Invader Zim

Just before Christmas, Nickelodeon was running commercials for the Christmas episode of a show called Invader Zim. The commercials featured the show's Christmas song which ran like this:

Bow down!
Bow down!
Before the power of Santa
Or be crushed!
Be crushed
By his jolly boots of doom!

OK, so how are you supposed to resist that? Anyway, after watching the program I discovered (or should I say our entire family discovered) that Invader Zim is one of the most brilliant TV programs ever made. The concept of the story is rather simple... an Invader named Zim from the Irken Empire is sent to Earth to scout out the planet and report back ahead of the upcoming invasion. That's Zim (with the red eyes) watching TV with his useless robot servant, Gir, in the picture up top. The Irken Empire destroys other planets for fun and in order to get their snacks. Actually the Irken Empire has no intention of invading Earth but the Almighty Tallest (the rulers of the Irken Empire is whoever is the tallest) hate Zim (because he is a screw-up AND he is short) so they sent him to earth to get rid of him. Zim disguises himself as a 6th grader (I told you he is short) and disguises Gir as a dog (that's Gir in his dog suit). Dib is a 6th grader who realizes that the new green student is actually an alien intent on destroying Earth. Gaz is Dib's sister and her major goals in life are to win at video games and annoy Dib. That is the show and madness ensues from episode to episode. Whether it is Zim turning Dib into bologna, ("No one should be this delicious!") or whether it is Dib defeating Zim with water baloons ("Score one for the human race, score nothing for the Zim thingy race!"), every episode is pure nonsense and insanity.

Gir: Oh, I left it at home.
Zim: You left what at home?
Gir: The guidy, chipy, thingy.
Zim: Why would you do that?
Gir: To make room for the cupcake!

Update: Here's The Santa Song.

Beth is sick

This has been a rough month for my daughter. She was dizzy at school and felt completely worn out so she went to the nurse and came home. She stayed home for a couple of days then went back but the same thing happened again. Off to the doctor and the doctor discovers that her spleen is enlarged. Yikes! That might mean mono! Off to the lab for a test, wait a couple of days, and the result is... not mono, in fact the tests reveal nothing of interest. Conclusion? An unspecified viral infection, maybe the same one that Michel has in her middle ear. We were back to the doctor today and things look better so anyway, tomorrow she goes back to school because she has missed enough.

Today was a hectic day. Michel was getting another pain shot so I had to take the morning off. But Mikey's bus was late. So I took Mikey and Michel over to the hospital, dropped Michel off, drove to Mikey's school, dropped him off, then went home, grabbed Beth and took her to the doctor, then went back to pick up Michel, and then took them both home, grabbed a Subway BLT with no "T" for Beth, then drove off to work. I got here at 1pm so I will be going home late tonight.

So how is Michel doing, you ask? Not too good. She thinks her shunt needs to be adjusted because she is not feeling right so she hasn't been back to work for a couple of weeks. And so it goes.

Geek Squad Sucks

So they have cool little cars, impressive commercials, and wear nerdy looking clothes. They still suck. Twice I have gone to Geek Squad with a computer problem and twice I encountered a teenager who knows less about computers than I do. The first time was the disk problem... OK, I really didn't expect them to open up the disk and recover the data but I did expect them to make more than a minimal effort. In fact, the Geek Squad guy did nothing more than what I was able to do myself. He pulled the drive and put it in another PC where it still didn't work. Duh... I told him the disk was fried. I expected a little more like maybe swapping the electronics on the drive and seeing if that might do something. But that would have required some technical know-how and that does not seem to be what geek Squad is about.

OK, how about the second problem which happened last week with my daughter's PC. According to the lights on the back of the PC, the processor failed. So I called Geek Squad on the phone and they said, "Sure, no problem, bring it in, we can fix that." Well, actually after I dragged the PC over there I discovered that if I buy a new processor from Dell they will put it in for me. For $50. They wouldn't even bother checking the computer to make sure it really was the processor or even order the processor themselves. Putting in a processor may sound scary but if you can plug in a toaster without electrocuting yourself, you can put a new processor in a computer. It is about 5 minutes worth of work. So Geek Squad will be happy to put in the processor, with no guarantee that the processor is actually the problem, at the equivalent rate of $600 per hour. Nice work if you can get it.

They will install a hard drive at $40 (after you buy the hard drive). What does installing a new hard drive entail? Open the PC, slide the hard drive into a slot, and plug two cables into the hard drive. Close the PC and start her up. Less that 5 minutes work. They will install a memory chip for $30. Again, less than 5 minutes for you to do it yourself. They will install anti-virus software for $30 plus the cost of the software. Are you telling me that someone might own a computer and not know how to put a disk in their CD player because that is all Geek Squad will do for you. For $170 they will remove any viruses and spyware and add a firewall and some virus protection. $170!!! I cleaned up my sister's PC which was infected with both spyware and viruses without using anything other than some free anti-spyware software and 90-day free version of Norton.

Geek Squad is a rip-off. They charge outrageous amounts for the simplest work but are incapable of doing anything more than what anyone can do with just a little advice or assistance from a random teenager.

Backup Software

So I went on a search for backup software and found NTI Shadow 2. The best part is that it only costs 99 cents (at least until midnight California time, New Year's Eve). So now I am backing up the "My Documents" folder of our computer on Beth's hard drive and the "My Documents" directory of Beth's computer on our hard drive. I am also looking at IBackup as a possible solution. There seems to be a mix of good and bad about it (plus it costs $10 per month). Of course it does give you access to your files from anywhere on the internet which may be a good or bad thing depending on how secure the data is being held.

Without bad luck we ....

would have no luck at all. The hard drive on our PC decided to have a mechanical failure. This isn't one of those easy to recover from failures but a hardware crash that means the data is lost. What data? Everything. Yes, I know I'm a programmer and should know better than not backing up my data but I didn't so stop nagging. I even had two hard drives in that PC and the one that failed is the one with the irreplaceable data. Michel lost all of her graduate work. We lost all of our emails. This means that if your email address was on our optonline account, we don't know what it is anymore. So tonight I'm going to buy a new hard drive and start the laborious task of reloading all our software onto our PC. And this time I'm going to buy a couple of USB Flash Drives so that we can keep backups of everything we do. Just shoot me.

Michel!

Michel goes Xmas shopping.

Michel had an incident last week. We had to have an ambulance come to the house and take her to the hospital. She was feeling very dizzy... so dizzy that she couldn't even walk. We were afraid it was something related to her brain. The doctors did a few tests and decided that it was an inner ear viral infection. The prognosis? She'll be better in a week or three months or anywhere in between. Meanwhile she is walking around trying to keep from toppling over. Her doctor put her out of work for a couple of weeks and I think that upset Michel more than anything else.

The shots to reduce the pain have worked well but now the other side is bothering her more. She starts those shots in a couple of weeks. In the picture you can see she is wearing her neck brace (sorry for the quality... it was my camera phone). The neck brace helps reduce the pain. Everytime we go driving anywhere Michel complains about the pain if the car jerks and she has been throwing up because of the vertigo. I just want her to be better. But this isn't getting better and it may never get better.

The Baltimore Excursion

I have been very bad about posting to my blog and I have so much backlog. So let me catch up a little. Back on December 7th we had an appointment to see George Capone, M.D., at Johns Hopkins. He is the Director of the Down Syndrome Clinic and he has been following Mikey since he was a baby. He is also one of the leading experts (if not THE expert) on the dual diagnosis of Down syndrome and Autism. We broke the drive down into two days by staying at Michel's sister's house Tuesday night. She lives right by Trenton so it leaves a drive of about 2-2.5 hours. We got to the clinic early even after taking two rest stops during the drive down. Dr. Capone was thrilled with the way Mikey has improved since our last visit. Mikey was great. He sat on the floor, played games, watched his DVD, signed his needs... it was great especially compared to last time we were down to see Dr. Capone. The medications combined with the ABA have definitely been working. Dr. Capone dcecided that since we have psychiatrist that Mikey is seeing on a regular basis now, that he doesn't have to see us for a year! If we need his advice we can exchange emails with him. meanwhile he gave us some suggestions for further medication changes that should help Mikey even more.

We really are seeing a huge difference with Mikey. He is much more attentive in school. He is actually learning school material and not just "life skills". His new school, AHRC has been great. I dropped him off last week and everyone knew him when he came in. One of his therapists told me that Mikey is her favorite student. He's like the little mayor of AHRC. This is a HUGE improvement over the Rosemary Kennedy School where he was originally going to go. There was an article in the paper about the school's use of "detention rooms" which are little more than dark, padded closets:

BOCES center's discipline comes under fire

Based on Mikey's behavioral issues, there is no doubt that they would have locked him up in there. At AHRC it has been nothing but wonderful.

Killing babies

We used to institutionalize babies with Down syndrome. Now we kill them.

An extra chromosome isn't awful by Beverly Beckham. Read it and cry.

Mikey sees the dentist

Saturday we went to the dentist to have four of Mikey's baby teeth pulled. Mikey has the same problem that Beth had when she was little... her aadult teeth came in behind her baby teeth and didn't push the baby teeth out. So Michel had gone to the Pediatrician and got a little valium to slow Mikey down before the big day. We gave the valium to Mikey about 30 minutes before the procedure. The valium had exactly zero effect! Mikey was bouncing around in the waiting room like a mad man, laughing and entertaining the staff. We got him into the room and I climbed into the chair first and then I wrapped up Mikey with my arms and legs. He squirmed a bit but I held him. The dentist shot him with some Novacaine and Mikey got loose and bumped the needle. My fault! This time I held him by the elbows instead of the wrists and really got him good. The four teeth were gone even before we knew it. Mikey no longer looks like a shark with multiple rows of teeth. We have two more teeth to remove and then we are all done.

Our pediatric dentist is absolutely wonderful. He came in on his day off to take care of Mikey so that Mikey wouldn't miss any school. We met him when Beth was little. We had taken her to a couple of dentists and she was terrified of them. One dentist told us, "I can't work with your child." We took Beth to see Dr. Charlie and she was crying like crazy when she went in. By the time she was done, he had her laughing and hugging him. He has an incredible way with kids that melts away all their fears and anxieties.

On the NJ Turnpike

This defines our luck.

Michel has a procedure

Michel had another medical procedure (the specifics of which will not be mentioned) and everything went great. As usual, as you can see from the picture, Michel was a trooper and went in to face the worst medical science could throw at her with a smile on her face!

Perfect Weather

November has been the perfect month so far. You will recall how miserable October was, but November has been great. The leaves have been turning but they are still mostly in the trees. This is a view from the front of my house looking west down my street.

It's lucky that the weather was so nice this past weekend because the new neighbors moved in. The house across the street has been vacant since January so we have been looking forward to having someone finally live there. They are a young couple, Melanie and Josh, with no children yet. Beth was hoping for a girl in the 8th grade but these things don't always work out. Of course, with any luck this does mean that Beth might find some baby sitting jobs in her future!

With such perfect weather, Mikey wanted to go for a drive so we hopped on the Parkway and drove down to Jones Beach. The nice thing about the Parkways on Long island is that they have a lot of trees planted along them. This time of the year it is especially pretty as the trees are changing color.

We drove along Ocean Parkway down by the beach. Amazingly, they are still charging to park your car so we didn't stop which was fine by Mikey. He just likes the drive and to listen to music. I took this picture of the world famous Jones Beach water tower, designed by Robert Moses and built in 1930. Here is a satellite image of the tower. The tower is where the roads intersect. The Jones Beach theater is just to the upper right in the satellite image.