hendrikboom

Another Monday on the back porch. This time it's a cool sunny day. But I'm sitting in the shade, so the sun doesn't bother me overmuch. I don't need my hat or sunglasses, which is a good thing because I've lost my sunglasses about a month or two ago, and haven't been willing to spring the money for new ones if I might still find the old ones.

I've been thinking of the asthma thing. Hot humidity I can't stand. If I'm in a hot shower for too long so that the air in the bathroom gets thoroughly saturated and the mirrors mist over, I start to breathe heavily, as if it's an effort to get enough air in with all that inhaled water. But cool humidity is great. In fact, it's the recommended treatment for croup. When my kids had it (is seems to be common in the young) the doctor said to set them outside on the porch on a rainy day. (the porch has a roof -- he wasn't recommending that we drench them). Failing that, turn the shower on cold, and have them sit in the bathroom inhaling the cold mist -- again, don't put them *in* the shower -- that would be cruel. The emergency paramedic we once called when my son had trouble breathing said often just putting the child out in the cool night air is enough of a remedy so that when they arrive, the child, waiting on the porch, is already smiling.

So the temperature of the humidity is important. It may well be that the difference is that cool humidity has less a water in it than hot humidity, though how that would be better for croup I don't know. Or maybe hot humidity breeds allergens.

I spent the weekend fussing with our LAN. Suddenly on Saturday morning, our internet connection was down, and, independently, my daughter's computer couldn't connect the the file server where most of her files were stored. The internet problem turned out to be that Primus's server in Toronto (where they route me through even though I'm in Montreal) was dead. but try as I might, I couldn't get the network file system on out LAN working for her.
Next day it all just worked. I suspect that the network file system may have needed an internet connection to work properly, though I can't imagine why. Other NFS connections I set up in an attempt to isolate the problem worked just fine.

Anyway, that's what I've been doing instead of writing recently.

-- hendrik