Geek On The Mountain

So maybe a few ounces isn’t exactly a lot of bulk…

We had a pediatrician appointment today and the girls have both put on weight. Inara is just over her birth weight and Pagan is just below. Both put on weight since their appointment last week. These are their first weight “gains” per se, so it’s nice to see. I think Pagan is slightly behind only because she burns so many calories crying.

For those who don’t know (I had no idea until a week or so ago), babies actually lose weight after they’re born. Within a couple of weeks they should start to put weight back on and apparently once they’re back up their birth weight they’ll put on about a half an ounce every day.

This is also their two week birthday.

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Sometime in the past couple of weeks one of our sites got linked to in a rather bad manner. The site was pretty pathetic actually. It was just a bunch of literally anonymous people (nearly no one was identified by email address or URL) bitching about all kinds of stuff. I almost feel bad for them if that’s what they spend their time doing. At any rate, my first thought was that there was no reason to let these jerks link to us, so I used apache’s wonderful mod_rewrite to block all traffic from that site.

As I was perusing the docs for mod_rewrite I noticed that it now supports cookies and I had a great idea about no only blocking/redirecting traffic from an offending site, but setting a cookie to stop them from coming back by just typing in the URL as well. It was a really good idea. Until it didn’t work. Our version of Apache is too old and our mod_rewrite doesn’t support cookies. So I decided I’d just do it with PHP instead.

The PHP script is really simple. It just checks the referer (the technical term….it’s referrer in english of course ) and if it’s from the banned site it sets a cookie and then redirects the user to someplace else. You can send them to some other website, back to the referring site, or just to a different page on your own site (like a 404 error page for example). Afterwards, even if they type in your URL by hand (so there’s no referer), the script sees their cookie and just redirects them again. You can set how long you want them to be banned for as well.

It probably would have been only slightly simpler to use mod_rewrite instead of PHP. I just generally like the idea of being able to do things to a visitor before they even load a page.

So, if you want to stop stupid people from showing up at your site (or even a specific page) because another stupid person posted a link somewhere, this script’s for you. Of course it won’t stop anyone smart enough to realize what’s going on and just turn off cookies, but it will stop the other 99.8% of people out there.

Instructions are included in the file.
bad_url_block.php
(right click and “save as” and remove the .txt)

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I don’t think “first Thanksgiving” really means anything when they’re only a week and a half old, but it makes for a good title for the post.

It went fine though. They didn’t quite seem up to turkey, so they just stuck to milk/formula. Which is really what they had the day before. And the day after. And…Well, I’m sure they didn’t really notice it was a holiday.

I tried to watch the Lions play. I gave up a little ways into the fourth quarter. This is similar to how I watched the first three games and then just gave up on watching them for the season. They always suck (it’s a Ford thing), but this year they’re sucking with confidence. It would have been kind of nice if they could have pulled a win out of their ass for once, but not so much. I always figure it looks worse when it’s this huge national thing… the only game being played at the time. Come to think of it, that has to be annoying for everyone involved really. We all get to see football every year on Thanksgiving, but it’s pretty much never a good game. At least they have the second game now..

The babies did go to the doctor on Friday and they seem to have thrush, which from I gather isn’t terribly uncommon. For the really stupid part though, they put gentian violoet, a purple dye, in their mouths. Being the day after, I can say that it did seem to help them out, but come on…. it’s purple dye! I mean really. They stick their hands in their mouths and chew on their clothes and everything gets all purple. Plus, it’s in their mouth, so it doesn’t really dry up to quickly. Effective, but a stupid idea nonetheless. They also have some medication they’re supposed to take. My favorite part is how it says on the bottle that you’re supposed to swish it around in your mouth and then gargle. Honestly, I told them to do it but I don’t think they understood. (Instead we kind of spread it on with a q-tip…I believe the idea is that it’s supposed to remain in contact for a short period of time). I don’t think any of it causes them any pain or discomfort really. Actually, I smelled the medicine, and it’s cherry flavored. Seeing as though they’ve never had flavored anything, it should be quite the treat.

Beyond that, we haven’t done much. We did manage to watch all three X-Men movies. We got X3 from netflix and figured we’d re-watch the first two. It seemed rather anti-climactic to me, but it was still pretty good.

And then there’s dice. I’ve developed a strange obsession with dice over the last several days. That’s a lie really, I’ve “liked” them for a long time. I’ve just been thinking about it lately. Mind you, I don’t mean boring 6 sided dice with dots on them. I’m talking about cool looking polyhedral dice: 8 sided, 12 sided, 20 sided, etc. I used to play D&D years ago and I had a bunch of dice. We generally played at one guys house and I always left all my stuff there, including when I moved away. I rarely go back to that town (nor does the guy who’s house the stuff was at for that matter, though much more often than I) and I’ve fallen out of touch with everyone anyways, so I never did get my stuff. Not that I’ve ever really cared, mind you. I don’t exactly have time to play D&D nor do I know anyone in the area who does, and those two things have been true for a long time now. But now I find myself thinking about dice…. I’ll have to find a hobby shop around here and pick some up. They’re so cheap that I’m sure shipping costs will ruin any benefit of buying them online. Unless I can’t find cool speckled ones..

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Can anyone read the new theme?

Milenka set this up for me last week sometime. I like it. She actually had me all setup with a similar one a couple of months ago, but I never got around to customizing the sidebar or anything so that I could use it. She gave up on me and did the sidebars herself this time.

There are a couple of things left to do to it, but the biggest problem is the size of some of the fonts. It probably doesn’t look quite so small for those running at less than 1600×1200, but it’s really hard to read here. I’ll eventually hunt down the spot where I can change that at.

Otherwise, it’s a refreshing change of pace. I think.

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Everyone has been home for two nights now and I must say, it goes much easier at home.

First of all, we have a co-sleeper which allows the babies to be right next to the bed. This means that you (basically) don’t even really have to get out of bed to take care of them when they wake up, which makes a huge difference. Secondly, our huge bed has plenty of room to put them in between us if need be without having to worry about them falling. Hospital beds are, of course, quite narrow and don’t even come close to allowing for this. It’s also easier because I’ve just given up…

Two nights ago they slept pretty well. They were up all the time, but since we could stay in bed it was easier on the all and all. We basically took two shifts of taking care of them. We actually hadn’t planned it that way, but it just so happens to work out that once I fall asleep I really won’t much notice the crying for the first few hours so that’s how it worked out

Last night was even better. I went to sleep expecting to wake up in 3 or 4 hours, but instead I got nearly 6. Milenka fell asleep and they were quiet for almost 4 hours and consequently I got plenty of sleep. It worked out great. My actual plan was to just literally get up with them when it was my turn and go in the den with them instead of trying to sleep for 10 minutes before one of them started making noise again. I ended up doing that anyways, but it was after a (nearly) full nights sleep though so it was more like just getting up a little earlier than usual.

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