2004-09-28
GMail Invites
Are you sick yet of all the people asking for GMail invites? Are you fed up with people writing about how they still have six GMail invites left and to write them an email for one? Welcome to the club! I'm especially intrigued about all the cases where people are actually bartering something in exchange for a GMail invite.
WTF?
Excuse me people, but we are basically talking a simple web-based email service here. Granted, the typically Google-style, spartan interface is slicker and more responsive than all the other web-based emailers I know. Granted also, that 1 GB of space is a whole damn lot. And I can also see that applying Google's search technology to managing such a large volume of email is a neat idea.
But then, attachment size is sufficiently limited that you can't do such potentially useful things as emailing a complete iso image. The interface also refuses to work under Opera, although it apparently works fine under both IE and Gecko-based browsers like Firefox and Mozilla. And then there is that privacy policy SNAFU and the lingering aftertaste of Google's software actually parsing all that email to feed the context-sensitive Google ad-bar.
So we are dealing with a Google-branded bag of mixed blessings here, which doesn't quite warrant all that much attention, IMHO. I know that I sure won't email anything remotely personal or sensitive via GMail, and will rely instead on encryption and using Webmailers which are bound by the extensive German privacy regulations, not that those are worth a whole damn lot with all the terrorism hysteria and the worldwide weakening of citizens' rights and liberties since that fateful day more than three years ago.
Anyway, it so happens that, yes, I had six GMail invites this morning, and no, there are none of them left, and yes, I will likely have more, and no, you can't have one. And no, I'm not being facetous.
I got my GMail invite via ISnoop's GMail-O-Matic, and I intend to send all the GMail invites I'll get back to themi. For one thing, I view it as a kind of repayment. But even more importantly, I think that this is the sanest approach to the GMail craze: Those who want an invite register an email address with ISnoop's mailer, and as soon as someone with invites to spare sends one of them to the input address, the next person on the list gets mailed the invite automatically.
Nice. Simple. Hassle-free. No need for begging or displays of faux-generosity. Just getting people together to facilitate a simple exchange. What's not to like?
2004-09-18
Home At Last
First, a big Thank You to everyone who has commented here over the last few weeks. Your wishes and thoughts have been a tremendous help for me to get through all this.
Second, my wife is finally back home since earlier this week. Her release from hospital basically was her birthday present from the hospital staff - I'm reasonably sure that if she hadn't had her birthday this week, she'd still be lingering in the limbo of that hospital bed. But she's home, and things are so very much better for this single grace alone.
She still has to take the contraction inhibitors every four hours, but even though this means that the alarm goes off at two in the morning so she can take her pill, we're both sleeping much better than before. Not to speak of the boost to our well-being that comes from no longer having to eat alone and being able to hug and touch and kiss each other every time we want to, except when I'm at work.
Third, the original plan for this weekend had called for S and U to come over again, and for S, their toddler, and my wife to have a nice day while U and me are finishing the last few things on the upper floor. But S called yesterday, and the whole family is down with fever and diarrhoea, a gift which their toddler had brought them home from kindergarten. I miss them, their easy humour, their wonderful child, and their companionship, but I'd rather miss them than have them bring that bug into our home, because my wife is still a long shot from being back to full speed, and right now our most important concern is to avoid anything that could possibly be another risk to the pregancy.
But even without the help of S and U, things are progressing nicely. We (that is my father-in-law and me) have carried the first pieces of furniture to the upper floor and assembled the baby bed. Tomorrow we'll assemble the shower cabin, thereby more or less finishing the bathroom and with that the whole upper floor. And that means that except for such minor things like the fact that we still don't have lamps for any of the upper floor rooms, and no furniture for two of them, and that there's still that room in the basement with all the remaining construction material, our house is now ready to welcome its next inhabitant, and it's basically finished as well.
And a big fat hurray for having my wife home and the house as finished as it is!
2004-09-10
I suppose if one has to go mad...
...slowly is the way to go. You wouldn't want to rush going mad, you might miss some of the good bits. (Paul Tomblin)
So, either the stress and sleep deficit of the last few weeks are slowly taking their toll, or I have just seen something decidedly strange while I was out stargazing.
We are sufficiently far away from any major cities around here that I'm able to see the Milky Way on any sufficiently clear night. Meteorites are easily visible, and so are satellites. It's not uncommon to see several of them at once, each crossing the starry sky on their own silent, steady path. Never until now have I seen something like what I saw this evening, though: three satellites, passing from north west to south east in what I can only think of as a V-shaped formation.
Sure, it was a somewhat ragged and asymmetrical V, but there they were. Three satellites, all going with the same speed in the same direction, with no more than two Moon diameters between the tip of the V and the other two ends. Strange, really strange.
Anyone with a better grasp of our various space faring programs care to shed some light on this?
In other news, my wife might be able to come home on Monday if her CTG's stay reasonably clean of contractions until then. That seems manageable if we suspend our efforts of turning the baby until Monday.
We'll see.
2004-09-05
Being Busy, Redefined
It's 11 p.m., and every minute I'm blogging is one that I won't sleep tonight, so I'll hopefully manage to make this short. Anyway, as I expected, I've been somewhat busy these last weeks in much the same way that the surface of the sun is warm, or water has upon occasion been observed to be very slightly moist.
My wife is still in the hospital, and although her psychological state has somewhat improved, the long period of forced complacency is starting to take its toll. That's why I'm entertaining some small measure of hope that I'll be able to take her home next weekend. That way, she wouldn't have to face the prospect of having her 31st birthday in the hospital... So, please, leave your fingers crossed a bit longer.
[Update: My wife just called and it's semi-official now: she won't get out of the hospital for her birthday. Fuck!]
Our little baby girl keeps on growing and thus expanding my wife's belly to as yet unknown proportions. What's giving us pause is the fact that she seems to be determined to make her entry into the world butt first. To be sure, I can somewhat understand the sentiment, but if she doesn't rotate into a position that makes it more likely that she'll come out head first, we're facing a much higher risk of birth complications and a caesarean (this is one odd looking word!), and that's something we had actually hoped to avoid. To add insult to injury, many of the methods of turning the child in utero are contraindicated when there have been premature contractions, which severely limits our options in this case. I sure hope that either we or our midwife will come up with some way to rotate the girl into a more birth-friendly position.
In other news, this has been one of the more enjoyable weekends in the last few months. S and U, our rediscovered friends, have been staying over at our house. And not only have they and their sweet toddler of a son been wonderful company for me, U has also been extremely helpful in furthering the house construction project. The result: the upper floor landing and the three rooms on the upper floor are finally finished. Of the major tasks, all that remains to be done is the sanitary installation in the bathroom, which I can easily do alone except for the shower cabin. That one is better tackled with two people, which is why S and U have promised a repeat visit in two weeks.
I'll hopefully have finished the rest of the bathroom until then, so we'll have time to assemble the shower cabin as well as the crib, and move those parts of our bedroom that aren't to remain on the ground floor to the upper floor as well. Then, all that remains is finding a few lamps to hang in the upper floor rooms that don't make us scream in horror at their sheer ugliness (and you guys have no idea how freaking impossible that seems to be right now) as well as a bit of furniture for our new bedroom that fulfills the same criteria and seems to be equally hard to come by.
All that will come in its time. Right now, all I'm looking forward to is a good night's sleep and a chance to repay at least a small part of the kindness and helpfulness that S and U have shown towards us. Thanks guys, you are true friends!
|
