What’s in a name?

Posted on Friday, 28th January, 2005 by ianmacd

Franbert has now been gestating in the womb for 24 weeks and Sarah’s belly has begun to grow very quickly. It’s hard to imagine she still has almost four months left to go before Franbert is finally unleashed upon us.

We continue to wrestle with potential names. I’ve already read multiple baby name books and have at least one more to read before I arrive at my final short list. I’ve also been looking over the site of the Sociale Verzekeringsbank and voornamelijk.nl, but learning the currently popular names is of only so much use when you believe that your coming child will be unique and therefore deserves a name that is not shared by countless others.

On the other hand, even the most popular name is actually given to relatively few children, simply because so many names are given in total. So, in the end, you don’t really have to worry about there being half a dozen Sannes or Sems in the same class at school.

If we knew the sex in advance, we’d only have to come up with one name, but that would be a cop-out, so we’ll do the work and come up with two. Besides, we can save the other name for next time, assuming we get the other gender next time.

Posted in Children | 1 Comment

Ian gets to stick around

Posted on Friday, 28th January, 2005 by ianmacd

Yesterday, I received an I-797, Notice of Action, from the Department of Homeland Security. This informed me that my application to have the provisional status removed from my green card has been accepted for adjudication. This process will take at least 330 days, so my green card has been automatically extended for one year, with work and travel authorised.

Basically, this gets me the right to stay in the US past 20th March, when my green card would originally have expired. With that, another part of our grand masterplan falls into place.

Posted in Life | Leave a comment

New Hobby

Posted on Wednesday, 19th January, 2005 by ianmacd

Babies do weird things to people; well, not even babies. Foetuses do weird things to people.

For some reason, I have been drawn into the dark, subterranean world of… baby shopping. That’s right, there’s nothing I now like more than ambling around baby shops on a Saturday afternoon, looking at all of the lovely little clothes that are available. They look so cosy; I wish they made them in my size, even though I probably couldn’t pull off wearing an all-in-one outfit with ducks on the feet.

My favourite brand is Kissy Kissy. The name might be vile, but the clothing is simply lovely. The designs are eye-catching, but don’t pander to archetypal ideas of what is fitting for a boy or a girl. Most, if not all, of the clothing seems to be made from cotton, too; no nasty man-made fibres.

Babies are a good excuse for more geekwear, too. ThinkGeek has a good catalogue. My own employer has its own small line, too.

Sarah can look forward to a baby shower a few months from now, but what about me? I want a baby shower, too! Equal rights for dads! Seriously, I hope my colleagues are reading this and throw me a baby shower. There really isn’t much that would please me more.

Posted in Children | 4 Comments

Ayaan Hirsi Ali back in Dutch Parliament

Posted on Wednesday, 19th January, 2005 by ianmacd

Controversial politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali was back in parliament today after spending the last couple of months in hiding abroad. Hirsi Ali is the subject of many death threats in The Netherlands, as she is a very outspoken critic of radical Islam and its many excesses.

She went into hiding after the Dutch film director and newspaper columnist, Theo van Gogh, was murdered for his outspoken criticism of radical Islam, which culminated in the release of the film Submission, which he made together with Hirsi Ali. Tensions were running at an all time high after his death, so Hirsi Ali was taken into hiding for her own protection.

Today, she made a triumphant return and vowed to continue her work. I must say what a great deal of admiration I have for this woman. She grew up in Somalia and suffered genital mutilation as a matter of course. When Somalia collapsed in on itself, her family fled to Saudi Arabia, where she had to stay indoors and wear a veil.

Her family sent her to Europe to travel on to Canada, where she was to marry a cousin. Instead, she went to The Netherlands and claimed political asylum. In the years that followed, she mastered the Dutch language (she really does speak impeccable Dutch), worked as a cleaner and post sorter, then went to university and studied political science.

Eventually, she became a politician and began to work for the emancipation of Muslim women and against the more nefarious tenets of radical Islam. She’s been threatened with death many times, but has vowed not to be intimidated or silenced.

I’ve admired this courageous woman for some time now and thought I should mention her story here. We could do with a few more like her in the world.

A rather good blog about her has recently appeared.

Posted in Politics, The Netherlands | 3 Comments

Technology in the dark ages

Posted on Wednesday, 19th January, 2005 by ianmacd

Computers can do so much these days, or can they? Some things are just too hard to set up for the basic need they address.

I spent a significant chunk of this evening configuring my laptop to use my GPRS mobile phone as a modem. It’s a Sony Ericsson P910i. The Google employee ski-trip is coming up a couple of days from now and it’ll be nice to be able to get on-line from the hotel room; or the bus on the way up, for that matter. Yes, it’s sad, but I like to be able to get on-line at the drop of a hat and Opera on my phone just doesn’t cut it. Using the command line over ssh is even worse, as the phone’s keyboard is too awkward to use and doesn’t even support the sending of control characters.

Anyway, after recompiling my kernel to support Bluetooth (how’d that happen? I was using Bluetooth three months ago and I had support configured in then.), I configured Bluetooth support. This involved scanning for my phone, picking up its MAC address, querying it to find out on which channel it supports DUN (dial-up networking), and then binding the Bluetooth RFCOMM system to that channel, which gave me a /dev/rfcomm0 device to play with.

Then it was a simple (simple?) matter of running pppd over that device. pppd is one of those pain-in-the-arse programs that is just never simple to configure or debug. chat scripts full of Hayes AT commands; lots of low level options to mess with; copious debugging output to wade through; configuration scripts that are called after a connection is established. And then the damn thing fails to write a /etc/ppp/resolv.conf, so I have to do it manually.

Why can’t things be easier? I first configured pppd back in 1995, if I remember correctly. Now, some 10 years on, you’d think I’d be an expert, but some things just remain hard, because you never really use them enough to build up expertise with them.

I’m reminded of 1997, when I wrestled endlessly to get ipppd (the synchronous version of pppd) working with a passive Teles ISDN card plugged into one of my ISA slots. What an unbelievable amount of hassle that was to get working. Ethernet is very simple by comparison.

But I digress. Computers are still in their infancy, really. Yes, they can do a lot, but we humans have to do an awful lot to get our computers to do anything. And I should smile, really, because it’s the fact that not everyone has knowledge about such things that keeps people like me in demand with employers. Ideally, though, things would be different and everything would just work.

Anyway, like most computer users, I eventually got the thing I was messing around with to work. I’ll now have Internet access from the hotel room in Tahoe, assuming my phone has reception in that area.

Posted in System Administration | 1 Comment