Year: 2005

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.

Poo colorizer

Today we took Maxim for his 3-weeks pediatrician check. He was measured, tested, checked and looked into. He gained 300 grams since the last examination which was 9 days ago. He didn’t grow even one centimeter though.

It is also about time for Maxim’s hearing test, but dr.Simos is delaying it a bit, since there is still some water in Maxim’s right ear. This can trigger non-perfect results, so it is better to wait a bit until it disappears.

The biggest concern this time was Maxim’s poo color. During the last few days he is crapping with dark green substense more often than usual. As explained by dr.Simos, this is the sign of disbalance in the boy’s food processing department. There are all sorts of bacteria which are responsible for processing different elements, like water and fat. The green color of his poo shows that there are more of some bacteria than there should be and less of the other than there should be. This disbalance could have also caused his sleeping problems recently by the way. To solve the problem we were adviced to give him some medicine. The medicine is called Beneflora and is produced by good people of Ortis. Beneflora is a soluble powder which regulates digestion and “reinforces the body’s defenses”. The can with 125 grams of the substance should be enough for 10-15 days and costs about 3 CYP in any local farmacy.

We’ll try this thing and we’ll see if Maxim’s poo will change its color from the current dark green into a recommended yellowish. I’ll let you know of any changes.