Moving today went as about as well as you could possibly ask for. The movers arrived at a few minutes to 9, had most of the place packed up within 30 minutes, and I think we headed to the new place in a little over an hour.

Mad props to Handle With Care Moving. The guys were really great.

The rain also held off for the duration, thankfully.

There's just dregs left at the old place, oh and the entire kitchen. I think we're both subconsciously dreading (and therefore avoiding) moving the kitchen stuff, because we really don't want to unpack at the new place, because the kitchen is going to get totally destroyed in hopefully a couple of weeks time.

I'm finding wall space to be a bit of a premium at the new place. We're trying to keep the second bedroom as usable as a bedroom as possible, while primarily using it as a study, so that when we have house guests, we can throw some sort of bed down in that room and not have it all become ridiculously cluttered. When you've got desks all against one wall, a built-in wardrobe against another wall, and a full length sliding door on the other wall, that doesn't leave too many options for a bookshelf and retaining space for a bed. I think we might have to avail ourselves of some more elfa shelving and ditch the Ikea bookshelf we currently have.

On the other hand, our bedroom is looking pretty good. For the first time in ages, it's just going to be a bedroom. No desks, no filing, no storage. The wardrobe has less space than our old place, so we're having to be pretty ruthless with clothing. Oh, and the bathroom storage: way less. Not sure how we're going to sort that one out at the moment.

The phone and cable TV should get hooked up tomorrow, and then I'll get the DSL moved over, so hopefully by Wednesday, we'll have Internet connectivity.

We brought the cats over this afternoon. They're still confined to our bedroom at the moment until they calm down a bit.

We have until next Sunday to officially be out of the old place.

There's a release critical bug (that severity is debateable, in my opinion) in elfsign, a package I maintain.

It seems to my casual observation, that switching it to generate SHA1 signatures wouldn't be too hard, given it's using OpenSSL, and OpenSSL has a sha.h file. I really wouldn't know where to start, though, and ideally it should continue to verify existing MD5 signatures, so it's more than just changing an include and a few function calls.

To boot, upstream seems to have disappeared, so it's looking like removal is the best option. The popcon numbers for this package aren't very high either, which is another nail in the coffin.

So if someone reading this cares about elfsign in Debian enough to send me a patch to use SHA1 in the next month or so, I won't file a removal request.

This was born from a need to see how big a ZIP file I could send my accountant in Australia, and scratching the itch to write some code.

The fact that most SMTP servers talk Extended SMTP makes this relatively easy, and Python has some great modules for DNS and SMTP.

One gripe I do have is how long it takes the Python modules to mature. It's taken until Python 2.6 for smtplib.SMTP() to gain a timeout parameter, for example.

Anyway, I was able to write something nice and generic (it works for any domain) in around 100 lines, thanks in no small part to the DNS module, which makes getting a list of MX records stupidly easy.

$ ./maxmessagesize.py andrew.net.au
daedalus.andrew.net.au: -1
$ ./maxmessagesize.py pollock.id.au
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM: 35,651,584
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM: 35,651,584
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
$ ./maxmessagesize.py debian.org
master.debian.org: 104,857,600
$ ./maxmessagesize.py cameronp.com
mail1.mysmarthost.com: 30,000,000
mail2.mysmarthost.com: 30,000,000
$ ./maxmessagesize.py ubuntu.com
mx.canonical.com: 62,914,560
$ ./maxmessagesize.py clug.org.au
mx.clug.org.au: 50,000,000
$ ./maxmessagesize.py linux.org.au
morton.linux.org.au: 52,428,800

It's good to see that in most cases of domains I tried, all of the MXes had the same maximum message size.

Source code is here

Yesterday we went back to Stanford for another ultrasound and a fetal MRI.

We had pretty much the same gang doing the ultrasound as two weeks ago, so that was a nice bit of continuity. A paediatric radiologist came in at the end to take a look. She was the most confident of anyone that everything was going to be okay. She thought she could see something resembling the cavum septum pellucidum on the ultrasound. I think the ultrasound report said it was an "unusual shape" or something like that.

After that, we got packed off for the fetal MRI. There was a bit of a wait, as there's only one MRI machine for the children's hospital, and the studies tend to take 30 to 45 minutes, but we eventually got in.

I got to sit in the room with Sarah while they did the MRI. I was hoping to be able to sit in the control room instead, so I could look over their shoulder and see how it was all done. We both got earplugs because the machine is pretty noisy. It's not the hammering sound that they seem to go for on TV, it's more various different pitches of a horn.

The radiologist told us she'd probably read the MRI later that night, as there'd be a bit of a backlog with the long weekend, and that we'd get a call today.

Sarah got impatient this afternoon and called her obstetrician, and he called her back shortly afterwards saying he'd spoken to the radiologist and everything was fine. Exact specifics are not known at this time, but we'll be quizzing the obstetrician at our next appointment in a couple of weeks.

Needless to say, we're both extremely relieved that everything is okay, and can scrub one thing off the list of things to have to worry about at the moment. Now we can just concentrate on trying to move house this weekend.

We've got a walk-in wardrobe in the master bedroom of our new place, and the existing fittings were pretty crappy, so as part of the repaint, I ripped out the old stuff, and we bought some new elfa stuff from The Container Store.

We did the initial design a couple of weekends ago, and went back today to actually buy the stuff.

The whole process is pretty slick. You rock up with your measurements of the space, and a designer fiddles around with some special CAD software and does up a design for you, and that spits out a pick list of all of the bits you need, as well as what needs to be cut to custom lengths. A couple of hours later, you come back, and they wheel out a cart load of bits and pieces, you put it in your car and head home to put it all together.

I was initially a bit worried about the assembly, but it's even easier than IKEA. You get tailored instructions for your design, and the only point at which it anchors to the wall is at the top, and then everything hangs from there, so it's pretty hard to screw it up, and it's all adjustable. Added bonus: in an earthquake, it moves with the tremors instead of toppling over or ripping itself out of the wall.

I'm very impressed by the product, and absolutely love the result. It only took us a couple of hours tonight to slap everything together.

We listen pretty much exclusively to NPR in the car these days, and often when we're pottering around on the weekend, we catch A Prairie Home Companion. It's a light-hearted radio show, which makes us laugh.

When we learned that it was coming to town, we lashed out on some tickets. We went to the recording of today's episode at the War Memorial Opera House.

We had seats towards the back of the balcony on the fourth floor. The opera house is a beautiful building. The seating is incredibly steep. The stage was miles away, I wish I'd brought binoculars. The opera house normally holds 3200, but because there was no orchestra they could put in some extra seats. It was a full house.

It was cool to get to see how the show is put together, and we had an entertaining time.

We're not huge users of Caltrain, because frankly, it sucks. It's way slower than driving to San Francisco, and by the time you've paid for two return tickets, you might as well have driven and paid for parking.

That said, we do use it from time to time. One of the things I noticed when we first moved over here was this intriguing box on a pole, to the side of the normal ticket vending machine. It looked all battered and faded, kind of like a deprecated form of ticketing that had been phased out years ago. Except it looked too high-tech to be phased out.

Fast forward to four years later, and we're using Caltrain to get back from SFO after returning from Atlanta for Christmas, and there's this "Don't forget to tag off" TransLink poster inside the carriage. I'm now officially intrigued.

I did some browsing of their website on the journey home. How could this be? Hong Kong's MTR has the Octopus Card. London's Tube has the Oyster Card, and the Bay Area has TransLink? Why the hell isn't this thing being pimped out more? It's awesome! I mentioned it to a co-worker the other day, who's been in the Bay Area for 7 years, and he'd never heard of it.

So I signed up for it for myself and Sarah, and two cards promptly arrived. If you sign up with an autoload of $20 or more, there's no cost for cards at all.

So from now on, whenever we need to ride Caltrain (or BART or Muni, which are the public transport networks we're ever likely to use) we can just wave these cards at something and never have to worry about a ticket ever again. It's awesome. Apparently VTA is coming on board with it later this year, so that'll round things out nicely.

It sounds like it's been an epic implementation, starting back in 1999, and still rolling out ten years later. Better late than never.

The added bonus will be for our visitors. When they come, we can just give them these cards, and they won't have to deal with BART's utterly confusing (for casual riders) fare system.

One of my favourite things about Hong Kong was the MTR and the Octopus Card. Now we just need awesome mass transit for the Bay Area. Somehow, I think that's going to take even longer than TransLink.

I was driving home from a late night at work recently, and I was almost home, when the car behind me lit up like a Christmas tree.

My immediate reaction was, "Oh crap, I'm tired and I wasn't paying attention to my speed". So I pulled over.

To my relief, it wasn't my speed that was the problem, my left-hand tail light was out. The officer was very nice about the whole thing, but he gave me a fix-it ticket.

He told me I had until I think some time in February to fix the problem, then I had to get a police officer to sign off that it had been fixed. I thought that was the end of it, and continued on my way home.

The other day, I got this official looking letter in the mail the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara. My initial thought was, "ha, the fools have issued me a jury summons like they did for Sarah. Can't they tell I'm an alien? Nanoo Nanoo."

So I open the letter and start scanning it. It's a courtesy notice. The first actual sentences I run into start with "Failure to respond to this notice by the due date may result in your bail being increased...". Huh? Bail? What?

It turns out that there's a bit more to the fix-it ticket story. Not only do I have to get a police officer to sign off that I've had the tail light fixed, to avoid going to court, I have to pay a $25 "dismissal fee" (also known as California is broke and needs every dollar it can get).

Today was the first day that either of us have had any time to scratch ourselves, so we trekked off to Toyota. The guy yanked off the cover inside the boot, and was poking around to show us where to change the bulb, when lo and behold, it started working again. So it was just a loose connector. Dammit.

So now I have to track down a police officer. Preferably under the cover of darkness, as we've tinted the front windows of the Prius, which is apparently cause for another fix-it ticket. Although I'm struggling to find the wording that specifically says that.

renovate

v 1: restore to a previous or better condition
  2: make brighter and prettier

remodel

v 1: do over, as of (part of) a house
  2: cast or model anew

I much prefer the term renovate to remodel. Remodelling to me feels more like tearing down internal walls and changing the actual layout of the place. But we're in America, so remodelling it is.

We've had a bit of (mostly self-inflicted) scope creep. It started with just wanting to get some Ethernet cabling installed, then we decided to get recessed canned lighting (the whole lamp thing over here drives us nuts), and then we discovered that acoustic ("popcorn") ceilings are a haven for dust mites (we're both allergic) so it made sense to get the ceilings redone while they were putting the lights in. We're also getting the light switches replaced, and new childproof power outlets. We also got the electrical panel upgraded.

Removing popcorn ceilings is somewhat hilarious. They put down plastic everywhere, then have at it with a garden hose, and then it just scrapes off. The ceilings they've completely finished already look a million bucks, so we're very happy with the decision to do that. The Ethernet cabling installation caused a lot of wall carnage, so we're going to get the walls repainted as well.

Then we can get the carpets cleaned and stain proofed, and then we can start thinking about trying to move some non-essential stuff in. Hopefully it'll all be done by next weekend.

The kitchen cabinets have a six week lead time, so the kitchen remodelling will have to be done while we're living there.

Unfortunately some unexpectedly time demanding stuff has come up at work, right in the middle of this, so Sarah's had to do the bulk of the running around to sort out contractors for all of the work, and I've been stuck at work until all hours, 7 days a week. To cap it off, I've managed to come down with a cold, and feel quite crappy. NyQuil consumption is ensuing.

Sarah hit the 20 week mark on Monday, and so we had the big anatomical ultrasound. We also found out that it looks like we're having a girl. We're now trying to come up with a name.

There was also a worrying piece of news: they couldn't see the cavum septum pellucidum, while they were checking out her brain.

Apparently the cavum septum pellucidum is a particular marker they look for when they're checking everything out.

Now what the absence of the cavum septum pellucidum actually means isn't terribly clear. Apparently normally this is found along with other abnormalities, but the rest of her brain structures look fine. The nuchal translucency we had earlier in the pregnancy came back fine also.

So we got bustled off to have a chat with the genetic counsellor (during which the 4.1 earthquake happened). We got booked in for an amniocentesis for later that afternoon, as well as a fetal MRI at 22 weeks, and trundled off home.

To cap things off, when we were trying to park back at the hospital for the 2pm appointment, I managed to scrape the car up against one of the poles in the car park. (The lower level parking is notoriously tight). Note to self: always use the free valet parking service from now on.

Sarah had some second thoughts about the amniocentesis, as it does carry with it some risk of miscarriage, and after chatting with with a couple of the obstetricians, we elected not to do it. The fetal MRI should definitively determine if the cavum septum pellucidum is absent, and then we can talk to a paediatric neurologist about what the ramifications of that might be.

One of the reasons they wanted to do an amniocentesis now, rather than after the fetal MRI, is the amniocentesis itself takes a couple of weeks for the results to come back, and that would bring us up to the 24 week mark. Apparently if we wanted to terminate the pregnancy, once it was at 24 weeks, we'd have to go to LA to do it.

Whilst I consider myself an atheist these days, I was raised a Catholic, and although I like to think of myself as pro-choice, I still have a lot of problems with abortion, so I don't think I'd be comfortable terminating unless it could be shown with reasonable certainty that our baby was going to be in a really bad way. Based on how the rest of the brain looked, and the nuchal translucency results, and the fact that the amniocentesis would only identify chromosomal and not genetic neurological disorders, I don't think we'll be aborting.

From my limited research, it sounds like the cavum septum pellucidum disappears at about 3 months after birth anyway, so looking at it one way, you could say our baby's brain is developing faster. Other research has indicated a correlation with optic nerve development issues, so I don't know if that means she might be blind. We really need to chat with a paediatric neurologist. But hopefully the fetal MRI will find it, and this will turn out to be nothing.

An anxious two weeks will now follow.