One of the reasons I was relictant to write a wiki before starting work on ikiwiki was the wiki/blog spam problem. Now that ikiwiki is reasonably mature, it's interesting to look back at how that turned out. The basic spam prevention mechanism in ikiwiki is the same as the one many wikis use: By default, it requires registration before you can edit a page. This is a pretty small stumbling block for spammers, especially since ikiwiki doesn't bother with email verification. It even prefills the login form with your username and password after you register. It would take about 5 lines of perl to defeat its registration process. Suprisingly, only one spammer has spammed any of my wikis. To defeat that spammer, I added the most common second layer defense against spam: A blacklist. Again I implemented the bare minimum, a way to blacklist a given user and ask them to "go away". Nothing to blacklist IPs, nothing more complex. That was put in place last October and I've had no problems with spam since. Around the same time, I made a change that I feared might open up a whole new class of spam, when I added openid support to ikiwiki. As far as I know, noone with an openid has tried to spam an ikiwiki wiki yet. Ikiwiki did grow one other common spam prevention tool. Josh Triplett added support for a user account creation password, so you have to know the password to get an account at all. This isn't used by default though. The only other possibly anyi-spam measure is that ikiwiki does allow locking down pages so only an admin can edit them, or so they can only be edited via commits to a revision control system. I use these methods for personal stuff like my blog, and might have cut down on the incentive to spam. Spamming a discussion page is just not as interesting as adding spam direct to my blog's rss feed. It seems likely that any new wiki system will have less spam at the beginning, especially if the spammers have to write code to bypass its registration system. That one spammer spparently did so fairly early is suprising. That no others have tried since is also suprising. My ease at blocking the spammer by simply banning them suggests that they were going after the easiest possible targets, and that it's not yet worth their while to work around even the simplest countermeasures. But if so, why did they add support for an entirely new registration system? My guess is that their existing code happened to work with ikiwiki's registration system. (This would take probably 20 lines of perl. ;-) Of course, there's all kinds of counterspam measures that I could implement if needed. By the way, if you use ikiwiki and have had problems with spam, I'm of course interested in fixing that. It'll be interesting to see when additional measures turn out to be needed, as the wiki and sites using it become better known.

My GNOME desktop is broken upon my primary machine, and it has taken me too long to get it sorted out. Short version: metacity will not run:

skx@vain:~$ metacity
metacity: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_thread_gettime

The .so file referenced is a symlink to libgthread-2.0.so.0.1200.13, and using nm I can see there are no symbols listed:

skx@vain:~$ nm /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.1200.13
nm: /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.1200.13: no symbols

That seems weird to me, but libraries are mysterious beasts, so I might be expecting this behaviour? Anyway dpkg claims this file is installed by libglib2.0-0, and the package hasn't had an upload since July 17th, so I can't believe this is the reason for the recent breakage (Even given that I don't logout often..) Reinstalling both packages (metacity + libglib2.0-0) has failed to fix the problem so I'm lost. Right now I'm running GNOME with a different window manager, icewm, via a ~/.gnome2/session file:

gnome-wm --default-wm /usr/bin/icewm-gnome --sm-client-id default0

This works almost perfectly - it is better than metacity in the sense that new windows don't overlap existing ones if there is spare screen space, but worse in that alt-TAB shows two windows "Top extended Edge Panel" and "Bottom Extended Edge Panel" - which I don't need/want to see. I'd be happy to stay with IceWM if I could fix those two problems, but I'd love to know why metacity is broken, and how I can fix it. I can't see any obvious bug reports - and I'm not 100% certain that the gthread package is the source of the error... Any suggestions welcome.

ii  metacity       1:2.18.5-1     A lightweight GTK2 based Window Manager
ii  libglib2.0-0   2.12.13-1      The GLib library of C routines

The Washington Post has an article about handwriting, apparently for some university entrance exams in the US 85% of students write their essays in block letters. The article claims that students who have poor writing skills demonstrate lesser ability to construct sentences - and claims that this indicates that there is a link between hand-writing and mental processes. While the article didn’t cover the evidence in much detail I was left wondering whether there were any tests of teaching students to touch type and then assessing them on the same tests. I suspect that increasing the ability to record text in any way would increase the sentence length and the use of long words. While students who can only write slowly will have an incentive to write more briefly. My handwriting is quite poor, I was never able to write quickly or particularly legibly and since completing university I have had little incentive to improve my writing skills. When laptops became cheap enough for me to own one (in 1998) my hand-writing skills decreased and when I started seriously using a PDA about a year ago they decreased again. I don’t believe that my writing skills (in terms of conveying ideas and instruction to other people) have declined during this time. In fact the steadily increasing amount of writing that I have done has improved my skills a lot. I think that children should be taught cursive writing, but it shouldn’t be regarded as especially important - or more important than touch typing! Then there’s the issue of the Dvorak keyboard. If the government wanted to improve the efficiency of the nation (which is what they claim to be doing) then maybe teaching all students touch-typing on a Dvorak keyboard and subsidising the purchase of such keyboards for everyone would be better than some of the current ideas in education. Dvorak keyboards would certainly be better than flag-poles! News reports indicate that hand-writing skills are decreasing dramatically in Japan due to word-processors - and a significant number of students are never learning how to write any significant portion of the Japanese letters. But the sky doesn’t seem to be falling on them either. Mark Greenaway writes about having bad hand-writing and is apparently considering some sort of remedial course. I have to wonder how good Mark’s touch-typing skills are and whether he would benefit more from improvement in that area.

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Pedagogical faultlines, being held in Amsterdamn in mid-September, re-examines pedagogy in light of new media technologies as well as traditional institutions…. Hopefully they will have the programme up soon, but it certainly looks quite intriguing.

So I have an extra chair today at my office. Is that good?
Some weeks ago, I started noticing some stinging and numbness in my legs, specially the left one. I went to the social security, and got a simple prescription: Two weeks having a certain medicine whose name I don't remember by now. But the timing was not the best, as this happened exactly during my vacations - After finishing with this medication, I still had a full week before coming back to work. And when I came back, things seemed to be fine. But still, this does not tell me if my body is at fault, or if it is my chair instead...
At the Institute, we have basically two models of chair: The one I usually have, a bit taller and better suited for my kind of table (as its arms fit nicely just under the table (as they were designed to go together). The other, a bit shorter and rounder, but with higher arms.
The stinging in the left leg is back there - No, it does not (yet) bother me, but I trust it will. So, of course, I tried the other chair. The seat is much more ergonomical, yes, and it feels overall better - But I have to reach over to use my keyboard...
So this means I can either get a different chair by my own means, or choose between back and leg pain.
Sweet.

One thing that I don’t like is blogs that provide no method of feedback. When I want to read something with little or no possibility of feedback I’ll read one of the many newspapers that are available. Craige McWhirter’s blog is one of them. The CAPTCHA system doesn’t work (I must have tried at least 20 times with both Konqueror and Iceweasel) and he doesn’t provide an email address. He does provide a mobile phone number which is handy for people in the same country. AKISMET works fairly well on my blog and makes the spam quite managable. As the number of legit comments are not that great I manually approve them thus avoiding having a spam ever appear on my blog - showing a spam encourages more of the same. The comment I wanted to make on his post was to reference my previous blog post on this topic and suggest that one thing that can be done is to improve public transport which will increase the area of land available to people who work in central city areas. This means that the land prices can decrease and housing prices will follow. Another issue is that he suggests assisting people in paying rent. While this may sound like a good thing the current system of Negative Gearing is designed to decrease rent, but instead merely increases the price of owning a house.

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Just a short note to let you know that due a change in debbugs’ SOAP interface several applications including apt-listbugs and rng are temporary broken. The change was not too dramatic and I suppose the problem will be fixed shortly. Meanwhile you can use reportbug which is not affected, since it still uses the HTML interface. Update: Don fixed the problem and everything should be working as usual again.

news.com.au reports that MS has hired former Miss Australia Erin McNaught to sex up the computer industry’s geeky image and describes her as a “University Drop-Out” (later in the article it’s revealed that she deferred her course so she might end up completing it). Hiring her is supposed to demonstrate that IT careers have “gone from geek to chic”. There are lots of more professional ways of demonstrating that idea. One way is to compare the median income of IT people ($54,422 according to payscale.com) to the median for the Australian population ($13,200 to $20,000 for females and $31,200 to $41,600 for males in 2006 according to the ABS) which clearly indicates that IT people get paid more than most Australians. Another way is to use adverts such as the Apple adverts for Mac vs PC, and Novell adverts for Linux vs Mac vs PC. Note how the female Linux character in the Novell adverts is cool and cute while still keeping all her clothes on. Yet another possibility would be to find some cute female MS employees and get them to do the promotion. MS is one of the largest IT companies in the world and has a large presence in Australia, surely they have enough female employees that they can find someone to do this promotion who isn’t famous for wearing a bikini! Hiring a model who is famous for swim-suit work to promote the computer industry isn’t going to affect the career choices of any but the least talented male students and if anything will scare off female students (who are already under-represented in the computer industry). The fact that the news.com.au story included a set of pictures of hew in swim-suits and lingerie with the title Erin McNaughty really says it all. It seems to me that Danni Ashe (wikipedia link) is better qualified for the MS job - after all she has even been recognised by the Guinness book of records for her work in sexing up the computer industry. Unlike Erin she has created web sites herself and started a very successful online business. Surely if being famous for wearing bikinis makes Erin suitable then being famous for wearing no clothes at all makes Danni even more suitable! :-# But seriously, has anyone ever hired the Chippendales (wikipedia) to advertise in the computer industry? There is a reason why that sort of thing doesn’t happen, and the same reason would apply to hiring an ex miss-Australia. Updated to fix a bad link.

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As many may recall, I wrote a couple of scathing posts about my less than stellar experiences with Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey/ So, I am happy that people are finding the post and leaving their own horror stories. While it sucks that they have had problems, it is key to splatter these stories over the net. It it is a good indication that if I start my BCBS complain site, the name and domain which already exist (and the name is quite clever, imho), it will flourish. I am still on the fence about it as I am “giving” BCBS another chance to come through with the payment. I am in fact about to write my first appeal letter and send it off hopefully this weekend. In another month I should know whether they approve my claim or whether I will have to move to the second appeal process, which apparently goes to an external review board. But hopefully the posts and comments will keep coming as they are good grist for the BCBS mill.

Next week, Debian will turn 14. The celebration of this here in Holland means nothing specifically other than a good occasion to get together and have a drink. It will traditionally take place in Breda, organised by our good friend Geertje Stappers, on Thursday the 16th. See the wiki page for this and other celebrations.

I have had, on occasion in the past, a reason to use the wonderful TortoiseSVN software. It is, by all standards, a really great solution for someone wanting to use SVN in a MS Windows environment, and uses the official svn client in order to leverage open source as much as possible. Recently I have been using it a bit more as I work at Honeywell as a programmer. I've come across a couple things that bug me about the interface.

The first is that some actions inexplicably lock the place that initiates that action. The best example I have of this is when I am looking at the window for an Update, and want to see what happened in the log, I click the button to open the log, and I can't use the window while the log downloads. Sometimes this can be an issue because the server is pretty slow at producing logs for some reason (it's beyond me, and NotMyProblem(tm) because I'm not in charge of the admin). This makes it irritating because I can't inspect other files while the log is downloading. Strangely, the server actually will return other requests quickly, like the request needed to see the diff between the working copy and the tree. It would be much better if the windows were separate - they're not related to each other in effect, so the locking of the initial window is completely useless. I could have called up the log from another action, that would leave the update window perfectly usable, so I know it's possible.

The second problem that I have run across more than once relates to the proximity of actions in the right click menu while committing a change. Take a look at the screenshot of this menu.

There have been many times when using this window that I realize that I forgot to add a file that I need to commit, so I right click on the file and move down to the "Add" menu item, only to miss and click on the "Delete" item. "Delete", when used on a unversioned file, performs a windows delete, causing me to curse at the (now missing) entry in the commit log and go running to the recycle bin to retrieve this temporarily lost file. These two options in the context menu are entirely too close to each other. The "Delete" and "Add" actions have completely opposite meanings and effects, and having the program do exactly the opposite of what you expect is what I consider to be a Very Bad Thing. I would move the "Add" action up to the top of the list (it is, by far, the most common reason for me to use the context menu), or at least place another menu item in between.

I'm feeling like I'm being very unhelpful here, complaining about these issues in an open source project and not producing a patch to fix these issues. I may produce one in the near future - unfortunately when I'm not at Honeywell, I don't really have a Windows development environment setup.

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1. JD: The reason diffs are quick is because svn keeps a copy of the original file in the checkout, so diffs and reverts don't need to hit the server.
   #1 2007-08-09 00:41 (Reply)

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I've let my talks page fall badly out of date in the last year. As a first stab toward updating it, I've uploaded all of the notes for all of talks I've given calling for a free culture movement built around a standard of freedom and for adoption of the Definition of Free Cultural Works. There are notes posted for talks at the following conferences and meetings:

• Wikimania 2007 (2007-08-03) in Taipei, Taiwan. Notes: HTML, ReST
• iCommons iSummit (2007-06-16) in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Notes: HTML, Rest
• Freeculture.org Annual Conference (2007-05-26) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notes: HTML, ReST
• FSF Associate Members Meeting (2007-03-24) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notes: HTML, ReST
• Wikimania 2006 (2006-08-04) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notes: HTML, ReST; Slides: PDF, ODP

The talks and notes are not the same, but they are often very similar and they share a lot of text. The only recording I have is the one from the FSF Members meeting which I posted here before. It's still available online here:

• Talk (OGG Vorbis or MP3)
• Q&A (OGG Vorbis or MP3)

Perhaps a couple other recordings will surface. The good news is that I think that those of us involved with the definition have begun to make real progress in getting the message out and I think that, in several real ways, we've changed the nature of the conversation around free culture. I hope so, because I think that, looking at the list above, it's probably time to move on and to think about helping the definition and the movement in new innovative ways and with new compelling arguments.

I’m 23 years old since 2 am on this August, 8th. Thanks for the congratulations messages I’ve received so far :-), resiak even sang happy birthday to me on IRC! Next year (August, 8th, 2008), 08-08-08, I will turn 24! 08+08+08! Something really bad is going to happen because of that Probably that’s gonna be my really lucky year. But how en Earth can I be more lucky than what I am today? In the meantime, I’ve invited my closest local friends to a bar this Friday to celebrate my birthday. Let the rum and tequila flow, baby! Yeah!

This is an updated translation into English of the one-question interview with pjorge (based on Darren Rowse’s one-question interviews idea) in which Javier Candeira (Barrapunto co-founder and editor among many other things, and a good, loved friend of mine) comments about an interesting game of his creation that’s being exhibited in Barcelona and that deals with the fears many parents have towards the Internet and the new enterntainment technologies and videogames. The game code will be released as GPL, even though the game data will have a non-free Creative Commons (with a non-commercial clause). The game has a really interesting approach, and mixes the concept of pinball games with that of graphics generated with “paper dolls” techniques, to try to make people think about the ideas mainstream media are pushing, and the way they try to tell everybody how to raise their kids. You might like it or not, but it will probably won’t leave you indifferent. That’s what art is about, in fact, isn’t it? What is ‘El rei de la casa’? ‘El rei de la casa‘ (an expression that in Catalan and Spanish means “the precious child”) is an exhibition and a videogame. The exhibition deals with the cultural construction of the idea of childhood, and can be visited until September 24 in the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona. From there. Among other works, in the exhibition there are photos by Loretta Lux and Bego a Egurbide, paintings by Marc Ryden, Kiki Smith and James Reilly… it’s really worth a visit. The videogame is a commission from Andr s Hispano and Marc Roig, curators of the exhibition. They wanted to portray Internet and videogame arcades (or cybercafes, which are their modern equivalent) as one of the “new forests”, these places where parents don’t dare allow their children go alone for fear of the dangers (real or imagined) that may lie in ambush. The Internet has entered into the collective imagination, and one of the memetic niches that it has crept into is that of the bogeyman, the scapegoat that bears the brunt of all the evil that happens in society. It is enough to look at the news programmes from right-wing TV stations with their adversative Internet coverage: “it’s good, but…”. All over the media you see headlines like “gang of pedophiles arrested who sold child pornography *on the internet*”. They conveniently skip that pedophiles filmed those poor kids *in a flat*, and that they did it *on a bed* and used *videocameras* just like those used by the reporters now sounding the alarm. But no, what’s bad is *the Internet*.
The other theme that we wanted to touch on with the pinball game is how videogames are presumed to corrupt childhood. When pinball games were introduced, the North American authorities laid down the law: it was an infernal machine that incited gambling and even lust. From the religious right to the secular left, every moral guardian has denounced the supposed harmful effects of videogames on childhood: because of them children and teenagers engage in murder, robbery, truancy, bad school grades and even untidy bedrooms and doubtful personal hygiene. For this reason, the “new forest” of the Internet and videogames had to be a videogame, proving once more that games are cultural vectors, a form of artistic, political or commercial expression like any other. It also had to be a videogame about the a triangle: on one side the children, on the second one the children minders (parents and society at large), and finally the Great Scapegoat: the Internet. After many abandoned and reworked proposals we arrived at the present design for the game: an emulated pinball game presented on a panoramic TV screen, and having two levels: one set in the real world and named after the exhibition, and a second one set in a more or less conventional cyberspace. This second level is called “Prey of the Net”, and portrays the vision of the Internet that a Fox viewer may have: you have Spam, game-playing killers, kids making more money than their parents, S&M gear, dildos… in short, everything that is scary and nothing that is comforting, at least to some. All the illustrations for this pinball, both on the gameplay field and on the scoreboard, are by Mauro Entrialgo. For the scoreboard I asked him to prepare a set of drawings similar to KISS dolls (like the cut-up dolls that kids still played with in the last century). Thanks to these dress-up dolls the scoreboard shows more than the score (which grows randomly anyway); it also portrays the state of the boy or girl protagonist of the game. I say “boy” or “girl” because in the game, just like in real life, you have a 50/50 chance of starting the game of life with either sex. The fist level, ‘El rei de la casa’, portrays the stress that families feel when facing children’s media consumption. The targets trigger lines from the parents: “All day in front of the Idiot Box!” when you hit the tv, or “without a degree, you are nothing” when you hit the school. There are four targets on the right, which can be reached shooting the ball with the left flipper (the one representing the parents): school, museum, church and reading. On the left, and reachable from the right flipper, representing the kids’ id, are the TV, the kid’s peers and the videogame console; at the top of the playing field, towering above it, the internet-enabled computer. As the ball hits the different targets, the scoreboard dresses the kids in a housecoat, a leather jacket, and gives them a mortarboard or a saint’s halo. They are the pride of their parents, kids still not perverted by the Internet. It is cheap symbolism, I confess, two-dimensional sociology, but that was also something we aimed for. After all, pinballs have always been complicated allegories rather than complex ones. In a first design I planned to make computer accessible only under certain conditions, but that is not something that would have work in this exhibition: some people just play and play (which gives me an immense joy), but other people can’t or won’t give it much effort. It’s best to make it easier for everyone, so they can send the ball into the next level even without meaning to. The second level, “Prey of the Net”, is accessed when the player puts the ball through the PC’s screen. Here the character on the scoreboard keeps smiling while the game dresses them in a straightjacket, S&M headgear, or leaves them in their underwear, with their hands full of money, playing cards, bloody knives and sex toys… to their parents’ horror. The player has no fixed goal here, only to make the ball go through the pachinko and the spinning spider. These elements work as an atrocity generator and a rebuke distributor. Parents’ voices scold the player, faced with the horrors of the Internet. But the star is the scoreboard. Mauro rocks. Right now the code and content for downloadable game are done, and the people responsible for the ISO are giving it the final touches. It will be a bootable liveCD with some Debian variant that (hopefully) will run on any PC bought in the last two or three years. We will treat the computer as a games console, which may or may not be symbolic (if you want it symbolic, we can make it symbolic!). The game itself is under the GPL license (the pinball part is based on Henrik Enkvist’s Emilia, which is packaged in Debian), and only the graphic resources will be under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. The music is also under a non-free Creative Commons license because of the status of the original samples, but I recommend you download it and play it because its author is none other than man, the Barrapunto founder and sometimes editor.

Michal iha asks about a mobile phone usable in Japan. When I went to Japan this spring, I've researched some options. Renting such a phone in The Netherlands was about 50/day (!). However, when you rent it upon arrival in Japan, it was only 500/day, ~ 3. It worked perfectly and is very affordable for shorter trips. See NTT DoCoMo for details. Apropos phones, I've got a new mobile phone: the Nokia 6300 to replace my previous 6310i. Transferring the data on it worked great with the help of gnokii. The only question was how to get rid of my old phone responsibly. Stiching AAP, a sanctuary for monkeys, offers the possibility to send the phone to them for free. It will be recycled and AAP gets a bit of money for it. A real "win-win" situation.

I've been cleaning out my home directory from cruft, and re-arranging things so that I can more easily find stuff in the future, without resorting to grep -r. As a result, I find old stuff I'd forgotten about long ago, such as Blinkenlites, which was not at all my own writing. Today's amusement is all mine, from 2003 when I bought a new laptop.

Ode to my laptop
by Lars Wirzenius Oh, my laptop, how I adore thee!
Wherever I am, so you will be!
If my co-workers I don't want to see,
I'll take you to the cafe with me! You're compact, and have every device,
nothing extra, but enough to suffice.
You're closed, I can't commit the vice
of adding hardware, even something nice! This makes my life rather easy,
hardware makes me queasy,
it's never logical, often greasy,
code is better, even when cheesy. Oh, my laptop, you are my friend!
My true and my trusted friend!
To your welfare I will tend,
my true and trusted friend!

etbe: Two Questions for All Serious Free Software Contributors asks:

"What do you think is the most important single-sentence of advice that you can offer to someone who wants to contribute to the free software community?"

He who does wins, so don't let the bastards grind you down.

"If you had the opportunity to say one sentence to someone who knows about computers and free software (EG they have used both Linux and Windows and done a small amount of programming) to convince them that they should join the free software team, what would it be?"

Imagine every bug you found could be fixed by you if you want, or a friend, or an enemy, or someone you hire, or the original developer, or whoever and that it's your choice who you ask to do it, with no veto from the copyright holder: that's free software. The second sentence is a bit long, but I found it hard to encapsulate the power of that freedom in one. I use the bug example rather than costs or anything, because I think that's what will be most attractive to someone who has done a bit of programming: the right answer to "why can't I fix this trivial bug?"

RFA: glipper -- A clipboard manager for GNOME #436550.

Glipper is currently my package in Debian at 0.95.1-3 and that version
is written in C and uses a binary data file which has raised one bug
(#436078 - wishlist severity). It currently has no other bugs.

There is now a
new release that closes this bug, my problem is that
v1.0 is a ground-up rewrite in Python! Essentially, glipper v1.0 is a
completely different package internally. (Previous translations have
also been lost.)

I have no python experience, no python packages and no ability to do
anything if (when) python code goes wrong. I don't want to have to
learn python just for glipper (don't have time).

So - I don't see what I can do except request adoption of glipper, it
just seems so weird to leave a package which is active while I am also
active.

Anyone fancy taking on glipper?

I don't think there's any point retaining the old C package - that code
is already dead upstream.

Currently, there is no RCS for the debian packaging for glipper - I was
using CDBS and the current watch file needs editing to look for a
tar.bz2 instead of the previous tar.gz.

There are two issues with migrating from 0.95.1 to 1.0:

1. the ~/.glipper directory needs to be removed.


2. Glipper v1.0 is also now GNOME only, support for other window managers
   has not been implemented in the python version.

In answer to Russel's recent “tips for new contributors” posting, I give you the answer to the ultimate question about life, the universe and “How can I contribute?”: Find an area that you really care about. Or, rephrased in a less friendly way: “If you have to ask, don't.” And answering Russel's real question (one sentence to give to somebody who wants to contribute): “Know the community. Respect the people who are in the project much longer than you.” Knowing the technology isn't important - it's always possible to learn technology. But not knowing the community leads to frustration very quickly, and the new contributor will possibly not even have the chance of having the technical side of things even seriously looked at. (Of course, you may still come to the conclusion that you know more than “them” and that the people running the project right now are morons. If this sentiment persists, perhaps it's time to fork the project?) Ganneff's reply is also worth thinking on.

Today we went to see our new obstetrician. Ironically, he was our second preference (our current, third preference, who hasn't been all that endearing anyway, is going to be out on sabbatical when the baby's due). I think we'd already decided we liked him better before we even met him, but he did come across as a bit more calm and less alarmist. That said, he is currently of the opinion that the baby should be delivered at 36 weeks, which is September 14, which is a few weeks earlier than the date we were throwing around, of October 8 (Sarah's Mum and Aunty arrive on October 6). So that's going to make things interesting. We're seeing him again next week, which is after Sarah's had another echo-cardiogram to see if her aneurysm is still stable. The results of that will help firm up the delivery date. He also said that because the 28-32 week mark is when the heart's working the hardest, we're really in the danger zone now. It looks like we won't be going camping next week after all. The doctor didn't think being 6 hours by car away from home was a terribly good idea.