TheSwirl.org

We got a small tricycle for Eric yesterday and he tooled around on the deck learning how to make it move, ring the bell and steer.  He had a blast and it was a lot of fun watching him enjoy it.

The temperatures rose to a balmy 40 degrees today and we ventured outside for awhile. Eric made bubbles under the supervision of Christmas Moose.

I want to give my impression of two software tools that I have recently used: Mozilla Thunderbird - the open source mail client and Picard - the free MP3 tagger from Musicbrainz.

I have been a long time customer of Qualcom’s Eudora mail client for my home email accounts.  I started out on the Apple Macintosh and migrating to PCs.  I have convinced many of family members to use Eudora as well.  I have been at home using my laptop from work to answer email and browse the internet and using Dreamscape’s Webmail client was getting a little tiresome. I downloaded and installed Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/).  The user interface is a lot like Eudora and the free mail client that comes with Ubuntu.  So far I like it a lot and it is free.  There are some recommended plugins - such as a calendar function - that I haven’t used yet, but I plan to try them as well.

I had a bunch of albums on CDs that I had burned that no longer retained their ID.  Whereas MusicBrainz tagger operated on a track by track basis Picard (http://musicbrainz.org/wd/PicardDownload) is an album oriented browser.  It uses a clustering algorithm to associate the tracks with candidate albums and then the user selects the album and the song titles and IDs are re-labelled.  I had a couple of failures, when it seemed to find a match but didn’t re-label the files  but overall it worked well.

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Overall this hip operation is a lot less painful and is recovering much faster than my previous one, considering that I was still in the hospital 9 days ago.

Yesterday I walked using just one crutch. I don’t go fast, but it is quieter and takes less space than the walker. I also crawled on our exercise bike and peddled for about 20 minutes to see how my hip would react. Since things seemed OK I did 30 minutes on the bike this morning and plan to do another 30 this afternoon, depending on how sore I am. It isn’t the load on the muscles, but more the degree of bending/flexing that the bike causes at this point.

A positive is that I can accommodate more sleeping positions and even managed to lay for 20 minutes on my right hip. This means I am not as stiff waking up in the morning, because I can move around a little.

Since I got my staples removed on Friday I can now shower - which is greatly preferably to washing up at the sink every day. I can’t reach below my knee on my right leg, so I still need help with my sock & sneaker on that side. I need to be careful about what pants I wear so I don’t irritate the incision. For most days when I am stuck at home, sweat pants are the preferred attire.

I finished listening to the 1st Harry Potter book. I can see why it is popular with young kids and pre-teens, but I doubt if I will read/listen to the rest of the series. Yesterday I read the book “Busting Vegas” by Ben Mezrich about the MIT Math kids that play Blackjack for a living. It is a good follow up to his 2003 book “Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions”. Now I am already searching for more to read.

Eric and I have been playing a lot of card games - mainly pitch and war which are both similar in Eric’s version. He gets to chose what cards he gets out of the deck and has quickly learned about face cards. Play begins with him asking me to go 1st and then him picking out a face card from his pile to ensure victory. I figure it is good for him as he is learning his numbers. He still gets his face cards mixed up and 6s, 9s, and 8s, but he recognizes the rest of the cards. He had a Eureka moment the other night when he recognized the college basketball players were wearing numbers on their jerseys like the numbers on his cards!