Basketball applies to parenting! With one child and two parents, the adults can double-team the child, or at least eat and sleep in shifts. Speaking from experience, the transition to two children is a huge change! Now the adults have to switch to man-to-man defense instead. Eating and sleeping may suffer. I’m sure three children rocks the boat again, as you shift to a desperate, out-numbered (but you’ve still got the size advantage, at least for the early years) zone defense.
I’m sure everyone with Unix experience has their own cherished best practice to compile software from source. I’ll try to tone down the soapbox.
What set me off was a TidBITS article on DNS (at work, we compiled that patch as soon as it came out). I was ready to yell at my computer screen! They got it right about the need to patch right away, but wrong on how to do it well.
The very basic process to compile from source is:
./configure
make
make install # as root
Well, I like to log the results of those three commands; if it fails to build, I’ve got something to study later without worrying about my scroll buffer. I also like the visual feedback of how the compile is going, so I also want to see the output as well as logging it to a file. The reason why make install is its own step is so that you can follow the principle of least privilege. My method does all of those things.
./configure | tee configure.out
make | tee make.out
sudo make install | tee make-install.out
Feel free to choose your own file names, or switch to root instead of using sudo (potentially more secure, but longer). However you do it, just keep in mind that logging and least privilege are Good Things.
Cale hasn’t had a green poop since two days after I quit eating dairy. Interesting! That makes allergic colitis sound likely. I had to research green poop, of course. The green poop generally means that the intestines are emptying faster than usual yellow. That could be excessive drool from teething (we’ve seen that recently) or an intestinal virus (hope not!). Green frothy points to foremilk/hindmilk imbalance, for instance if the baby nurses too frequently. Cale would, given the chance! Green could mean too much iron, which wouldn’t be hard with my diet.
Between the mucous and the return to yellow once I was dairy-free, I can agree with allergic colitis. I haven’t decided if I’m brave enough to try the other test: does green come back with dairy? It would make the experiment much more valid, but at the expense of a very sad baby. That’s a very high cost!
CookingAugust 5, 2008 9:57 pm
I remembered reading about baking powder and baking soda, and enjoying this tidbit:
Baking soda causes reddening of cocoa powder when baked, hence the name Devil’s Food Cake.
Now we know how the cake got its name!
(I try to avoid baking powder, even Rumford, as it always tastes metallic to me when the baked good cools, and often before then as well. I’m not the only one, though. I’m going to see if Bakewell is sufficiently less metallic. Making my own baking powder helps.)
Baby 9:35 pm
Here we go, a baby feeding guide. Don’t know why I couldn’t find this this weekend when I looked, but here it is. We’ve already started with thicker rice cereal than that, and Cale likes it. He acts like he would happily take more breast milk if I could make more. He’s right on target gaining weight (shucks, 80th percentile; I’d be worried if weren’t breastfed), but he’s also the weight Karston was when he was 9 months old. Karston had other calorie sources then! Certainly Cale seems to appreciate more calories. He’s fascinated when we eat, and he really goes after the spoon.
On the other hand, he has only pooped once since we started rice cereal this weekend, so maybe that’s why you’re supposed to mix it thinner than we’ve done so far. Let his digestive tract adjust?
So I’ve been having a conversation about ADD, and Amy showed me a quick adult ADD screening quiz. (What’s funny here is that my web search turned up the longer quiz first, and I thought to myself, Gah, too long, where’s the short quiz?)
I mean, there’s childhood ADHD to explain why I couldn’t even walk calmly as a kid (too boring) and took 2 hours to fall asleep that usually changes into adult ADD (I thought I was calmer because I’m exhausted with children). I’m not sure there’s a difference between attention deficit and multi-tasking, except that the second is a real asset at work. I think I would write it off as modern life favors multi-tasking, except that I also have incredible focus at times. It’s really productive. And honestly, skittering from one topic to the next, even at work, generally isn’t all that productive. It’s kinda fun to whack-a-mole on my email, but at the end of the day … the more productive days are when I follow my checklist of what to do (or have focus). So while I haven’t internalized it, it sure does make personality sense.
I was once told there were two types of insomnia, sleep acquisition (can’t fall asleep) and sleep inhibition (can’t stay asleep). Luckily I usually only have one kind, can’t fall asleep. So I was asked how I fall asleep. I’ve listed before some of what works for me.
My friend Alison said she would take 0.5 mg of melatonin when she couldn’t fall asleep, followed by a second dose 30 minutes later if she still weren’t asleep, and that always worked for her. That never worked for me, so I gave her the rest of my bottle. Then I learned that melatonin is released when your eyelids don’t have any light on them, so I tried the eye shield, and that has worked well for me. As it turns out, the proper dose is 0.3 mg of melatonin instead. Melatonin is also effective for insomnia in ADHD children!
White noise is my other major aid along with an eye shield. However, I’ve also considered listening to an audiobook or podcast as I fall asleep. (Interesting note about working memory and falling asleep, sounds like it would also be effective for me.)
Other tactics … I try to switch off multi-tasking (thinking about everything) by concentrating on something, like the white noise, or my breathing if I have no congestion to distract me. If focus doesn’t work then I think about thinking about nothing until my mind is clear.
I like to do static stretches before bed and when I can’t sleep. It runs off some energy, and it aligns my body. Then I climb into bed, making sure that I’m super-comfy with no pain points, all symmetric joints aligned, and no twists.
Over the years, I’ve learned a few things about my food cravings. If I want salty food, I usually need protein. If I eat refined sugar, I just want more sugar (but I can turn that off with fruit, sweet but not refined). If I want chocolate, I’m stressed (or in the presence of really good chocolate). I’m not sure I believe all of it (but hey, it’s worth a try), but here’s a chart of what to eat for each craving. Some of these are ironic … if you crave soda then you need calcium, and that soda will likely impair your calcium absorption! Others make sense to me. For instance, craving chocolate is linked to B deficiency, probably the same B’s that are mal-absorbed under stress, completing the explanation of my rare chocolate cravings. I prefer the (hint of) scientific explanation for cravings, but since it’s a sales pitch, it stops short.
The other craving I get is when I’m late eating a meal, I often get The Hunger, where I want to eat for the rest of the day. It’s hard to fight The Hunger, and I’m gassy then too. (Like now. I thought that was a false alarm that I was hungry for lunch at 11:30 AM, but the after-effects indicate otherwise.)
So we all heard about the DNS flaw announced by DoxPara. Boy, was that a busy week for us! Turns out, the secure version of BIND has this little problem with CPU load, accompanied with complaints about file descriptors, above a certain number of DNS queries per second. Ouch.
The immediate key to get it under control was to add ulimit -n 4096 to named.conf so that BIND would use more of the available file descriptors. The fix with more breathing room was to install the next beta version of BIND that has better performance. We’ve been out of the woods since then, and we’re no longer expecting another shoe to flatten us.
In fact, now we can relax while those who didn’t patch have discovered that the flaw has been discovered before its scheduled public announcement … yikes!
I heard that Omar Sharif once said women weren’t frivolous enough to study bridge enough to play world-class bridge. Sandra Landry, a world-class bridge player, thinks men and women play a different game of bridge too.
Landy suggests that the male game is tougher and more aggressive because of testosterone levels. Men, she says, concentrate better, while women are multitasking, unable to give maximum effort to bridge. ‘’Obviously,'’ she says, ‘’women are more balanced and lead less obsessive lives. They play bridge to meet people and to enjoy a stimulating pastime away from home, children and career.'’
For some reason, this also makes me think of cooking. I know a number of people who cook for their families. The men prepare these outstanding meals. Fancy. The women, myself included, aim for fast and healthy. Scoop a one-bowl meal out of the crockpot? Awriiight! It’s a completely different class of cooking. And Sandra’s right, I’m not thinking about just cooking, I’m also thinking about my boys, maybe even thinking about work or about catching up with friends … Impressing anyone with a fancy dinner is not on my radar. And bridge? It’s merely a game. We can skip the cards and just chat, too.
