When diapering a little boy, it's a pretty common suggestion that you take steps to prevent spurious pee from making too much of a mess. What doesn't get said is that this applies for the other end too. For a breast feeding child, you need to be prepared for it to happen at the least opportune moment and have a range of over a foot. I expect that this applies equally to either gender of child. Enough said.

If this post offends you, and I can't imagine why, let me take a moment to remind you that you have already been warned.

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One of the 'downsides' of the way Blosxom is implemented is that is relies on a post file's modification date to assign a date to the post. This makes editing files a little tricky: editing files on a Unix box updates the modification date and therefore promotes the post to the top of the blog. I don't know if there's a better way to do this, but I've written a little script that edits a file, making sure to restore the previous modification date.

The implementation is pretty simple: it uses mktemp to create a temporary file and touch -r to copy the modification dates from the post file to the temporary file and back. Be sure to modify the #! line to point to your installation of bash, should you decide to use this script. A nice generalization of this script would have it prompt for a description of the update and add the text to the post.

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
  echo
  echo "This script expects a command line argument: the
  echo "name of the post to edit."
  exit 1
fi

DATE_MARKER=`mktemp /tmp/date_marker.XXXXXX` || exit 1

touch -r $1 ${DATE_MARKER}

${EDITOR} $1

touch -r ${DATE_MARKER} $1

rm ${DATE_MARKER}

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There's a long running joke about Ken Thompson's car. It goes something like this: 'Ken Thompson's car replaces all the confusing gauges with one warning light -- the experienced user will know what's wrong when the light goes on.' Ryan is just like that if you replace the 'one warning light' with 'one piercing cry'.

The compensating factor for Ryan's lack of communications skills is that babies don't need or want all that much. It basically boils down to food, clean clothes and diaper, a comfortable enviroment, and some companionship and cuddling. That makes an exhaustive search of all possible 'error conditions' relatively brief. It is frustrating at times (1:00 in the morning and nothing seems to be working), but I don't know if it'll end up more or less frustrating than 15-16 years from now when he's asking for a new sports car or extended curfew.

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One of the criteria we had for picking Ryan's given name was that it should be difficult to shorten into a nickname. This is something Teresa has enjoyed about her name, and given my dad's intense dislike of ever being called 'Stevie' it was pretty easy to understand her position on the subject. Ryan seemed like a safe choice until about two days after he was born, at which point I lapsed into calling him 'Ry-Ry'. Oh well. Ryan, If you ever hate the nickname 'Ry-Ry', let me apologize now and get it over with. I kind of like it.

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Ryan turned two weeks old the other day. In honor of the occasion we've put a few more pictures online in another album. There's also good news to report about his two week checkup. Ryan lost the usual weight immediately after birth and has been steadily gaining weight since. Yesterday, his weight was 8 pounds 3 ounces. Based on that and his recent feeding behavior he's hit one of the initially expected growth spurts. He also got a clean bill of health from the doctor otherwise.

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With Ryan's arrival, my blog is going to start containing more non-techical material. To avoid forcing people into reading about the poopie diapers and/or lexical closures they aren't interested in, I've partitioned the blog into a couple of sub-feeds. I've also started using URL rewriting to remove the reference to blosxom from links to the weblog. Links to this weblog should now look like this: http://www.mschaef.com/blog/personal/ryan_charles. The old style links should work as long I continue using blosxom, but if that ever changes they will start failing. (I'll try to put permanent redirections in place to avoid too many problems with obsolete links.) Without further ado, here are the good weblog links:

• All content (RSS)
• Personal content only (RSS)
• Technical content only (RSS)

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Teresa and I are thrilled to announce the birth of our son, Ryan Charles Harrison Schaeffer, born July 29th, 2006 at 1:29PM, weighing 7 pounds 8 ounces and 20 inches long. Both mother and son are doing well. You can view pictures of his first few days here. We'll periodicially post updates via a a blog (RSS).

Love,
Teresa and Mike Schaeffer

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