haggaret.com

This'll be a quick post. Grace was born this morning at 0830, weighing in at 8 lbs 11 oz, 20.5 inches long. Both Amy and Grace are doing great, in fact Grace is having a nice snooze right now.

Some photos have been uploaded to Flickr but only the ones taken with my iPhone (read: crap quality) cause I can't get Internet on the laptop. I'll upload the rest when I take a trip home in the next few days.

It was bound to happen I guess - the inevitable trip to emergency with Liam. He's a pretty high energy little guy and he loves to climb and run, and you can pretty much always find some scrapes and bruises on him from various mis-steps. Anyways, today while we were walking through a parking lot on our way to the car, he was holding onto my hand. He started lowering himself (crouching) so that he was hanging by his right arm. I pulled him up and swung him a bit forward to get him back on his feet. He thought that was a great game - so he did it a few more times. I really should have known better than to continue playing this particular 'game', but well... Anyways, on the last one (of course it was the last...I should say the third time) I felt something, like maybe two bones rubbing together and after that, Liam's mood immediately changed. He started kind of whining, not outright crying, just sort of whining. We put him in the car and drove home. When we got home, he didn't seem to want to use his right arm for anything, he just let it hang by his side. Well...it didn't take long before we decided that we had better go to see the doctor. We hadn't actually planned to go to the hospital, we were hoping to just go to our regular drop-in clinic, but sadly it was closed when we drove by.

When we got to the hospital, we were just going to ask the triage nurse if we should stay or simply go find a clinic somewhere, and she said we might as well stay since we were already there. It didn't take long, maybe 10 minutes, before the triage nurse actually had time to sit down with us. After that, it was maybe another 5 minutes before getting registered. We went straight from registration to a small waiting room with a few other people. There was a young girl (and her parents) who had fallen off a horse and broke her arm and another older couple - not sure what the woman was there for. Anyways, Liam had a great time playing with the older gentleman, even calling him Grampie a few times. :)

I think we waited maybe 45 minutes in the small waiting room before a doctor came to check on Liam. We told him what happened and he said that he figured it was "nursemaid's elbow", which is something that can happen to children quite commonly. Basically a ligament in the arm gets pushed out of place and stuck behind a bone - or something like that. He said that it is quite commonly misconceived as a dislocated elbow. Anyways, he took Liam's elbow in his hands and did some manipulation - which Liam didn't seem to mind much (he's such a tough guy) until the very end - and then voila! Liam was completely back to normal! It was amazing the transformation. Whereas before he would whine if he moved his arm at all, after the doctor did whatever it was that he did, he was back to climbing on the chairs and running around, just being Liam.

The doctor sent Liam for an x-ray of his elbow, 'just for completeness' before he let us go. The x-ray showed that nothing was wrong and Liam was definitely back to his normal self. The doctor, Dr. Montgomery, was fantastic! He took the time to explain everything to us and was just generally a really nice guy. He had a good sense of humour about everything and left us feeling like we made the right choice for bringing Liam in. That being said, he did say that if it happens again to maybe wait a couple of hours to see if it sorts itself out, which quite often it will apparently.

So - we were in and out within a couple of hours! That's pretty damn good if you ask me! It cost us $13 in parking fees, but that's nothing when you consider we went in with a little boy who was hurting and left with a little boy who was happy as a clam!

This saga started back in October of 2007 when I first submitted a 'change request' for an incorrectly named road in the New River Beach area of NB. I submitted the change directly to NAVTEQ and eventually got a response back from them in May of 2008 saying that they had made the change. I wondered how long it would take before I saw the change on Google Maps. Well just the other day I was playing around with my iPhone and the Google Maps App on it and decided I'd go and have a look. Turns out that Google has indeed picked up the name change, as you can see from the photo accompanying this post. The weird thing is that when I visit google maps from a compter, it still shows the old name - see here. So, it looks like the maps being used by the Google Maps application on the iPhone are more up to date than those available to everyone else. What's up with that?

UPDATE: I was really curious about this, so I did a bit more digging. It seems that the maps that are available through Google's API for maps are also the more up to date maps. I checked out the maps at gmap-pedometer.com and they too have the updated road name. Just to be sure, I checked out the maps on activesteve.com as well and sure enough - updated road name there too. Interesting that they don't use the most up-to-date maps for themselves... BTW - the 'most up-to-date' does't mean they are correct, I've seen at least a couple of errors in the maps so far.

I just pledged Duane who is participating in a 'blogathon'. It's an interesting concept, and definitely an impressive feat - a blog post ever half hour for 24 hours - especially for someone like me who sometimes goes months with no activity on my blog. Anyways, if you have some time, head on over to his blog and have a read. If you're feeling generous, you could even pledge him.

Lately I've been wondering if I should make the switch from Drupal to WordPress. It's funny, cause way back when I first started this blog, on the advice of Boris, I started it using WordPress. That lasted for a short while and then I decided that I really needed to be using Drupal, since that is what Boris himself was using, plus a few other friends were also using it at the time. I went through the painful process of copying my content over manually - not that there was a whole lot of it - and I've been pretty happy with Drupal ever since. I guess I figured that Drupal would give me more control over my site, and what I was able to do with it, but after having used it for a few years now, this site is nothing more than a very sporadically updated blog of mine - so why not just go with a nice easy blogging CMS like Wordpress? The added bonus of course would be the WPtouch theme that Duane and Dale Mugford developed. Anyways, I've just been thinking about it. Haven't looked into any sort of utility for converting my content from the drupal DB to a Wordpress one...

Well I guess Apple got their way, after hoping that that my WiFi stability troubles would go away with the latest OS X update, and then realizing that they didn't - I am at the point of being so sick of the dropouts I'm experiencing (to my network) with my macbook that I'm willing to shell out the $$ to buy an Apple AP; specifically the airport extreme. To be fair, I'm not convinced this is actually a problem with my macbook not playing nicely with my AP, but more thinking it's a problem with my POS access point. I've used the macbook in a bunch of different locations now, with different APs and I only get the dropouts occuring at home so... Anyways, placed the order today for this new unit and I'm looking forward to getting it. It'll play nicely with my macbook and iPhone and I plan to plug a USB hub into it and connect my printer and external HDD to it. That way I should be able to print, even if the iMac is asleep, and I'll have a backup solution for my macbook which I'm currently missing. Fantastic! The only thing I'll be missing now is the AppleTV, but that should come within a few months I think. :)

Check out the screen capture to the right of this post. A piece of SPAM showed up in my SPAM folder today and when I took a closer look at it, it was sent to homdepot at haggaret dot com. The only place I would have used that address would have been to sign into the Home Depot webpage, and I don't think it is supposed to be publicly visible. To me that means that they must have sold my email address. Not cool at all.

BTW, I do this for nearly all website where they ask for an email address. Makes it easy to filter incoming mail and also to find out if they are doing stuff like selling your address...

I've never lined up early for something before today, well not really, I mean I've waited to get into restaurants, movies and amusement park rides, but nothing like this. So, prior to today I had sent an email out to a few people I knew who were thinking of getting an iPhone, seeing if anyone wanted to join me in the waiting game this morning. Most people said no, but one friend said that he'd join me. Unfortunately (for me) on Thursday night he backed out, saying he had something else to do. At that point, I wasn't sure if I was going to bother going alone or not. I watched the eleven o'clock news to see how many people had queued up already to get a feel for whether or not it was worth it to go the next morning. It didn't look like a whole lot of people were there so I decided that I'd get up early and head down to have a look.

I set my alarm for 0600, but was up by 0530 and out the door before 0600. It was a bit wet out, having rained over night and I thought this would help my chances of being in a decent place in line. I drove downtown and cruised by the Rogers store on Bank St - the one that was supposed to open early at 0800. There seemed to be a decent lineup, but I parked the car and added myself to the end of the line.

As most people who know me know, I've been anxious to get my hands on an iPhone ever since they were first released. Sadly it took more than a year for the thing to come to Canada (yes I know I could have bought one, unlocked it, etc) but now that it is finally arriving - we are getting the latest and greatest, and at the same time as the rest of the world - that is good news indeed! Anyways, when Apple announced that the iPhone 3G was coming on July 11th, I was all set to rush out and get one...until Rogers announced their rate plans that is. After careful consideration, I decided that it just didn't make sense at the prices they were offering and so I signed the petition at ruinediphone.com and set about moping and cursing Rogers. I also decided to send them an email to express my displeasure, here it is:

This post is more so I can remember that this happened than anything else. Got my first (?) ace today while out golfing with JK at lunch. It was on hole 1 in Kanata from the red tee. It was a forehand throw and I used my Hawk, which I haven't used in a really really long time. Why the red tees? Well JK and I (and sometimes Dave) go out and play the Kanata course quite a bit at lunch time and since it is only a 9 hole course, we play each hole from the blue tee and also the red tee. Why the question mark up next to first? Well I can't remember if I've ever gotten an ace before. While you'd think I might remember such a thing happening - you would be wrong, since I have a horrible memory. There is some speculation that I may have aced the original hole 4 at JC Park way back when, but nobody is really sure. Anyways, just wanted to make sure I mark it down somewhere so it's recorded for the history books. :)