Maj went out for her birthday party with a passel of ladies, so I stayed home and ate pizza and watched Twelve Monkeys with the baby. We had a good time, but as the baby is approaching 1 years old, my going-to-sleep tricks are becoming somewhat outdated.
My main way to put the baby to sleep is to walk her from the front door of our apartment all the way back to the laundry room, and then turn around and walk out to the front door again. I sing during the entire process, mostly Neil Young and Johnny Cash tunes, but also a mix of 80s pop, reggae, songs, and goofy children's songs. Really, it's anything I can remember the words to, or that I can bridge over with some ad-libbing.
This worked pretty well when she was teensy-tiny, and it's still the best way for me to get her to sleep. But as she's approaching 15kg, it's getting to be a serious workout for me to slog up and down the hallway 50 times belting out Take the Skinheads Bowling at high volume.
We have a few baby books on how to get a child to sleep easier, but I've been taking the path of least resistance. I'll probably have to take the plunge and get her to fall asleep in bed soon -- which will probably mean some angry baby moments. Still, putting the baby to sleep is one of the most satisfying things in my life right now -- I highly recommend it.
tags: baby amitajune sleep neil young singing
Programmer hierarchy
Luke Welling's programmer hierarchy, based on The Brunching Shuttlecocks' classic Geek Hierarchy, is humorous and accurate.
tags: programming languages haha
Tag improvements
So, I've made some improvements to the tagging system on this blog. Instead of doing a full-text search at runtime to lookup which pages contain which tag, I instead keep a map of tags to page names in a separate db, and then look up in that index at runtime.
The bummer is that I'm not figuring out a way to keep that db up-to-date easily. The best action, of course, would be to have the tags db updated at write time, but I can't figure out how to make that work. I tried it with a write macro, but you can't get the title of the current page with a write macro, unfortunately. I might just add a hook to the commit action -- that's about all I'm coming up with right now. It's annoying that Wiliki doesn't have hooks enabled anywhere. Gar.
tags: wiliki tagging optimization