Chikka-Chikka REMIX!

Fatherhood + CA PFL is awesome!

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:48:00 -0700

For the past 7 weeks I’ve been on leave from work, 6 of those came with a significant chunk of my salary paid by the State of California. My daughter, Samantha, was born June 30th and I’ve gotten a lot of time to spend getting to know her. Paternity leave has been great, but all great things come to an end. As of August 19th I have returned to the office.

I love my daughter and spending time with her has been amazing. I have changed over 400 diapers and dealt with a lot less sleep since her birth. Being a father is a new experience for me, as she is my first child. I took the newborn prep class at Kaiser, use “What to Expect the First Year” as a guide and have taken advice from friends and family.

I’ve given up on the newborn care class, they pretty much just try to scare you into a certain style which may or may not work for your kid. Also my daughter has gone from infant to newborn, so it no longer really applies. But in these classes they throw out years of experience that seemed to work out ok in the last generation. And perhaps it was just my class, but everything was backed up with “or it will lead to SIDS”.

First thing I noticed was that the class taught us to swaddle the baby with the arms pointing up. Supposedly this promotes muscle growth and reduces the chances of SIDS. When my baby was born the nurses in the hospital swaddle arms down! WTH? I took the class at the same hospital she was born, had the nurses not? Why are they swaddling my daughter in a way that increases SIDS? Well not standing for that I re-swaddled her and put her arms up, but she didn’t stop crying until I re-did it again arms down.

Trying to wake her up every two hours was another “or it will lead to SIDS”. This one was particularly scary at first. Much like her daddy, my daughter can sleep. She’s an expert at it, a natural. Sounds, moving her, tickling…nothing worked. The only thing we could do was wait until she woke up to feed her. Not to mention that she is a belly sleeper at times simply unwilling to sleep in any other position. First noticed during burping she will sometimes only like to sleep when face down, another SIDS no-no.

SIDS is incredibly scary and I don’t think the hospitals are doing new parents any favors by saying this stuff. Especially since just 10 years ago they would do things very different and the infant mortality rate hasn’t changed drastically in the US during that time.

My deal with B&N

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:37:00 -0700

Ok Barnes and Noble, I have got a deal for you guys. Leave my Nook Simple Touch open and my future purchases will come from the B&N store.

I was at the mall yesterday with my wife and daughter. One of my mom’s friends had given our daughter a $25 gift card to Old Navy just for being born. Good deal we thought, so on our way to redeem it we made a wrong turn at the mall and ended up in front of Barnes and Noble’s Nook Center.

Immediately I wanted the new e-Ink Nook Simple Touch. My wife reminded me that I already own the Nook Color, and although this is true I stopped reading on it for extended periods as my eyes got strained. Primarily I use it as a tablet, and have it loaded with CM7. I played with this thing for five minutes in the store and bought two. My wife now wanted one as well. That wrong turn cost me $350 with the covers, tax and so forth. Oh well, tis life.

I told my wife that we would only open one first, and if it was possible to load the Kindle app then we would keep them. It was, and we kept both. I had paid for a lot of content on the Kindle store and I didn’t want to lose it. As long as I had compatibility, I’m cool. Although I don’t own a Kindle, my prior content was purchased on Amazon and primarily viewed on my Nook Color. This is because I like to keep my credit card on as few websites as possible and Amazon already had it.

Long story short, I am very happy with my Nook Touch. The interface is cool, I didn’t lose hundreds of dollars in content. Now to repay Barnes and Noble for allowing me to do this with their device, I will purchase all future content from the B&N store. I already added my credit card to my B&N account, something I hate doing. That’s the thanks they get for having a system that boots from SD Card first.

Phone overboard!

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 13:03:00 -0700

A couple of days ago my phone was drenched in toilet water. I had left my phone in my sweatpants pocket and after a fateful morning deuce, it flew directly into the toilet. Luckily I had already performed the courtesy flush because I would’ve given up on the damn thing instead of attempting to retrieve my data.

I immediately removed my phone battery, SIM and MicroSD. This got most of my data but Galaxy S phones (like my Captivate) have 16 Gigs of internal storage. Internal storage is where the Camera stores pictures and the reason why I swung into action to pull my phone out of the john.

I have pics of my baby daughter there, some that had been taken after my last backup. Wanting to get them back I washed and dried my phone. I figured since it was covered from top to bottom with toilet water, I could run it through a moist cloth with soap to remove as many shit particles as possible. Afterwards I threw it in a clean trash can that had a hairdryer blowing hot air onto the phone.

After a thorough drying I was able to turn on the phone but my computer wouldn’t recognize the usb storage. I was in luck though as my phone was still able to get online. I used dropbox to transfer my pics off my phone. Once this completed I formatted my internal storage and factory reset my phone. No lost data, but now I have an expensive paper weight.

Oh and for the record, that is a random pic I found on Google. Just thought this post needed a visual.