More baby news
We are on day 200. I only say we because with 80 days left the little wife has made it very clear that there will be some huge reorganization going on outside of my office. I'm pretty sure that is her way of saying that I should stay inside of the office and work, but I'm not completely sure.
Dawn has to endure the lovely gestational diabetes test this morning which apparently calls for drinking a nasty Orange mixture until you are almost ready to puke and then you have to wait an hour (w/o puking) so they can suck your blood.
In other news, we finally have a "decoration" winner. Blue Jean Teddy will be Aiden's new best friend. This somehow won out by being the same choice for 3 weeks in a row. Prior to the 3 week rule there was a new theme every other day. These included: Builder Bob, Pooh, Disney (almost everything, usually individually), a space theme (which was proving difficult), and my personal favorite involved finding 8 inch floppies, a picture of Edmund Berkeley and his SIMON (it was Ivan Sutherland's first computer) and maybe an old PDP-8 and doing a history of the computer along the walls. My plan was vetoed.
Washing Machines and VeriSign
As you may already know, the clothes washing machine decided that it was time to retire recently. Apparently, the "speed control circuit" which is about $170 installed has died and in the process, or as a result of, the motor is on the way out. Almost $400 to fix. BUT, we can buy a new one for $600 and get $150 (or so) back in the form of an Oregon Tax Credit. So, repairs are out and we are getting a new one.
In other strangeness, apparently VeriSign (the people who own Network Solutions and have been charged with maintaining the master database of most of the top level domains) is now my #1 spammer. Yes, if your domain is about to expire, and you registered with VeriSign (apparently ever in your life), you can receive numerous RENEWAL NOTICEs to renew your domain for just $69.99 (never mind that you can do this for $8 these days). If I were a betting man (meaning I was buying and selling stocks), I would definitely short this company, except that they are at $7.30/share - off from their 52-week high of $57.93 (oops, well probably still would). The funny thing is that I called them and ask them to stop (nicely, even) and they informed me they didn't have a way to do that. If I could just delete the messages, they would appreciate it.
On a funny side, they just announced a BIG HUGE COOL FINANCIALLY VIABLE THING where they are going to help companies become compliant with the "Do-Not-Call" requirements of various states (think Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991).
VeriSign the only company that can succeed in getting huge government contracts (maintain TLDs for years) and still feel the need to spam you to death with a great $69.99/year deal (only about 875% more than what you have to pay)! Of course, I'm probably not on Oracle's list (think California Oracle licensing fiasco).
One other strangeness
I had my first HD mystery failure ever today (well, in the last 10+ years, back when I worked at Computer Warehouse I had a few that were strange, but that was back in the day of MFM, RLL and Winchester interfaces). The IDE drive in our CD-R duplicator tower thingy died. Just mysteriously died. It is a Quantum drive and since Maxtor basically took over all Quantum's hard drive business, I ran their software on the drive. It's got some little block at the very very beginning that is actually un-recoverable. I didn't get all crazy with it (think Spin-Rite, etc), but according to the Maxtor stuff it "ain't gonna get fixed".
Luckily, that toy will take any old IDE drive, so I shoved the one from my little test server into it and let it plug along (I'm not a fan of downtime). Now Dawn can still do work tomorrow and I can wait on this new replacement drive to show up via slow boat.