Bad Habits

I'm worried about Caedmon. Oh, I mean, he's growing, he's eating, he's sleeping. But alongside that, he's also learning all sorts of things that won't play well out in the real world.

He clearly believes that he's the center of the world. And my wife and I – and the dozens of visitors who show up every day to ooh and ahh over him – are doing precious little to disabuse him of that notion.

He thinks that he's badly malnourished. About eight times a day he thinks this, and lets us know quite loudly what he thinks of our obvious lack of concern for his nutritional state.

He thinks that everyone in the house needs to hear just how hard he's working at his latest bowel movement.

His idea of a schedule is to sleep all day and party all night.

He thinks it's perfectly appropriate to vomit the contents of his stomach onto whoever is holding him.

He believes that rubbing his butt around in a diaper full of yellow-mustard crap is the zenith of bliss, and that any attempt to remedy this situation is a fundamental threat to his life, liberty and happiness.

He believes that personal hygiene is an affair beneath his notice.

I get the impression we're going to be working on these bad habits of his for some time.

Again, missing the point on Vista

Larry Dignan, in his blog over on ZDNet, is continuing to miss the point on what's really wrong with Vista.

Microsoft's announcement that it is preparing a Vista Service Pack 1 beta in two weeks is curious on many levels. Although Microsoft delivers improvements via service packs I can't help but consider Vista SP1 a do-over.

He goes on to explain that most of what's supposedly coming in SP1 should already have been in the base OS, and that it's fundamentally "an indictment of Vista 1.0".

I can't complain about a new service pack for Vista (though I could certainly complain about the fact that it's about six months later than it should have been). And like everyone else, I really do wish that Vista was more stable out of the box, and had fewer compatibility issues.

But the real problem with Vista isn't its mediocre stability or its broken compatibility with so many different devices and software packages. It's that as a user, you don't get enough in return for the underlying changes that broke compatibility and that decreased stability. All things considered, taking the good with the bad, Vista is arguably better than XP. But it's not enough better to make it interesting. It's mildly better. It has a couple of really stupid features, and half a dozen fairly nice ones.

But note carefully: it took the world's largest software company, and some thousand of the world's best developers, five years to release a slightly improved version of Microsoft's most important product.

That's as clear a signal of an impending "inflection point" as I've seen in my career. I'm not entirely clear yet on what it means, but there's no doubt that it means something big. The times, they are a changin'.

Pentax K10D

Up until recently, my digital SLR was a Nikon D50: a basic, but basically functional DSLR. I liked it, and liked it well enough to take almost anywhere – right up to the point where I took it up Mt. Adams a month ago, and then like an idiot (a lot like an idiot, according to my wife) left it in the trailhead parking lot. Once I gave it up for lost, our deal was that I couldn't buy a new one until I made all the arrangements to get our roof replaced, but then Caedmon began showing signs of arriving early, and I took advantage of "unexpected circumstances" to acquire a new camera in time for his birth. I'd initially been planning to go with the Nikon D80, but at the last minute I decided to go with the Pentax K10D instead. My father is a longtime Nikon aficionado, and honest to God, we spent more time discussing my switch to a Pentax camera than my switch to a Presbyterian church. Priorities, you know.

So now that I've had the camera for a couple weeks, and have mostly put it through its paces, I thought I'd give some initial thoughts on it.

Likes:

• It's got a weatherproof body. Since most of my photos (so far) are taken in situations where the camera might indeed get wet, and I already lost my first D50 to a leaky water bottle, this is a major plus.
  
• The vibration reduction (built into the body itself!) seems to work pretty well. I can take pictures at 1/10 second or slower and have them generally show up clear. From what I can tell, this is even better than the results I got from my very expensive (and now lost) Nikkor VR 18-200 lens. And as a result, I plan on using the Tamron 18-250 lens, which is about $300 cheaper than the equivalent Nikkor, and is a tad more powerful.
  
• It's about $100 cheaper than the D80. Not a huge price differential, but worth noting.
  
• It has a dust-removal system on the sensor that seems like a pretty cool idea. Can't say that I ever noticed the lack on the D50, but it's a nice thought.

Dislikes:

• The automatic white balance setting needs a ton of work. My Dad swears by setting the white balance manually, but I never noticed much of a need to do so on my D50. But indoors with the K10D, if you leave it on the "automatic" setting, the resulting pictures end up way too warm. You can address this by setting it manually, of course, but then you have to remember to change it again when you switch lighting.
  
  As an example, this picture was taken using the "automatic" white balance setting. Notice how yellow everything is.
  
  Just a second later (after I'd realized the white balance was wrong), this was taken using the "Tungsten" white balance setting:
  
  And this is (of course) what you get when you forget, leave it on "Tungsten" and use the flash:
  
  You can override all of this, of course, if you shoot RAW and fix it on your PC – but that's rather a pain.
  
• The built-in flash is very uneven, and doesn't work as well as the Nikon. Pictures that I've taken with the flash, even at short distances, tend to be badly underexposed.
  
  For instance, this picture was taken with my Dad's Nikon D200, with the built-in flash:
  

  And this one was taken with my Pentax K10D, again, with the built-in flash:
  

• Pentax doesn't have anything like the same "depth" in their accessories that Nikon has. None of the stores around here have anything but the barest selection of Pentax lenses. If I want to get anything decent, it's gonna have to be off of Amazon. Given that I'm probably only going to need a couple of basic lenses, this isn't a huge problem for me. But it's worth noting.

So would I make the same decision now? Hard to say. Possibly. If I can find workarounds for the problems I've noted, I would be very happy with it. As it is, I'm only moderately pleased. Anybody out there have any suggestions for me?

Bonding

We're slowly getting to know Caedmon, I think, and he's getting to know us. We're still learning, of course: sometimes when we think we've got something figured out, he'll change it up on us. Like last night: we thought we'd figured out how to get him onto a three or four hour schedule, and then he managed to maneuver us into feeding him maybe every half hour or so. I still don't quite know how he managed to pull that one off – but it made for a long night. (And now that we're well into the middle of the day, he's sleeping, well, like a baby.)

Most of the time, though, we seem to understand each other. It's easy to tell when he's hungry, of course: he turns his head hard, looks over one shoulder or the other, and opens his mouth wide. It's called "rooting", but you'd almost think that he'd just spotted a tasty breast hiding behind his head and was trying to catch it unawares. By watching him closely, it's usually possible to tell other things too: like which end the gas he's about to emit needs to come out of, or whether he's really done with the bottle (sometimes he likes to fake you out), or when he's just bored and wants to be held. He peed on us four times yesterday, though: given that the instrument in question is uncovered for perhaps .3% of the day, he must have an exquisite sense of timing. That's a behavior I'd like to figure out the cues for.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be going through this process with a baby that Galena and I had given birth to ourselves. Because we're adopting Caedmon, there are aspects of the bonding process that we don't have available to us. We can't search his face for signs that he might have my nose or Galena's cheeks; we can't blame his constant farting on any genes he may have acquired from me, or his fussing on the super-ego he inherited from Galena. When he yawns, he looks just like Emmanuel, his birth father: he doesn't look like me. I told a friend recently that the bonding process with an adopted infant feels a little like physical therapy after a brain injury: you can still get there, but you have to work at it more, and you have to learn, and take advantage of, different neural pathways.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote a letter to the (still unknown) birth father in the packet we put together for our adoption agency. This is how I put it in that letter:

In our journey through infertility, Galena and I have had to say goodbye to much that we have desired greatly. It has been exceedingly painful to know that I'll never be able to fall in love with my wife's cheeks on my daughter's face. I will never be able to argue with Galena whether our child has my grandfather's nose, or Galena's eyes, or whether our son's particular strain of stubbornness comes from her side of the family or mine.

But when we say farewell to these things that we hold so dear, I believe that we also open ourselves to the mystery of divine love. It is natural to hold close the child of your own flesh and blood: it is supernatural to entrust your child's care to another. It is understandable to desire a child of my own flesh and blood; it is a gift beyond words for someone to give me theirs. Adoption is a sometimes painful demonstration that, as human beings, we can be more than our biology, more than mere nature: that grace may sometimes still turn us into something that we might be but were not. As Jesus said, "Until a seed dies, it abides alone." And I believe that in precisely this way, God will honor your sacrifice, and will bless your child.

I know that Galena and I won't be perfect parents. Like all human beings, we will make mistakes and will be impatient. At times we will fail to show to our children precisely the grace that God has shown us. But we will also love the child you fathered with everything we have: and the child you helped to bring into the world, we pledge our honor to shepherd through it.

As I consider what adoption means, to me and to Galena, to you and to your partner, and to our child, I remember what the apostle Paul once said, that we are all God's children by adoption. It is an astonishing gift – once our eyes open to see it – that we are able to partake of the divine life in this fashion. I hope one day to tell our child this story.

On the Water

Keith and I played hooky today and went fishing on the Puget Sound. It was a fishing trip I "gave" him for his birthday a year and a half back, and we finally got around to scheduling it. We're both kind of lame that way. But the weather today was the sort that has fooled any number of unwary visitors into moving to Seattle after a short summer visit: gorgeous blue sky, perfectly calm water, mountains everywhere you looked – and a fish on the line every few minutes.

Matt McCulloch, the owner and principal guide of Tyee Charters, was perfect: he swore just enough to be interesting, knew exactly where the fish were and how to get them, and understood a lot more about Internet marketing than I expected. When we weren't talking about the best depth to run our lures, we were talking about SEO and AdSense. Turns out that small business owners use the Internet to market themselves. Who knew?

We only took two fish home, but we pulled a lot more up to the boat: either they were too small to keep, or they were Kings and hence out of season. But it was as good a day fishing as I've had, and I recommend it.

More.

Whining about Vista

Over on ZDNet, Ed Bott has posted a defense of Vista that amounts to damnation by faint praise. He rightly points out that XP had roughly the same problems in its introduction that Vista is having right now: not enough drivers, buggy third-party drivers, minimal support-by-Google-query. I think he's missing the point, though. Vista was supposed to be better than XP, and as an operating system, it's nothing short of disappointing.

There are two things I actually like about Vista: integrated desktop search, and reasonably cool photo management. XP doesn't come out of the box with either of them, but MSN Desktop Search is a reasonable substitute for the former, and Picasa is a pretty good substitute for the latter. On the whole, I do prefer Vista to XP. But not much. A little. I suppose. So if Vista is a mildly improved OS, why did we have to wait five frigging years for it? Yes, I know that they rewrote the whole thing underneath. I'm very pleased. But it doesn't actually help me in any interesting way.

Like I said in an earlier post, MS needs to be careful. There's a real opportunity here for Linux here – and given the recent popularity of everything Apple, an even bigger opportunity for OSX.

And I'll be damned if my brother doesn't think the same thing. Scary, that.

Oh, and on a side note: my Pocket PC phone successfully synchronizes with my Vista desktop about 10% of the time. It's probably because all the relevant software is written by different companies that never talk to each other. (Hint #1: it's all written by Microsoft.) Or because it's a 1.0 release and MS hasn't had a chance to get everything figured out. (Hint #2: MS released the first version of ActiveSync eight years ago.) Or because Microsoft doesn't have enough resources to troubleshoot these sorts of problems. (Hint #3: MS has ~$50 billion in cash reserves.) Or because this isn't a very popular configuration. (Hint #4: Almost every professional I know has a Windows CE-based phone.)

Sigh.

At Home

Wow, they say that having a baby changes you, but you can't really explain it until it happens to you. Eight days ago I was a reasonable, reasonably intelligent human being. Now I find it entirely normal to discuss dirty diapers around the dinner table with my closest friends and family. The color of Caedmon's piss has become a topic of some moment between my wife and I. We measure each ounce of liquid this little guy consumes, and count up how often he wets or dirties another diaper. We get up multiple times in the middle of the night to help him do more of this.

Damn good thing he's cute.