RSS feedAfter so many years of embracing independent media, if you think that big media’s stranglehold on the world is loosening, then you’d be wrong, and the Olympics are a primary example.
Time zones are always a problem when reporting world wide news events, but most of the world understand this and just deal with it. Something broadcast from Australia, say APEC or some such, gets broadcast on Australian time, and if this means evening in Europe, the middle of the night for the U.S., or daytime for Asia, then so be it. The current conflict in Georgia? During the day in Europe and Asia, but middle of the night for the U.S.
The rest of world recognises that time zones exist, and that sometimes they work for you and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they fall during television’s prime time, and sometimes they don’t. Unless of course you’re U.S. broadcaster NBC, in which case you can simply pay to make sure world events, in this case the Olympics, happen in U.S. television prime time.
Let’s just put this into perspective. A television broadcaster has paid money so that a news event will take place in prime time.
Traditionally, at a swim meet, the heats are run during the day, and the finals are held at night. That’s the way it’s always been, regardless of where they’re held, and regardless of where they’re broadcast. Yet NBC has the power to change the Olympics so that the finals are held during the day, and the heats are held at night, so that they sync up with U.S. time of heats during the day and finals at night. And they’ve done the same with a whole range of events, including the gymnastics and the marathons.
In Australia, we’re only a few hours ahead of Bejing time, so the traditional timing for the swimming would have been perfect, heats during the day, and then finals at night. But with the U.S. pandering in place, we now have the finals being run at lunch time Australian time.
For us, the swimming is where we excel, it’s what we do, and we generally have a passion for swimming more than any other sport. It’s a tradition for us, especially when we usually beat the U.S. swimmers.
But not this time. On one of those rare occasions when a world wide event actually occurs in a good time zone for us, we’re now stuck with most of our population not actually being able to see the swim finals because they’re being held at lunch time.
NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol is one of the key people to blame. In an interview with The Guardian, he said:
In the first conversation that I had with the new head of the IOC, Jacques Rogge, I told him that it would be almost impossible for an American network bidding on the games in the future … not to have some way to have ‘live’ happen. … I emphasised from the beginning that it was important to us, if possible, to have swimming and gymnastics work this way.
But it’s not just NBC who’s to blame. Obviously it was the IOC, traditionally as bent and corrupt as the drug cheats they keep ranting about, that had to agree to the change, because the Chinese certainly don’t need the money. Co-incidentally of course, the change in schedule means that the swim finals will now broadcast in Europe in the late afternoon and early evening, not such a bad compromise for them.
Now the swimmers themselves aren’t particularly impressed with the situation either. All their competitive lives they’ve been used to swimming heats in the day and finals at night, and now that’s been completely flipped on it’s head. So much so that swimmers are saying they rarely reach their peek until the night, and so world records won’t tumble as much as they usually do under the new schedule. Yet obviously NBC don’t care if the performances are watered down, so long as it’s watered down in prime time.
Big media is still in charge, they’ve integrated citizen media into their model, and they still control everyone who counts. Meanwhile the world keeps on spinning, and still the world’s news events just happen to occur more often than not in U.S. prime time. Their demise cannot come too soon.
With the U.S. credibility around the world at it’s lowest point ever, and their financial markets completely crumbling, when will big U.S. media lose its stranglehold on what world events happen outside U.S. borders?
Today is Molly’s due day, 8/8/8, and it’s also the opening of the Olympics.
When Molly was born on 1st July, all the nurses were saying how it was a great date to be born on. Well, sort of, because our due date was even better!
Just before the opening ceremony started, we had a little birthday cake for Molly. It was actually a pavlova, but who’s counting. Speaking of which, how many candles do you put on for a 0th birthday? We decided to have one candle, which I had to blow out, because Molly was asleep. Louise and I then ate the pavlova, which was lucky, because it wouldn’t have gone three ways.
One of the big changes for us is the lack of time to do anything but eat, sleep, work (for me) and look after Molly. And even the work is just the ones that I’m contractually bound to. Other work? Film and stage project? Nah, no time. I even had to miss Scriptless last night because I had a massive headache from exhaustion. Louise is doing pretty well though, considering she’s doing 4 to 5 of the 6 daily cares Molly needs.
At this point it’s tempting to go off about how offensive some of the open ceremony was, but… there’s not enough time, aside from saying I wasn’t amused at the children of all the countries China has invaded carrying the Chinese flag, and seriously does anyone believe the whole “will the birds ever come back, we need to look after the environment” when they’re the most polluted country on the planet? I said I wouldn’t do a rant didn’t I… Did I mention the big white dove, the great symbol of hypocrisy?
Molly’s yet to reach that constant crying period, and we’re starting to think she mightn’t actually be a crying baby. We had a visit today from the community nurse (courtesy of the awesome RPAH), who said we’d start to see some changes now that she’s officially reached her due date. No idea what that means, but more normal sleep and feeding patterns were mentioned, so we’ll see how that turns out over the next few weeks.
There’s an absence of information on how to get a Subversion server running on Mac OS X, and what information there is on the web gives the impression that it’s difficult. It’s not.
I used to run an application called Mac SVN Server – MAS, a standalone app with Apache and a Subversion server all built in, by Uli Kusterer. You just run it and you have an instant web based svn server. But it’s all packaged up, meaning it’s not that easy to upgrade to new versions of svn, and is pretty heavy weight considering it’s an entire Apache 2 web server.
Instead, contrary to what most web sites seem to say, you can just run svnserve, the Subversion custom server component with Mac OS X. Here’s how I did it:
- Download the Subversion package from Martin Ott’s .mac page and install it on the Mac running 10.5 (Leopard) or later, that you’re going to use as your Subversion server. This includes the svn client and the server. It’s a standard Mac package installer, so just run it and you’re done. All the binaries will end up in /usr/local/bin.
- Create a new user called “svnuser”.
- Create a directory for your repository. Use mkdir /Users/svnuser/svn, or if you need to, use sudo mkdir /Users/svnuser/svn.
- Create your repository. Use sudo svnadmin create /Users/svnuser/svn. Check the directory to make sure it has correct ownership for svnuser, and if not do a sudo chown -R /Users/svnuser/svn to set it correctly.
- If you have a repository from another Subversion server then you can simply copy it over the top of the new directory, and it will work fine, so long as the repository version is supported. For Subversion 1.5, it will also support a 1.4 repository. I copied my old 1.4 repository from MAS, and it’s worked perfectly. You may need to do another chown to make sure the ownership is correct.
The server is now installed. To run it, simply log in as svnuser and run the server with svnserve -d -r /Users/svnuser/svn. You can now access it from any client (1.4 is built into Mac OS X 10.5 so no need to install the client anywhere) by doing a standard svn check out: svn co svn://ipaddress-of-svnmac/repositorypath
But instead of running it manually, we can run it automatically when the server Mac starts up by using launchd. You can read up on Getting Started with launchd, but basically it’s the new startup process in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). So, to start svnserve automatically, create the file /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.tigris.subversion.svnserve.plist, and put the following in it:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>Label</key>
<string>org.tigris.subversion.svnserve</string>
<key>UserName</key>
<string>svnuser</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/local/bin/svnserve</string>
<string>--inetd</string>
<string>--root=/Users/svnuser/svn</string>
</array>
<key>ServiceDescription</key>
<string>Subversion Standalone Server</string>
<key>Sockets</key>
<dict>
<key>Listeners</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>SockFamily</key>
<string>IPv4</string>
<key>SockServiceName</key>
<string>svn</string>
<key>SockType</key>
<string>stream</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>SockFamily</key>
<string>IPv6</string>
<key>SockServiceName</key>
<string>svn</string>
<key>SockType</key>
<string>stream</string>
</dict>
</array>
</dict>
<key>inetdCompatibility</key>
<dict>
<key>Wait</key>
<false/>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>
This automatically starts the server when it boots. It also switches it from a standalone daemon to running under inetd, but it makes no real difference. There are a lot of different versions of this plist out there, but this is the only one I got to work. Unfortunately I can’t remember the site I borrowed it from. Email me if it’s you.
You’re done.
Note that the UserName property defines the user to runs svnserve as, but launchd only allows this property when it is running as root. There are two launchds on the system, one running as root (process 1), and one running as each user. The one running as root loads its plists from /Library/LaunchDaemons.
Updated from comments over time.
[..] Be aware however that the eval function is extremely unsafe. If there is the slightest chance that the server is not encoding the JSON correctly, then use the parseJSON method instead. The parseJSON method uses a regular expression to ensure that there is nothing dangerous in the text. The next edition of JavaScript will have parseJSON built in. For now, you can get parseJSON at http://www.JSON.org/json.js. [..]
[..] The right thing is frequently a monolithic piece of software, but for no reason other than that the right thing is often designed monolithically. That is, this characteristic is a happenstance. [..] The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing. [..]
I mean seriously, someone needs to invent a better baby bottle. Surely it’s not that difficult you know, milk goes in the bottle, bottle goes into baby’s mouth, baby provides a seal around the bottle, and you just pour the shit down baby’s throat. What could be simpler?
The most popular bottle brands in Sydney today are Avent and Pigeon. They’re nicely sculptured in clear plastic, with a slightly thinning bit in the middle to make it easier to grasp. Inset is a photo of an Avent bottle, now owned by Philips.
All these bottles have one thing in common, unless you tip them up to about 80 degrees, a few mls of milk will remain in the bottle, because there’s an internal lip that prevents it running out. You can see it in the Avent ones pictured, but they seem to be like this in all bottles. On top of this, the standard teats you buy are fitted to these bottles in a way that actually creates a second internal lip, that you guessed it, prevents another few mls of milk from leaving the bottle.
At first I thought this may be so that any sediment will fall into the lip and not into baby’s mouth, but I doubt it. It’s just plain badly designed.
We’ve put men on the moon, worked out how to incinerate hundreds of thousands of people in an instant, and we’ve invented the hot and cold thermos, surely after feeding babies for hundreds of thousands of years, the practice of feeding a baby properly is within our grasp?
Today Molly shat three times in the middle of a nappy change.
We’ve been changing Molly in her bassinet since she came home last Thursday, and my back has been starting to hurt because it’s too low down, so we finally bit the bullet and bought a change table. My Mum and Dad did the research over the weekend, and I went and picked one up today. The plan was that Louise, Molly and I would go, but the severe thunderstorms put paid to that. We also had another visit from the community nurse today, all part of the awesome service they provide for pre-term babies at RPA. Did I mention RPA rock, and you’d be either an idiot, or a Packer, or both, if you went anywhere else?
So it was my turn for cares this evening, but it was the first time we’d be using the new change table, so I managed to con Louise into helping, in what ended up being the triple poo incident. I had a run of eight cares in a row at the hospital when Molly would wee on the new nappy in the middle of the change and cause us to change the entire bed and all her clothes, but I’d been fairly lucky in the last few days. Not so now. Three nappies, eight wipes, two towels, a singlet and a jump suit all soiled.
Sunday, yesterday, was going to be a big day. We were supposed to have visits from two of Louise’s brothers, then one of her sister in laws, then a friend of mine to help empty the house of a bunch of old computer crap that’s been taking up valuable Molly space, and then Louise’s sister. In the end, none of it happened, which as you know is normal for our scheduled plans. Except for her brothers, who popped in while I was out doing even more shopping for necessities, like antibacterial hand wash, bottom wipes and chocolate, not necessarily in that order.
We’re starting to get more sleep now, and patterns with the cares are starting to emerge. I usually do the late night ones solo, and Louise does the early morning ones solo, and we share during the day. Although today Louise did most of them, as a rehearsal for the next three days when I’m at a client in town. This may not last that long, as they’re trying to get me security access so that I can work from home, which would make things oh so much easier, and I’d actually get more work done as well. But it would mean more poo disasters.
I was going to make this part 40 blog post the final in this series, but I kept remembering cool stuff to mention throughout the day, so I think I’ll continue on. Although I forgot them again by the time I got to writing this, so I need to get out my old reminder notebook out again. Louise and I both get calls and emails from people who are reading this blog, not just family and friends, but also distant friends and acquaintances. I’m not sure whether it’s an interesting read, or whether it just brings back memories of them going through the same thing, but either way, that’s gotta be a good thing.
Right now it’s 10pm, and time for a feed and cares. Louise is asleep on the lounge, and Phoebe is asleep on her lap, with Molly upstairs asleep in her bassinet. How come everyone is sleeping except for me? Time to wake them all up…
Again, if you’re not into my personal stuff, then please consider customising your RSS feed so that it doesn’t contain the personal stuff. Either way, I still figure there’s either a book, a stage show or a stand up routine in all this, which I’ll probably work on when I get some free time… some free time… some free time…
When people say that you don’t get any sleep in the first few months of baby being at home, you think OK, I’ve had some pretty bad nights in my time, sure it’s going to be bad, but how hard can it be?
Last night was difficult, getting up every few hours for feeding and cares. At 3am I couldn’t take it anymore and ended up sleeping for most of the night, with Louise doing every shift and then sleeping a few hours this morning on the lounge.
We were both sleep deprived before Louise went into hospital, trying to finish up all our projects before the baby was born. Then Louise went into hospital early, which just made the sleep deprivation worse, because she wasn’t really sleeping, and I was trying to run the house as well as finish projects off. Then Molly arrived and went into the high dependency unit, which sucked up even more of our time, and Louise got discharged, which took up even more. Most peoples’ sleep deprivation begins on the day of the birth, usually with a long labour, and then a few days later when everyone goes home to 4th hourly cares. Our lives were screwed before we got anywhere near getting back home.
But we’re surviving. We had a community nurse come and visit for several hours today, giving advice to Louise and I, and a check up to Molly. Then we took her out in the car for her first outdoors pram ride, to the Bonds seconds factory to get a few extra necessary clothes, and then to good ol’ Marrickville Metro to get some extra cleaning products, and of course a cone.
On top of all that, I think we’re in the honeymoon period, as she rarely cries, and she pretty much feeds on schedule. I must say however that Louise’s sister’s lasagne was awesome.
Molly came home yesterday (Thursday) at around 2pm. Yay!
We had about 4-5 hours sleep the night before, getting up around 8am. We didn’t get the bottles and other bits and pieces on the Wednesday, and typically for us, we actually bought the wrong food. I mean, it’s not like we bought chicken chunks in jelly, when she prefers tuna strips in brine, no, we bought the formula the hospital uses, but for full terms, not preterms. So knowing we’d have to feed her around 3pm, we had to exchange the formula and buy the bottles before we got to the hospital.
The formula exchange went fine. But when we got to the chemist… they were out of bottles. Great, we were about to be the primary care givers for a newborn, and we had no way to feed her. There’s something to be said about having a spare rubber device or two around the home, because you never know when it might come in handy. The chemist said they’d be getting more bottles in around midday, so that meant we could probably pick up Molly and then pick up the bottles from Marrickville Metro on the way home. Assuming of course that the bottles would arrive when they said they would.
We turned up at the hospital at 10:45am. The only thing we’d heard so far was that one “she may be able to go home tomorrow”, so I tried not to get too committed to the idea until it actually happened. Louise was more convinced, and none of my “let’s just see what happens, no expectations” type lines would sway her, she just knew Molly was coming home.
When we walked in, everything fell into place. The nurses all assumed she was going home, and had already done most of the work required to make that happen. They’d also done the 11am cares for some reason, which was a shame, because we were looking forward to doing the last one, but no matter.
By midday we were pretty much ready to go. The doctor came around for the final discharge check up, which Molly pretty much slept through because it was under the nice warm bath lights. The final step consists of the doctor shining a light into her eyes and checking for a reaction. Well, Molly wasn’t having any of that, and kept her eyes firmly closed. Then the doctor got paged, and said if she didn’t open her eyes in the next minute, she’d have to leave and Molly would have to stay until later in the day. The three us rubbed hands, her legs, her tummy, her cheeks, nothing worked… then finally humming Moby Dick by Led Zeppelin saved the day, and she open each eye slightly to see where daddy was. Eat that Teddy Bears, John Bonham moonlights as a doctors assistant.
We had to return all the hospital clothes and linen, so we dressed her in a pink singlet from Louise’s mum, a cute little white with pink spots jump suit, the only clothes we own that fit her, from one of my aunties, and wrapped in the same wrap that my grandmother knitted for me when I came home from the hospital. The latest lot of photos show everything off.
We wheeled her cot out into the main part of RPA, and then outside for the very first time, in the RPA emergency drop off, we’d parked the car.
It was a little embarrassing, because I didn’t know how to properly use the car seat, or even if it was OK for a premmie, but the nurse was great and knew hot to strap her in. Originally we thought we’d have to pick her up in the pram, so it was sitting in the boot, waiting for for dad who knows nothing about prams or strollers, to have to pull it out and somehow nonchalantly expand it (from it’s portable collapsed state) into an actual stroller. Luckily we didn’t actually need it.
So we finally left the hospital, and stopped off at Metro on the way home. I’d love to say we left her in the car while we went shopping, but some of the family may not see the funny side. No, I sat with Molly with a window slightly down, while Louise went and got the bottles, a final cone, and strangely enough, a pie with sauce. Molly’s mum is a bit of a nut job at times. I hope she’s getting most of it from me.
As I write this, we’ve had our first 32 hours at home, and this the first moment I’ve had to blog. I’ll hopefully cover those initial 24 hours tomorrow, once I’ve had a little sleep. Or does this just go on for 18 years now?
I was in town today working with a client. I’d just reached a major project milestone around lunchtime, when I got a call from Louise at the hospital. She was there to do the 11am cares, as previously mentioned in What a crazy year, part 35, and she said “they’re saying she might go home tomorrow”.
Like everything that’s happened in this long saga, nothing ever comes with a warning. Events always seem to sneak up on you unawares, and then when you least expect them, bam, something happens.
And so here we are, in no fit state to support a baby at home, yet like it or not, she’s probably on her way tomorrow (Thursday) morning. While the nurses all usually tow the the same line, every now and again you get varying opinions, so I ask who actually said she might be going going home. “Oh, one of the doctors came over to us with the nursery registrar”. Hmm… OK, that’s probably fairly accurate then.
I still have to get my car registered, so this morning I got up early to take it in for a service and rego. But first I had to drive it from up the street down to my house, in order to put the fourth wheel back on. It was parked too close to the curb to do it, hence I had to move it. Unfortunately though, the battery was flat, because I hadn’t used in the three and a half weeks since the tyre was slashed. So, I had to drive Louise’s car up to mine, in order to jump start it. This meant blocking the entire street, which is the main sneaky connector street between Newtown and Marrickville that everyone uses in the morning to bypass King St. I annoyed quite a few people, but they could all see that I wasn’t to be messed with at this point in the birth of my child, so I didn’t get any crap from people. I then parked Louise’s car, drove mine to our house, and switched the dickie wheel for the real one, all with the engine running so it would charge the battery. Don’t do this at home folks.
Meanwhile, back to lunchtime and Louise’s phone call, we agreed that we’d both head home and then run through the plan for the day. We both got home around 2pm, which left us a few hours of shopping time to get the following necessities that we so far didn’t have: nappies, towels, singlets, a new matress for the bassinet, a matress protector, wraps, and some clothes. Any clothes.
The other big thing we hadn’t done, is fit the car capsule, or in our case, the car seat. It’s the law, so if we didn’t get it fitted in time, the she wouldn’t be coming home. We’d booked in a fitting for Friday, because that was the soonest the people we preferred could do it, and we figured there’s no way she’d be out by then. And of course we just may have found some time to go through the container of gear to find the seat by then as well. Instead, I had to drag it out this afternoon, and call around for someone to install it. We found someone. It took them 5 minutes. Our biggest concern, sorted on the spot in 5 minutes. Nice one. I enjoy life when things turn out better than expected.
We also have to get her from the hospital nursery to the car, so instead of just wheeling her out in the hospital cot, we figured that her own pram would be the way to go. So tonight was spent putting the pram together (from the container load) and assembling the bassinet so she can sleep (also from the container load). The pram was one of those ever extensible types, where you can keep adding extras until it resembles a space ship or an out of control Katamari. It actually came already extended, with an additional toddler seat attached to it, for a nice two level baby effect. Unfortunately I didn’t realise this at first, and couldn’t work out how this vertical tandem contraption unfolded correctly to form a simple pram. I eventually worked it out by downloading the manuals of several prams in the company’s line and working from those. For some reason our parm hasn’t got a manual available on their site. No matter, I eventually worked it all out.
Now it’s 3am, and I need to get sleep before Louise gets up to express, and we go to pick up Molly at 11am. I still haven’t talked about industrial chemist man and his foolproof breast feed volume measuring system, but that will have to wait until another day.