denis bider

Our son Aaron was born in the CIMA hospital in San José today, after 37 weeks of pregnancy, at 14:37 local time, October 31, 2013, by Caesarean section. He's tiny - 47 cm and 2300 g - but vivacious and hungry, and appears to be healthy despite his size. His weight seems to be mostly in his balls, which are bigger than his penis. His feet are tiny, and he arrived into the world with a head of dark hair, just like his momma.

We expected he'd be premature, but we didn't expect it would have to be by C-section. Towards the end of the pregnancy, ultrasound showed calcifications in the placenta. According to the ultrasound specialist, these calcifications were signs of an intrauterine infection, which could have resulted from a week of a flu-like illness which Jana experienced in August. There was a low level of amniotic fluid, and the baby had been behind with weight progression for a while. Since the amniotic fluid is composed to a large extent of the baby's own urine, the…

I found this awesome blog article describing couple privilege. It's literally the top search result for that search phrase, and for good reason. I've been irked by people expressing opinions that derive from couple privilege for years now, but I never had a coherent name for what they're doing, let alone what's wrong with it. This is the first time that I find such a stunning, exhaustive, concise explanation of what couple privilege is, and why it isn't a good thing.

The part that speaks most loudly to me is from Part 3 onward.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the person who got Jana and I to start watching Mad Men. You know who you are. Thank you.

We started watching Breaking Bad before Mad Men. Whereas we've already consumed all 5 Mad Men seasons available to us through Netflix, we've hardly progressed past Breaking Bad season 2. The following are the reasons.

Mad Men has brilliant character development. Each character is multifaceted and shown in a variety of situations, exposing their depth. Breaking Bad has static, two-dimensional characters, who always have the same problems, the same shallow relationships, and behave the exact same way.

Mad Men follows what might be plausible life stories of professionals in the 1960s. The narrative develops naturally, one never has the impression it's contrived or forced. Despite that, the story manages to be titillating, interesting, amusing, thought provoking, and diverse; sometimes stunning.

In Breaking Bad, the narrative is contrived and…

The following is an excerpt from a post by Louisa Leontiades, which corresponds with my views on the topic:
My Problem With Monogamy - Comfort Instead of Happiness
Everyone asks why. Why take the risk of having an open relationship when you have children? They perceive open as 'non-committed'. Why take the risk of being polyamorous when you are so happy together? They perceive polyamory as a selfish choice rather than a realistic choice supporting an inclination. Rather than argue those misconceptions, my answer is this.

The reason we are so blissfully happy is because we have an open relationship. Being monogamous is a horrible risk. And for us at least, a greater one than polyamory.

Monogamy is designed to keep couples together by creating barriers of exit; socially; financially and psychologically. One cannot look at the divorce statistics to ascertain how successful it is; this only proves how many couples remain married. Not how many couples remain happily married... Judgi…

Costa Rica has the stupidest traffic law I have ever seen. In the tradeoff between preserving evidence about an accident and avoiding congestion, Costa Rica firmly chooses the side of evidence preservation. In other words, if you're involved in any sort of traffic accident - however minor - you're supposed to leave the car exactly where it was, ignore the congestion this causes, and wait several hours for the police.

Just today, when returning from the shopping mall, it took us 20 minutes to overcome a distance of 250 meters, because of this:


The accident was absolutely minor; only the fenders on the cars were out of shape. Yet, these two cars stood like this, almost completely blocking a major roundabout, waiting for the police.

How anyone in Costa Rica thinks this kind of legislation is acceptable, is beyond me. Economic damage caused by the congestion is tremendous, and in most cases, by far exceeds the cost of the accident.

There might be a case of leaving the wreckage whe…

I recently stumbled over a Reddit community called The Red Pill. The central tenets of this community appear to be as follows:
There is such a thing as an alpha male. The main trait of the alpha male is that he's confident, and doesn't fall for women. He doesn't let women use him. Instead, he uses them. In modern times, an alpha man would likely not be married.According to The Red Pill, marriage is exploitation of men, and implies submission to the female. Laws are written such that (a) females have no repercussions if even after marriage, they still have sex with other men; (b) divorce benefits females through division of property that favors females, child custody that favors females, and alimony that favors females.There is such a thing as a beta male. This is a guy who doesn't control women, but lets a woman control him. He puts a woman on a pedestal, buys her an expensive engagement ring, and marries her. The woman then proceeds to cheat on him, and he might get st…

I have written previously about my disappointment with the design direction of Windows 8.

One of the most annoying "features" of this new Windows are the plentiful hot keys for things I really don't need, including WinKey + Enter (starts Narrator), WinKey + Plus (starts Magnifier), and of course the classic, the Windows key itself. When playing a game - I play World of Warcraft - it's very easy to press the Windows Key by accident, helpfully replacing your entire screen with the Start Menu, usually when it's needed the least.

I finally downloaded AutoHotkey to solve these problems. The following is the script I use:

; Disable WinKey + Enter (Narrator) #Enter:: return ; Disable WinKey + Plus/Minus (Magnifier) #+:: return #=:: return #-:: return ; Remap the Start menu to WinKey + S #s:: send {LWin} ; Disable WinKey when pressed alone ~LWin Up:: return ~RWin Up:: return ; Set NumLock state to always on NumLock:: SetNumLockState, AlwaysOn ; Disable extra mouse bu…

I've written recently about my limited satisfaction with my new laptop, an MSI GT70.

Another problem I discovered recently was that download speeds were limited to 1.5 Mbps. Since this slow rate persisted regardless of whether I tried the wireless or Ethernet connection, I thought the blame was with my ISP; but after extensive testing, it turned out that other laptops were able to get better speeds, up to 15 Mbps, through the very same connection. It was only my MSI laptop that was seeing very low download speeds. Interestingly, upload speeds appeared to be unaffected, and the download speeds were also fine when using USB tethering through my smart phone, which used the same internet connection, but bypassed the Killer network cards.

Eventually, it turned out that I needed to install a driver update for the Killer network cards (both wireless and Ethernet) that come with the MSI laptop. I was able to download new drivers here. After removing the old drivers and installing new ones…