Most of the kids that Nathan runs into are generally very nice to him.
Today, though, at the playground, some two or three year old girl walked up to Nathan, put her hand on his chest -- and shoved. Down went Nathan on her butt, and she walked off. Meredith told her that she shouldn't shove people, and she just glared at Meredith, and went on her way. She never said a word the entire time.
Nathan sat there looking surprised for a few seconds, then got up and came running over to be comforted for a minute before getting back down to keep on playing.
Oh well.
The Onion: My Adopted Daughter Is The Most Beautiful Child In The Third World
(Link found on Birthmother; Reprise)
(And please remember that The Onion, if you haven't seen it before, is satire. But funny satire...)
Scoble sure seems determined to rag on Microsoft as much as possible after having left the company. His newest rant is to attack Windows Live Spaces because many of the spaces hosted there don't meet his definition of "blog".
Scoble is fond of saying that resumes are an outdated concept since employers can just read someones blog to find out about the person. If I were a prospective employer, I'd certainly be reluctant to hire someone who is evidently going to spend such a large amount of energy attacking his former company as soon as he leaves. Evidently his "say nice things about [competitors]" rule doesn't apply to Microsoft, perhaps because we aren't a competitor?
Sheez...
A couple of months ago, a bunch of us in my team installed Promise TX4300 RAID cards and a pair of fast SATA drives in RAID 0 configuration to help speed up builds. And it has.
Except when the drivers freeze up my entire PC, forcing me to power-cycle the system. Then it does not really speed up my build. For bonus points, it will do this when I am trying to work from home with Remote Desktop, at which point I send out a plaintive email to the team asking if anyone is around who can please kick my PC.
When I go to the support page for the TX4300, it lists one BIOS version:
"FastTrak TX4300 BIOS V2.00.0.31"
and two driver versions, the latest of which notes:
"This driver is to be used with BIOS version v2.5.0.3115 or newer or newer and Windows WebPAM version 2.2.0.13 or newer. It is not compliant with BIOS v2.00.0.31..."
The older version will work with that BIOS -- but I have that BIOS and that driver version, and it turns my machine into a brick every couple of days.
On a whim, I tried downloading the BIOS updater for the TX4310 card, since the support page for the TX4300 says that that card is no longer sold and the new version is the TX4310. The 4310 does offer BIOS v2.5.1.3116, so I tried downloading that.
The instructions for that insist that the BIOS updater must be run from a floppy disk. I thought maybe the instructions were out of date, but no, the updater refuses to run from a hard drive, even a hard drive that's not connected to the Promise card.
It turns out we don't actually stock floppy disks in the supply rooms here at Microsoft anymore, but my admin was helpful enough to bring one in that she dug up at home for me.
At which point I realized that my PC doesn't have a floppy disk drive.
I filled out the web form on Promise's site last Friday and explained all of this. I immediately got the auto email response, and then nothing. Tuesday night, I emailed to ask about the status of my request. Nothing.
So, to recap: my RAID drivers hang my machine (even worse than crashing, since at least if it crashed, it would reboot automatically), I can't get a new BIOS that's required for the new driver, and even if I could, it would require a floppy drive that I don't have. And their support staff is ignoring me.
Anyone have any recommendations for a SATA RAID card that doesn't suck?
It's been a rough weekend. Nathan woke up in the middle of the night Friday night feeling warm, and by Saturday morning was really warm. Last night was worse - I don't think either Meredith or I got any sleep between about 4 AM and 6:30 AM. And somewhere in there, Nathan rolled over and threw up all over me. Yay.
We've been alternating between Tylenol and ibuprofen to try to keep his temperature down. When he sees the medicine coming, he starts saying, "NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOO".
Poor kid...
Last night was awful - Nathan didn't go to sleep until 9 PM, and then when we went into bed at 10:30, his temperature was up to 106°F. We gave him more medicine, put cold wet washclothes on his head and chest (as I held him while he cried), then eventually decided to go stick him in a cool bath (which he liked even less).
The bath had its intended effect; he started to cool off. The unintended, although entirely predictable, effect was that he was then all the way awake. Meredith finally left to go sleep in the guest room at my suggestion (figuring that at least one of us should sleep), and Nathan drifited off to sleep around 1 AM.
He woke up upset again at 3 AM, but this time I think it was because he was actually cold from sleeping with only a diaper on top of the sheets. I took his temperature, which he evidently thought was a prelude to more medicine ("NO NO NO NO NOOOOO"), and it was down to only 100, so I got him back to sleep without medicine.
He woke up shortly after 6, feeling much better (if only I could say the same). His temperature now seems to be fluctuating between 99 and 100, which is much better.
This morning, I noticed this headline on MSNBC: "Light coffee drinking may pose heart attack risk". As I sit here, drinking from my mug, I am cheered by the fact that this headline in no way could describe me.
The fever is down, but Nathan had his first bought of night terrors last night. 15-20 minutes of shrieking in terror, struggling so hard he was close to knocking me or Meredith off the bed as we took turns holding him.
If Nathan never had that again, that would be OK with me.