The Boschmans Account

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 !

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.

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.

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…

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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Everything fine. Nothing to tell. Nothing Happening…

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

Waiting can be damn frustrating sometimes.

Waiting…

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.