The last twenty-five days have been very educational. I've learned at least three major new sets of skills!
The most practical skills I've learned are Baby Skills. The last few weeks have been baby boot camp. I've learned how to hold the baby in a number of different positions that are comfortable for both of us. My favorite is a one-armed monkey-on-a-branch kind of hold. I can even eat while holding the baby! I've learned how to burp and "fart" the baby. I got eight farts in a row out of him once! Beat that high score! I am an expert ass-wiper. And most importantly, I've learned to interpret baby body language. Red face, arched back, clawing at the throat, and a series of slow, low screeches means there's a burp that needs to come out. A similar cry with legs flailing is a fart. A mild but inconsolable whimper is almost certainly a wet or dirty diaper. When he starts giving me purple nurples and head-butting me, it means he wants to eat. If all of his needs appear to be met, but he's still being a grumble monkey, then he probably just wants to cuddle or something... And when it's finally time for him to sleep, I've learned a few good techniques for knocking him out and keeping him down. Booyah, baby! I win! Baby skills!
Instead of sleeping when the baby was sleeping, I decided to learn other skills. One of these was learning how to phonetically read Arabic (specifically the Naskh script). I know it seems like a weird skill to learn, but I just follow my obsessions, I don't really pick them... I had recently gotten my old genealogy website back online with a new version of the software and... well... long story short I'm super Type A about the information in there, so I was trying to get people's names and locations in there in the native language. I got Ilya to put enter his family's names in Russian, and while Andrea's dad was here, I had him enter his family's names in Arabic. So, for example, instead of "Kamel Mustafa Abdine", I had him enter "كامل موصطفى عابدين". After populating the database with all of these Arabic names, I wanted to learn how to actually read them... so I did, thanks to my father-in-law Mohamad, the Shariah Program, Madinah Arabic, and various Wikipedia articles. I don't really know any words or grammar yet, but I know the alphabet, and I can pronounce most words with reasonable accuracy considering that they don't write down the vowels in Arabic words...
After the high of learning how to read Arabic dulled a little, I found yet another obsession: IPv6. It's a new protocol that was designed a decade ago to fix a lot of problems with the current Internet Protocol (IPv4). Apparently it wasn't sexy enough though, because even now, after we've officially run out of IP addresses, it's still hard to find anyone who actually uses the new protocol... The closest analogy I can make is to the whole Y2K thing. Do you remember that? Do you remember what a disaster it was? Me either. The IPv4 to IPv6 transition is like that. It needs to happen at some point kinda soon, it's gonna be a ton of work for us IT people, and no one will really notice or care when it happens... Anyway, it's bleeding edge and neato and there's a whole other Internet out there running on IPv6 that no one even knows about that I wanted to be a part of, so I decided to connect to it! That decision was the easy part. I'm still working on actually getting everything working... I signed up for a 6in4 tunnel from Hurricane Electric since Grande Communications (my ISP) doesn't yet have an IPv6 infrastructure. I had to install DD-WRT on my router, because the factory firmware options for IPv6 didn't work for me. I've now been mucking about with settings in my router and on my computers for about 3 days, but I've mostly done it! I have a web server serving content on the IPv6 Internet, and I can access the IPv6 world. Ha! Plus, my home network now supports up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 devices (that's eighteen quintillion, four hundred forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred forty-four trillion, seventy-three billion, seven hundred nine million, five hundred fifty-one thousand, six hundred sixteen). So, like, we're not running out of addresses again anytime soon. By comparison, the entire IPv4 Internet only supports a measly 4,294,967,296 devices (four billion, blah, blah, blah... There's not even enough for one per person! Lame!)
Anyway, I gotta go cuddle a baby.
Check me out at http://ipv6.evanstucker.com/ whenever you get on the new Internet.
مساء الخير