Or had – he seems like he’s doing pretty well today. Saturday evening he had a high fever and was shivering and miserable; some Tylenol fixed him right up but as soon as the Tylenol would run out he’d go back to miserable.

This ran through to this morning when he seemed to just snap out of it. We took him to a doctor because he still has a bit of a fever and after ruling out all the other usual causes of a fever in a toddler (throat infection, ear infection, etc), he said it was most likely the Swine Flu.

I find it a bit hard to believe, but if we’re through it then that’s a good thing.

I had a good experience at the clinic we visited in Brantford. We left home at 5:45pm and were back home at 8pm, and we spent over an hour not actually at the clinic. They let us register, said we could come back in and hour, and when we came back, brought us in within about 10 minutes. And I didn’t know they could do a UTI check on-the-spot like that. Very nice.

If you’re curious what the course of H1N1 might look like in a mild case like what Matthew had, here’s some notes I took:

6:10pm Saturday, noticed Matthew didn’t seem “normal”. We checked his temperature and it wasn’t far off normal at 99.3 but he seemed very sleepy / lethargic, unusually so for him.

At 6:30pm his temperature was 100.3. 6:50pm it was 102.9. 8:10pm, 103.5.

When I finally talked to someone at TeleHealth, they said not to bring him to the hospital unless his fever was over 105 degrees. Wow, that’s high. At 103 it felt like I could cook eggs on his back.

We kept him on Tylenol through the night Saturday night, and Sunday morning, he woke up with pretty bad shivers. He had the shivers on and off through Saturday in a predictable pattern: He’d start shivering, we’d give him some Tylenol, and until the Tylenol kicked him, his temperature would spike up pretty quickly and he would seem lethargic and miserable until suddenly the Tylenol did its job and the fever would drop and he’d perk right up. He’d stay happy until about a half hour before his next dose was due when the cycle would start again.

Today, Monday, after about 2 days of this, he’s doing fine, temperature stable at under 100 and no Tylenol.

Hopefully it stays that way.

I wanted to post this to help all the people googling symptoms to see what to expect – this is how it went for one little boy.

(Oh, and if you’ve got one of those digital thermometers – buy a backup battery. It’s no fun having to run out to find one because the one in the unit dies on you).

I’m not familiar with most of the apps but the one of them that I am makes the whole bundle worth getting. WriteRoom.

WriteRoom gives you a completely distraction-free screen to write in. It works like TextEdit, but when you hit Escape it toggles between a normal Mac window, and a full-screen green-screen style console.

It’s a unique way to get some writing done. Definitely worth the price.

Turns out, people aren’t buying it. Surprise surprise.

So often we see Chinese knock-offs of products like the iPhone whose quality is pretty seriously compromised compared to the original product. I wonder if some folks in China actually believe that it’s the brand name that matters, and not the product?

They aren’t going to sell 1 million weakened iPhone’s a month no how much their officials believe they will.

That’s an ad up there at the top of my feed. Tweetie puts those in until you pay for it, and I haven’t paid yet. Likely I will, though, even with the great free clients out there like TweetDeck.

There are two things that make this my favourite Twitter client. You can close the Tweetie window without closing the app. That’s just good Mac behaviour. And, it’s got great keyboard support.

Tweetie also adds a menu bar notification icon that indicates when there’s new stuff – not just in the people you follow but in the searches you’ve marked as favourites as well. I prefer the passive notification to Growl popups for Twitter updates – most tweets aren’t worth interrupting me for.

The free version is ad-supported so it’s easy to check it out.

I hope I can get fries with that.

One of the fun things about running Ottawa Events when I lived in Ottawa was finding all the events going on for the holidays and listing them. In Brantford, the City runs a pretty good listing of Brantford Events, but of course that only covers Brantford proper. The distance from Brantford to Burford, St. George, or Paris is less than than the distance from Riverside South to Orleans in Ottawa, so it makes sense to cover some of the goings on in the towns around Brantford as well.

So in that spirit, here’s are some Christmas goings in and around Brantford.

Ingersoll Rotary Christmas Parade, downtown Ingersoll, November 21st at 11am.

The Welland Santa Claus Parade, downtown Welland, November 28th at 6:30pm.

Christmas in Ancaster, at the new Ancaster Fairgrounds, November 28th and 29th.

Christmas Craft and Bake Sale at the Bell Homestead in Brantford, November 28th.

Holly Jolly Faire is a Christmas sale at St. Mark’s Church on November 28th.

The Brantford JCI Santa Claus Parade runs through downtown Brantford on November 28th at 6pm.

The Burford Christmas Parade is December 12th, no time listed.

Looks like Simcoe puts on a big Christmas lights display at the Simcoe Panorama, through all of December.

(And then there’s big Santa Claus Parade in Toronto on November 15th at 12:30pm, which may be worth a day trip to the big city).

(This is my entry for November 1st – I’m off to a pretty lame start).

Seems to me the problem of “how do we get a lot of people through a lineup” should be fairly well solved by now.

There are some key principles that make this sort of wait less painful. Don’t make people wait around. That seems fairly obvious, but so many stories I’ve heard from folks in Ottawa, through CBC, CFRA and blogs, tell of hours worth of waiting in lines, waiting in waiting rooms, waiting in staging areas, etc.

From the Ottawa citizen:

At a clinic outside Ottawa, people said they had started lining up at the Kanata Recreation Centre at 2 a.m. local time.

How can you keep people from having to wait around? Well, first off, give them some idea of the current load, and suggest an arrival time. Handing out tickets or wristbands is one way, and some clinics have done that. But why should I have to line up at 2am to get a wristband?

Here’s how I’d set this up.

You go to a website and register. Or pre-register anyway; I know some of the registration process has to be done by medical professionals. But get some of the details out of the way. Give me an approximate time when I should arrive, that’s got a half hour or so of buffer, but let me enter my cell number so I can receive SMS updates as my arrival time gets closer.

So, for example, when I register it tells me that I should plan to be at the clinic at 3pm. At 2:30pm I receive an SMS that says I should arrive at 2:45pm, or 5pm. Whatever the updated information is. Too many times I’ve been waiting in the doctor’s office for over an hour for my “scheduled” appointment, fuming that they could have called me and let me know they were running late. Why not let the system do the calling?

Anyway, that’s my ideal system, and that’s not what the Brant County Health Unit has, but they have something pretty close.

You visit this website (apparently built with Joomla – kudos), and pick an available 5 minute time slot. Assuming things don’t get too far behind (and that may be a big assumption, we’ll see), that’s it – you show up at the time slot that’s reserved for you and get your shot.

You’d think the big cities would have the best processes, but maybe the smaller communities have a level of agility that the big cities can’t manage. Anyway, we’ve booked an appointment for our son and I’ll post back with how it went.

Ctrl-3 – Brings up a way to search within the app for commands.
Ctrl-O – Navigate quickly within the current file (type to filter)
Ctrl-Shift-T – Open Type (filter for types using caps – BB for ButtonBar)
Ctrl-Shift-R – same thing but for non-code (resources, xml files, etc)
Ctrl-I – put cursor at right indentation for current line or reindent selection
Ctrl-D – delete current line
Ctrl-M – toggle maximize the editor

Also you can hold down the Ctrl key to turn any symbol in the editor into a hyperlink.

Some of these are Flex shortcuts and some are Flash Builder.

Here’s the video:

The engine that Jeff Atwood has built for Stack Overflow is designed to be the ultimate Q&A website engine, and seems well suited to bringing all this together. They’ve created a hosted version of Stack Overflow called Stack Exchange, and it’s open for beta signups now.

So I created Sink Overflow, a Stack Exchange site geared towards the kinds of problems you might run into around your house. Plumbing, heating, electrical, whatever.

What I’d really like is for people to contribute content. If you have any of these sorts of issues that you’ve had to deal with recently, please post a question, and then answer the question. Even if you don’t know the answer, ask the question anyway – hopefully someone else will.

The key to building a site like this is drawing in a community. I’m still working on how to do that. I’m even open to the idea of paying people for good answers to questions if I can come up with a way of doing that, although I know Jeff is opposed to the idea.

I’m still testing the waters on this idea, so I’m also interested in what happens to a hosted knowledge exchange site when the owner decides to pull out. Does that content disappear? Will Stack Exchange offer to let someone else buy the site and keep it going? Will Stack Exchange simply assume ownership of it?

Either way, if Sink Overflow does get some good content and for some reason I don’t continue with it, I will make sure that content stays on the Internet somehow.