March 20, 2007: Oreo’s Day in the Hospital

Last night was barely even a night of sleep for either Dominica or I. Dominica went to bed at a fairly normal time, around midnight, but wasn’t able to fall asleep pretty much all night. I decided that going to bed and just lying there worrying about Oreo wouldn’t do me much good and I had a lot of work that needed to be completed so I ended up staying up until after two in the morning working on the new Zimbra email server. The good news is that after all of that work the email server appears to be working just fine and I am very happy with the progress. We are on schedule still for moving the email this week.

After my first week of working with Zimbra my impression is that I still really like it. The interface is great, the features are great and the administration is pretty good. Not great but it isn’t that old of a product either. We are running on version 4.5. I do wish that they would produce two or three really cool skins similar to their “steel” skin as their generic skins are pretty weak considering what a sweet interface they have built. But that is purely aesthetic. And I wish that they had slightly more documentation but they do have a wiki and a forum that mostly take care of that stuff. I wish that I had more time to run Scalix side by side with Zimbra and do a real comparison but time is not on my side and I just can’t do that right now. Scalix doesn’t quite meet our needs because of licensing differences between the two products but for most people that I talk to the licensing would in inconsequential and Scalix might be a better choice but I would only be hypothesizing at this point.

I checked with the hospital before going into work this morning but they want to keep Oreo all day. Oreo will be very unhappy about that because he really enjoys his days at daycare but we don’t want to take any unnecessary chances with his health right now. Hopefully if anything is really wrong at this point they will catch it today while he is at the hospital. They are constantly watching the specific gravity of his urine as that is the biggest indicator right now of kidney problems. I believe that he will continue on the IV all day just to be sure that his fluid levels stay high. The “med-port” in his leg doesn’t seem to bother him at all. He is so good about things like that.

Today it was discovered that yet another Movie and/or Recording Industry heavyweight was guilty of violating the copyright laws that they are so involved with promoting. This time in the midst of Viacom’s litigation against YouTube for unknowingly hosting Viacom owned content it is discovered that Viacom’s own video hosting site, iFilm, has been illegally hosting other companies’ content and is doing even less to protect it than they are expecting YouTube to do. This really demonstrates the double standard in the MIAA. Everything is a “do as I say, not as I do”. Viacom is just suing YouTube because it is obvious that media companies like Viacom haven’t worked out the model and are not effective online.

Dominica picked Oreo up from the hospital around six this evening.  He was ever so happy to see her.  The vet was very happy to be able to send him home.  They were really scared that they were going to lose him to kidney failure.  Apparently it really was as bad as we had thought.  But they think that he is doing better now.  His blood work all seems to be okay.  They want us to watch him carefully and they need urine samples on Monday to see how he is progressing.  But they think that he is out of the woods.

Oreo had a lot of pent-up energy tonight and was bouncing all over the apartment.  He hasn’t had much chance to play while being at the hospital and normally he would have been at daycare to exhaust him but he didn’t get his normal dosage of daycare last week or this week so he is ready to play regardless of how sick he may or may not be.

We spent the evening snuggling with Oreo and watching the first season of Family Ties.  We went to bed early as Dominica and I were really tired.  Oreo was just happy to get to snuggle.

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