The Coppit Family Daily News

Here’s little Christopher standing at his toy chest. We try not to encourage it too much since he needs to develop his crawling muscles.

The link below is for the 7 month photos so far. There’s a good movie of him getting excited about a caterpillar toy.

A friend of mine, Lynn, just sent me a link to opt-out of “firm offers of loans”. It’s looks pretty legit. Check it out.

Well, I just created a new category for deafness. Our son Christopher is profoundly deaf, and will receive a cochlear implant some time in the next few months.

Here is a good article from the Wall Street Journal on cochlear implants and the deaf community.

Christopher is sitting pretty well now. Within the span of about 3 days he went from very unstable to perfectly stable. He also loves to army crawl around the house. Last night he dragged himself from the living room to Abbie’s food dish in the kitchen. The thing is, he made this 30 foot trek four times. Talk about determined.

I guess things will be happening quickly at this point. Stay tuned for updates!

I’ve released Category Access 0.4.0. This plugin allows the blog maintainer to restrict access to posts belonging to particular categories on a user-by-user basis.

This plugin was previously called “Category Limit”, but I’ve renamed it to reflect its new WordPress 2.0 compatibility. (Control is no longer based on user levels.) The plugin may still work with WordPress 1.5.2–please report your experiences.

Download it on my code page.

This plugin allows the blog administrator to set an explicit ordering, spacing, and indentation of categories in the category list that appears in the sidebar. The administrator specifies the ordering in the new “Category Order” management page. There is also an option for placing the category post count inside the link.

This version supports WordPress 2.0.

A screenshot shows the management page.

The plugin overrides any ordering or indentation of categories created by the list_cats() Wordpress function. It works by dissecting the normal <ul> or <br /> formatted list that Wordpress creates, then reconstructing a custom <ul> or <br /> formatted list based on the new custom ordering and indentation. Since the plugin modifies the display only, you can revert to the default ordering by simply disabling the plugin.The plugin handles subcategories (by overriding the parent-child relationship), and the post count on categories. If the plugin fails for you, it is likelythat your category list HTML is somewhat different than what the plugin expects. In this case, please email the HTML snippet to the me and I’ll try to fix it.

Download it on my code page.

Here is an interesting follow-up to the story given in the movie The Sound and the Fury. The movie chronicles the trials and tribulations of parents considering a cochlear implant for their child, given a history of deafness in the family. Apparently several family members now have CIs, and much of the animosity has died down.

If there was any doubt, this is proof that Christopher is my son:

The major news programs ran pieces on sleep inertia. They interviewed Joshua’s advisor, and showed Joshua as a guinea pig.

He says he was up for 36 hours. He sure looks it.

We met with two people from Child Development Resources today about Christopher. They sent a developmental expert and a speech pathologist to assess Christopher and plot out an initial therapy plan.

The good news is that he’s about a month advanced in most categories for development. Surprisingly, he dragged himself forward to get to a toy. We had not seen this yet–probably because we haven’t put his toys out of reach. Both of the assessors were impressed by his progress.

Of course, he’s way behind in language development. No surprise there. We automatically qualify for early intervention due to his hearing loss, and will probably do some simple signing with him until he gets his implant.

Christopher is starting to crawl. He gets up on his hands and knees pretty readily, then rocks back and forth. He can also lift one hand, but doesn’t understand to put it in front of the other. Check out the movies in the 6 months section of the photo album:

It dawned on me that the relatives would like to see Christopher live instead of watching movies all the time. After seeing what the h264 codec could do for movies, I really wanted to get a video chat program that would work for windows and support h264. (On Mac I have iChat, but Windows folks are out of luck on that.)

Mom bought me an iSight camera for Christmas, which is really nice. It works okay on Windows, assuming your software can fix the insane overexposure that the camera has out-of-the-box. Windows also doesn’t recognize the built-in directional microphone. But the autofocus and overall picture are nice.

Next I looked into software. Streaming video supports h264 and multiple viewers, but has nasty delays. Supposedly AOL Instant Messenger supports iChat, but I just couldn’t get it to work. After much web searching, I finally found SightSpeed. The free service provides one-to-one chatting, and 30 second video mail. It even has a web-based viewer that family can use even if they don’t have SightSpeed installed (it downloads an ActiveX control). Perfect! (Well, not really since it doesn’t have h264 support.)

I expect that soon my family will all have webcams. If you want to connect to me, install SightSpeed and search for “coppit” as a contact. Be sure to enable the video mail so I can send you video clips when you’re not online.

By the way, I did try Skype, but its video interface was clunky.