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Tom & Sam

Time to talk a bit more about our two boys.

Sam has been growing rapidly, and changes weekly. Tomorrow he will be one month old, and already he looks so different to what he looked like when he was born ! He still cries a lot, but the stomach cramps do seem to be abating.

Due to the excessive heat here in Belgium (the last two weeks the temperature has risen over 30° Celcius almost every day, and we are told to be careful of our water) Sam has been very thirsty. Almost every 2 to 3 hours he was hungry (that should be thirsty) again, so not easy on mum when she wants to sleep.

So I’ve started helping out by giving Sam a bottle during the night hours. While I was afraid that Sam would not be ready to accept the bottle, he doesn’t seem to mind. Have to see how that works out when I go back to work though…

Tom has been a marvellous boy these last few weeks : he isn’t jealous of Sam, always interested in seeing what we are doing with him (changing a diaper, giving a bath) and always wants to help us take care of Sam and give him kisses. Since last week he has also started to dress himself, without any prompting from us (well, I did push a bit when Dolores was in hospital, but not since then). You could see our eyes popping out when he first came down the stairs himself, fully dressed. He was grinning, and we were grinning back like happy mad idiots.

We’re very proud of both our children !

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Millions affected by Credit Card Theft

If you have been following the news, you’ve probably heard or read about CardSystems, the payment processing company that’s been amiss in following procedures after processing online payments. Instead of discarding the confirmation codes (on the back of your credit card) and expiry dates for each credit card transaction, they kept them on file. In a text file, that was accessible from the web. At first glance, 40 million cardholders may have been affected.

It seems that it is even worse now : CardSystems seems to have had troubles since last year instead of only the last month !

Sometimes I wonder how companies that do stupid things like this are able to survive.

What I am wondering about is when the shit will hit the fan. I mean : here is a clear case of company mismanagement that has affected millions users worldwide, and they get off with a slap on the wrist to do better next time ? EXCUSE ME ?

According to the Standaard, about 16,000 Belgian card users are affected. What are we, the affected masses of consumption users, waiting for ? Let’s start a lawsuit or 100 or so and sue these suckers out of existence ! It’s not because American data privacy laws are lax that we should let them get away with it – heck, our European privacy laws are way more stringent than theirs, we should be able to get them to appear before the European justice !!

It just makes my blood boil.

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Surviving the baby boom

We’re actually doing better than I thought we would be doing – as pointed out by the fact that I can start up my pc and can write blog entries and even -Caramba!- play Guild Wars for half an hour sometimes.

Sam can definitely cry, but he seems to be a lot calmer than Tom. Perhaps calmer is not the right word, he just seems to be able to sleep better. Tom was a very notorious bad sleeper when he was that age. Sam seems to sleep rather better and longer! Last night he slept more than 6 hours, which helped Dolores to recover from the brink of sleep-deprivation.

He does have a lot of trouble with cramps, though, after feeding. Takes a while for those to dissipate (usually by dissipating in his pampers).

Tonight I was watching the telly with Sam in the crook of my arm and suddenly I felt ‘watched’. It was Sam who was looking at me very intensely.

Probably checking me out, already.

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Sam and Mom are home

Sam and Mom have now arrived back home. I volunteered to stay with Sam downstairs so that Dolores could sleep for a few hours.
Phew – the boy can cry ! Luckely he also slept a bit, and Mom came back feeling much rested.

My eyes are a bit ‘sandy’ though. And this is only the beginning…

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Sam has arrived !

Today at 11:20 am our son Sam was born, brother to Tom. Weighing in at 3,360 kg and measuring 51 cm, our new-born is already actively seeking his food, aka mom’s nipple.

It was a normal but very long – almost 13 hours – delivery ! Mom is doing fine, after an enormous effort like that she is doing ok !!!!

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Another visit to the doctor

Everything fine. Nothing to tell. Nothing Happening…

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Waiting…

Dolores is doing well. So well in fact that she will deliver normally. So we’re waiting.

Waiting can be damn frustrating sometimes.

Waiting…

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WordPress 1.5.1

Tonight, after backupping all of my data, I upgraded my blog to WordPress 1.5.1 – I unzipped the new files over the old ones, and immediately got a crash of my site.

Luckely, it was just BAStats (a very good plugin that generates statistics on your site visitors) that needed to be upgraded – same deal, unzip over existing plugin files, and hops – all ok.

The upgrade took me all of 10 minutes. Cool, even with the unexpected crash thrown in.

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Guild Wars – internationally working together

Guild Wars is really neat. To succesfully complete the bigger quests, you are forced to group together with other players. This promotes a group feeling.

For example, in pre-sear Ascalon (before the invasion), to open the north gate, you need another player – one player needs to position himself in front of the gate while the other one goes to the top and pull the lever. It is timed to be impossible to pull the lever and run down to enter the gate. Clever !

A week ago I quested with a Greek guy whose LineAge 2 clan was preparing to move to Guild Wars – he was the advance party. Two days ago I played with a Dutchman, today with someone from Sweden. Diverse nationalities with divers ages ! The youngest I played with was 16, the oldest 30.

It’s fun virtually meeting and chatting to different people from different countries. And since you’re playing the game, you have the same interest, you can always talk about the game itself as a conversation breaker.

Most of the people I’ve met are nice, and in return I try to help out where I can, answering question on quests and dispensing advice, but of course there are some annoying people as well. Especially those that shout : SELLING AXE DMG 9-12 ! and repeating that shout every .34 seconds (they get around the excessive spamming rule by tacking on an exclamation mark every time).

But if you can’t stand them, just change your district or go do a quest. Chances are you won’t meet that particular person again. If worse comes to worst, add them to your ‘ignore’ list.

However, Guild Wars could do with some extra features for this area :
– you need to add your friends to a friends list by typing in the name; you can’t just right-click and select from a little menu : ‘add this person to my friend list’.
– they could use the same menu for ignoring people !

It IS functional, but it seems curiously unfinished. I suppose that gives them room for improvement, the game itself is swell.

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Guild Wars

I bought Guild Wars in the last week of April, apparently just about the day after it became available in Belgium. I had no problem purchasing a copy in the fnac, while in the forums people were aching to buy a copy in their local computer store – but it was sold out there. Just my dumb luck, I guess.

The thing that attracted me most to Guild Wars was the fact that you have an online MMORPG (Massive Multipe Online Role Playing Game) presence, but without paying those costly monthly fees. It’s not that I can’t afford them, but with the limited time I have, I would not be ‘using’ those fees efficiently. Last time I played an MMORPG was with Anarchy Online (AO)- which I really liked. However, 3 months after Tom arrived I stopped my subscription – I was getting so little sleep with our new baby boy that I had only been online 2 or 3 times in those months.

Apparently, every 6 to 9 months Guild Wars will bring out expansion packs, and it’s up to you if you purchase them or not. So instead of paying 150 euros or more a year (15€ per month, one or two months free) you pay the purchase of the game (in the fnac it cost me about 45€) plus the expansion pack.
I’m hoping that those expansion packs won’t be full-price, but something along the lines of 30 € maximum. No price setting for these expansion packs is known at the moment.

Guild Wars has been a very nice experience so far. The startup is very very fast, login is quick and moving about the world is smooth. This week however, some parts of it have slowed down -I think there are many more players now than last week, and when you pop up in a district (an ‘instance’ of town where a limited numbers of players are in), depending on the number of players, you see yourself appearing in about 10 seconds or so, while last week the apparition of your character was nearly instantaneous.

While each district (or copy) of a town is a separate instance, you can migrate freely between them : if your friend is in district 4 and you are in district 9, you can still chat to each other, and if you want to meet up, simply change to the district number and find him or her.

Compared to my AO experience, I very much like the improvements they have made to their game – GW has been described as a third-generation MMORPG. Gameplay is much smoother. However, there is still some room for improvement :
– you cannot control your pets (if you are a ranger give them a name with /petname , a command that is mentioned nowhere on the site, except in a forum)
– you cannot control undead horrors
– I would love to have some small scripting ability for the emotes, so that you can string them together !

More on this game later…