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3:56PM

Olivia Brielle Campbell

7lb 12oz

19.5 in long

She is beautiful and is very soothed by our voices already.

3:30PM. We’re pushing! I can see the Baby’s head full of hair! They are calling the doctor over. She crowned in 15 mins. The doctor is on his way.

2:30PM. Fully dilated. Still at station 0 and the doctor wants her to labor down until she gets to a +2 station. They also have her in  funny position now to try and get the baby to rotate around. Once she gets to a +2 station, they will have her push every two minutes until the baby is born.

12PM. The nurse just came in an checked and my wife is at 9 cm already. It’s crunch time. She will be back in another hour to check again, but we are to the point where she can feel the urge to push at any time. She has been resting very well trying to store her energy… she will likely need it soon.

10AM. Doctor finally came in. He decided to go ahead and break her water. INTENSE contractions now. There was an immediate call for an epidural. The anesthesiologist is here doing it now. Finally some relief. I’ve been told this will be my only child now… We’ll see. Great, now comes the catheter. That is something I don’t want to even think about… At least she can’t feel much now. Contractions are peaking much higher.

8:30AM This morning, we have not yet seen the doctor. He was supposed to come in about 6AM to check on things and decide how we were going to proceed, but we have not seen him yet. My wife is starting to have pretty regular contractions now and and when the nurse checked her earlier she was 4 cm dilated and the baby is 80% effaced. The warmer is setup to put the baby in when she comes. I have been trying to occupy myself by surfing the web and watching TV. Hopefully the doctor will come in soon so we can know more about what the plan will be for the day. For now, we wait.

3AM. Starting the Pitocin. My wife is struggling with whether or not to get some kind of pain relief through her IV. She will be able to get an epidural in another hour-and-a-half, but she has been trying to hold off on that. The medicine is starting to take effect as her contractions are becoming more intense. I think she has decided that she doesn’t want to have a baby anymore.

12:30AM Well, we are very close now. My wife has been having a few health issues and been going to the doctor twice a week for monitoring. She has been on bed rest now for almost a month which seemed to be helping things. Today, the doctor did his exam and determined that it was time to get the show on the road. They are going to induce labor starting with some mild drugs tonight. We are now at the hospital. She is trying to sleep right now as she will have a long day ahead of her. We are very excited and it is hard to rest. The nurse will be starting Pitocin (induces contractions) in a few more hours, and the doctor should be in around 6AM to see where we are at. 

It is a funny feeling knowing that your baby will be born sometime later today. I cannot easily describe all the things flying through my mind. It is really all starting to sink in.

Veterans’ Day, 2008. Not too bad if I do say so myself. (We almost made the Marine Corps Birthday Joe!) I can’t help but think about all those that have fought and died for me to be here today bringing a new life into the world.

Fear. What is to come? What will I have to deal with in the near future to raise a baby? What will I have to deal with in 15 years when she is a teenager?! How will I know if I do something wrong? What do I do now? Who will she be? Will I be able to send her to the best schools?

Love. A new life. A part of me. I will pour all that I am into her. She means everything to me already and I haven’t even met her yet. I can’t wait to hold her in my arms and know that she is mine and that this is all real. 

Fulfilled. New purpose, new meaning. New goals and desires. What once was thought important begins to drift away leaving only what is truly important; family. I will have a family. a baby. 

She is sleeping now. I should rest too, but too much to think about. Not much time left.

On my aluminum Apple Keyboard I prefer to have the F1 - F12 keys operate as the F1 - F12 keys by default, and access the brightness, expose, and other extras in combination with the Fn key. The is the opposite of the way they function in OSX. In OS X, you very rarely ever need to use the F1-F12 key unless you are using some professional software that uses them for shortcuts, so it is not that big of a deal. In Linux, however, I use these keys a lot to switch to virtual consoles and access gnome shortcuts. Previous to Intrepid, it was recommended to install pommed to enable the functions of many of these special keys. pommed’s config file had the option to swap the way the Fn key works, requiring you to use Fn in order to change the brightness, etc. Now, in Intrepid (8.10) most of the functionality of pommed has been implemented into hal and pommed simply creates conflicts. So how do we swap the function of the Fn key?

First edit /etc/modprobe.d/options
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/options

and make sure it has the line
options hid pb_fnmode=2

Then save and exit. Lastly, we need to update ramfs:
sudo update-initramfs -u -v -k `uname -r`

Then just reboot!

I decided to do a complete reinstall with Intrepid on my iMac. Everything went quite well, so I decided to share the steps that I took to do the install. Note that in the end, I want to dual-boot OS X and Ubuntu on my iMac with no other partitions. You will need to adjust your install for any custom setup you might want to have.

1. Download the Ubuntu 8.10 x64 Desktop iso and burn to a CD with Toast at the slowest possible speed.
2. Use DiskUtility to resize the OSX partition and make space on the hard drive for Ubuntu. Select your hard drive on the left side, and on the partition tab, click the “+” to add a partition to the disc. You can make this partition any format as it will just be removed later. Right now, we are just allocating space for the install.
3. I already had rEFIt installed, but if you do not have it yet, now is a good time to do it.
4. Make sure that the Ubuntu CD is in the drive and shutdown the iMac. Start it up again, and this time you should see the rEFIt menu on startup instead of the grey and white Apple logo screen. If you still boot directly into OS X, then you might need to perform the manual installation of rEFIt.
5. Once you have rEFIt working, you will be able to select the Ubuntu CD to boot. Eventually, you will get to the Ubuntu desktop.
6. Once there, go to System > Adminstration > Partition Editor. This will start gParted. In this application, you will see a graphical representation of the partitions on your hard drive similar to how DiskUtility does in OSX, except this will show ALL the partitions (even ones that Apple tries to hide) and free space on the disc too.
7. Near the Right end of the bar at the top, the partition that was created with DiskUtility will show. There will likely be a tiny bit of free space before and after this partition as well. At the beginning of the disk, there will be a EFI partition (don’t touch!) and the OS X partition (shows as an HFS+ filesystem). Select the FAT32 partition created in DiskUtility and delete. This will leave a bunch of free space on your hard drive for Ubuntu. When you are ready, click “Apply” and the partition will be deleted.You can now quit gparted.
8. Now,  start the installer with the icon on the desktop. Choose your language and then Timezone. (I chose English and the Central Time Zone [Chicago]). Why in Linux do we always have to choose a city for the time zone? I just want to specify the name of the time zone I am in!!
9. On the next screen select the Macintosh variant of your language’s keyboard. (I chose USA-Macintosh. This variant has always worked for me on my older White Apple Keyboard as well as my newer Aluminum Keyboard).
10. On the next screen, choose to install to the largest continuous free space on the hard drive. This will allow the installer to create a root and swap partition in the free space you left on the drive.
11. Next you will setup your user account and password. (I also chose to enable auto-login as I am the only person that uses this machine.)
12. On the final screen, click the Advanced button and choose to install GRUB to /dev/sda3. This is the Ubuntu root partition. Click OK for that and back at the summary screen, click Install to start the installation.
13. During the install play a little Tali or Tetravex :). After the install is complete reboot the machine.

That is it for the basic installation. After the reboot I went to System > Admin > Hardware Drivers and enabled the “Broadcom STA driver” (not the B43 driver) to get the WiFi working. 3D Acceleration and “Extra” desktop effects worked with the default open source driver, but there seems to be an issue when using 3D graphics while desktop effects are enabled (to test this, you can enable the “Extra” desktop effects and then run ‘glxgears’ from the commandline). Turning off the desktop effects will fix the issue. Enabling the Proprietary ATI driver in the same place where you enabled the Broadcom driver will probably help that situation.

After all that, you can install any updated packages with the update manager and reboot. WiFi should now work. Stay tuned for other tweaks that I make to my machine to get things working the way I want.