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Bugaboo

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FROG_black_bassinet-809If you’re used to my usual tech posts, you may want to skip this one, it’s a bit rant-y.

So, almost exactly a year ago, my son was born. And at that time, we were loaned a pretty wonderful stroller made by a company called Bugaboo. The stroller is a Bugaboo Frog, and it’s from 2004. It wasn’t cheap for the owners, costing nearly $1k. But, it worked through both their children, and there is no reason it couldn’t last through ours. One of the big selling points of these strollers is they’re extremely modular, and parts can be replaced relatively easily. We replaced a wheel a few months back that had it’s axle bent. Sure, it cost $50, but at least it’s better than replacing the stroller.

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Re-organizing the Office/lab

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Before Office Re-orgSince getting into Electronics work, I’ve had my office organized like the picture on the left. And this worked just fine when all I had was a Fluke handheld meter, a bench power supply, and a scope. Maybe also the Function Generator. But when I added several bench multimeters, and stuff was getting shifted around, suddenly I couldn’t reach the desk work area with standard probe leads (5F), or the far right part with scope probes. So, for weeks now, I’ve been contemplating re-organizing to allow for easier use of my gear.

Then, the other day, I was watching a video by Ian Johnston, and I noticed he had his scope right above the desktop, which gave me the idea to put the scope above the monitor, move my server and drobo elsewhere, and then put all the rest of my testgear above the desk as well. At the same time, I was finally going to move my Airport Extreme into the linen closet in the center of the house to provide even coverage everywhere (and hopefully resolve the dead-spot in the dining room).

After Office Re-orgTwo days later, with some extensive cleaning, and re-organizing, the picture at the right is the result. Obviously some serious cleaning has taken place between the two, but the general layout is the key change. And having just worked on a new project at the desk, I can say the new layout works MUCH better. I am able to run leads from the power supply to the desk (even the left side of the ESD mat), run a lead from the frequency counter (which has a 6′ lead), DMM leads, and a scope probe all to the same circuit and still have room to use the computer, which is advantageous since I’m working on a GPS Disciplined Oscillator that I needed to provide power, get serial output, check voltages, and check frequency output. So really, the new layout is great. Also, moving stuff off the shelf to the left let me purchase a modern Akro-Mills shelving unit to move nearly all my components to. I plan to buy another and wall mount them both, but I need to find the space for them both first. Sadly, the unit doesn’t quite fit between the shelving uprights. =/

Personal Update — 8 Months

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Sean StairsJust thought I would take a moment away from the normal geek-ness of my site, and do a personal update. About 8 months ago I posted that I had just had a baby son, and yay verily, 8 months later he’s grown up quite a bit (see picture). He has long since gotten his first tooth (Christmas day, 2013), and 3 more. He’s working now on tooth 5. About two weeks ago, he figured out crawling forward (he’d been crawling backward for at least a month prior, and was quite good at it). And shortly after figuring out forward crawling, he started finding all kinds of new things to “pull to stand” on, like the stairs (hence, the picture). =) So, that’s been fun (baby-proofing things he finds that we didn’t even think were likely to be found). =)

The only issue has been, the little guy doesn’t sleep well. At his best, he was sleeping in 2 hour chunks. Lately, this has been hour, at most, chunks. Turns out much of this was due to him having ear infections, which we’ve been fighting, and seem to have under control at this point, but lately he brought home a “wonderful” cold from daycare that both my wife and myself caught, and have been “dying” from the last several days, all the while he’s been crawling around wanting people to play with. ugh. But, we’ll all get better.

In short, parenting is interesting. It’s both exceedingly enjoyable and exceedingly frustrating, and given previous experience, as the little boy gets more able to interact with me/us, that scale will begin to tilt more and more toward the “enjoyable”, as most of the “frustrating” comes from him not being able to communicate in any real way. So, maybe it should be said parenting is all about patience…