Gremlin’s Fireside Chat

Happy Chinese new year!!! – and there is the rub. Our daughter Maeve – the elemental force of day to day life these days – comes home and announces that she is a ‘Rat’ and is very proud of it. Rat – what do you mean ‘Rat’? Maeve attends the excellent ‘educate together school’ in Donabate and as part of their multi-cultural view of education they have been learning about the Lunar New Year which is also known as the ‘Chinese New Year’ despite being common across many cultures and areas of Asia.

As part of this it was explained to Maeve by ‘teacher’ (a nice young lass) that based on her birthday (Jan 16 2008) Maeve was a ‘rat’; No problem there you might think – according to Chinese mythology Rats have many positive characteristics. The problem was though Maeve was told by Teacher she was a ‘Rat’ where as in reality she is a ‘Pig’. Maeve was born in the year of the Pig (2007-2008) rather than the year of the Rat (2008-2009) and because Teacher told her she is a ‘Rat’ rather than a ‘Pig’ Maeve won’t accept what I am saying – even though I have doubled checked it.

Meeting Teacher tomorrow (as I do most mornings recently) is going to ‘interesting’. How do I tell her that she was ‘wrong’ and how will she tell Maeve? As the chinese say ‘we live in Interesting times’.

Before you ask … I am a ‘Dragon’ and good lady wife is a ‘Pig’.

What is man but an amass of conflictions – Conflictions of emotions, of being, of purpose.
To be a man – a human man is to be essentially alone.
Love transcends these barriers, but is itself like quicksand forever moving.

Circ 2000

Open-ID is a great concept; not too sure how big its going to get, but I think its going to be massive. What better than one place dedicated to doing authentication  and sign up and then third party products and websites using the authentication and permission systems of the first company/entity to do the actual login. Makes sense to me; save writing up all that pesky login code, and from a user perspective you only have to write down all those user names and passwords for the various websites you use.

So how does this related to the title of this posting? Well I was reading Mike Desjardins article on “A reason to hate enterprise Java” which gave a link to another one by Scribd on the “Java Technology Concept Map”. This latter page allows you to download the article as a PDF – but you have to subscribe to the site to do so. Surprisingly this is the first site I came across that gave you an option to login via open-ID, and this already peaked my interest since I knew basically what open-id is but at the time did not have one. So off I went to the Open-ID site and off the main page there is a link to where to get an Open-ID and to my surprise Flickr, Wordpress and Yahoo are all listed as providers. In the end all I had to do was to in the login page for the “Java Technology Concept Map” put “yahoo.com” and sign in using my Yahoo account and I could download the article.

Hope you find it useful.

For developers who want to use Open-ID with their product you might be interested in Open-ID’s Developer Page.

Its amazing how fast they learn to walk, and I am impressed at Maeves progress. On 26th Dec 2008 Maeve took her first three steps; by Monday February 2nd 2009 she could follow me from living room to kitchen and back. By today February 9th she pretty much walks everywhere (with the odd fall) and she is so proud of herself.

From 1st steps to regular walking = 38 days.

I forgot to mention the fact that Maeve has 8 teeth with 3 coming through – thats 11.

Poor Maeve is ill – but on the road to recovery thank God. On Monday Maeve became lethagic, sleep, whiny, not  and more worryingly had a high temperature – some 38-39 degrees; very hot to touch. “The Redhead” gave me a call in work and said that she had made an appointment with the local Doctor to find out whats wrong with our little bundle of joy. Fortunately I managed to get home and down to the doctors before the consultation took place.

As it turns out Maeve is suffering from Tonsillitus – a very painful affliction for an adult let alone a 11 month old baby. The doctor perscribed a 5 day course of antibiotics, and there the fun started.  The antibiotic does not taste nice and it got to be a real game to try to Maeve to take her medicine. She would purse up her lips, and move head from side to side – a real problem. The best solution we found was a plastic dropper bought from the local chemist and the expediency of sticking in my finger so she could not close her mouth and the insert the dropper and squeeze.

Its been three days and at last her temperature has returned to normal and some of her bubbly personality has started to resurface.