Huh. Another older woman gettin’ it on with a teenaged boy. Happens all the time, let’s open the article to see if she’s hot OH GOD MY EYES
(Mother I’d Like to Run From, if you couldn’t figure it out.)
As a father who is also a geek, I have a question for nurses, childcare professionals, physicists, etc. Can someone explain to me why I can’t warm breast milk in a microwave?
Sarah and I got into a small argument the other day, and I acceded to her wishes, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. When you heat a liquid in a microwave, it tends to heat unevenly. This is why anything you heat in a nuker usually have to be stirred halfway through. So when heating breast milk, you end up with small sections of the milk that still cold, and sections that are infant-searingly hot. Obviously this is bad. The recommended technique is that you heat up a bunch of water in the microwave, and then sit the bottle of milk in it for a few minutes to warm it.
I did that the other day, and left the bottle in for longer than anticipated; the outside got quite warm, while the inside was sort of tepid. So: I shook it up. This caused the colder milk in the middle to mix with the hotter milk on the outside, bringing the whole thing to just about body temperature.
Why can’t I do that when microwave heating? Throw the thing in the nuker for 5 seconds and then shake the bejebus out of it. I don’t stick it in Josephine’s mouth without testing it on my arm either way, so what’s the problem? Why can’t I do this? Why?
One interesting side effect of my current diet is that it’s gotten me cooking more frequently. I’ve always enjoyed cooking, but it’s hard to find the time, particularly if one works all day. If you want to cook anything complicated, it can take an hour or more of preparation; if you don’t get home until 6, suddenly you’re not eating until 7:30, which is unacceptable when small children are involved. It’s no wonder busy families tend to eat fast food, or ready-made meals in boxes from Stouffer’s.
When dieting, though, the easiest way to fill up without taking in a lot of calories is to eat vegetables. Salads are highly recommended, but boring; after a while I long for something with a little more flavor. Cooked vegetables are the next best thing, but the “vegetarian” ready-made meals you find are horrifible. The solution? Slice up your own veggies and throw ’em in a hot pan. A cabinet full of tasty spices also makes a big difference; curry powder, for example, makes anything, even plain cauliflower, into Special South Asian Cuisine. Yum.
It also helps having Sarah home with the kids for the summer, because it means she can get a head start on dinner. She’s awfully good about timing it such that I can come home, quickly slice some veggies and fry ’em up, and she’s already got a low-calorie meat like pork or chicken a-roasting. (Last night was pork tenderloin, and it was better than sex.) It seems to be working so far; in the first 9 days of my diet, I went from 271 pounds to 261. To be sure, a lot of that is the heralded “water weight,” but hey, I’ll take it.
Now I just need to start going to the gym. I’ll, uh, get right on that.
If you’ve an eye for pleasant vistas and fine architecture, it’s time you checked out BLDGBLOG. It’s full of interesting tidbits about urban planning and building design, and the occasional poignant observation:
Malfunctioning fire alarms going off inside foreclosed homes have become a major distraction for fire departments in suburban Arizona, according to ABC15 News. Fire fighters, however, cannot legally enter a property unless they see smoke or have obtained the owner’s permission. But in an era of bank ownership and rampant foreclosure, even finding the owners can take weeks.
The result is that “neighbors have to listen to the alarm until the battery dies, which can take days.”
First we were surrounded by ruins, and then those ruins began to sing.
What in the crap?
Oh, I believe it all right.
If you’re a dork like me, you love to read things like this: 15 Classic PC Design Mistakes. Note that while it says “PC,” it means this in the broadest sense; Macs and Apples are included, as are a number of old “legacy” systems. If you like that, you should also check out: the Ten Worst PC Keyboards Of All Time. The modern keyboard has become so universal (aside from minor differences in backspace keys and the like) that we forget how insane some of the early keyboards are. I had forgotten how kludgey my old C64 keyboard was.
Now that digital photography is all the rage[1], I think it’s time to stage an intervention: folks, any printer you can afford is not going to make a nice photo.
I know HP and Epson and Canon have promised you that your printers will make quality prints, but they won’t. They will make “half-decent” prints for a short while, and then things will get clogged and the pictures will be streaky. Even when they’re new, the shots come out grainy, with colors out of a cross-processing nightmare. IT’s fine if you just want a picture of your kids to go in your wallet, but here’s the thing: too many people, myself included, are hanging framed artistic shots that look like seven asses in a speedo.
There’s no reason to put up with this. Sure, you have to wait a while, but places like Shutterfly can produce fantastic, inexpensive prints and mail them straight to your door, and they charge you nothing to store your pictures (unlike Kodak, which is now asking you to cough up for that service). There are even options wherein a local pharmacy or megamart can produce them for you to be picked up later in the day! Walgreens will do it, and also Walmart, although if you’re like me going to Walmart causes me to donate vast sums to whichever political party supports eugenics.
If you’re looking at a photo printer, ignore internet advice or anything you might read in Consumer Reports. The only thing you need to know about photo printers is this: can you afford the one you’re looking at? If so, it’s a piece of crap. The only photo printers worth their salt are the ones purchased by professional printing services, which are thousands of dollars. You do not have thousands of dollars to spare, or you wouldn’t be reading this: you’d be sitting on a beach in Cabo drinking heavily. At least, I sure would.
Ah, sweet, sweet desperation.
Click the link fo’ mo’.
I’m watching the situation in Iran with absolute awe. I said earlier that I’ve never seen anything like this, and I supposed that’s not true; tearing down the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR are similar, but not even half as well communicated. Even in a country where the government is continually blocking access to websites, preventing people from reporting on the situation, news is getting out. People around the world are setting up proxy servers to enable Iranian bloggers to post pictures and videos, and as has been noted elsewhere, Twitter has finally made it clear what a spectacular application it can be.
Andrew Sullivan, it should be no surprise, has taken the lead on coverage, with links to the Twitterers on the scene, commentary on how the cable news networks have just about ignored the situation, and good snarky comments on how the Neo-Conservative movement appears to be supporting Ahmedinejad. He’s even redone his blog theme in green to show “solidarity,” a strange word to hear from a conservative blogger.
I’ve added a bunch of Iranian folks to my twitter feed and the stories they send out are insane. They’ve made it possible to find things out like Basij thugs firing AK-47s into crowds and university dormitories being assaulted by government troops. There is a downside, of course; the government is opening its own Twitter accounts to disseminate fake information. If you’re interested, look at @StopAhmadi and @change_for_iran, both of which are reportedly very real.
BTW: lest we all forget, this is why we have a Second Amendment. “But this could never happen here,” you say. You keep thinking that.
