You may have noticed a lack of new stories on OSNews the past week, and that’s because my fiancée and I had our first baby about a week ago. Since I’m making use of my ten workdays of childbirth leave as granted by the Swedish government, I’m not allowed to perform any work during those ten workdays (we’ve got another few hundred days of parental leave, too), which includes OSNews work. Since OSNews’ owner David happened to be on vacation with his family at this time, too, we were kind of left in the lurch.
Our apologies, but there wasn’t much we could do.
In any event, we’re learning how to be parents by leaps and bounds every day, and we’re taking good care of our little .deb. I’ll be back on duty coming Monday, so expect normal service to resume then. In the meantime, feel free to submit news items David can quickly and easily post – it doesn’t have to be perfect, as long as we give y’all some stuff to talk about.
Until then, I’m going back to installing and configuring Void Linux on my main laptop – I already use and love it on my POWER9 machines – and I’ll see you all in a few days.
Let me be the first to say congratulations.
And don’t worry too much about anything else then the baby. The first days are really precious.
Congratulations! 😀
Looking forward to your post under sleep deprivation 😉
congratulations!
Good luck to your sleep! 😉
Congrats Thom!
First of all .. congratulations on the new baby. I hope the baby and mom are doing well.
I was wondering whatever happened to the website. This explains it all.
congrats!
Congratulation Thom!
Beware, children WILL get in the way of the hobby. I bought a couple PDP-11’s last year and have had to mothball them since the arrival of my child in december, and to a lesser extent, lack of storage media for them.
I’ll try and write an article on my PDP-11 saga, maybe during the summer. Especially whilst the little one isn’t running around shoving jam sandwiches in the floppy drives.
Mine is now old enough to want to play. He doesn’t understand that we can’t always get Outrun, Mario Kart or even Minecraft running on what I’m fiddling with at any given point
“What do you mean, your IBM 1401 won’t run Crysis?”
Congratulations and welcome to the club! You will get a lot of opportunities over the next couple of years to catch up on Youtube while you do daddy duties!
Don’t rush to return, tech will still be here when you’re ready..
Fabulous news. This is a very special time for all of you.
Congratulations and enjoy every minute. I’m a granddad now which is way more fun than the being a father – the little buggers eventually go home 😉 and looking back I wished I’d spent more time with my kids when they were little. Everything else fades but kids and family is forever.
Congratulations, Thom!
Believe me, kids grow very fast, as so, reserve the time to enjoy every phase of their development (my favorite is between 2 and 5, specially when they start to ask “why” for about anything – depending on your mood, you can play with it a lot – 🙂 ).
My grandpa used to tell my grandma that he wanted a complete football team and, at least, one supporter for each player. Unluckily, he died in his forties and could not see his dream come true (had “only” eleven). My father had 6, and I stopped at 1, even though I would love to match my father on numbers.
Cheers!
acobar,
Yes, congrats Thom.
Times change, it would be much harder today. Raising a big family in the US can be brutal on finances. My wife had 30 days paid family leave, but she actually took a full year off. As is typical for fathers in the US, I had zero days leave. The insurance was particularly painful, ~$1,450/month to continue our health coverage via cobra. Even just basic dental visits are totaling $490 out of pocket for our two kids. Six kids…I could not do it. One nuclear family is enough, then snip, haha.
“his dream come true (had “only” eleven). ”
So at least a soccer team 😉
Congrats!
I’m not a parent unlike most of the comments here, but I will also add: take your time with the kid. It’s one of the most important times in your life.
Congratulations Thom!!!!! we can wait a few more days 😛 we hope you the best!
Congratulations! You’re in for one hell of a ride but it’ll be worth every minute!
Congratulations! That’s wonderful!
And I’m just happy that OSnews is the kind of sites that prioritises the well being of their writers.
Let me chime in: Congrats and all the best. Have two (nearly twens) and would not like to miss any second (even though kids can really get on your nerves).
Congratz. On the kid. Also goodies to the mother. She did the hard work after all.
As a father I can say that Sweden has made a good choice to force fathers to be a father. Those early days are to cherish.
Congratulations!
Congratulations for you and your family.
Huge congratulations!
Cograts Thom! Enjoy these precious moments!
5/5 is Children’s Day (a public holiday) in South Korea where I am atm…
Btw, didn’t realise you were in Sweden, moving there later this year myself…
All the best! 🙂
Congratulations! I’ve never commented on anything on OSnews (despite being a regular reader since as long as I can remember ) as I rarely feeled qualified to contribute anything meaningful – however I am a father of four kids…so on this topic I have some experience.
Congratulations to you all! 🙂 Take a long break and enjoy these precious first months, you never get this time back – you can never do it later. They grow so quick and change by the day, to have the opertunity to be there during this time is a real gift.
I don’t believe it. Are you trying to convince us that a new baby takes up a lot of your time? Come on, babies can take care of themselves! Next you are going to say you have to feed it and change it`s diapers, really the baby can handle all of that itself.
Raising a child is easy, just let it run with the wolfs outside or give it a high-end multi-CPU computer if you want to get it inside. 🙂
Easy as Pi. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Congratulations \o/ Also for the mother 😉
This can be the most intense time of your life.
I wish all the best for you folks, strong nerves, patience and a lot of love.
And thank you for running osnews. my #1 news site
Congratulations Thom!!
Thorm – maybe put up a review of Void. Seems an interesting combination of minimalist and approachable.
That’s awesome news, congrats! You’ll make a great father, you manage a news site where everyone with opinions on obscure operating systems gets to share them. That’s like navy dad training.
Congrats!
Congratulations Thom!
Congratulations to you and your family, Thom!