From Zen Computer

Eight weeks ago I changed, everything changed. My wife and I where expecting our second child that August. Nine months of bliss. Nine months of planning, dreaming, seeing…

On August 17th I was sitting in a status with my lead system administrator. My wife calls, she tells me that she is worried, she had not felt the baby move the whole morning. She had eaten fruit, which normally would make our baby dance…this time nothing happened. She called our mid-wife, who told my wife to head to the hospital at once. She took my daughter, called myself, her parents and a friend and drove off. I took a taxi to the hospital. While in the taxi I was still dealing with work things, not really imagining what was to come…how can one.

We arrived at the hospital at the same time, and luckily, so did our friend. She took care of our daughter right away. My wife and I raced upstairs, to the birthing ward. We were first put in a room with six other women. Around us we heard happy mothers, often with a husband, friend or their mother, with the doppler sound of heartbeats surrounding us.

Our midwife had arrived as well. We where waiting for minutes, that seemed like hours, for a nurse to come see us. As the time went by, our midwife desperately  attempted t plug the doppler to try to get a heartbeat herself. Finally a smiling happy nurse arrived. How could she not be happy, working in such a place, surrounded by glowing smiling mothers. Yes, some worried, but always glowing. But she was unable to find the heartbeat. A head nurse was called in, she could not find one either.

Things sped up, a doctor with her resident  came. With them they brought an ultrasound cart. First the resident tried to find the beating heart. She was looking more and more desperate, and I think I already knew what was coming now. The look was too telling. Up until that moment I had been trying to calm my wife, who deep down had already known long before me. I had kept asking her not to worry, the machine was surely broken. Surely she was panicking for nothing, I had said until this look. That we would hear our child’s heart-beat  in just a few seconds.

But the residents eyes took all of that away. The doctor offered to try, but we knew. I was out of words of encouragement. And my knees gave in…again an eternity. The doctor looks my wife in the eyes “I have no good news”. We did not question her, we where speechless. They brought into another room. To be on our own, but they still bombarded us with information. Or so it seemed. We where under the most brutal shock. What happened then is yet another story. What remains is that our perfectly healthy daughter died of asfixia in utero, an cord accident. An accident…a cruel act of nature.

What remains is that about six hours later my wife gave birth to our daughter. Who passed away after nine months and four days in her mothers womb. By far the most painful day of my life.

No, it is not good to think of other things.

No, there is nothing that will make you think of anything else.

No, it does not help that we have a living wonderful amazing daughter. We lost a child, we where to have two.

Yes, I am taking care of her, off course I do, we take care of us, as best we can.

There is nothing to say, there really is not. As little as one can be prepared for this. As little there is to say. Acknowledge, that is all I can tell those that surround those to whom this has happened. A simple acknowledgment, a child has died. No parent is supposed to bury their own child, just be aware of it, and respect it. Death is not a tabu, you can talk about it.

Astrid is there all the time. I am fully functional, but she is there.  She was here with us. And she will always be with us, for all the years to come.

A little more then a week after this we held a ceremony for our child. Which was incredibly soothing. And I thank all of you that where there…

Here is the text I read during this ceremony, originally written in German by my godfather, translated by his wife and sent to us, then slightly adapted by us…

How should we not be frightened when the skies are bound to tumble down on us. How should we be happy, bright, calm, composed, when death is knocking on our door, where there was life invited as a guest.

We are full of fear and full of horror in these days and weeks. We are feeling like this when we think of ASTRID, and there is little consolation to be found when we look outside, into the world.

Life is threatened by the insanity which we create for ourselves, with our ideologies and phantasms, with our fears and security strategies, with our religions.

And when we trust the future, in good hope and in good faith, and the future is taken away from us, we are speechless, disgusted and indignant.

It is not long ago that a deadly born child was treated like a Nothing. It was taken away from her mother immediately, as if it would be dangerous to get in touch with the baby. And one had to return to daily routine as soon as possible.
Being born dead meant as much as never having lived.

Together, we are contradicting this thinking.

ASTRID has got a name among us. ASTRID has got a biography.

There are images of little ASTRID. She had her place and her home in her mother’s belly. We know from science that her senses had been awake for a long time, that she had already formed a whole specific character, and that her father’s and her big sister’s voices had a familiar sound. She knew her mother’s likings.

A verse of Matthias Claudius’ poem comes to mind:
Do you see the moon in the skies? It can only be seen half but it still is round and beautiful. Thus there are many things we laugh about because our eyes cannot see them.

This verse describes a bit of our feelings. There has been a short life, coming to an end, which was dramatically early for all of us.

But there was a life, from which we may suppose that it was, in itself, round and beautiful.  It is not sure that a life of ninety years is beaming brighter in its glance and perfection than this short period of life.

We are in the happy confidence that also, ASTRID’s life reaches its accomplishment. We firmly stick to the hope that the life of little ASTRID remains connected with our lives, in a good way. We put our trust in the faith, which promises us that the fiber of life cannot be ripped by death.

October 15th is the Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. My wife, my daughter and myself will go to the ceremony here in Montreal at the Oratoire Saint Joseph, and my thoughts are first and foremost with us. But also with all the parents that live through this. Some of you I have met in the support group. I worked with a father who experienced the same. And I thank you for your advice…

8 weeks have passed, a life is to come…

UPDATE : My wife wrote a little note about her experience with the Québec parental insurance plan, that was published.

Savers vs Speculators

Middle Class Misery

Army of New Mubaraks

Bin Laden Bounce

Unfortunately there is no open calendar (yeah I am looking at you, googlers).
And the iOs/Android solutions. Are nothing much but a flimsy sideshow with no calendar integration. Same thing goes for the site. Seeing an event site with so little social integration, is a little sad in this day and age…

Anyways, these are the talks, I would like to go see.
Note that this is not the full schedule.

The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

There are more cloud based services out there, but since two days one in particular has caught my eye. Cloud coding. Just about two years ago, the mozilla foundation created Bespin. I have to admit, I never heard of it, not conciously anyways. Bespin has since then now moved on to a third name, but more on that later. Back then I was (and still am) perfectly happy with Eclipse. Eclipse extended by PDT, FDT and (the recently aquired) Aptana all hooked into an SVN let me code in full comfort.

But that bliss was kind of blown wide open on March 4th. A simple poll that has led to some frenetic searchning, reading and trying. It turns out that the browser based coding environment is already quite crowded. No FDT substitute is to be found yet, but I am sure that will come to fruition sooner rather then later as well. As a matter of fact I don’t think I have seen mention of any browser based coding environment that allows developers to compile something. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Given life, and the life that fills my own walls, I have to admit, that my exposure to the platforms I am about to link to is rather limited. But still I did install or run all of them and I have chosen a front runner, for myself that is, already.

Ace

Formally known as Bespin, then Skywriter and now ACE – this open source editor has a most intriguing installment over at Cloud9. It has one thing going for it, it is indredibly slick. It seems to have an impressive user base and it hooks directly into your GIThub. Finally the very impressive backers make it clear for why this platform is the front runner on the poll, the backers are non other then the before mentioned Mozilla foundation as well as ajax.org. Two names that undeniably have a lot of weight.
Support syntaxes: Javascript , HTML, CSS, XML, Python, PHP, Java, Ruby, C++, CoffeeScript

CodeMirror

Slick, clean and hassle free, are the first words that come to mind. This program takes some setting up on your end. This might also be a draw-back, especially having just been over at the Ace, where a simple sign up to Cloud9 gave me what I came for. But most developers, like myself are not afraid of a little tinkering to make things work I guess, so not all that bad again I guess. Also CodeMirror has one very impressive list of supported languages…I do personally have one issue with this platform, and I don’t know if it is reasonable or not, but as such, it seems to be a one man show. Surely not on the development front, but there is one name only that is fronted on the site, and one name alone. Much like with Ruby I like the product, but there is just something wrong…but again that might just be me , oh no wait, the poll result says otherwise for now.

Supported syntaxe’s : JavaScript, XML/HTML, CSS, HTML mixed-mode, SPARQL, HTML+PHP mixed-mode, Python, Lua, Ruby (unfinished), SQL, PLSQL, diff, Groovy, C#, Scheme, Java, XQuery, OmetaJS, Freemarker, Regular Expressions

Eclipse Orion

Again one of those big names. And as I said earlier, the simple name just makes me bias for it. Eclipse has been 1st choice tool since for ever. installing it, I was hoping that I would be able to implement any existing Eclipse libraries into it. But with the base install all that I could get to work was writing JavaScript and CSS. Maybe I am missing something, and I am sure I am, but I lost interest pretty fast, so the current installment,  just did not do it for me. So I am leaving the Supported Syntaxe’s out of this one. As such I will certainly keep a close eye on this one, but I will stick to Eclipse Helios and Subclipse for now

SourceKit

SourceKit is an implementation of the before mentioned Ace platform. It is directly integrated into Chrome (or Chromium for myself). And those of you that read me, know that I have a soft spot for this browser (though I have to admit that Firefox 4 Beta is looking incredibly promising). What really got me exited about this platform, and transfer a project to it, is how it ties in with Dropbox.com. So this allows you to work on your projects from one computer to the other. I think the user could be given the choice on which cloud space to use, UbuntuOne come to mind, but at any rate this truly looks powerful, and will, for now, be the tool I will play around with. There is one problem I do have with source-kit, it’s dropbox linkup and the whole cloud computing concept in general (yes I am looking at you Chrome OS). What happens if you are, god-forbid, in a net-less place. I did try myself, I unplugged my network cable and fired up source-kit, no error, not nothing, just a never ending attempt to connect to my drop-box. Why does the program not simply store my work in the local Dropbox folder that will synch as soon as I come back online, just a thought.As long the 100% up global spanning wireless network is not accessible by you and me, cloud OSes are just not the way that I see us going yet.

So while I am waiting for Eclipse to eclipse them all…Ace is the platform, and SourceKit is my favored flavor of it.But as of yet, not having any auto completion, no extending of my own classing and intelligent importing just does not make this a viable solution yet. But I am sure there is more to come…

So there you have it, the cloud is growing and growing. Exiting times indeed…