How time flies when kids grow up.

I remember when we’d be able to have her lie on the couch and not worry about her falling off because she couldn’t roll yet. Now, we lie in bed trying not to wake up as she rolls back and forth over my wife and I. Two year olds are active!!!

She runs, jumps, loves to slide, can lump words together into smal sentences, and loves to come back to my office at night, where “lap” is soon followed by “cracker pwease.” It’s amazing how polite she is. I guess my efforts in that regard are paying off. She doesn’t always say the P words (how many kids do?,) but please, thank you, welcome, and bless you are much more common than I expected at this age.

Now, the somber yet hopeful news. Last week we had to take her into Children’s Hospital for a yearly checkup of her Neutropenia. They did another hip biopsy, which requires general anesthesia. It’s very sad and disheartening to watch her drift into sleep and then to just sit and wait for her to come back out. We found out that my combing her hair is an effective way to piss her off so that she comes out of her sleep state. I guess I don’t do it that well, huh??

The results are back, and she is no worse off than before. Negative on all the tests they ran, and they even ran one that went to the chromosomal level (it checks for the possibility of onset MDS/AML)

She’s been back on her shots for a while, and with these results, it looks like she’ll be on them for a while longer. So even though she hasn’t gotten worse, she hasn’t gotten better yet either. Kind of a good news/bad news scenario.

As a treat for both her and my mom (nana,) we got a family membership to the Seattle Children’s Museum. This place is so much fun (and only 4 blocks walk away to boot!!) I took them both last week and Kelsey had a great time. So much to explore and learn!

Hope all is well with you and yours.

EDIT: So, it appears I’ve jinxed us once again. Whereas she was not admitted, we did have to take her to Children’s this evening for a fever (Nuetropenics have to go in if they spike over 101.5. No Tylenol, no sleeping it off, just a trip straight to the ER. She had an ANC (absolute neutophil count) of 6200, which means we could go home. The minimum is 1200, or she gets admitted and dosed with antibiotics in case the fever is due to a bacterial infection, that with an ANC too low she could not fight on her own.) At least we got to see Balto while we waited in our isolation room (she can’t even wait in the ER waiting room until her room is ready, we have to stay in the car, go straight to triage, and then striaght into isolation.)

[Extraordinary rendition] is a euphemism to describe the practice of moving a suspect to another country where the rules against torture are less strict. In other words, torture by proxy ñ we can’t legally torture someone, but we can ship them off to another country who can do it for us.

This is the title and a short excerpt from a letter my friend and colleague sent around this weekend. It goes into detail regarding his thoughts about why Kerry should be elected. He backed up every point with evidence and research from across the board (not just “…as the Post says…”)

I thought you both might be intersted in reading and/or linking to the online version he posted on his personal forum site.

Democrat or Republican, this is what the election process should be about. Intelligent discourse and research. Not any of this BS about signs being stolen or plastered with feces.

Let’s cut through the crap (pun intended I suppose) and get back to basics; Debate and discussion, with the ability to understand that people’s opinions will differ from yours. But remember, that’s OK, because this is the United States (apologies to my International readers .) That’s why our ancestors moved here! Don’t regress our country into what it was we so fiercely ran to get away from. Allow people their viewpoints. Disagree, but disagree peacefully. Give and take constructive criticism. And for goodness sakes, leave the signs where they are, OK??

Jonathan cares about his future and his country and took the time to show this in a manner befitting all of us. He went above and beyond what the “average” concerned voter could ever hope to acheive.

I challenge anyone reading this to even come close to doing the same. I know I can’t, but at least I can link to him.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a utility of the week, so to make up for it, I’ll post links to two sites I found recently that I’ve found useful to certain tasks at hand.

First, www.SQL-Server-Performance.com. This site has a slew of incredible information on SQL server. I visited it after finding it in a Google search for tips on performance tuning for SQL Server 7.0. They’ve got tips, articles, book reviews, and even forums (which I haven’t even had the time to hit yet.) The tips are well written, comprehensive and incredibly useful to anyone needing quick information on SQL Server.

Second comes Forums.DigitalPoint.com. These forums range from general e-commerce to general business; however, the big focus is on SEO. I don’t do much of this, and likely never will get heavily involved in it since it is such a specialization, but some of the folks here know their stuff really well and it makes for very interesting reading. I’ve been able to get some good tips and some break time reading that is fairly absorbing.

With the election two weeks away, don’t forget to start making up your mind on all the various issues and candidates. Even though the election itself is November 2nd, I just dropped my ballot in the mail 15 minutes ago. Now I can officially say that my vote counted in 2004, will you be able to say the same come November 3rd?

I hope you’ll be able to say the same thing…

Jason Calacanis raved about X1, and the company that wrote the software called and Jason convinced them to give out some copies. I’m more than willing to check it out to see how well it works. I’ll report back next week with a review.

HR4520 passed the House on 10/7/04 (and it’s equivalent - S1637) passed the Senate a while before that. This is the so called “American Jobs Creation Act.” A couple blogs make mention of the tobacco buyout clause added to HR4520. What I didn’t know about until last night while reading Bargain$hare was that there was another major ammendment that had been added that will greatly benefit all WA state residents.

We would, after the President signs the bill, be able to deduct state sales tax paid on our Federal Income Tax returns. From what I’ve seen of the thread (registration required) at B$ it looks like the IRS will be providing tax tables, but may allow deductions above the table amount for specific large purchases given reciepts (although I can’t help but think that’d be an audit flag…) A quote:

Before 1986 we could deduct sales tax as well as state income tax but that was before the tax rates were reduced with the 1986 Tax Reform Act.

However this act is mainly to benefit the residents of the 9 states that do not have state income taxes or only tax interest and dividends. This act would bring some equity to residents of those states but would be of little benefit to residents of the other states.

Under current law, individuals are only permitted to deduct state income and property taxes on their federal tax returns. Seven states ó Alaska, Texas, Florida, Wyoming, Washington, South Dakota, and Nevada ó do not have a state income tax. Two states – Tennessee and New Hampshire – only impose an income tax on interest and dividends, but not wages. Therefore, residents of these states who itemize are placed at a disadvantage simply because these states choose to raise revenue primarily through a sales tax instead of an income tax.

I was talking to Lenn the other night about wanting to transfer Podcasts directly to my Pocket PC’s storage card. iPieter has a great tutorial on how to use a Pocket PC in general to do this, but it comes up very lacking for most who have PPCs with small RAM footprints, escpecially when Curry et all are spinning out 40M+ Podcasts.

I saw Scoble’s post today referring to Jake Ludington’s WMA Pocasting instructions and decided to beat a path to completion of my goal - using iPodder to transfer the downloaded files directly to my PPCs storage card.

Two issues stand in my way of being 100% satisfied:
1) The 1.0 release of iPodder for Windows, while being a great improvement to previous versions since a UI now exists, still won’t allow me to change the download directory. I tried adding a feeds.txt with a new file path, as iPieter’s original tutorial suggests. No dice. I may be able to get around this one shortly if the iPodder development team fixes this.
2) ActiveSync is a PITA in that it refuses to natively sync to Storage Cards (Why Robert and Lenn, why??) I found an app that costs $5.95 called MightySync; however, it does not appear to allow for automated syncing. From all indications, it is great for syncing to Storage Cards, but needs to have the transfer manually kicked off.

So, I figured I’d head down the dangerous road of registry hacks. I hacked my PPC registry using PHM RegEdit (freeware) to point all instances of “\MyDocuments” to be “\Storage Card\My Documents”, deleted the partnership with my PC, recreated it, and my PC’s registry indicates that the sync folder on the PPC side is “\Storage Card\My Documents”.

I am now in a state where I can do one way syncing through Active Sync of files on my Desktop to my PPC’s storage card. Yep, you heard it here first, I am using ActiveSync to copy files straight to my Storage Card (YEAH!)

WAIT!! I said one way sync, remember… So, even though I can drop a file into my PPC synced files folder on my PC and have it go to my PPC’s Storage Card, I can’t get ActiveSync to remove the file from my Storage Card when I remove the file from my PPC synced files folder on my PC. In addition, ActiveSync incorrectly keeps track of the synchronized state of files.

When will I be satisifed? I’ll be 75% satisfied when iPodder for Windows will allow me to change the download path like previous versions. Then, I will at least be able to have ActiveSync transfer things over automatically.

I’ll be 100% satisified when Microsoft’s Mobile Solutions team chooses to FINALLY support syncing of files to Storage Cards. If no other technology made this necessary for their roadmap, this one does. I can’t effectivley use my PPC to listen to Podcasts unless they are on my beefy storage card. Please, make it so that I can do this automatically and not have to copy things back and forth manually.

I can either manually sync my non audio files and (kind of) automatically sync Podcasts, OR I can automatically sync my files and manually sync my Podcasts. I SHOULD be able to automatically sync both (AND to a storage card!!!) Robert and Lenn, who do I need to bug??

I’m going to break my promise of no political posts because this is just too damn hilarious.

Via Drudgereport:

Reported in the October 5th, 2004 Cyber Alert. Apparently NBC Nightly News for 16 seconds had a cutout picture of Bush in front of a banner. All that was visible were the letters “ilie”. Yep, I lie. Guess they had it right.

The letters came from the word “FAMILIES” in a sign on the far side of Bush, which read: “TAX RELIEF FOR WORKING FAMILIES”

I got tired of seeing all the server errors for favicon.ico in my logs. Yeah, I could have filtered them out, but instead, I choose to take a twist on Blue Needle’s logo (I should really put it on the main site somewhere) and make one of my own. So, I used a trial version of Icon Easel 98 from Easy Apps to make one. Check it out, it’s up there in your address bar (and/or tab if you’re using a tabbed browser like Firefox.)

I read somewhere that a particular version of IE only usees the 16×16 sized icons, so I used that as my canvas. Pasting in from an external program came to be more of a hassle. Icon Easel 98 wouldn’t accept anything that was not the same aspect ratio (despite twiddling with all the paste settings.) Once I had the right ratio, it didn’t scale it all, it just placed a garbled mess of colored squares. BUT, it got my color pallette into the icon, and I just winged it from there.

After saving and uploading the icon to my site, I put the following two lines in the head of my main site’s header include file as well as the index.php page of my Wordpress installation.

<link rel=”icon” href=”http://www.blueneedle.com/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon”/>
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”http://www.blueneedle.com/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon”/>

Let me know what you think of it!

Thanks to Anita for another wonderfully organized meetup!

Despite being over-run by Microsofites (heck, it WAS on the Eastside…) I didn’t really talk about anything particularly techie. The first part of the night was dinner at a table with 8 MS folks, myself, and Kayne of Pleasing to Remember.

I got to talk with Julie a bit while Ted and their daughters hit the Crossroads carousel.

The finale was a very invigorating talk RE: politics with Kayne and Natasha of Pacific Views. They both also contribute to the King County Democrats Blog. I haven’t had a political conversation remotely this good since I left NOVA/Metro DC to move to San Francisco back in 1995.