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Happy Easter 2003

Happy Easter! It was an early Easter rising for our family this morning. Katherine woke up every 2-3 hours last night, and decided that she was not going back to bed at 5:30AM. Christine fed Katherine and played with her until 7:30 at which point both of them passed out due to exhaustion. Steve, in his never ending quest to ship Port Magic, was up trying to fix yet another “showstopper bug” this morning. Finally, we got around, headed to the Sarins and had a wonderful Easter brunch in sunny 70 degree weather.

Other noteworthy events today: we went shopping and for a long walk with Bisco. Katherine tried avocado again tonight – made a big thicker this time – and made faces at her food. She doesn’t seem to be too keen on avocado unlike her parents and Bisco who has learned to park himself under the high chair. We also bought a new 6+ month Fisher Price toy; it consists of different shaped plastic building blocks (triangles, circle, square) that can be stuffed thru same shaped holes into a plastic drum. This is the first time Katherine has played with toys in a container, and she had a good time knawing at the blocks and kicking the drum.

Katherine has also learned to sit up without any help at all! This has opened up a whole new world for playing and interacting. She occasionally keels over to her side (whoa!) or will fly backwards and bonk her head on the carpet. But, all in all, she’s gaining her balance and starting to enjoy her 6+ month toys.

David Stutz Leaves Microsoft David Stutz

David Stutz Leaves Microsoft

David Stutz was one of the few technical guys at Microsoft that really understood the profound effects of the Internet and “open source community” on the computing industry. It’s a very sad day at Microsoft when someone like David decides to leave. In his leave email, Stutz lays out a good argument for why Microsoft is losing the software innovation battle to the open source community and why the future of computing is distributed, decentralized. It’s definitely a must read piece.

I share Stutz’s views on Microsoft and how it needs to evolve to continue it’s Windows franchise in a distributed computing world. I respect Stutz for putting his thoughts in writing and sharing them with the public. Most people at Microsoft will probably not understand that he’s trying to help them succeed rather than just being critical.

Christine Goes Back to Work

This is Christine. I went back to work this week starting on Wednesday. After only a two day transition period, Patty did a great job taking care of Katherine and managing the house. Every day, Katherine made more and more progress to take the bottle from Patty.

  • Monday: She only took 2 oz after crying for 10-20 minutes and ate nothing else from the bottle the entire day – despite Patty’s valiant attempts.
  • Tuesday: We didn’t have much more success, until Patty remarked that the Avent nipple seemed too big for Katherine. I pulled a Gerber bottle out of the back of a drawer, and voila…Katherine emptied the entire bottle! She drank about 7.5 oz that day.
  • Wednesday: Patty switched entirely to the Gerber bottle. She fed Katherine 10 oz over a couple feedings (right before she fell asleep) and brought Katherine to work so I could nurse her.
  • Thursday: She drank 14 oz. over four feedings, although she ate only when she was tired.
  • Friday: Katherine drank 14 oz. readily over three feedings with no crying or fussing at all. This has been huge progress!

Katherine is now drinking from a 3-6 month moderate flow Gerber nipple. The only downside is the fact that we invested in 10 Avent bottles and a bunch of Avent nipples (which she still refuses to take), but this is a small price to pay for bottle feeding!

Other huge news – Katherine started to sleep through the night this week. She fell asleep at 9AM Tuesday night and slept the entire night! I work her up, much to her dismay, at 7:30AM the following morning to feed. Her schedule has started to solidify. Both Wednesday and Thursday nights she feel asleep by 8:30PM. Unfortunately, she did wake at 1AM Friday morning with a wet diaper, but it was an uneventful night otherwise.

Between her sleep schedule and acceptance of the bottle, parenthood has gotten so much easier. Our only remaining challenge is Bisco, who came down with a nasty case of kennel cough after our LA trip. While he is no longer congested, he’s sneezing quite a bit. On Wednesday, Katherine came to work with white stuff in her hair. Patty explained that Bisco sneezed on Katherine’s head, and that she wasn’t able to clean it all out. Oh Yuck. ๐Ÿ™‚

Katherine is also developing her motor skills. She grabbed her little plastic keys from my hand a few nights ago and shook them enthusiastically as I made my dinner in the kitchen. She’s also taking walks with Patty around the neighborhood in her Baby Bjorn facing forward. I’m looking forward to this weekend and spending two quality days with Katherine, learning more about her developments this week.

I’ve include two pictures Steve took of Patty playing with Katherine.

Port Magic Alpha Released

Last week, Pure Networks released an alpha version of Port Magic on the web. We got a lot of positive feedback for the problem we’re trying to solve: automatically open ports on an Internet gateway when a user plays or hosts an online game. Modern Internet gateways (LinkSys, Dlink, Netgear, etc.) all interact with the user using a web interface. To configure your Internet Gateway, you type in http://192.168.168.1/ into your web browser. Since the UI is based on HTML, the Internet Gateway vendor has very few tools to work with to design good UI (wizards, state storage, controls). Most of the configuration UI is simple HTML controls they have a 1:1 correspondence with a setting in the gateway.

Port Magic automates the population of the port range forwarding dialog of a LinkSys Internet Gateway. We chose to use the http protocols over UPnP because using http works across all versions of the LinkSys Internet Gateway. We caught some heat from a couple of UPnP zealots on the forums for picking http over UPnP. We’re not anti-UPnP or trying to develop a competing protocol. We set out to solve this customer problem of automatically opening and closing ports when I launch and close an online application.

Free Xbox from Pure Networks

Just in time for the holidays, get a chance to win a free Xbox from Pure Networks by completing this short survey about home networking. The winner will be drawn at random from all entries on January 30, 2003. Click here to view official contest rules.

Pure Networks will use the survey information to help build better home networking products for our customers.

DynaCenter is now Pure Networks

It’s official. DynaCenter is now Pure Networks, Inc. We published the new web site http://www.purenetworks.com/ designed and coded by Rob. I drew the task of switching over our email to purenetworks.com. It took a while for me to figure out how to get the Exchange server switched over. It turns off that recipient policies is the trick. It allows you to quickly add a new @domain.com name to each name in the address book.