Author: Bill Ruhsam

Yesterday, on a whim, I checked out the Wikipedia article on Unicode. I have seen the terms “UTF-8” and “UTF-16” and “Unicode” for years but I didn’t have much idea what all that meant.

This tweet emerged from my reading:

I just skimmed the Wikipedia article for Unicode and came to the realization that I KNOW NOTHING. http://t.co/QVVhgenaHP

— Bill Ruhsam (@bruhsam) August 19, 2013

Seriously. Wow. Check out the article and see if you agree. I’ll wait.

It’s both humbling and exciting to realize how little you know about some things. Things that have been outside your realm of learning or experience. I read this statement from the article…

Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs (renderings) for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this sometimes leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs (see Han unification).

…and realized that if I could understand what those words mean when all put together, I’d have a much better understanding of a topic, because while all those words are English, I had no idea what that sentence means.

Learning is fun. Everybody should skim Wikipedia occasionally.

Griffin came home from the hospital yesterday. We had the first day and night at home. The day was easy, the night was less so, simply because we’d spent three days getting used to taking care of him at the hospital with all the equipment, chairs, tables, etc. that were there. Now we have to learn to do the same things at home with our own chairs, tables, beds, etc. It’s a learning experience.

Still, the little guy is doing well and continues to be a tiny little cute bug.

If you’ve been following my Twitter stream, or looking at Flickr, or receiving texted images over the last few days, you will have met the birthing team. Of most importance, of course, is Jenn and Griffin, and I had some small role in helping out, but let me introduce you to Jessica Stansel and Jacob Hollis. Literally, I don’t think we could have done this without them. They were both there to help out with Jenn during labor, assist with fetch and carry tasks, hold hands, stay with Jenn while I was in the NICU with Griffin, hold Griffin while Jenn and I rested, fetched food, assisted in hand-feeding, basically doing everything that would have been extremely difficult for two people, especially one who has a bad back. We love these guys and we’re privileged to have them by our side to help out.

There are more images loaded up at the Griffin Ruhsam Flickr set. Here are a sample.

As always, updates are most easily found at my Twitter stream.

For some first baby pics and other images surrounding the birth, see the photo set at Flickr.

For the whole timeline, go back through my twitter stream.

Griffin Milton Willis Ruhsam, PhD, MD, PE, DVM, GCVO (August 3, 2013 – August 3, 2184) was an American entrepreneur and sports star who is best know for his contribution to the Grand Unification Theory and his mastery of origami dancing. Also known as “The Bowtie”, his sports career spanned seven decades in the longest-running series of le Tour de France stage wins in history (457) while juggling. He was born in Marietta, GA to his parents Jennifer Bowie and William Ruhsam, Jr. He is survived by his wife Dame Oephilia Julia Harrod Williams and six children, 27 grandchildren, 124 great-grandchildren, and 221 great-great-grandchildren. Services will be on August 8 at the main portal of Ceres Station.

It’s not a HIPAA violation if the husband posts it.

Jenn’s doing well. All systems nominal.

We are officially one day past the due date. Here’s today’s pictures.

Apollo wanted in on the action.

I’ve been listening to The Weepies this week. I’ve just now noticed that I’m two albums behind. I will have to rectify that.

I love State DOTs that have active flickr accounts.