The past 48 hours have been the most trying of my life.

It started Saturday night when Rosey yelled for me to help her in the bathroom. She was bleeding. A lot. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do other than be there for support. We spent an hour in the bathroom and were positive that Rosey had miscarried. Finally, once all the bleeding had stopped, I packed her into the car and drove down to the local hospital.

We waited three hours for a doctor to examine Rosey and in that time we ran through the gamut of emotions. At 3am Rosey was examined, and the doctors were fairly confident that she had, in fact, had a miscarriage. They scheduled an ultrasound for Monday to confirm that everything had passed and that she was not at any risk of an infection.

Obviously, we were both completely devastated. Rosey’s pregnancy so far had been extremely difficult with her sleeping 18+ hours a day and unable to eat.  (She had lost nearly 10 lbs.) But we didn’t want it to end like that.

We talked a lot about our situation on Sunday, and Rosey was feeling physically better, which was at least a small positive.

On Monday afternoon, we went in for the ultrasound and received the surprise of a lifetime…

Our baby was still there! Heart still beating. It had not even moved!

Rosey was hysterical.

I was stunned.

What had just happened? How could Rosey lose that much blood and clots and everything be okay? All we had was questions, and no answers. The medical centre quickly scheduled us in for an appointment the next day. There they performed another set of tests on Rosey and everything looked good. No signs of any trauma.

The doctor were not able to explain what exactly had happened, and could not rule out a potential miscarriage in the future, but at the moment the baby is doing well, and Rosey is feeling a lot better. They’ve prescribed new medication to help alleviate her morning sickness and allow her to eat.

It’s a nerve wracking time for us now. We overjoyed that we hadn’t lost the baby, but so scared about what might happen. All we can do is try and stay positive. Whatever happens will happen and there’s not much we can do to prevent it.

Hopefully our trip to Ottawa this weekend will take our mind off the potential bad. I just want the rest of the pregnancy to go smoothly. No more scares. One normal, health baby at the end.

So, yeah, going to be a daddy!  We’re very excited.  This is the week eight ultrasound.  Only 32 more weeks to go!

(I know there really isn’t much to see.  Sort of looks like a blurry set of pixels.  Later ones ought to be more focused.)

Rosey found this great link for creating yourself as a SouthPark character. She’s proceeded to create a composite of both her and I.

Rosey and I picked up a new digital camera a few weeks back (a Canon Powershot A540.) It’s a great camera, but we needed somewhere to post our pictures so our friends could see them. We started using Flickr, which is very slick setup, but they limit the amount of data you can upload in a month unless you’re a subscriber.

Well, there’s no point in paying for hosting when I all ready have a domain. Therefore, I installed Gallery at http://www.wormbytes.ca/gallery

The best part is that I can rsync the files from my desktop to the server and then import those photos directly into the gallery. Nice and easy.

My grandfather (Henry Kaes) supplied me with a bunch of old photos of various members of my family. I’ve collected them here with as much documentation as possible so that my children (some day), will know their family story.

Family Portraits

For many years I wanted to join the ACM, but I never had the money (first as a starving student, and then as a starving small-business owner.) Last December, however, I began work at ePublishing so I decided to take a bit of my salary and join both the ACM and the IEEE. Both organizations are a great idea for anyone working in the computing industry.

While I’ve gotten a lot out of my IEEE membership, I absolutely love the ACM Professional Development Centre —especially the free online books offered to all members.

The ACM offers access to both O’Reilly’s Safari® Enterprise Library and SkillSoft’s Books24x7. I still have a large collection of books I’ve purchased, and I will continue to purchase new books in the future, but for the price of one or two hardcover books, I can have access to a full library for a year. It’s a great way to discover whether a book is good enough to own.

If you are trying to stay current with what’s happening in this industry, I would highly recommend becoming a member of both the ACM and the IEEE.

A co-worker sent me the Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design. Put it this way: 60% of a web designer’s time is spent swearing at Internet Explorer or Bill Gates (or both!)

Enjoy!

For the past year or so I’ve used the JavaScript library Prototype to make coding in JavaScript more pleasant. Today, while reading A List Apart, I came across a reference to a new library, jQuery. Initial impressions are favourable.

Unfortunately, like Prototype, trying to read the source code for this library/extension is extremely complicated. I’m hoping this is just due to my lack of JavaScript guru-ness, since it seems like one needs to be a guru to understand what the code is doing. At least the documentation is clear for an end-user.

I came across an article in Nature today that discusses Stephen Hawking’s theory of how the universe began. Basically, he assumes that every possible history of the universe was present in the first few instances after the Big Bang. Within that period the histories that lead to our present universe began to dominate, while the other possibilities whithered away. Cool concept!

Customers of Sympatico’s high-speed Internet service receive instructions on how to set up their email; however, these settings are aimed at people using Outlook, Netscape, or Eudora. What I needed were instructions on how to configure my local SMTP server, Postfix, with Sympatico. Of course, that information is not available. This document details how I figured out the settings required to make smtphm.sympatico.ca happy.

Installation

You need a version of Postfix built with TLS and SASL support enabled. If your distribution doesn’t come with it pre-built follow the instructions at:

• Building Postfix with TLS support
• Building Postfix with SASL authentication support

On my Debian unstable system I simply did:

apt-get install postfix libsasl2-modules

Configuration

I’m assuming that your Postfix configuration directory it /etc/postfix. Adjust appropriately to accommodate your system.

To use SASL we need a password file containing our user name and password for the server we are connecting to. Per Sympatico’s instructions the server is smtphm.sympatico.ca.

cd /etc/postfix
mkdir sasl && cd sasl
echo "[smtphm.sympatico.ca] USERNAME@symaptico.ca:PASSWORD" > passwd
postmap hash:passwd

The above creates the password file and the hash-based database file that Postfix uses. Of course replace USERNAME with your [% symaptico %] user name, and PASSWORD with your password (the email password, not the b1 password to access the Internet.)

Make sure in your main.cf you have configured your relayhost as: relayhost = [smtphm.sympatico.ca]

Finally, add the following lines to your main.cf file:

# Enable TLS/SASL for the smtphm.sympatico.ca server
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_tls_note_starttls_offer = yes
tls_random_source = dev:/dev/urandom

smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl/passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options = 

Restart Postfix and send a test message. If all went well you should see the successful sending of the message in the Postfix log file.

Good luck!