Month: March 2005

Nail trimming

Today I was turning some of my hair into grey. Seriously. I was trimming Maxim’s finger nails. It was done twice by his grandmother, so I was lucky. Today though I had to do it myself. For those of you not familiar with the procedure here is a short tour.

Firstly, imagine the sizes and fragility. A piece of paper is much thicker than Maxim’s nails. They are also very soft and small. A pair of tweezers needed to trim these nails looks like Godzilla’s jaws.

Secondly, I want to remind you that Maxim is not yet in control of his hands. He can barely guess that his hands are a part of him. He moves a lot without knowing so. He also has a bunch of reflexes which help him through the first days of his life. One of the reflexes is closing his hands into a fist when alert. The only way to have them stay still is wait until he falls asleep or really calms down during the second part of his feeding.

I was lucky with the first nine fingers. It took me about 5 minutes only to take care of them. The thumb of his left hand though was always trying to hide. Every time I was trying to open his hand he would go back to the alert mode and close the fist even stronger, putting his thumb under all other fingers. After about another 5 minutes of manouvering with Godzilla’s jaws around his tiny hand I finally managed to trim the thumb nail too.

During the procedure I was so concentrated and felt so much pressure that it made virtually all my muscles strain. But I am proud to report that no baby was hurt in the production of this post. Fortunately, this procedure needs to be done only about once a week.

On meaning of words: console

I am not a native English speaker. I’ve learned most of my English in high shool. A big part of my vocabulary also comes from my Computer Science education. Somehow, many words in computer terminology come with the only true meaning to me and I don’t even bother checking them in the dictionary. Sometimes, years later after I have learned the word I see it in a different context. Looking it up in the dictionary and thesaurus never stops to amaze me.

Until today, the word “console” was only a noun to me. It meant the command line interface to a computer program. I never suspected it that it had any other meaning. But today I saw it used differently in the sentense:

I tried to console the old man.

This sentense was used in a rather sad story about the victims of Asian tsunami at the end of the last year. The story is as far from the computers as it can get. So I looked it up in the dictionary.

console – To allay the sorrow or grief of. See Synonyms at comfort.

Not only I saw the synonyms at comfort, but I’ve also checked the thesaurus for console. And it is exactle where I started to get really amazed.

Several words that thesaurus suggests for console (as a verb) sustitution are: calm, cheer, encourage, and untrouble. The amazing part here is that very often experienced computer users would switch from slow, limiting, and complicated graphical user interface to text mode console to solve some problem. And what console will do to them is: calm them down, cheer them up, encourage them and untrouble.

I really the connection now between console verb and console noun. But wht I find interesting is that text mode consoles were among the first user-to-computer interfaces. They were definetely before slow, limiting, and complicated graphical user interfaces. This leads me to believe that user interfaces that were before consoles were a real mess.

Now, can anyone remind me what were these interfaces? My memory doesn’t go beyond punch cards. And these were really ugly if you ask me…

AUTO_INCREMENT keys in MySQL

For ages I have been using AUTO_INCREMENT keys in MySQL. All of my projects needed either a unique numeric id, which is perfectly taken care of by AUTO_INCREMENT or non-numeric key which I was generating myself. Today I found myself in a situation where I needed to import some data into a table that has a unique numeric key generated by AUTO_INCREMENT. I was confused for a second. I didn’t know how to combine the provided keys from the data to be imported together with the incremental keys of the table itself. It turned out that everything is much simplier than I thought. If a key value is provided when creating a record, MySQL will use it; otherwise it will generate one using an AUTO_INCREMENT feature.

Now I am trying to understand how could I live up to this age and not use this feature even once…

Feeding the medicine

Today we tried to feed some of that medicine to Maxim. It turned out to be a bit harder than we thought it would. The powder is not completely dissolving in water. It stays in the form of tiny particles, which don’t get through the bottle’s teat all that well. Instead, these particles gather together and close the flow throuth the teat. One has to shake the bottle every so often and than feed the mix again until the flow is closed, than repeat. Not much fun.

Getting the medicine in can be achieved by a number of tools from the “baby toolkit”, which we don’t own yet. Unfortunately. Buying one involves some time for investigation on the Internet and with other parents. And time we don’t have. Plus we really needed to feed Maxim the meds straight in and at that minute. So I let the engineering approach kick in…

As some of you might remember, one of my recent experiences with Maxim was him sucking my finger. This part worked, so I decided to use it. I washed my hands. Than I fed him some more from the bottle until it got stuck. Than I carefully disassembled the bottle, so that a whole bunch of those particles stayed in the bottle’s teat and wasn’t washed away. I put the whole bunch of semi-dissolved powder particles on my index finger and put it into Maxim’s mouth. He started sucking on to it. I knew that I had only about 10-20 seconds, so I used this time to assemble the bottle back and shake it a bit. The moment Maxim let my finger out I gave him the bottle. He sucked on to it too. When he spitted the teat out I inspected his mouth and made sure that all the medicine was gone. It worked.

He swallowed everything. He knew that I tricked him though, because he gave this “you my personal enemy for life now” look. I passed him on to his mother just to wash some of my guilt with her milk. I am so lucky he won’t remember this trickery…

Christian baptising

Many people ask me when are we going to baptise Maxim and if we have selected his godparents. I am sorry to disappoint you all, but we are not going to baptise Maxim. Olga and I are agreeing on this. We think that the choice of religion is his own choice to make. We are not very religious (read: very not religious) and thus the issue is not so very urging for us.

The same goes for the choice of godparents. He will be the one to choise. If he asks me, I can make a suggestion or two, but I won’t go in it any deeper.

Some people have noticed to me that with age people get more religious and that I might change my mind in the future. This is true. Especially, as some of you know how easy I can change my mind. So far I speaking as things stand. We are not planning on baptising Maxim. Maybe this will change. Maybe not. But not now for sure.