The big news for today came late this evening – the Ralstons have managed to rent their home out which pretty much sets them up to be able to go to the Congo at any moment. We don’t know the details yet on when they are going to travel to Africa but the only major barrier left has been removed. In theory they could leave in as little as a month.
After working until after three thirty in the morning I slept in a bit today. Oreo was very snugly and stayed in bed late with me. I had to get up and work for a little over an hour, which was pretty busy as most of my morning’s work was condensed into a pretty short period of time.
Liesl was super-ultra sleepy girl today. She slept all night solidly, had her morning snack around seven, and then slept again until we woke her up to put her into the car. She was a very happy baby today with all of that sleep.
At eleven we took Liesl to her doctor’s appoint. She has not had one in quite a while. She did very well. Her doctor said that she is looking really good and all of her stats are right where they are supposed to be. She is up to twelve pounds and two ounces according to the official scale and is twenty-four and one half inches long. She turns three months and one week old tomorrow.
We had some concerns about Liesl having an ear infection because she has been touching her ear a lot recently. The doctor checked and there is nothing wrong with her ear. It would appear that she has just recently discovered her right ear and enjoys playing with it and nothing more. That was our only indicator so we are happy to find out that that is all that is wrong.
We were talking to Liesl’s doctor about her progress with rolling over. He was expecting that she would start rolling over very soon as three months is the common mark for that but she started flipping from front to back two entire months ago over Christmas break. She has not yet flipped from back to front – until today. While we were talking to the doctor about her rolling over she decided to do her very first back to front roll right in front of us while all of us were talking about that very thing. So she now has all forms of rolling solidly under her belt.
Liesl started her vaccinations today. She is a little bit behind on them because of the scheduling issues so she has six vaccinations that she is ready to get. We want to avoid her getting them all at once because that seems very unhealthy and unwise – especially when we are neither traveling anywhere nor is she exposed to any number of people as she is home all of the time. But we don’t want to avoid the vaccinations either even though neither of us has much faith in them and tend to think that they are just more medical nonesense to get more money from people who cannot afford to do their own research into them.
We talked to the doctor and he was perfectly happy having us spread out the shots so that Liesl will get one every month for the next five months. This seemed like a good comprimise. So she got her first shot today which she was extremely unhappy about. At least her first one is out of the way and there are just five more to do.
We came home and I skipped my lunch break so that I could get back to work as there was a bit of work backed up from me having been gone for an hour. It was a very busy afternoon.
Around four o’clock this afternoon, UPS arrived with a box from Amazon – my birthday present from Dominica. It is my white Acer Aspire One running Linpus Linux. It was a few hours before I had an opportunity to take it out of the box and test it out.
My first impression of the Acer Aspire One running Linux is that it is totally awesome. It is absolutely tiny for starters. I knew that it was small but actually getting it into my hands really brings home just how small and portable this unit is. The construction is really solid and this feels like a serious device which is what you expect from Acer which is one of the big commercial computer makers along with HP, Dell, Apple and Lenovo (technically Apple is not a commercial vendor – they make consumer gear – but they build their equipment like they are.)
The Linpus Linux OS that comes with the Aspire One works pretty well for many things. It is a modification of Fedora 8 which is a good Linux system but is not exactly current. Fedora 10 is current and Fedora 11 Alpha is already out there. Linpus on the Aspire One uses OpenOffice 2.3 and FireFox 2.0 both of which are sorely out of date. I think that having an up to date Fedora installation would be much better than the limited Linpus even if it uses more system resources. Linpus Linux does not have any type of traditional desktop or application menu system which makes its use rather awkward.
The Linpus OS that is included is functional and might work well for a lot of users who do not want to have to worry about managing their own operating system although it leaves them with a rather antiquated system. My plan is to try installing Fedora 10 onto the Aspire One to see if that will meet my needs better. I would love to see OpenSUSE 11.1 working on it as well. I will be doing some experimentation.
I have a 16GB SD card added to the Aspire One which expands its operating system space to 24GB. That is so much space for a netbook with no hard drive. The Aspire is the first machine that I have purchased with an Intel processor in a very long time. In this case the Intel Atom. This model has the N270 processor which is not quite as nice as the lower-power consumption and slightly faster N280 processor available in some other Windows-based Aspire One models.
I did not get to play with my new NetBook for very much of the evening as there was a lot of other work to do so I worked on the HP nx6125 which is my Windows XP workhorse laptop and Dominica played with the Aspire One.
We watched a mix of Murder She Wrote, Kate & Allie and Extreme Engineering from the Discovery Channel. We watched a show about building subways and one about the making of the Panama Canal.
Dominica was able to do some more work on her class today and was able to wrap up the second of the four classes necessary to complete her Linux System Administrator program. So at the end of the day she is now officially at the half-way point through the program.
We stayed up until around one thirty in the morning then it was time for bed. Dominica was working on putting together Liesl’s jumper which she is about ready to start using.