The Coppit Family Daily News

Sometimes it’s hard work being a baby:

For a long time now I’ve been looking for the magical panorama software that will automatically figure out how different images fit together, then warp them and merge them.

Today I found it. It’s called AutoStitch. Just throw a bunch of images at it, and it will sort them out. It will even handle images of different sizes, up/down/left/right stitching of images, and (get this) images from more than one panorama.

There are two things it doesn’t do very well. First, it doesn’t automatically match exposure levels across images very well. The metrix plugin did the trick for me. It’s for Photoshop, or any program that can use Photoshop plugins (such as Paint Shop Pro). The second thing it doesn’t do is crop the resulting image. For that I just did it manually in Mac’s preview program.

Here are some panoramas I made:

* NOT FOUND *

This article talks about a lady that gave birth to a 13 pound baby. One of the facts at the bottom of the article is that less than 1 percent of babies are born more than 11 pounds.

Dorothy says her grandfather was 14 pounds. She says she has the birth certificate to prove it!

As soon as I got home today, I downloaded Google Earth. The folks at Google have an awesome mapping interface. It’s like Google Maps on steroids.

Anyway, right when Dorothy said “Look up Area 51!” we got a knock at the door. Was it the CIA? Did they know we were trying to get info on a top secret aircraft testing facility? Would I ever get to tell anyone this story?

It turned out to be an Orkin salesman trying to get us to buy pest control. After he left, we still weren’t convinced. Maybe Orkin is a shadow company run by the CIA. Maybe they get rid of the natural bugs and plant electronic ones! And we give them full run of our houses!

Conspiracy theories aside, Google Earth is super-cool. Here’s our neighborhood:	For major cities, they have the shapes of the buildings. You can also tilt the map to get perspective, and fly around. Here’s Washington DC:
It will also show terrian. Here’s Boulder, CO, looking to the west:	And finally, Area 51:

So far they gubmint hasn’t come to snatch me fr0238 9 8 fj-a/sdf23

If you’re using a new web browser such as Firefox (any OS) or Safari (Mac OS only), you can tell the web browser to automatically check this website for new articles and display the results in a toolbar or bookmark list. See this webpage for Firefox instructions, and this webpage for Safari instructions.

Internet explorer doesn’t have this support built-in, but here is a toolbar plugin. I don’t know if it works well or not.

Of course, you could just set this webpage as your homepage.

Anyone can post comments by clicking on the “comments” link on an article. Right now I’m moderating them, so there may be a bit of a delay before everyone else can see your comments.

I can also give you permissions to post your own articles if you want. Just let me know and I will promote you and create a new category for you.

By popular demand, I’ve put six new movies of Christopher in the photo album:

You’ll need to install Quicktime 7 to see the movies. On Windows, they don’t yet have an official release, but the public preview release seems to work just fine.

I’m back working today, after helping Dorothy for a week. I’ve got a couple of papers to review, and a couple to write.

I am writing my first blog entry. I don’t think it will really work.

Today we went to the lab and doctor again. He’s gained more weight, and his bilirubin score is going down. Yay!

Here’s a photo comparing me against Christopher:

Same pointy head, same sideburns, same nose. The only major difference is that you can tell I was 6 pounds and he was 10.

Yesterday was Dorothy’s birthday. We went to Guiseppe’s for dinner. It’s our new favorite place to eat. Lower on the price scale, but still very good. We invited friends of ours, Bruce and Jennifer, to join us. One funny thing… They were the last and first people we had dinner with before and after the birth of Christopher. (He slept the whole time.)

Dorothy and I got her birthday present yesterday… We put money down for a new Honda Odyssey. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait 2 weeks to 2 months for it to arrive.

I watched Christopher while Dorothy went to the doctor to get her staples removed. They were mad that she drove herself there. I’m not really sure how driving is worse than being a passenger–maybe they figure she’ll stay out of the car more if she can’t drive.

Some pictures for Christopher, day 6:

We took Christopher to the lab for a bilirubin test, then to the pediatrician for a checkup and the test results. His bilirubin was up a little, but the pediatrician wasn’t worried. His weight was also up 4 ounces from the 9 pounds, 3.8 ounces when we checked out of the hospital. He lost more than a pound, then gained back 4 ounces in a day! (Actually, it was probably less weight gain since they weighed him without his diaper at the hospital.)

Here are some more pictures from day 5:

This is the inaugural post for this blog. I figured that it would be a good way to keep friends and family up to date with what’s going on in my life. Actually, I should say to keep people up to date with my son Christopher–before he came along, no one really cared about day-to-day updates from me.

Hopefully I can get Dorothy publishing as well… We’ll see.

I’ll be retro-blogging for a few articles to document the birth of Christopher…

Last night was pretty okay. We’re continuing to supplement Christopher’s nursing with formula for now. He’s so big he needs a lot. Today we head home. We’re more than ready, since we’ve been in the hospital almost a week. Dorothy’s mom threw a birthday party for Christopher.

Day 4 pictures:

I was at work all day, working on the proposal. Got it in at 4:59! My students Robert and Meghan helped out a lot over the last week.

Last night Dorothy was a bit stressed out. Apparently the baby was crying for food, and her milk hasn’t come in. Since she was all alone and exhausted, Dorothy finally asked the nurses to take him. I think they ended up giving him some formula.

Christopher has a bit of jaundice… My mom says that I had it pretty bad when I was a kid, and had to lay under the lights for 3 days. Luckily Christopher isn’t that bad off.

Dorothy reports that in the afternoon she spent about 3 hours talking to the lactation consultant. Happily the consultant wasn’t militant about breastfeeding. Given Christopher’s size, she was happy supplementing with formula.

I’ll sleep here tonight. Tomorrow we leave. As a token of appreciation, I brought the nurses spaghetti and meatballs from Paul’s Deli. Ronnie’s a sweet guy there who fixed me up with a big platter.

Day 3 pictures:

* NOT FOUND *

Day 2: Walking again

Today Dorothy got on her feet. It amazes me how fast they let her get up. She says she feels pretty good.

Dorothy’s dad Carmen visited, along with her mom Maryanne and brother Daniel. A little later Jeremy, Heather and Willow showed up as well.

Since it was father’s day (and because I was a little stir crazy), Carmen, Dan, and I went out to dinner. I headed home to get a decent night’s rest… I have an NSF proposal due tomorrow, and need a clear head to finish it.

The neighbors were starving for info, so I accepted their offer of a beer for a story. Increasingly I’m thinking that part of the need for a C-section was because we were forcing Dorothy’s body to do what it wasn’t ready to do. Next time, if it looks like the baby is going to be big, maybe we should head straight for the operating room and avoid the labor and induction.

Day 2 pictures:

I carried him to the nursery, where they weighed him at 10 pounds, 4.6 ounces. His official birth time is 9:38 am. He was 22 inches long at birth.

Dorothy has slept most of the day, and so has the baby. Later in the evening her mother and brother Daniel stopped by. Dorothy got a princess balloon.

Little Christopher is doing pretty well, sleeping all day. Apparently babies don’t need much food the first day, which works out well since mom isn’t in much shape to give it.

Here’s a great pic of the little tyke:

Click to see the rest of the photo album.

Big thanks to Norm Beekwilder for prepping me for the C-section. As he said, it isn’t a gentle operation. They do a lot of tugging and pulling. Thankfully I was behind a drape where I couldn’t see anything.

For Dorothy, it was more painful than anything so far–she cried out a couple times. Dorothy said she could feel them pulling stuff out and putting stuff back in. To his credit, Dr. Hurt tried to help her as best he could. He gave her a couple shots of pain relief (on top of the epidural), and also gave her some powerful stuff once the baby was born. But I get ahead of myself…

It seemed like the tugging and pulling was getting pretty intense when suddenly I heard a cry… Our baby boy! At that point Dorothy and I both started crying ourselves. Meanwhile the nurses were starting to take bets on how big he was. They carried him around the drape so that Dorothy and I could see him. Next they carried him to the corner to clean him up some.

When they got him there, the pediatrician was surprised by a little gift from Christopher. Apparently he peed and hit the wall from inside the bassinet. They checked him out, and he seemed okay. He got an 8 for his 1 minute APGAR, since he was a bit blue in the feet.

One funny thing: Once they got him to the bassinet, I swear I heard him cry “Help Me!” I asked Dorothy, “Did you hear that?” And she said, “Yeah!” Next I asked the nurses and doctors if he said “Help Me!” and they agreed.

Next they brought him to me. I was surprised… I thought they would take care of everything. Besides, what can I do? Well, it turned out that I could carry him to the nursery. When we got there, I ran to get my camera. While I was gone, he let out the first of his merconium deposits. Apparently the nurses weren’t happy because it would throw off his weight.

He was a whopping 10 lbs, 4.6 oz. Healthy, even if his eyes didn’t point in the same direction yet. (Just for the record, I predicted 10 lbs, 8 oz before he even was born.)

I stood there while they gave him his vitamin K shot, eye drops, etc. It seemed like an eternity. I even snapped out of it a couple times to ask about Dorothy, who was busy getting sewn up. Later we found out that they took her uterus out, cleaned it out, sewed it up, and put it back in. Yuk! But finally she did wheel by, and I left the boy to go check on her.