Infertility Podcast & Blog

Since this month is “National Adoption Awareness Month” Malky and I talk about adoption, both how we feel about it as a couple, why girls are chosen more than boys when adopting, how to find grants for adoption and how to keep your adopted child healthy. All of that, plus infertility news. As always, click on more for links that we discussed during the show.

Have a thought or a comment about the show? Feel free to leave us a comment here or email us at podcast@benedictfamily.org or you can call us at 206-337-1409

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I was never a real big fan of the NBA. I remember going back to when I was a kid I never really had a favorite team but when the finals came I was rooting for one team or another. This is most likely the result of growing up in Pittsburgh and not having a local NBA team to follow.

Living now in New York I do try to follow the local teams but I am not what you would call a rabid fan by any stretch of the imagination. This bit of news from today’s paper however made me really feel like blogging about the Knicks.

A little background, I think, is in order. Last year, the Knicks hired Larry Brown to be their coach and it couldn’t have been a worse idea. The reason being that Brown’s idea of basketball (play defense, pass the ball of offense) wasn’t the same idea that the “star” players had of how to play the game. This in turn lead to lots of sniping between several of the “star” players and the coach. This led to one player getting benched several times and not taking shots when he was supposed to. Ultimately, this got Larry Brown fired (which can be another post all together) and the new coach was the team’s General Manager Isiah Thomas and there was much rejoicing from the players.

A scant 15 games into the season and the exact same situation is coming to a head. Thomas has now benched Marbury several times and Marbury has now refused to shoot when he is supposed to. There is even now griping from Marbury about how he doesn’t understand why he is being benched at all. This just proves that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it and that Thomas is a lousy GM who should never have been hired in the first place (which could be another post as well)! Another thing that this proves is that Marbury is poison to a team and a coach killer as well.

This is a once proud franchise that has fallen to depths that are truly embarassing.

Tags: Sports by aaron
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As always, the day after Thanksgiving here in the US is the phenomenon known as Black Friday. Basicly there are lots of crazy deals early in the morning in hopes of luring customers to the stores to buy more at those stores. I’m not a big fan of shopping all together so I just see what sort of good deals there are on the web. Something that I am a big fan of is radio. I really like listening to talk radio and to be more specific, sports radio in particular.

You may be wondering at this point, what Black Friday and sports radio have to do with each other? Well a few days ago I was listening to the radio and I heard a great ad on the radio for eBay. It was some guy snoring and the voice over talking about how the day after Thanksgiving is now national sleep in day since you can get anything that you want at eBay. I think it’s a great ad and I wonder how well it will work.

Tags: General by aaron
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Malky’s Mac mini arrivied on Tuesday and I had it up and running in less than an hour. You hear about how small the Mac mini is but you can’t really appreciate how small it is until you see it in person. I mean this thing is really small. One of the nice features of a new mac that is really cool is that you can transfer your settings and documents over to your new mac via firewire. The process took about 25 minutes and Malky was ready to go. (Malky had been using my computer with a separate account so this made things very simple)

Malky is very happy with the new mac so far and I am helping her get adjusted to the new surroundings. I even bought her a book to help her make the adjustment.

Tags: Apple, General by aaron
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To those in the US enjoy your Thanksgiving.

Tags: General by aaron
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Malky and I discuss some listener feedback, go over the latest news and continue with our discussion about the top 10 fertility centers. Feel free to leave us a comment at www.benedictfamily.org/podcast or email us at podcast@benedictfamily.org. Click on more to see the sites & news we discussed.

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As I have mentioned in previous posts, Malky’s computer went toes up last week and she has been using my macbook in the interim while we look for a replacement. We have finally found the replacement. We went with (drum roll please) a mac mini. We went with the lower end one (1.66 dual core processors and no super drive).

There were several reasons for our decision

1. We have a good monitor, mouse and keyboard (the latter from the old and original rev iMac) so to get something like an iMac would be a waste of good peripherals. Not to mention the webcam that I bought a while ago for our video chats when I’m on the road.
2. There is no way that I would have been able to convince Malky to allow me to get her a iMac
3. I don’t want to worry about having to admin another windows box at home

The next step is to extract the data like Malky’s pictures from the old hard drive and get everything that she needs onto some sort of back up media for when the mac mini arrives. I figured that I would get a linux based live cd distro and install that onto a partition made up of whatever disk space I have left on the old drive. The question that I have is what would be a good live cd distro to use? If you have a thought, leave me a comment.

Tags: Apple, Family by aaron
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and boy are my arms (and the rest of me) tired. more later.

Tags: General by aaron
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Well, I’m here in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport watching the plane that I’ll be taking home in about an hour just pull into the gate from its last flight. I have to say that this was a very enjoyable Shabbos and one that I didn’t really expect at all.
First of all, I want to thank the people at the Phoenix Community Kollel for setting me up with a place to say and eat for my stay here. My hosts, the Cohen family, were wonderful and it turns out that we know a lot of the same people and I have a ton of regards to send to people. That would usually be enough to put me at ease in a strange city, but it also turned out that I know a few members of the Kollel from other places (like from my days at a sleep away camp that no longer exists and an old high school friend that I had not seen in 18 years.)

Shabbos lunch was something to behold, and it was delicious as well. I would like to thank my hosts for that meal, Amir & Sandra Goldenberg, for a wonderful meal and some wonderful conversation as well. While at lunch, I did meet a fellow blogger, Mark Einhorn, and have started going through his blog. It’s an interesting read and really enlightened me to something I had no clue about heretofore.

All in all, it was a delightful Shabbos and now I am looking forward to being home in about 5 hours or so.

Update: While in my post flight shower, I realized that I forgot to thank the person who got the ball rolling with this whole thing. That person is none other than my one and only brother in law from the west coast, Shalom Garfinkel. So Shalom, if you are actually reading my blog, thanks.

Tags: General, Religon by aaron
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It’s the last day at the conference. It’s has been a pretty good conference for us lead wise. I have gotten all of the leads that we have gotten so far into the our CRM system and are ready to rock and roll post conference. The conference is ending at 2:00pm and I then head to someone’s house for Shabbos and after Shabbos I’ll take a red eye back to New York and get in at about 6:00am on Sunday morning. I will actually be home for a few weeks and then be on the road once again.

Tags: Work by aaron
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