welcome to spiceland.

Tru and Michael are both sick. Tru had a sinus infection several weeks ago that was cleared up quickly by a run of standard antibiotics, so when she got sick last week, displaying the same symptoms as in her previous illness, we thought it was the same thing. We took her to the doctor, who quickly prescribed the same treatment. After four days on the treatment with no improvement, we began to worry that she had something different. Yesterday morning, we awoke to find her sporting a 102 degree fever. It spiked to 103 just before the appointment we had scheduled earlier that morning. She has a virus, although its not the flu. We’ve been treating the fever with Tylenol, Motrin, cold bottles, and bare skin. Today her fever broke, got up to 103.4 again, and has since broken again. She was normal when she went to bed a few minutes ago. I sure hope it doesn’t come back overnight!

We think Michael has something different from Tru though, because he has no fever. He’s got aches, headache, congestion, and a sore throat. He stayed home from work the first half of today and may take the whole of tomorrow off.

Update: Tru had a fever of over 104.4 at 4AM this morning when I got up and checked on her. I gave her Tylenol and Motrin and put her back to bed. It was 101 at 5AM and 98 at 8AM.

Update: Tru got her fever back around lunchtime. She woke up from her nap at 4PM with hives all over her body, concentrated on her hands, hips, legs, and feet. Mike is taking her to the doctor right now. Pray that it is just a minor allergy or reaction to the virus!

I use Linux. I don’t have an iPod. I’ve been wanting a good way to auto download and sync podcasts with a non-iPod mp3 player such as Palm, Pocket PC, or any other drive map-able device. It had to be something I could do quickly on my way out the door. I’d found several that would download the podcasts, and several that would sync to an iPod. I didn’t find any that would download AND smartly sync to a non-iPod device. So I finally wrote my own.

Podcast Downloader is a collection of Perl scripts that one can use to easily auto download the latest podcasts and sync them with a mounted mp3 player. This setup is ideal for those of us with Palm Pilots, Pocket PC’s, and other portable MP3 players that mount as a normal drive that cannot use iTunes or the other fancy sync programs. Create a .txt file with all of the rss feeds for your podcasts. Setup cron (or another any scheduler) to run podcast-download.pl periodically to download all of the latest podcasts (e.g. each night). When you want to dump the latest to your portable device, run podcast-sync.pl

Links:

Permanent Project Link at FuzzyMonkey.net

Download the gzipped tar archive (v. 0.3)

The README

A sample data file

Update: Welcome Diggers!

Update: Upgrade to v. 0.2 to improve use with cron.

Update: Upgrade to v. 0.3 to fix bug in parsing special characters in podcasts.txt. Format of podcasts.txt has changed.

A few random things …

Does anyone want a kitchen scale who lives in town? I’d like to get one and shipping is free on orders over $59. They would be $24.95 no shipping and no tax. These are a must have for anyone watching what they eat. CalorieFreak lets you specify all kinds of sizes and portions but the only one that is gauranteed to be available for any food item is grams. It is also the most accurate way to enter exactly what you eat. Not only that, its fun to find out more and tear down your assumptions. You’ll be amazed that you are really eating 3-4 servings when you think you are only having one. Anyways, check them out in all 11 colors here.

Also, our projector bulb went out. It actually didn’t go completely out but it now says “replace lamp” when we turn it on. From what I could find on Google, that means we have less than 100 hours left on it. I then swapped bulbs and put in the one from our backup projector (that I got just for this purpose) and now it says the same darn thing. So I guess we have 200 hours left and have to wait 3 mintues each time we turn it on for the annoyhing message to go away. In the mean time, we’ll save up for this bad boy. It’s not likely we can ever get that one but it would be nice. Its going for $1,800 right now. Perhaps it will drop in price in the next 6 months and our bulbs might last that long.

Here are a few videos for you.

Tru Taking a Few Steps

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Tru Rocking Herself

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I am trying yet another video method to find the best way to share videos with you guys. This time I am using a brand new DIVX browser plugin that should automatically work for all Windows and Mac users. Linux users will still be able to see it if they are using the mplayerplug-in. It may pop up a window asking you if it is ok to install the Divx plugin. Say yes. You will only have to do that once.

Please comment and say whether it works for you and what operating system you use.

Re-post of Tru Talking (with Divx Plugin)

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Tru just took her first steps about two minutes ago! She was standing in the kitchen facing the cabinets, but not touching them. She pivoted on one foot, then took 3 steps toward me! The only bad part is that Mike is still on his way back from his business trip in Atlanta, and he missed it.

We have a new fairly long video of Tru. This time, we have her saying a few words (in “Truspeak”) and a glimpse of her playing her favorite game: light on, light off.

Tru Playing With Lights (HQ video is 90MB)

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I saw this posted in digg.com and thought I’d have to share! Its a funny read. To all of my family members and friends who ask me computer questions about Windows or IT related things and are confused as to how I could be a computer person and not know the answer, here is why:

I’m a Programmer, Not a Computer Guy

Michael

Today is my first milestone towards living more healthy (notice that I didn’t say “diet”). I lost 5 pounds over the past 2.5 weeks. To illustrate, here is a five pound bag of flour. That is how much less weight I have to carry around all day long every day!

I’m using our calorie/fat/protein/whatever log site and you should too!

www.caloriefreak.com

Michael

I went to the doctor again yesterday for a followup. My doctor did an ultrasound to see if my ovary had gone back to normal and to look for remaining debris from when my cyst ruptured. My ovary looked normal and there was no debris, but they found another cyst. She says this one has “closed itself off,” which I assume means it isn’t becoming more full of fluid. She thinks it won’t rupture, and that it will just be absorbed by my body. I sure hope she’s right.