Alex - Now Self Entertaining

Alex has finally reached the stage of his life where he can sit and play quietly by himself. About 3 weeks ago, he figured out how to sit on his own. This is not to say that he can get from lying position to sitting. Only that if we put him in a sitting position, he doesn't tip over... very much.

Alex Using Folding Chair

The next phase of the child training is to reduce the number of times that I have to get up to put Alex back into the sitting position after he tips over. Fortunately Will is very interested in this task. He will grab both of Alex's hands and pull him back into a sitting position. However, he doesn't understand that Alex has to get his balance back before he lets go. So typically Alex ends up tipping over again.

And, to answer the eternal question... how does Alex's development compare to Will's at this age? It seems to me that Alex is about a week behind Will. Will was sitting and standing at 4 months old. Standing, you might ask? Yes. Obviously not getting up to standing on his own or doing it without support, but able to hang onto something and not tip over. Here is the photographic evidence.

Will August 2006

The Personal Terabyte

Back in the day when we were lucky to have 10 gig drives to partition among our various installations of Redhat Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows 98, there was a project at Georgia Tech called the Personal Terabyte. I don't think if I was involved in these particular folks in the CoC, but as part of my "leisurely third" year, I took an 8000 level seminar class on what do with all that stuff filling up all that disk space. In particular, we were looked at heuristic algorithms to identify various components within images so you could find the particular image of the cat you wanted to turn into a lolcat. Anyhow, 10 years later, Angela and I bought a personal terabyte of our own. We've been spiraling towards success in this area for quite some time. We've had over a terabyte of TiVo storage for about 18 months, and I think my collected computers have about 750 gigs between them.

At any rate, here is a picture of Alex with the IOMEGA Terabyte NAS.



For those technically inclined, the NAS has 2 500 gig drives and is configured for redundant backup via RAID 1. Effectively, the result is a .5 Personal Terabyte shared among the four of us. So, it's really like a Personal Eighth of a Terabyte...