Rhymes with Toaster

Our (now) five year old, J, used to get heavy fevers about every three weeks. It would spike up to about 103-104 degrees for two or three days and he'd be miserable. During this time he would also have trouble eating, drinking and just breathing. The doctor's diagnosis was PFAPA, which is still a bit of a mystery regarding causes and treatments.

We'd heard some people's success with removing tonsils as a treatment for PFAPA, but nobody really knew why that worked, and the docs were reluctant to go to surgery on healthy tissue. However, it became clear that J's tonsils were affected by the fevers, to the point that he was having trouble sleeping at night because his airway was so constricted. The decision was made that the tonsils were not healthy and should come out. If it happened to help the fevers, then so be it.

J had his tonsillectomy at the U of M hospital one year ago today. The surgeon did a fantastic job, and the recovery was as quick as could be hoped for. The effect on his sleeping was immediate.

It had been about 3 weeks since J's last fever, which was a really tough one that lasted longer than normal. We held our breath and waited for the next one to occur. Weeks went by, no fever. Months went by, no fever. Now it has been a full year with no fevers and I think we can safely say it's gone. The increase in J's quality of life has affected the entire family.

We are so thankful to have our J every day instead of just 18 of every 21.

Music: Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton

One year ago today, I was playing around with Automator in OSX and decided to create a script that would automatically upload my latest picture in ichat to flickr. Every time I change my chat icon in iChat I upload it, (mostly) daily. It has gotten to the point where it's taking over my photostream and I'm just ready to quit, or at least slow way down.

So what better way to celebrate the one year anniversary of my first ichat2flickr picture than a nice 90 second slideshow of all 187 pictures. You'll see at the 0:47 mark where I upgraded to Leopard and the ichat pictures changed to 640x480 instead of 256x256.

I used iPhoto to create a slideshow of all the pictures, then exported a quicktime movie into Quicktime Pro to squish it all down to 90 seconds.

This also means that I won't be posting all these goofy pics as often, so my contacts won't see my face plastered in their photostream quite as incessantly as in recent months.

I just installed an HTDV Wonder tuner card into my ubuntu MythTV box. So while I watch a bit of a very pretty PBS program, I wanted to throw a couple of notes here to remember what the heck I just did.

My myth box is running ubuntu fiesty fawn. I debated whether or not to update to the latest version, gutsy gibbon, before I installed the card, but it had taken a while to get the Video-out working just right and I didn't want to rock the boat too much. Then I found the following page, which helped tremendously:

[http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATI_HDTV_Wonder]

Luckily, it had instructions for Fiesty Fawn, so I decided to go for it.

I shutdown, opened the card and physically installed the card in my last free PCI slot. I followed the directions at the link above for manually setting up a perl script to grab the firmware for the card (I had to sudo most of the commands to get them to work, though). The firmware worked correctly and the drivers loaded on the first try. So the card was recognized and loaded by the operating system, that left configuring mythtv to actually tune something in on the card, which is where I ran into problems.

I followed the directions for setting up the card in mythtv, but I couldn't tune any channels. There are two inputs on the HDTV Wonder: "DTV" and "CATV". I wasn't sure which one to plug in my analog cable connection. I believe the directions were for using an antenna, not for tuning non-encrypted HD channels on the Cable connection. After a lot of trial and error, I found a setting that actually tuned in some channels. I saved the settings, went into myth, and I can now watch FOX HD, NBC HD, ABC HD, CBS HD, and PBS HD for NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE on my comcast "basic cable" subscription, not to mention some other local digital channels.

Here's the changes from the above instructions I had to find to tune HD channels on my basic analog cable, plugging into the "DTV" port on the card:


4. Input Connections
New Input
Select "DVB : 0"
Display Name: ATI-HDTV
Video Source: CABLE-HDTV
DVB Options:
Unencrypted channels only - checked!
Radio Channels - checked!
Use Dish Long-term EIT Data - unchecked
Scan for Channels
Scan Type: Full Scan
Frequencey Table: Cable
ATSC Modulation: Cable (QAM-64)
Channel Separator: (5.1) Period
Existing Channel Treatment: Minimal Updates
Next <--- The scanning process will take a long time!
Verify the output, checking for "Locked" channels.
Exit mythtvsetup with the Esc key


The hard part was the channel scan.

Now I just need to get the guide data set!

Found via [http://www.tuaw.com/2007/08/20/keeping-time-with-aurora-and-polarclock/|TUAW]:

I just found this cool new screen saver called [http://blog.pixelbreaker.com/polarclock/|PolarClock]. It's a cool visualization of the current time. It's available for Mac and Windows, so go get it.

PolarClock 3.0 is now available as a screen saver for Mac and Windows, and also as a dashboard widget for OSX Tiger.

This release is a total rebuild from scratch using Flash CS3, Flex Builder and ActionScript 3.0. There has been a staggering amount of feedback over the past few months, all of which was very useful. There are more things to add, but there are only so many hours in the day!

I've had a few thoughts recently that don't merit a full blog post, but I still want to share. Perhaps a [http://tumblr.com|tumblelog] might be better for me to share quick ideas and thoughts. Anyhoo, here's a few ideas that have popped into my head recently:

• What the heck is [http://www.demko.com/AARP070630.htm|that thing on Kevin Costner's face]?
• There's always that moment when you realize, "oh yeah, I did have asparagus at dinner." Those of you who eat asparagus know what I mean. Gets me every time.
• Thank goodness for air conditioning at work.
• My kid is turning into a total pokemanic, but at least it's better than captain underpants quotes all the time. Heck, I'm starting to like playing pokemon myself.