When we visited a doc for the situation, it actually did turn out to be pretty normal. What he said was more like this, "Its pretty normal for a baby of this age. In the weather of Bangalore, the young body is not able to cope up with the changing temperature." I cant really tell you why, but that statement did make lot of sense.
The weather of the city is PERFECT to live in. Its hardly more than 26-27 and its hardly lower than 20. So, that makes a perfect range, but then what ? Well, the temperature changes so many times during the day, that its wierd. You really have to be ready for both extremes from the range.
And with a baby, its harder. You cant always control his actions, what he is doing and what not. When he's playing in water, when he has thrown his socks away and things /temperature and the baby gets cold. The cold eventually turns into fever anyway.
Another thing that came out with doctor's visit was the fact that we were giving him the wrong dosage of the right medicine. For his age and body weight he should have been given 5ml of the syrup, whereas we were giving him only 2.5ml. Once we fixed the dosage, the fever was gone right away. It was such a relief to see him do the things again...
learning curve.. u see.. being a parent is such a huge learning curve.... :)
Monday, February 1, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Toys for him...
Its been hard to buy toys for the baby. In this age, he would put anything in reach into his mouth. Invariably, something passes into the body from the outer surface of the toy/thing.
If the toys are not good (and I really mean GOOD) quality, the paints, the surfaces, the plastic any of these might pass into body and cause any kind of harm.
I remember, few years ago, there was a recall by major toy manufacturers in US due to toys painted with lead content. I appreciate that kind of quality standards. But, I dont know how much of such/similar quality controls exist in India. We also get cheap toys in the open market, many a times not from any known manufacturer or someone similar. I dont know if there is any standard using which I can judge these. It would be great if I could figure out whether these are safe for my kid or not...
For that to work out, there has to be a mechanism from govt side. Administration and control of the quality at manufacturer's side and then transparency and honesty from the officials concerned. In a country like ours, corruption is rampant, and hardly anything exists which cant be bribed. In such environment, its even harder to trust any labelling.
Given this, we could only go for the biggest brand name in the business, "hoping" those guys would be quality concious enough and would not make anything that might harm kids.
I figure funskool and fisher price are two such brands, but my knowledge in this area is only starting off. Perhaps there are more and better. But I would learn on the go...
gud luck kids in buying safe toys...
If the toys are not good (and I really mean GOOD) quality, the paints, the surfaces, the plastic any of these might pass into body and cause any kind of harm.
I remember, few years ago, there was a recall by major toy manufacturers in US due to toys painted with lead content. I appreciate that kind of quality standards. But, I dont know how much of such/similar quality controls exist in India. We also get cheap toys in the open market, many a times not from any known manufacturer or someone similar. I dont know if there is any standard using which I can judge these. It would be great if I could figure out whether these are safe for my kid or not...
For that to work out, there has to be a mechanism from govt side. Administration and control of the quality at manufacturer's side and then transparency and honesty from the officials concerned. In a country like ours, corruption is rampant, and hardly anything exists which cant be bribed. In such environment, its even harder to trust any labelling.
Given this, we could only go for the biggest brand name in the business, "hoping" those guys would be quality concious enough and would not make anything that might harm kids.
I figure funskool and fisher price are two such brands, but my knowledge in this area is only starting off. Perhaps there are more and better. But I would learn on the go...
gud luck kids in buying safe toys...
Monday, January 25, 2010
Fever again...
Well, there must be something terribly wrong. Or else, how would one explain a 1 year old to have about six episodes of fever/cough/cold within a span of less than three months. I dont get it, especially when the doctors tell me that its normal. Well, from where I come, its not normal at all, probably its normal for Bangalore.
The city doesnt seem to suit me as much as I wanted and hoped for. We were greeted in the new city not only by nice weather, but also by fever to the young one, in first week of november 2009. Strange as it may sound, till today, he has had fever about 6 times, almost all the time accompanied by cold and cough. Sometimes, fever high enough that we had to rush to an emergency to handle it.
Somebody was saying its the weather of the place that allows germs and what not to grow faster. Spoke to a few neighbours in the apartment complex, and there were similar reactions. Almost everyone has similar situation, especially with their kids.
One family in particular mentioned that their kid was down with cold and wheezing like symptoms for over a month and its not going away at all. :( Really sad.
For me, the worrying part is that the doctors take it so easily. We normally take ours to Manipal Hospital. A close by and renowned hospital. In the OPD we have visited three different doctors and all of them tell me the same thing each time I visit them with feverish kid in my arms, "Oh, its normal for this weather. Kids do get some cold and cough now and then". How can someone take fever to a small kid so lightly...
Perhaps I am being naive, or inexperience is making me think all this, but one thing for sure, there is something funny about the whole thing. I dont think, its normal at all to have fever almost every weekend.
Still worried...
The city doesnt seem to suit me as much as I wanted and hoped for. We were greeted in the new city not only by nice weather, but also by fever to the young one, in first week of november 2009. Strange as it may sound, till today, he has had fever about 6 times, almost all the time accompanied by cold and cough. Sometimes, fever high enough that we had to rush to an emergency to handle it.
Somebody was saying its the weather of the place that allows germs and what not to grow faster. Spoke to a few neighbours in the apartment complex, and there were similar reactions. Almost everyone has similar situation, especially with their kids.
One family in particular mentioned that their kid was down with cold and wheezing like symptoms for over a month and its not going away at all. :( Really sad.
For me, the worrying part is that the doctors take it so easily. We normally take ours to Manipal Hospital. A close by and renowned hospital. In the OPD we have visited three different doctors and all of them tell me the same thing each time I visit them with feverish kid in my arms, "Oh, its normal for this weather. Kids do get some cold and cough now and then". How can someone take fever to a small kid so lightly...
Perhaps I am being naive, or inexperience is making me think all this, but one thing for sure, there is something funny about the whole thing. I dont think, its normal at all to have fever almost every weekend.
Still worried...
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Long time... :)
Its been lonnnng time since I found any time to write about him.. :)
We have had his first birthday, moved to a new city, have been expecting him to walk any day now , but he's not obliging yet...
The other day, we found him trying to type on the keyboard of the home laptop, (instead of banging on the keys, like he likes bang everything else) :) It was great fun to watch, how kids learn. He must have seen someone tapping keys while we typed, and he knew better than banging...
Its been a roller coaster three months for all of us. Moving to a new city, especially was tough for him since the weather here is very different from the old place. Better, but different. So his tiny body took its own sweet time adjusting to it. Sometimes we feel, the adjustment is still going on...
He got fever quite a few times, cold more than anything else, and sometimes a few rashes here and there as well.. Most of them were weather induced, and mostly doctor was telling us to not worry, and just take basic precautions. Well, its easy for them to say, ok, but hard for us to fathom, that it would actually be ok...
We have had his first birthday, moved to a new city, have been expecting him to walk any day now , but he's not obliging yet...
The other day, we found him trying to type on the keyboard of the home laptop, (instead of banging on the keys, like he likes bang everything else) :) It was great fun to watch, how kids learn. He must have seen someone tapping keys while we typed, and he knew better than banging...
Its been a roller coaster three months for all of us. Moving to a new city, especially was tough for him since the weather here is very different from the old place. Better, but different. So his tiny body took its own sweet time adjusting to it. Sometimes we feel, the adjustment is still going on...
He got fever quite a few times, cold more than anything else, and sometimes a few rashes here and there as well.. Most of them were weather induced, and mostly doctor was telling us to not worry, and just take basic precautions. Well, its easy for them to say, ok, but hard for us to fathom, that it would actually be ok...
availability of native drivers !!!
As I mentioned earlier, I was busy experimenting with a columnar database, InfoBright.
The experience till now is mixed, in some scenarios, the data loading is very good, as much as 40k rows per second, whereas through other channels its a poorer 500 rows per second. When I go with their built in loader, its lightening fast, but when I try from Pentaho or Informatica, its measly.
Apparantly, the drivers and the compatibility of the third party tools do play a role in attaining the performance.
The fact that they dont have any native driver published, is a huge bottleneck. Informatica dont even have a native connector for MySql, the more known cousin of InfoBright (being open source, the core engine of InfoBright is based on MySql only).
One thing came out of this experience for sure, the liking for open source got better and better. During the hunt to see the reason for slow performance from Pentaho, I even tried and managed to get the source code of the plugin (transformation) that pentaho uses for Infobright. Its pure java and it was a very powerful and awakening feeling to see the code of the item. I felt as if I have the power, the choice to make a difference, make it better. :)
I am currently exploring other options, one of them includes creating a dump file (read : csv) of the data, and then launching the command line tool to load the data into target db. I dont like it, but lets see if there is any better (read:faster) way around...
The experience till now is mixed, in some scenarios, the data loading is very good, as much as 40k rows per second, whereas through other channels its a poorer 500 rows per second. When I go with their built in loader, its lightening fast, but when I try from Pentaho or Informatica, its measly.
Apparantly, the drivers and the compatibility of the third party tools do play a role in attaining the performance.
The fact that they dont have any native driver published, is a huge bottleneck. Informatica dont even have a native connector for MySql, the more known cousin of InfoBright (being open source, the core engine of InfoBright is based on MySql only).
One thing came out of this experience for sure, the liking for open source got better and better. During the hunt to see the reason for slow performance from Pentaho, I even tried and managed to get the source code of the plugin (transformation) that pentaho uses for Infobright. Its pure java and it was a very powerful and awakening feeling to see the code of the item. I felt as if I have the power, the choice to make a difference, make it better. :)
I am currently exploring other options, one of them includes creating a dump file (read : csv) of the data, and then launching the command line tool to load the data into target db. I dont like it, but lets see if there is any better (read:faster) way around...
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Its been a while...
Its been quite some time since I wrote anything to this blog, let alone anything valuable.
However, last few months have been quite eventful in my personal and professional life. I have landed a job with a company in Bangalore now, which works a lot more with open source systems/applications than my previous employer. I can easily say that this was one of the points in my decision making.
Currently, I am opening up to working on Ubuntu and probably virtualization, mysql, postgresql and most importantly, Informatica Powercenter and Pentaho. The suite of tools is just too exciting for me to find right words to express my feelings.
Recently I have picked up a project to do a Proof of Concept for using an open source columnar database and compare its behavior with oracle for a given application. Of course it involves data loading, and analytical queries, so there would be some interesting stats collection and comparison. Attempts to break a system are always more interesting than to make it J
Lets see how it goes…
Also, I would try to be more regular on the blog now onwards…
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
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