For a long time I have been intrigued by the idea of getting more out of each day. More waking (and productive) time.
I have looked at polyphasic sleep especially the most famous form, Uberman's sleep, on several occasions in the past. However it has never really been practical for me to try it out.
Sadly this is still …
Last Saturday Liz, Edward and I went out for a meal to celebrate a friend's birthday. This isn't the first time we've taken Edward out for an evening meal and his reactions so far have generally been good, although he can decide that there are just too many new things to look at for any sleep to be taking place. …
How has it been 45 days since my last post!?
I knew it had been a while, but time is definitely flying a bit too fast at the moment. I think it's what comes of being busy at work and then just as busy at home.
At least I get some variation though, Liz is busy at home and then …
Apparently most babies first start their crawling career in a rather backwards direction. The problem with crawling backwards is obviously that it doesn't take you forwards towards the object you're staring at and wanting to reach.
So the straight forward answer is not to bother with going backwards, and just keep concentrating on the object you really, really want to …
In the last week Edward has discovered a whole new purpose for his rolling - to enable him to rock! And he hasn't been holding back.
Pretty much the moment you leave him, he'll put in just a single roll to get himself onto his tummy and then he'll be straight up onto all fours.
He's yet to actually manage …
One of the things the NHS give you as a new parent is a small red book in which to record your child's first few years of medical history.
This book has pages that cover basic details of the baby's birth, lots of pages for notes, various pictures (eg for recording teeth) and a number of charts.
One of those …
Approximately two weeks ago Edward discovered that lifting one leg up underneath him and pushing hard while pulling with his hands could propel him quite rapidly across the floor.
He spent a few days doing this very successfully, although intermittently. He could easily cover a couple of feet in a minute or two when the mood took him. Since then …
A short while after Edward was born, it became apparent that we needed to start cutting his finger nails (as he was starting to scratch his face).
Since that time it has been my job to perform this task as Liz has been too concerned about cutting his fingers off.
So every week or two I have been using a …
While trying to get a new Ruby on Rails application up and running on one of my servers, I came across this:
$ ruby script/server
./script/../config/boot.rb:29: undefined method `gem' for main:Object (NoMethodError)
from script/server:2:in `require'
from script/server:2
Being the first thing I ran after rails <myapp> this is quite an early point in the process to start failing!
The fix …
I'm a little late with this entry as Edward was Christened just over a month ago now! However I did want to say that we did all survive, even Liz managed not to have a heart attack from the stress!
It was actually a lovely day, for the weather, the service and to see so much family and a few …
Having failed to find the option in the GIMP to create colour mapped PNG files, I have just had to discover a couple of handy commands...
The first of these takes a RGB PNG and gives back a colour mapped (by default, …
Xsane does do this, but it's an awful lot of clicks, even between pages and that's after you've got to the right screen and before you eventually output the file.
So here's a simple bash script to the rescue...
#!/bin/bash export DEVICE="device, use 'scanimage -L' to see list" echo Pages: $1 echo Filename: $2 FILENAME_BASE="/tmp/$2" for (( i = 1; …
Is there actually such a thing as a small family?
I thought mine was fairly small with no more than three children in any family unit. Yet I'm still managing to account for nearly half of the 60-ish guests we're expecting at Edward's christening tomorrow!
I guess 60 isn't really a very large number. Yet when you start thinking about …
A few days ago we finally migrated Edward to his cot.
Prior to this he had been sleeping in a moses basket, but he recently got to the stage where he could push with his feet and knock his head into the other end! For a while he's been looking rather cramped width-wise. This moses basket is supposed to be …
A couple of weeks ago Edward started to sleep through one of his normal night time feeds. He hasn't managed this every night since, but hasn't been far off.
The unfortunate part is that he doesn't seem to have quite worked out when "night" is yet. He has taken it upon himself to become comatose from around 5 or 6 …
:-)
Liz's kitchen is small. Not the smallest I've ever seen, but small enough that it can't really hold more than two people at once. It is also quite feature packed - washing machine, dish washer, fridge, freezer, cooker all built in. One thing that is not built in is a rubbish bin, or indeed any space for one!
For the …
Last week I placed an order with Lakeland for two identical items. Later that week a package arrived from Lakeland as expected. However opening it revealed two items that I had not ordered.
I phoned Lakeland on Monday this week (while heading into town with the incorrect items, ready to post them back). Not only did they answer the phone …
Just a quick photo update...
I am now officially trying the freelance approach to employment (complete with my first project, thanks to Tim Small)
I have my own limited company, lots of highly marketable skills (Linux (high availability and clustering), Java, Perl, etc) and lots of real life experience making a large web application work better, faster and stay alive longer.
Things I am …