Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

It's been known to some for quite a while already, but now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. Sarah announced at work today that she is pregnant, so soon the whole world will know.

The estimated delivery date of our baby is 18th May 2005. The plan is to deliver the baby at home, using a midwife. Depending on your point of view, this is either entirely normal and conventional or radical and irresponsible. I'll leave it to your imagination in which camp we are.

The news that a woman is pregnant seems to result in two particular questions (at least in the US), to which I'll provide answers below:

 Q. Do you know whether it's a boy or a girl?
 A. Yes, we're pretty sure it's either a boy or a girl.

 Q. Have you decided on a name?
 A. No.

Before Sarah would let me reveal our news, I'd already blogged a number of entries about the pregnancy. You might feel moved to read them; or then again you may not. More old entries may appear over time if I can persuade Sarah to share her musings with you. She's a very private person.

Anyway, I can't tell you how excited I am at the prospect of becoming a dad. It's all the more surprising, given that I used to hate children; I really did. I never wanted to hold a baby or play with other people's. I would grimace on a transatlantic flight if a child boarded and took a seat within five rows of my seat. Their crying and whinging drove me mental.

This is one of the few areas of life in which I've mellowed, however. I like children now; I really do. I have no idea why this transformation in me has taken place, but I first noticed the mellowing process occurring about seven years ago. It took a few more years before I decided I actually wanted children of my own, but when the moment arrived, there was no doubt in my mind.

Anyway, I've resolved not to be the kind of obnoxious prat who goes on about his children all the time, as if everyone else should fawn and drool over them the way their parents do. Stop me if I go too far. This time I'll do the decent thing and stop myself.

"So God is dead, like Nietzsche said.
Supersition is all we have left."

That's a lyric from the song 1985, which opens the Manic Street Preachers' most recent album, Lifeblood. That lyric, more than any other I've been exposed to in recent months, seems to characterise the age in which we're living. All we need now is for all the religious fundamentalists to actually realise that God is dead.

I'm blogging when I should be writing appraisals of my colleagues. These will be used to determine the size of their performance bonus. Everyone has to write a bunch of such appraisals of their colleagues; it's one of the seemingly democratic aspects of the job.

Here we are in 2005. I can't believe it's upon us. So much will be happening in our lives this year. For one thing, the McKenna-Macdonald clan will see a 50% expansion of its ranks in May, when Sarah squeezes the person inside her out and into an uncertain world.

We bought our first baby clothes yesterday at Lullaby Lane in San Bruno. It was a surprisingly significant event to me from an emotional perspective. Our wardrobe now contains Franbert clothing dangling from coat-hangers. It makes him/her seem a lot more real. If anything were to happen to the baby now, the impact on me would be so much greater, or so it seems. Those items of clothing belong to the baby now; it's just that the baby is currently still wearing Sarah and doesn't need any clothes.

Why's it so hard to find baby clothing in decent colours? I don't buy into the whole gender/colour association bollocks. It's sartorial fascism for infants and I want no part of it. Inculcation of idiotic and oppressive social norms starts right here, while the infant is still in the womb. What nonsense!

So, if it's a girl, she's going to have to wear some blue. If it's a boy, he gets away without having to wear pink, because pink is vile on anyone. Of course, you might claim it's my own social conditioning that makes me say that, but I'd just ignore you.

It turns out that my employer offers six weeks of paternity leave. That means I'll stop working when the baby's born and won't return to work until the beginning of July. What a deal.

What then? The second half of the year will be tumultuous, but I can't say much more than that at the present time. Certain people still have the power to foul up our plans if they become aware of them. You just can't trust anyone these days, so we're forced to play our cards close to our chest. Ominous, huh? Sorry, but it has to stay that way for now.

There's a lot of crap to deal with this year. I have to go to the Dutch Consulate later this week to hand in a passport renewal application. Hopefully, that occasion will pass uneventfully and I'll have a new passport within a few weeks. In the meantime, I'll be unable to travel for a few weeks, but I had no plans to, anyway. It just makes me nervous to be without a passport.

I've also been busy getting friends to write and notarise affidavits attesting to the genuine nature of our marriage. (Incidentally, anyone who's seen us argue knows the marriage must be real.) These will be submitted in evidence when I submit my application to have the provisional status removed from my green card (a.k.a. permanent residence permit). I have to file that application within the next few weeks or I'll be subject to removal proceedings from the US after 20th March. While I'd like nothing more than to get the fuck out of here, it has to be on my own terms and March is a tad too soon, given our plans.

Before Christmas, I had to write a will and retain the services of an estate planner. I didn't even know what an estate planner was until a few months ago. Basically, it's a death consultant. He's basically there to ensure we're not robbed blind by the US government if we both snuff it in a plane crash. If we move abroad, US law no longer applies, so we'll have to get all of this done again at some point in the future.

We now have a couple of accountants, too: one in San Francisco and another in Amsterdam. It's become too hard to figure out the tax consequences of our actions, so now we have to pay others to do it.

Life wasn't always this complicated, was it?

My article on Ruby/Amazon has finally made it into print in the February issue of Dr Dobb's Journal.

This is my first published work for a computer magazine in just under ten years. It's hard to imagine it was that long ago that I wrote a monthly column about the Internet for the now defunct PCW Plus, a magazine devoted to users of the dearly beloved Amstrad PCW.

I'd still like to write a book at some point, if I can ever manage to summon the energy. I used to think I'd one day write a book about LDAP or Bourne shell scripting, but there are good books available on those subjects these days.

No, it's more likely I'll turn my hand to newspaper journalism at some point in the future, once I have more free time available.

Sarah and I went along to Stanford Hospital today for our third ultrasound scan of the baby. The last one was at 13 weeks into the pregnancy, so expectations were running high as we headed in for the 22 week scan, which would seek to measure the baby's growth and rule out any abnormalities.

We instructed the woman conducting the examination that we did not wish to know the gender of the baby before birth and away she went with the echo sounder.

Franbert is doing very well, we were pleased to hear. He/she looks a lot bigger than 8 weeks ago. According to my book, Hét Negen Maanden Boek, he's now approximately 28.5 cm long and weighs 440 g. What a lot of baby; no wonder Sarah's belly is swelling so nicely.

Anyway, all was well within: no club feet, no cleft palette, normal growth, a beating heart, a closed spine, etc. The placenta's lying a little low, but not covering the cervix, which is good. This is quite common and the placenta will probably retreat upwards along the wall of the uterus as the pregnancy progresses.

It was rather odd to look at Franbert this time. He looked a little ghoulish as the ultrasound rendered his bones, but not so much of his flesh. All we could see was a small skeleton with some hazy, translucent grey matter around it. I'm sure he'll be better looking when seen through human eyes.

Nevertheless, it's priceless to see his fingers and toes, his little legs, the curve of his bum, the femur inside his leg, etc. I'm not one for messing around with nature, but the glimpse behind the scenes that an ultrasound gives you is really irresistable.

Lying in bed before we headed to Stanford, I was treated to my first kick from Franbert. Sarah's been feeling them for a while now, but they're still mild enough that it's impossible to feel any but the most energetic from the outside. This morning, however, he was active and I was able to feel him move against my hand. It's very cool to be able to engage in this primitive form of contact, as I truly believe it aids the bonding process.

If you're interested in such things, we've put up ultrasound photos from the three scans to date.

Well, I've taken care of one piece of bureaucracy today. I drove up to San Mateo this morning to hand in my passport renewal application at the Dutch Consulate.

While I was there, I verified what I'll need to do to obtain a Dutch passport for Franbert when he's born. It turns out that we basically just need to get his birth certificate legalised with an apostille, which is what I'd already figured out from the on-line documentation.

What I didn't know is that we're obliged to also get him an American passport. The US has a rule about citizens with dual-nationality only travelling into and out of the country on their American passport and this rule applies equally to those just out of the womb, so that's another bit of bureaucracy to take care of when the time comes.

In the next couple of days, I'll send off my I-751 form and supporting documentation to the INS (or Department of Homeland Security, as they're now known). That will set in motion my application to have the provisional status removed from my green card, thus allowing me to stay here past March.

It's taken a fair bit of effort to collect the supporting documentation for this application: copies of bank account and credit card statements, an ultrasound photo of Franbert, a copy of our apartment lease, multiple notarised affidavits from people who know us... Bah! Still, now all I have to do is seal it in an envelope and send it off by registered post.

I put my I-751 application in the post on Saturday. Now it's up to the powers that be to grant my request to remove the provisional status from my green card and allow me to remain in the country beyond 20th March.

We've now also got copies of Sarah's birth certificate and our marriage certificate, both with an apostille applied by the relevant states. That should make getting a Dutch passport for Franbert much easier a few months from now.

Computers can do so much these days, or can they? Some things are just too hard to set up for the basic need they address.

I spent a significant chunk of this evening configuring my laptop to use my GPRS mobile phone as a modem. It's a Sony Ericsson P910i. The Google employee ski-trip is coming up a couple of days from now and it'll be nice to be able to get on-line from the hotel room; or the bus on the way up, for that matter. Yes, it's sad, but I like to be able to get on-line at the drop of a hat and Opera on my phone just doesn't cut it. Using the command line over ssh is even worse, as the phone's keyboard is too awkward to use and doesn't even support the sending of control characters.

Anyway, after recompiling my kernel to support Bluetooth (how'd that happen? I was using Bluetooth three months ago and I had support configured in then.), I configured Bluetooth support. This involved scanning for my phone, picking up its MAC address, querying it to find out on which channel it supports DUN (dial-up networking), and then binding the Bluetooth RFCOMM system to that channel, which gave me a /dev/rfcomm0 device to play with.

Then it was a simple (simple?) matter of running pppd over that device. pppd is one of those pain-in-the-arse programs that is just never simple to configure or debug. chat scripts full of Hayes AT commands; lots of low level options to mess with; copious debugging output to wade through; configuration scripts that are called after a connection is established. And then the damn thing fails to write a /etc/ppp/resolv.conf, so I have to do it manually.

Why can't things be easier? I first configured pppd back in 1995, if I remember correctly. Now, some 10 years on, you'd think I'd be an expert, but some things just remain hard, because you never really use them enough to build up expertise with them.

I'm reminded of 1997, when I wrestled endlessly to get ipppd (the synchronous version of pppd) working with a passive Teles ISDN card plugged into one of my ISA slots. What an unbelievable amount of hassle that was to get working. Ethernet is very simple by comparison.

But I digress. Computers are still in their infancy, really. Yes, they can do a lot, but we humans have to do an awful lot to get our computers to do anything. And I should smile, really, because it's the fact that not everyone has knowledge about such things that keeps people like me in demand with employers. Ideally, though, things would be different and everything would just work.

Anyway, like most computer users, I eventually got the thing I was messing around with to work. I'll now have Internet access from the hotel room in Tahoe, assuming my phone has reception in that area.

Controversial politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali was back in parliament today after spending the last couple of months in hiding abroad. Hirsi Ali is the subject of many death threats in The Netherlands, as she is a very outspoken critic of radical Islam and its many excesses.

She went into hiding after the Dutch film director and newspaper columnist, Theo van Gogh, was murdered for his outspoken criticism of radical Islam, which culminated in the release of the film Submission, which he made together with Hirsi Ali. Tensions were running at an all time high after his death, so Hirsi Ali was taken into hiding for her own protection.

Today, she made a triumphant return and vowed to continue her work. I must say what a great deal of admiration I have for this woman. She grew up in Somalia and suffered genital mutilation as a matter of course. When Somalia collapsed in on itself, her family fled to Saudi Arabia, where she had to stay indoors and wear a veil.

Her family sent her to Europe to travel on to Canada, where she was to marry a cousin. Instead, she went to The Netherlands and claimed political asylum. In the years that followed, she mastered the Dutch language (she really does speak impeccable Dutch), worked as a cleaner and post sorter, then went to university and studied political science.

Eventually, she became a politician and began to work for the emancipation of Muslim women and against the more nefarious tenets of radical Islam. She's been threatened with death many times, but has vowed not to be intimidated or silenced.

I've admired this courageous woman for some time now and thought I should mention her story here. We could do with a few more like her in the world.

A rather good blog about her has recently appeared.

Babies do weird things to people; well, not even babies. Foetuses do weird things to people.

For some reason, I have been drawn into the dark, subterranean world of... baby shopping. That's right, there's nothing I now like more than ambling around baby shops on a Saturday afternoon, looking at all of the lovely little clothes that are available. They look so cosy; I wish they made them in my size, even though I probably couldn't pull off wearing an all-in-one outfit with ducks on the feet.

My favourite brand is Kissy Kissy. The name might be vile, but the clothing is simply lovely. The designs are eye-catching, but don't pander to archetypal ideas of what is fitting for a boy or a girl. Most, if not all, of the clothing seems to be made from cotton, too; no nasty man-made fibres.

Babies are a good excuse for more geekwear, too. ThinkGeek has a good catalogue. My own employer has its own small line, too.

Sarah can look forward to a baby shower a few months from now, but what about me? I want a baby shower, too! Equal rights for dads! Seriously, I hope my colleagues are reading this and throw me a baby shower. There really isn't much that would please me more.

Yesterday, I received an I-797, Notice of Action, from the Department of Homeland Security. This informed me that my application to have the provisional status removed from my green card has been accepted for adjudication. This process will take at least 330 days, so my green card has been automatically extended for one year, with work and travel authorised.

Basically, this gets me the right to stay in the US past 20th March, when my green card would originally have expired. With that, another part of our grand masterplan falls into place.

Franbert has now been gestating in the womb for 24 weeks and Sarah's belly has begun to grow very quickly. It's hard to imagine she still has almost four months left to go before Franbert is finally unleashed upon us.

We continue to wrestle with potential names. I've already read multiple baby name books and have at least one more to read before I arrive at my final short list. I've also been looking over the site of the Sociale Verzekeringsbank and voornamelijk.nl, but learning the currently popular names is of only so much use when you believe that your coming child will be unique and therefore deserves a name that is not shared by countless others.

On the other hand, even the most popular name is actually given to relatively few children, simply because so many names are given in total. So, in the end, you don't really have to worry about there being half a dozen Sannes or Sems in the same class at school.

If we knew the sex in advance, we'd only have to come up with one name, but that would be a cop-out, so we'll do the work and come up with two. Besides, we can save the other name for next time, assuming we get the other gender next time.