVP" doesn't mean the same thing everywhere...like in California, which *might* mistake that acronym for Sexually Violent Predator (yikes!!)

Great picture of G'pa with Emerson

A great picture this weekend of Emerson with G'pa!

Posting from e-mail and from SMS

To help keep me more active with posting, I'm going to try microposts from my iPhone and from e-mail.  We'll see how this goes.  Also, insert random picture of Emerson here.

OK, I'm properly chastised

One of my longtime friends contacted me a couple of days ago. Tone can be hard to determine in e-mail, but it *looked* concerned...and he asked me what was wrong, alluding to my blogs. Not posting anything in several months, especially when most previou
s posts had been about Emerson, was probably a little jarring.

In truth, we've just been incredibly busy. So what's been the deal?

Probably the same things that most 2-wage-earner-with-first-baby families go through. And now that Emerson is mobile, it's even crazier. But I apologize to all three of the people who use this blog to keep up with me. ;) I have footage of this on the day it began:




We just got back from a whirlwind 36-hour trip to Springfield to see my parents. We decided to take my car (a sedan), but we also decided not to board Clyde (the kennel has raised its prices so it would have been $100 for this trip....I could have driven Clyde to Branson and gotten him his own hotel room for less). This meant fitting the two of us, plus baby, plus all the baby stuff you travel with, plus 120# of dog in a 4 door sedan. Good times. That said, Clyde is the laziest dog ever, so that helped.

I've been spending some time making inventory for my latest hobby/obsession--wood turning--and also working on a new website that will feature my stuff, potentially with the ability to sell some of it online. Probably a pipe dream, but it's fun to work on. A couple of examples were some darts I did on commission, and a pen made with spalted maple from trees in our old family resort (now buried under 22' of rock so they could build a strip mall), and a unique-shaped gold rollerball made from black palm:



And at work, the slimmer MIS department has been collectively pulling Yeomen work levels, as the number and complexity of projects seems to have jumped lately. Still, I must be doing something right, because I made SVP this go-around. Good stuff.

Wireless Security Class in St. Louis

I'm going to be mentoring a class for the SANS Institute in St. Louis in March. The course is an advanced take on wireless security, titled "Wireless Ethical Hacking, Penetration Testing, and Defenses." If your company does anything with wireless--including having a "no wireless" policy--then you should seriously consider taking this class.

More info on the course content here.

I know that a lot of companies are nixing their training budgets right now. The economy is in dire straights, so this is often the first place they cut. Still, this class is a bargain compared to the "on site" SANS conventions, and I can arrange discounts if there are further budgetary concerns. Please contact me if you are interested. If I don't get more registrations, the class will be cancelled.

UPDATE: this class was cancelled. Stupid economy.

She's fun when she isn't sick

The camera *does* make a difference...

OK, so the subject is pretty darn cute. And if the camera adds 10 pounds, she is no longer at the 20th percentile for weight at 7 months. You judge for yourselves...

I decided to pick up the Canon EOS Rebel XS, rather than the XSi. The differences? Mainly 10 megapixel resolution rather than 12 (not a big deal at all unless you are going to blow up the pics to be ginormous...), and a lack of spot-metering. Oh, also *significantly* cheaper. Apparently, the internal buffer is smaller, so if you are doing a lot of servo-driven shooting in RAW mode, you can overrun the buffer and you'll drop from 3 fps down to 1.5 or so. The XSi shoots 3.5 fps continuously.

One of the greatest technological advances since I have used an SLR (which was back in college) is the advent of image stabilization in the lens (Canon puts the tech in the lens, but I think Nikon puts it in the camera body...not sure, they call it "VR"). Anyway, it's pretty amazing--last night I shot a 3 second exposure without using a tripod, and it came out crystal clear. This will let you take shots of things in relatively dark conditions without using a flash, and without getting grainy images. Good stuff.

Aside from the camera, Emerson is doing great--she is over her third ear infection in two months, and also got over a nasty virus that made blisters in her mouth and throat. It was so sore than she didn't want to swallow anything, and then she made an association between the pain of swallowing and the sight of a bottle...so anytime we'd come in with a bottle, she'd start crying. Ugly.

She really is a chill baby, though, especially when she's well. I think we're very, very lucky.