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March 29, 2005
Clean Bill of Health
Riley went to the doctor today as a final follow-up and she gave him a clean bill of health. His ears (he had an ear infection in both ears after he left the hospital) were both "perfect" and he's doing great. He's been eating like a horse lately, but we're hard pressed to complain either about his appetite or his copious energy. He's pretty much 100% back to normal, which is a real relief.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 5:14 PM
March 11, 2005
Riley and the Rotavirus
When Riley awoke Monday morning, he seemed a little sluggish. Melissa said that she was going to stay home with him, but I blew it off as just being an over-worrying Mom. So she went to work. Oops.
While I was buckling him into his car seat, he threw up. Hadn't ever seen him do that before, so it obviously scared me. I brought him back inside and put him in his crib long enough to throw the cover to his car seat in the washing machine. Since we didn't have a car seat, we were a little stranded until Melissa could get home from work.
I called the doctor's office and the nurse said that it sounded like a stomach virus, which Melissa and I know well from December and early January, when we both got it (and Riley somehow did not). She told us to keep feeding him so he didn't get dehydrated.
Over the next couple of days, he started to get seriously dehydrated. His eyes were black and blue and his skin turned pale yellow. He lost considerable weight and didn't start doing better even after we stopped giving him formula (at his physician's request) and fed him solids. He kept the solids down, but still looked terrible.
Finally, on Wednesday night, his doctor told us to take him to the ER. We did and they took us in immediately, saying that he was very dehydrated. It took them six sticks to finally find a vein large enough to IV, and they started him on fluids.
It's Friday afternoon now and he's doing a lot better. He's still at the hospital (as are Melissa and I, obviously), and he's started eating again. He's been on IV fluids for the past several days. Turns out that it's rotavirus, which spread through pretty much his entire daycare classroom (and the adjoining rooms). He's getting better, but he was a pretty sick little dude.
Hopefully we can go home tonight or, at worst, tomorrow. Never would have thought a little stomach bug could put you in the hospital for three nights, but here we are. He's at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and the staff has been phenomenal. Really great folks. Thanks to everyone who has called and emailed -- the kiddo's going to be fine.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 4:00 PM
March 4, 2005
Famous in the Family
My sister and her boyfriend are on the front page of the Rock Hill Herald. Fortunately, it's not a mug shot or another streaking photo, but the two of them mugging at a Winthrop basketball game.
I guess now she can officially graduate in May.
BTW, the photo says "I Love Gregg Marshall," Winthrop's basketball coach. The newspaper seems to have resized and sharpened the photo to within an inch (pixel?) of its life.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 11:55 AM
March 3, 2005
Here's a birthday gift for Ry...
Found this charming little bear on Engadget. It's really adorable, right up to the part where you read that the bear's head houses four microphones and a camera and the head spins to track the child so the parents can watch him from the Web. Better yet, the parents can speak to the child through a "special phone" (where the hell are these parents anyway, that they're watching their kid through a surveillance-enabled stuffed animal via the Web?). Good lord, it's like "A.I." crossed with "The Exorcist" with a side dish of "1984." I'll take a pass, Microsoft.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 10:38 AM
March 1, 2005
radioSHARK Review
So this weekend my curiousity got the best of me and I trekked to the Apple Store at Lenox Mall to buy a radioSHARK (please forgive the precious capitalization, but that's how they do it). For those who haven't seen one before, the radioSHARK looks like a white shark fin with blue "gills" on the side and a USB connector. You plug it into your PC or Mac, install the software and you can listen to the radio on your computer.
Not that sexy by itself (there have been devices that do this before -- wow, check out that vomitous interface!), but what the radioSHARK brings to the table that's pretty cool is the ability to schedule recordings of radio broadcasts and pause live radio, much in the way you can with TiVo. The recorded programs get shimmed to your media player of choice (as long as you like iTunes on the Mac or Windows Media Player on the PC) and dumped into whatever directory you want. Of course, they're un-DRM'ed files, so you can always burn an audio CD.
The device is certainly nice looking, glowing blue when it's just hanging out and red when it's recording. It's completely USB-powered, so there's no AC adapter, which is also nice. Reception in my lower-level office is fine, albeit with a constant FMmy static in the background. It got considerably better when I plugged in a pair of headphones in the device's headphone jack, which doubles as an antenna. For voice programming in particular, it's great; for music, it sounds about like any other radio, which is only so-so.
The software is fine, though the interface is a little goofy on this one too. It's kind of a hybrid of OS X and Windows on both platforms (I'm running it on Windows) and they both seem pretty much identical. Scheduling recordings is fairly simple, though there are no program guides like TiVo -- you have to specify by day-and-date. Maybe one day.
Audio files can be captured to either uncompressed AIFF or compressed AAC on the Mac or uncompressed WAV or compressed WMA on Windows. That's kind of annoying since, if you're on a PC and want to use an iPod, you have to convert the files before you can copy them (the iPod doesn't support WMA). It's not a big deal, but a surprising oversight. Hopefully they'll support AAC and iTunes on the Windows side soon, or, better yet, one of the Media Center guys will write a plugin.
The only platform-specific feature I've found is that the Windows version of the software will let you network broadcast a recording while it's in progress -- so if you know that "Fresh Air" is on and you're not at a radio, you can use Windows Media Player to stream it from the machine hosting the radioSHARK. It's a neat trick, but not all that useful. Better would be if it could stream constantly.
In the end, though, the device does what it claims to do and it looks pretty spiffy doing it. It's not cheap ($69 at the Apple Store, $55 from Amazon for those who don't demand immediate grat), but it's not outrageous either. It was really nice last night listening to yesterday afternoon's "Fresh Air" at 10 p.m. while I played some MLB 2k5 on the Xbox and, better still, I don't have to miss "Car Talk," "The Infinite Mind" or "This American Life" anymore (or drop $3 an episode on Audible when I'm taking a car trip). If you like radio, especially talk radio, this is a pretty cool gadget.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 2:18 PM
New Photo Galleries
Finally put up some new photo galleries. There are two:
Enjoy!
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Posted by Lee Clontz at 10:20 AM