I really don’t trust vaccines. I’ve read far too many horror stories of carelessness in how they are created, and the unintended consequences they sometimes have on people. So needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled to learn this morning that Hallie has shingles, courtesy of her chickenpox vaccine. The vaccine that was supposed to protect her from chickenpox has instead given her painful blistering. What’s more, the blisters make her contagious for chickenpox, so we have to cover them with gauze until they heal. Yay.

The upside to all this is now we’ve got something to blame for her not feeling well lately. But it’s a small upside.

No wonder Travis was grumping after his shots. He probably knows better.

Travis had his two month checkup this morning. He’s reached a hefty 11 pounds, six ounces (55%), 22.5 inches long (50%), with a 40cm head circumference (55%). In other words, he’s pretty darn proportional.

He was very good for his four shots, only crying during The Deed, but not after. He did kinda look to me like he was in shock afterward, though. He just wouldn’t look up at me. I think he was pouting, and to be honest I really don’t blame him.

Now all we have to do is teach Mr. T how to sleep and we’ll be all good.

If I were a terrorist aiming to wreak havoc on a city, my first target would be the city’s Nextel towers. So many law enforcement officers and first reponders use Nextel because of the incompability of their existing public safety radio systems. Often the firefighters can’t talk directly with the police at the scene. Or the troopers can’t talk to the city police. With Nextel, each can call the other directly. That’s why just about every police officer, firefighter, and federal agent carries a Nextel radio.

Seems like an awful lot of eggs in one basket, though, doesn’t it?
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Today is the winter solstice, the official start of winter as well as the darkest day of the year. From now until summer, the days will get longer (and hopefully warmer).

The winter solstice was celebrated long before Christmas. Read more about the history of this significant day.

One of the Christmas songs of my childhood is Snoopy’s Christmas by the Royal Guardsmen. The Royal Guardsmen were a one-hit wonder of the mid-60’s. I found it interesting reading about their history here.

I came across this interesing account of five times that the U.S. and Soviets nearly accidently started nuclear wars.

I’d heard about some of them, but this one was news to me:

On Nov. 9, 1979, in what Forden calls “the training tape incident,” three command posts showed a massive Soviet nuclear strike headed toward the United States.

American intercontinental ballistic missiles were alerted, jet fighters were scrambled, and an airborne command center – known as the president’s “doomsday plane” – took to the air, although without the president aboard.

When ground-based radars showed no incoming missiles, no counterattack was launched. It was later determined that a training tape simulating a Soviet attack had been mistakenly inserted into the Pentagon’s computer system.

Heh heh. Whoopsie! Just a training tape, guys…

It’s high time we quit playing with the fire that is nuclear weaponry.

After getting bombarded with comment spam lately, I’ve been thinking of countermeasures. I found this interesting discussion about the problem.

At the bottom of this thread is this handy little SQL SQL statement which will close comments, which is the place most of these comment spams get planted.

update node set comment=1 where nid (less than sign) (top node number – 10)

Now I need to find which table contains the top node number so I can automate this process and run it nightly.