Aaron had his first ear infection. Not a big deal but we were really glad that we took him in for a quick doctors visit last week. Initially, we were pretty sure he didn't feel well and Jennifer had been sick for a few days but we never suspected an ear infection. I love that Madrona has hours until 9:00 pm!

We got a weight on Aaron. We were guessing abouth 20 lbs but he officially hit the 18 lb mark at 16.5 weeks. The doctor thought he should make it to about 28-30 lbs at one year. Good thing we bought the "on the large size" (Britax Marathon) car seat. I think that Britax makes some rally nice stuff. Aaron has out grown his "zero to one year" convertable seat at 4 months. I traded the Subaru for a Highlander and am now thinking the Audi is on the chopping block. (Jennifer loves the Audi and doesn't really want to think about it. Reality will set in at some point.)

I am downloading and installing Oracle XE for a quick proof of concept for a job that I am working on. I haven't used and Oracle product since working for a company that was contracted to do a port of Oracle v5 to the Wang VS. A short time later I did some work for my father's company and came up with a contact management system using Oracle v6 and Apples HyperCard. Fast forward 15 years and I have a job that requires some data transfer with an Oracle Database. Thought I would give their express edition a try. All I can say is that the registration and download process was one of the most confusing processes that I have gone through in a long time. Click on the "accept lisence" button, select a download link, hit the browser back button and you are in UI hell. "You must accept the license agreement" only it is already selected. This was only the begining. I can't wait to see what the install throws at me?

The world would be in an uproar if Microsoft put out junk like this.

Update (Dec 6): It only got worse. Good thing I installed XE on a virtual pc. It made it very easy to just delete the whole thing. Hope my bias isn't too strong, but I feel good about continuing with MS SQL. Oracle might be a good product but it has a significant learning curve and I simple don't see a compelling reason to invest the time to get up to speed on it right now.