2005
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Obligatory wearing of the Empathy Belly by all the men in the class while their pregnant wives instructed them to lay down, roll over, bend down, pick up something, sit. A variety of commands similar to what you would give to any trained puppy. Yes I fully participated as well. Rolling over with 40 pounds strapped to your gut is rather hard. My pleas that I had already formed my own empathy belly over the last few months were met on deaf ears.
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Instructor asked us to get into small groups and put together our list of top 10 questions. I suggested to put on the list ‘What are we supposed to do when we get home with the kid?!?’ The person taking notes that I was joking. Oh, if only I was. ;-)
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Required graphic video of a woman delivering a baby. Oh boy. Don’t think I need to add all that much here, particularly don’t need to include any pictures.
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Found out we were the only couple in the class using a midwife. That surprised me. Maybe it shouldn’t have.
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Realized we need to get our doula picked soon. Surprised that a handful of people didn’t know what a doula was either.
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Enough with Sheryl Crow! This is Lance Armstrong. He’s won more Tour de France victories than any other man in history. Yet it seems that his record 6 wins are often overshadowed by the fact that he’s dating some “rock star”. (By the way, Sheryl Crow is a rock star? Guess I wasn’t listening.)
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I’m sitting here wearing my LIVESTRONG bracelet and it’s amazing how many of these things have went out. They’ve sold 46 million of them now. Holy crap! When we went and saw the Tour de France last summer these things were the ID tag for the American Tour fan. Now it seems everyone has them. Okay, that’s cool, but for some reason I’m a little bitter about it.
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I wish Lance would stop the tour. Really. He wont state publicly anything. His Discovery contract requires him to race one more. Seriously, I would rather he take on the spring classics or even better go after the hour record. He’s talked about all of the above, but has been non-commital about it all. Added bonus here would be OLN actually having more coverage of events other than the Tour. Non-tour coverage on OLN has dropped every year, even while the total number of hours of cycling has increased. It’s all Lance and the Tour de France. Let’s hit the cobbles of Paris-Roubaix!
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The Bike. Oh my. So on Oprah they had this story, tough story really, of this woman with cancer and she is fighting and she seemed amazing. Lance is her hero, etc. So at the end Lance gives her this bike. Oh My! Some stage-hand wheels out this P.O.S. $199 Target special Trek to give to her. Huh? This is Lance. Trek is his sponsor. They couldn’t spring for a carbon-fiber, ahh, anything? Wow. Even Lance looked a little stunned when he saw it. Kinda like he was thinking “send that thing BACK!”.
- WAY too expensive!
- Interface for managing your domain is SLOW and clunky.
- You cannot create an SPF record using their system! Oi!
Gettin' Jiggy With Power
Our power service is horrible (example, another). There is just no way around it. We seem to get regular under-voltage events and the occasional power cycle on a regular basis. Every once in a while for fun we get thrown a multi-hour outage as well. What a blast! For a computer geek like myself, this is nerve racking. I had some new UPS units on my Amazon wish list for a long time but it seems nobody thinks that is a fun present.
I hadn’t “right-sized” my UPS for my server for years. During that time I went from a simple tower with a couple of drives to my terabyte server with 10 platters spinning at all times. The Back-UPS Pro 650 I had on it was completely inadequate and to make it even better a couple months ago the battery had given up the ghost so there was NO battery power at all. I issued a self-test one day on accident which resulted in an immediate reboot!
I upgraded my server setup to a Smart-UPS 1500VA RM model. I chose the rack-mount model because I plan in the coming weeks to buy a half-rack for my server gear in the laundry room to get it all organized and setup nice. Great UPS. Got a little nervous first time I plugged it in. This thing has much more robust circuitry than any other UPS I have so it makes a lot of “electrical noises”.
I also solved the problem for my home theatre PC and the two TiVos. Now we will not miss our favorite satellite content even if the power is down for a bit! 🙂 I got a Back-UPS RS 1000VA for this stuff. My only disappointment here is that it seems that the Back-UPS RS line only works with PowerChute Personal Edition so I cannot tie it into the main PowerChute Console and manage everything from one place. Maybe they will change that in a future release of the software.
I got a new battery for my old Back-UPS Pro 650VA and that is now running my office and moved the absolutely lame Back-UPS 350VA that I had here to my iMac G5. Every computer is now on its own UPS. Yeah!
Customer Service
I just had one of those amazingly rare situations of having great customer service, with a bank no less! The second part of this sounds funny since I live, eat and breath technology but this whole experience was great.
I reconcile my bank accounts essentially daily in Quicken. I’ve done this forever (or at least over 6 years which is mostly forever). I saw on Friday that a check cleared for our plumber (see related story) for $158.95 but I had entered $138.95 in the register. Something was amiss!
So, first I logged into USBank.com and used the nifty feature where I can see an image of each check processed. I looked at this check and right away saw the issue, I had written the 3 somewhat sloppy and you could mistake it for a 5, but the long-hand version clearly said “thirty”. I called up USBank and entered my information to get to a customer service person. After getting the person on the line she brought up the check on her system. We both agreed on the error and she applied a credit.
Here is the part that just shocked me. She told me to refresh my screen and I would see the correction. I was taken aback. Surely the USBank.com site runs on some daily dump of data. There’s no way this is all tied right into the main transaction system for the bank! No way. I hit refresh and right there was my credit.
I wish all my transactions were this simple. I left with an immediate solution, I was empowered to verify the situation without even calling them and I and the customer service person were looking at the same information. Kudos USBank!
NetGear GS716T
I’ve written on our site about some of the trials and tribulations I had with my previous gigabit switch. I had purchased a cheap SMC 8508T switch a while back, it died, I had to RMA it and I’ve been having very, very odd problems lately. I finally decided enough is enough and I decided to get a switch that I could manage at some level. I looked at a number of switches and the NetGear GS716T seemed to be a good compromise between price and performance.
I plugged the switch in tonight, just unplugged everything from the current switch to the new one. Everything came up no problem. The 716T is a smart switch but it doesn’t require any configuration, out of the box it will just operate as a dumb switch. After plugging in and verifying everything was working fine I installed the administrative software and it immediately found the switch and I was able to configure it for the network.
Physically the box is stable. Power supply is internal so no annoying power brick. Good compliment of lights – however I find the use of green v. yellow LED for different speeds impossible to detect on the device. Luckily I don’t really care since the web interface gives all this information and more. The two fans built into the unit are loud though. I wouldn’t want this thing where you would care about ambient noise. Rack mount ears included and it will be very stable in a rack.
The administrative interface is basic, but covers all the bases. I haven’t figured out the details of the VLAN support, trunking, QoS, etc. Not sure I even need it but will be fun to play with. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next firmware upgrade so I can get jumbo frames and basic SNMP support (need to have MRTG graphs on all the ports of course!).
Baby Class
Tammy and I went to our first baby class tonight. We are taking the 6-week Introduction to Child Birth class at North Memorial. Highlights from the class include…
I feel like I should invite Tammy to my next annual physical just so we can level the field with all this information I’m getting lately.
Lost in Babies-R-Us
Today Tammy and I truly realized how completely and totally clueless we are in some respects to our upcoming adventure in parenthood. The day started with what seemed like a simple task. We needed to go and register for the upcoming baby shower. Simple enough task. We registered for our wedding and that was actually kind of fun, I got to shoot things with the scanner and she got to shop a lot.
Tammy had done some research on this to figure out what should be on our list, what the necessities were, etc. All-in-all this should have been a pretty simple process. Our first stop was at USA Baby. Tammy showed me the car seat and stroller combination that she liked and I thought it looked great too. If the rest of the day was going to be like this it would be a breeze! Evaluate the different products, give it a tug, see which one feels better and move on. The rest of the trip to USA Baby wasn’t worthwhile and we decided not to register there, not enough registry worthy stuff.
We then proceeded to the mega-mart of baby goodness that is Babies-R-Us. We stopped at the registry desk and got set-up. They had a scanner gun for me so I could have fun shooting things with the little red line. This is how shopping should be all the time. You get to carry a device and scan each item you want. Seriously, let’s get rid of the shopping carts and just walk around with scanners. Wireless transmission of each item as we scan it and then pick up a box at the checkout! Anyway, that’s another post. 🙂
We proceeded to start building the registry list and walked over to the thing that any moron knows you need if you are going to have a baby, bottles! We stood looking at the “wall of bottles” from a variety of companies. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. We picked up different bottles and looked them over. Fifteen minutes passed. We wondered if we wanted the bottles with the plastic bags in them or not. Twenty minutes passed. Do you want bottles with a bend in it? Do you need a sanitizer? What about a bottle warmer? What is the bend in the bottle even for?
This is the point where we realized we were really, hopelessly lost. These books list a ton of things that you “need”. Do you really need all this stuff? It seems crazy! Babies were born and prospered plenty before the invention of all these plastic items. What do you need? What is purely optional? What is a poor sales job trying to simply extract money from your wallet? Aargh!
We spent about 2 hours or more building a list of items. We left in a state of despair wondering where the baby sleeps when you go to a hotel? How and where is a bassinet used? Do you need the bottles with a bend in them?
I’m sure we’ll figure all of this out but it sure left us in a state of confusion. A quick call to a friend left a recommendation to get a copy of Baby Bargains. We proceeded directly to Barnes & Noble and purchased the book. Hopefully we will be able to get some wisdom from it…
[Moron] Dad Tip
I’ve commented before on the incredibly poor quality of reading materials for dads-to-be. One of the books that we have been following week-by-week of the pregnancy has these inane “Dad Tip” sections in each week. This weeks was so crazy to me that I just had to share it. From Your Pregnancy Week by Week the “Dad Tip” for Week 29 is
After the baby is born, you may want to take time off to help out at home and to be part of your baby’s early development…
This is the 5th edition of this book by the way. It was published in 2004! Now, I realize that there was a day and age when a new father may simply get a call from his wife in the hospital and go visit after work, but wasn’t that like 50 years ago or more! It seems rather insane to me that a father would need to be “tipped” to take some time off when his new baby is born.
I Don't Play a Plumber on TV
I like to think that I’m not a helpless guy around the house. I try to fix things here and there. I’ve got the tools to do basic repairs and maintenance. Sometimes I get in over my head and I usually have a pretty good sense of when it’s time to stop and call in professional help before causing more problems than we started with. In reality I’m probably not all that “handy” at all, but I sure like to think that I am. Probably a “guy thing”. So, when prompted with the opportunity to prove that “handiness” I don’t hesitate to dive in and see what I can do.
Last night I got home about an hour before we were expecting dinner guests. Nothing big, only one couple coming over, not a big party or anything. Anyway, when I got home Tammy informed me that the kitchen sink was stopped up. There was water standing in both basins and she had tried running the disposal more thinking it would agitate things out but it did no good. I decided to take a look into the situation and see if I could help.
First thing I did was unplug the garbage disposal. Tammy’s constantly shoving her hand in there and fidgeting with things without unplugging it. This makes my spine tingle for very irrational reasons. Before I shove my hand in that “beast of destruction” it’s getting unplugged and I’m testing that it doesn’t turn on with the switch. I felt around and nothing was amiss. We ran it and this time it shot water a good foot out of the sink. Water that was also laced with little bits of carrots and potatoes, the last things to go through the disposal.
I started poking on the other basin and trying to see through even more carrot and potato bits floating in a few inches of water. Deciding that it just had to be clogged with too much debris from the disposal I put a clothes hangar (this is one of the “professional tools”) down the drain and I could feel a lot of blockage and muck, or whatever word plumbers use to describe the junk that keeps water from going down in your drain.
I decided that if I could just put a plumbers snake down this thing I could probably clear it. I retrieved our miniature snake that is used primarily for getting hair out of shower drains from the garage and tried to run it down, but the drain openings were just too small. And this is where things went from relatively harmless to a complete mess.
I felt the drain through the water and the bottom “bolt thing” (another professional term) was loose so I started to remove it. My thinking here was this was just a bolt to hold this drain cover on. I could remove it and voila, I would have all the room I would need to run the snake. It turns out this bolt is actually much more substantial than just holding any old cover on. It turns out in fact, as I’m sure anybody that knows really anything about plumbing knows, which I obviously do not, that this bolt holds the drain onto the sink!
I was able to remove the bolt with no problems, but then as soon as I started to fidget with the drain I heard a gushing sound as the water that was in the basin started to rush onto the floor! I’m not talking about a little bit of water by the way. I was doing all this work through about 4-5 inches of standing water, a few gallons of water! After about 10 seconds of water gushing we had a small lake of carrot-y, potato-y water on the floor and about 15 minutes until our guests would be arriving for dinner.
Here is the point in my story where I really must thank Tammy. She could have read me the riot act for not turning on my brain or trying to do this minutes before guests arrived, but she just laughed. It was a huge mess. After the water drained on the floor I put things back the way they were, we got things cleaned up and other than the fact that we couldn’t use the sink the night proceeded as normal. That is until a couple hours later when we went downstairs and realized the water had came through the floor and poured itself all over my desk downstairs! Luckily no computers were damaged, however my iPod has a nasty dishwater residue all over it. I’m now groaning over the potential for the ceiling drywall to be damaged. Hopefully we’ll be spared.
A plumber is on the way today. I should have skipped my little adventure and just fixed this with a phone call to begin with. But hey, now I know what that bolt thing is for in the middle of the drain!
Flying Rant
Subject really says it all. This is definitely a rant. I’m writing this on a plane. I’ll post it after I land and get to the hotel when I will be a rejoicing with glee at no longer being confined to my 9 cubic feet of space. I’m on a business trip right now and being reminded minute by minute why flying is such a horrible experience.
I’m flying coach, as seems to be the case most of the time these days. I don’t fly enough to be gold or platinum anymore and upgrades come far and few between to those that are just silver frequent flyers. Honestly though, I would rather not get the upgrades and fly less frequently. It’s not a very good trade-off.
Just now while getting my laptop out I had to lunge to the rescue of my poor screen. I had opened the computer on my seat tray and pushed myself back as far as I can in the seat so I had some hope of using the it. Just as doing this the person in front of me decides to recline and my computer was being squeezed in this vice. I kindly (I hope) asked the person to not recline, they were okay with this, so now I can actually try to do something productive for three hours. Here’s an idea, let’s all just agree that you CANNOT RECLINE IN COACH! Deal?
While typing the last paragraph I’ve been nailed by the beverage cart TWICE as it went down the aisle. No “excuse me” from the attendants or anything. After all, we are just cattle right?
Just as I get settled in and start typing, tunes going on the laptop and feeling comfortable the guy on the window has to get up. Yeah. I’m typing now while standing with the laptop balanced on the top of the seat. Oh, and even more amusing. After I write about my experience with the seat reclining a guy in the row next to me just had his laptop taco’d by a recliner in front of him. He didn’t ask him to stop though. Is that more considerate than me or just being a push over? You pick. This plane is 100% full. If the airlines cannot make money in this market, I don’t know how they ever could. Maybe if they spent just 1% of effort actually trying to make customers more comfortable they wouldn’t be thought of as the Greyhound of the Sky. Grrrrr…
Pokipsy
For some reason I feel like writing something on my website tonight but I don’t really have a specific topic to write about. Usually I only post very topical things. We did this or that. Or we went to this place or that place. Pretty standard, if not a little boring, stuff. So, I’m just feeling like rambling a little bit.
I’m almost over my obsession getting Road Sign Math launched. The site is completely done, I opened the store and now it’s just time for more content. We are taking a road trip to Colorado and New Mexico at the end of March and I’d love to get a mathematically significant road sign in each state. One can only hope! 🙂
Speaking of that trip I’m really excited about it. In New Mexico we are going to stay at a B&B that caters to amateur astronomers. I’ll likely bring my telescope along and they host nightly star tours. The skies in New Mexico and its location are ideal for astronomy. I’m looking forward to it greatly.
Tammy and I went to see Hitch this afternoon. The movie is generally bubble gum for the mind, but it was pretty funny. I burst out in some gut laughter a few times. Of course, I’m a big fan of Kevin James from King of Queens. Guy is a riot.
While we were out we stopped by Barnes & Noble. I picked up the new Willie Nelson and Green Day CDs. I got off the Green Day train a while back after they became multi-platinum rock star heroes. I used to see Green Day at the Whole when I went to the U of MN and have liked them forever. The new CD, American Idiot, is surprisingly good. Willie’s new CD, It Will Always Be is also great. He’s just amazing. All of his songs are stories and they are so heartfelt.
There, I’ve gotten my urge to put something up on my site out of my system. I’m going to go off to other activities and stop boring you all. I won’t stand to be disparaged.
Turn Off Annoying TVs!
Ran across this product today and am tempted to order it just to have fun in sports bars! Some ingenious person made a keychain remote that broadcasts over 200 different shutoff codes for several hundred TV manufacturers. Annoying TV? TV-B-Gone! Only $14.99, well worth the value. :-)
Baby Update
Tammy has decided that she is now “officially pregnant”. How this differs from the last 26 weeks I’m not exactly sure. She seems to have decided that she now “looks pregnant” and not, as she says not me, just fat. Today was another checkup and the midwife. This appointment included the gestational diabetes test and we were both a little concerned about that one. Not for any particular reason other than just generally being concerned about the progress of the pregnancy.
I still find myself worrying all the time. This morning we were at the gym working out and Tammy had a cramp in her stomach. The place ground to a halt as everyone else in the gym, all of which were men, were freaked out about a pregnant woman having a cramped muscle in her stomach. Hypervigilante I guess.
Anyway, the blood sugar test came out just fine so nothing to worry about. She’s at 26cm now, exactly where she should be and everything continues to look fine. We got clearance to move forward with a late-March trip we want to take so in short, all indicators are green!
The next visit is in 4 weeks and then we switch to checkups every 2 weeks. We are also starting child birth classes in two weeks.
Weekend in Iowa City
We just got back from a quick overnight trip to Iowa City to visit friends. We wanted to get out of town for a night on the long weekend (I have today off!). Let me start by saying that I’m not a fan of college towns. Maybe I’m bitter and old or something, but it just seems like there is a constant rolling beer party going on in these places and at this point I’d rather skip it. Our hotel stay drove this home very clearly as we were awaken at 4:30am to obnoxious people in the room above us. I just laid there thinking GO TO SLEEP ALREADY! Jhez…
On the plus side Iowa City is a nice town and has some amazing restuarants. We had dinner at One Twenty Six with Tammy’s friend Lisa and her husband Eric. Tammy has known Lisa since living in Arkansas. I had a beef tenderloin at One Twenty Six that was as good, if not better, than any I’ve had at any steak house I’ve been to.
The next morning we had breakfast at Lou Henri’s with my buddy Dan and his wife Mel. I can highly recommend the 7-grain pancakes there! Also, they do something so cool – they give a 10% discount if your ride your bike there.
If you go to Iowa City, check these places out. And, whatever you do, don’t stay at the Fairfield Inn. 🙂
Road Sign Math Launched!
I’ve been dreaming up this driving game for a long time and I finally decided to launch the website! This is pure geek joy. :-) Check out Road Sign Math! It will soon be sweeping the country from coast-to-coast…
Fractions and Life
Every year just seems to go by faster, doesn’t it? How many times have you said that to yourself? Well, I’m here to tell you that not only does it feel that way but that mathematically it is the simple truth!
You see, I figured this out a while ago. When you are a kid it seems like the summers lasted forever. Winter was months of playtime. As an adult it seems that the weeks are days and the seasons fly by in a blink. Winter is no sooner here than it is spring and you are looking forward to summer. This all comes down to math and how you perceive time.
Here is my theory. Let’s take a look at the math. When you are 4 and then you turn 5, you are 1 year older right? When you are 9 and then turn 10, again, you are one year older. So the time from 4 to 5 is the same as the time from 9 to 10. Actually, no, it isn’t. You see, as you experience it the time from 4 to 5, when you turn 5, represents 20% of your life experience. In fact, it really even represents more since you don’t remember the time very, very early on, but we’ll leave that for another discussion. When you turn 10 years old the year that just preceded you is 1/10th of your life or 10%. As a result, the time from your 4th to your 5th birthday is twice as much experientially as the time from your 9th to your 10th birthday.
You can extend this easily and see that as you get older each passing year represents a smaller and smaller portion of your life. The entire decade that you spend from your 40th to your 50th birthday represents the same as that one year of fun from your 4th to your 5th birthday. They both represent 20% of your experience. As a result, it is absolutely true that time, or at least the perception of time, just goes faster.
There is an interesting by product of this which is the time before your first birthday. Technically that would be something over nothing, n/0. You cannot divide by zero but in essence this represents infinity. So that first year, if only you could remember it, was infinitely long. We could apply some limit theorem here (and you are welcome to give it a whirl) that that first second of your life was a breakthrough moment. It’s somewhat depressing to compare the infinity of your first second of life to the infinitely small percentage, like %0.000000001 of your life, for that last second.
Lance on Oprah
On Friday I got an email through one of the cycling mailing lists that I’m on that Lance Armstrong was going to be on Oprah that afternoon. I’m not an avid Oprah follower (imagine that!) so I asked Tammy to TiVo it so I could watch it later. Lance was on for the full hour along with Sheryl Crow. You do know that he and Sheryl have been an item ever since he split with his wife, right? Anyway, some thoughts…
Transferring thingelstad.com
I just initiated a domain transfer of thingelstad.com from Register.com. I finally got fed up with their lackluster service and outrageous prices and am moving away. I’m just posting this because if something goes wrong my site might go off the air temporarily. It shouldn’t, but I always feel a little nervous moving registrars (that’s the main reason I hadn’t done it to this point!).
Top reasons to leave register.com…
Where am I going? GoDaddy! If you watched the Super Bowl you probably saw their ad. 🙂 They are cheap, fast and technically robust.
Now I gotta get out of the house and enjoy this wonderful weather. Taking the camera out to play for the afternoon.
Million Dollar Baby
Tammy and I went to see Million Dollar Baby at the late matinee today. You would have to live under a rock to not have heard some of the publicity surrounding this movie, but I really didn’t know much about the plot. It’s a great story about a woman that is extremely persistant and gives everything to realize her dream as a boxer.
The movie is a real tear jerker. There were no dry eyes at the end of it. Tammy said that pregnant women should beware. She said she was on the verge of bawling! Nonetheless, it’s a great movie.
Marketing Security Updates
It was patch week from Microsoft this week. This month brought 9 or 10 security updates depending on your version of Windows. I find it really funny how differently Microsoft and Apple release their security patches.
Microsoft
We get a monthly release of all the security updates. They are packaged individually, which is a good thing since it gives the administrator the ability to not have to apply all of them. They generally have scary sounding names and cryptic looking descriptions. Security Patch for WonderBall.dll (KB123456) for example. And it will usually include words like malicious and takeover. Scary stuff! And wow, there sure are a lot of them. The average person would conclude that this software is horrible.
Apple
MacOS X is a totally different experience. Today, while updating my Windows boxes, I also got to update my Mac. Apple takes a different approach. I just got this nice dialog saying MacOS X 10.3.8 was available and did I want to upgrade my software. The funny thing is there was no mention of security, no words like malicious code. In fact it was completely opaque. If you look into the details though there are dozens of security updates. The whole thing is really a security patch to deal with bugs.
I’m not trying to say that Microsoft doesn’t have security problems. They do. But people that say the MacOS X is so extremely secure need to check reality. And I would suggest Microsoft change their wording but if they did they would be skewered for hiding security problems.
Yesterday hMail, today SquirrelMail
Had last morning with hMailServer. This morning it was SquirrelMail’s turn. Decided to use this contrary to my firmly held belief that PHP and Windows just don’t belong together. It actually installed really easily, I even got a fair number of plugins to go with it. SquirrelMail is a very nice webmail client, gotta admit.
Switch to hMail
I’ve been a longtime user of Xmail for my home email services. Xmail has been stable, reliable, etc. But it lacks IMAP support and configuration is entirely driven on text files. I decided to take the plunge and change over to hMail this morning. So far everything is working great. Configuration was a lot easier. I was able to get all my mail transferred into the IMAP store. If you are looking for an easy to setup windows mail server I would recommend it.