johnstewart.com

This past weekend, we crammed bikes, a trailer for the boy, and camping gear into our station wagon and headed to Peninsula State Park for three nights in Door County.

Here’s the photo album:

And some video:

A slew of pictures from the last couple of months of the spawn, who decided that Father’s Day would be a good day to start to crawl.

Homeopathy. It’s a religion masquerading as science. Basically you take some chemical and dilute it, and dilute it, until you have a solution that is, for all intents and purposes, simply water.

Somehow the molecules of water you have left "resonate" with the chemical you originally put in, and cause an effect the opposite of what the original chemical did. Really. It makes no sense on so many levels.

It’s total, utterly quackery and bunk. Unfortunately, it seems to resonate with the hippy-dippy crowd in Madison. Whole Foods fucking sells this stuff!

I’m all for the free market, but when something is openly a fraud, I think that should be illegal.

Some I’ve discussed this with in the past have felt that while it may be true that homeopathic "medicine" is no better than a placebo, at least it causes no harm

I think that’s true, in the literal sense. You’re never going to get sick drinking a bottle of homeopathic solution because it’s just water! However, if you’re one of the idiots who is fooled into thinking that it’s the best thing you can do to heal your children, then your child may die.

Sadly, this has has happened:

The parents of a baby girl suffering from eczema ignored the advice of doctors and persisted with homeopathic treatment for their daughter until she died from infection, a court has heard.

Homeopath, Thomas Sam, and his wife Manju Sam are accused of the manslaughter of their nine-month-old infant daughter, Gloria Thomas, by gross criminal negligence.

Poop seems to follow a bell curve in level of gross.

Right off the bat, the shell-shocked parents get hit dealing with meconium. It is unbelievable stuff… a tiny drop could tar a roof.

As the breast milk diet takes hold, though, the poop gets better. Doesn’t smell so bad at all and easy to clean up.

Augie just started solid food in the last couple of weeks… and now the poop has taken a turn for the worse.

It smells like the inside of a porta potty in August after a Phish concert, is solid, and has quite an affinity for sticking to his ass cheeks.

Can you teach a six month old child how to use a toilet?

I sit now in next to Gate 26 in the Sky Harbor airport. It is the end of a long couple of weeks.

It is also the end of an era for me.

For fourteeen years I have worked for the same company, in the same IT department.

I and the people I have worked with have built and maintained the Madison data center for this past decade and a half. Things have changed so, so much in that time. By now of course, people around the globe, across the US, Europe, and Asia, depend on those applications and servers to get their jobs done.

Now the end has come. Over the past two weeks we have planned and toiled towards delivering the entirety of the Madison data center to a new home. We did it with a scant day and half of downtime, as those servers, coccooned in expanding foam packaging, flew across the country in a chartered jet.

We kicked ass… just as we kicked ass in everything. As with all the tasks given to us, we treated it as just another job to do.

But it wasn’t, really, just another job to do. It was a job with a goal to make the Madison office obsolete. Now, in June, we can shut the doors and turn off the lights, and the services that we built will still keep humming along.

The only people that will care that Madison is dark is those of us who lived there. I have given my entire professional life to that place, and now that is done.

Last week, I officially rejected relocation to the Arizona office. There are many good reasons for this, professionally and personally.

The end result, though, is the servers and applications that I have built and cared for for so long will soon be someone else’s responsibility. It is both a relief and a sadness.

Since the announcement about the Madison close, I’ve been so busy trying to make this thing happen that I’ve not had time to take proper stock of what it means to me. Of course I’m sad. I’m angry at the people and reasons this decision was made. I’m relieved I’m not going to get a 3am call that a server is down. I’m frightened about looking for a job in this economy. I’m excited at the prospects of finding something new.

At any rate, it is the end of a long journey. I will miss the people I have worked with. I have a lot of respect for a lot of people I have known through the years, and although it really stinks we’re in this situation, I think most of us will be okay. I certainly hope so.

So, if you know of a good IT position in the Madison area, please let me know. My resume is up at MadisonComputerGeek.com. It may sound arrogant, but I’m really good. I don’t know it all, but I know a lot about a really wide range of technologies (one of the advantages of being the Head Nerd for so long). I’d be lucky to find a place where I get to do half of the things I’ve gotten to do with Heurikon/Artesyn/Emerson over the years.

Good-bye Emerson, and good-bye Phoenix. Take good care of my babies.

My employer is closing the Madison office. I was offered relocation to the Tempe, AZ, head office. A couple of weekends ago, Susanna, Augie, and I trekked down to check out the place.

We went and saw the Chihuly exhibit at the Phoenix Botanical Garden; very cool: 

Augie is getting more human every day. He thinks lots and lots of things are extremely funny.

He is also now eating some real food! Oatmeal turns out to not be his new favorite thing. Apples, however, he seems to love.

Here’s the full gallery link: 

Augie Month Four pictures are up:

Some more Augie pictures are now online:

Month 3:	Month 3.5:

(Post by Susanna) This Thanksgiving, we continued the years-long tradition of traveling to Dallas to be with Susanna’s aunts, father, brother, grandmother, and cousins for the holiday — but this time, because we had an infant and because airfare was sky-high when we checked it, we decided to drive. And since we were driving, we decided we might as well add a stop on the way there and on the way back to visit other family and friends. Augie was 5.5 weeks old when we left.

On the way to Dallas, we spent two nights in Kansas City to visit with John’s aunt Pat and Uncle Tom and cousins Ryan and Beth, and his maternal grandfather Mo. It was fun introducing Augie to the family — and Pat and Tom doted on him. They gave him a bath, and Tom brushed his hair, and they looked after him from 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. one morning, which meant John and Susanna slept a longer stretch than they had in 5.5 weeks.

The second night in Kansas City, we visited with family from John’s father’s side, including his aunt Rhita and Uncle Phil, and almost all his cousins. August met the newest member of the Zaroor family, Aixa, who was only 2.5 weeks older than he was.

The drive from Madison to KC was about eight hours, and it was another eight hours to Dallas. In Dallas, August met his great-grandmother, Nana, his uncle and maternal grandfather and step-grandmother, and both of his great-aunts. He spent a lot of time sleeping in the arms of his extended family (and a ltitle time sleeping in the arms of a waitress at a barbecue restaurant). We spent four nights in Dallas, including Thanksgiving day.

The longest leg of the trip was from Dallas to St. Louis, to see our friends Curtis and Matt. They gave us Vietnamese food and beers and made us waffles and held Augie and laughed at his funny faces and compared him to a billiken, the SLU mascot. We have since called him Little Billiken.

The full photo gallery is here:

There is no other garment necessary for clothing your child than a sleeper or footie. One piece does it all.

Make sure it’s got a zipper and doesn’t have 28 snaps which can only be assembled in a particular order. As the kid is screaming. At four in the morning.

Your wife may insist, especially when "going out", on dressing your child in "cuter" clothes. A shirt. Pants. Socks. Perhaps a hat and gloves, and a jacket.

All I know is when I’m the clock to take care of the boy, his attire consists of one item, and one item only.