Sleep Interrupted

Ben’s vocabulary growth seems to have kicked into high gear over the last week. Since the first vocabulary posting he’s learnt to say: burp, ears as “eez”, eyes, grape as “bate”, hot as “dot”, James as “Dames”, jump as “dump”, knee, milk as “moot”, Nat, nose, pass, Percy as “Purse”, Pete, please as “bees”, poo as “boo”, post as “boast”, shoes as “boos”, Teletubbies as “dahboh”, thank you as “dap dap”, Thomas as “Dom”, toast, toes as “doze”, and zip as “bit”. That’s more than a word a day — wow! — and there are probably more that we’ve forgotten about. What’s more, he’ll try to pronouce almost any word of two syllables or less. I wonder how long before he starts stringing words together…

Via Footnotes, there are some really interesting videos from Seth Nickell showing what happens when you render your Gnome desktop with hardware accelerated OpenGL through the Cairo vector graphics library. I hope this sees the free desktop world catch and surpass the like of Apple’s OSX tricks soon.

As promised by Andrew, here come some photos of Jessica with various family members.

I know for a fact that my friend Mark — come on, get a blog so I can link to you! — wants to start a startup company. So do I. Maybe we should do it together. As someone once said to me, you never get rich working for someone else.

Anyway, the point I’m failing to get to is that we should really be reading this essay by Paul Graham.

In totally unrelated news, I should be getting some new pictures of Ben and Jess uploaded soon.

I use the GNOME Desktop at home and I’m a real fan of where the developers are taking it with their focus on usability for ordinary people. I was talking to a friend last weekend about the release of version 2.10 when he asked me what had changed since the previous version. Despite the fact that I’d read up on it just a few days earlier, I couldn’t remember a single thing. I think this is because the recent releases have been far more focused on polish and performance and less on whiz-bang features — again, something I think is a good.

Anyway, for his benefit I’ll post links to the release notes and a great article on The GNOME Journal.

Since Ben was a few months old, a student in Speech Therapy & Language Development from Reading University has been tracking the development of his language skills. Because of this, we’ve started to keep a record of his emerging vocabulary. At least one of the teachers we know — Ed, I’m talking to you here! — expressed interest in this, so this weblog seemed as good a place as any to get it all written down. Plus it’s really cute!

So, here’s the list of words he can say, along with how he pronounces them: apple, ball as “bor” or “borl”, banana as “nahnah”, bike as “bite”, biscuit as “bsk”, Bob (as in The Builder), booby, book as “boop”, bottle as “bobble”, bowl, boy, cat as “tat”, CD as “deedee”, cuddle as “duddle”, cup as “dup”, Daddy, dog as “doh”, door, football as “foo’bor”, more, Mummy, owl, tap as “ta”, teddy as “deedee”, towel as “dowel”.

As you can see, we’re already through the very early stage; he’s learning about two or three words a week now!

I’m chronically addicted to reading WWdN. Over the last couple of weeks, while we’ve been getting used to having Jessica around, I haven’t had much time for this sort of diversion.

Yesterday I was playing catch up and I came across Wil’s post on numbers stations. I dutifully followed the Wikipedia link — I’m constantly blown away by the breadth, depth and quality of the articles there — and read on.

Within the first couple of sentences I’d crossed over into some strange parallel universe where shadowy organisations transmit streams of random numbers into the ether for reasons unknown. Bewildering and not a little unsettling. How have I managed almost 30 years on the planet without someone at least mentioning something so overtly strange?

This is probably the closest I’m ever going to feel to being in an episode of the X Files. You read the Wikipedia article linked above and tell me you don’t feel a shiver go down your spine. Of course, if you tell me you already knew about this, you’re obviously just covering up for The Man.

It’s been cold of late. I have proof — our car tells me that it’s minus zero outside. Minus zero. That’s got to be cold, right?

As promised, here come the photos…

So. I’ve finally gone and joined all the cool kids on the intarweb and got myself a weblog.

Why? Well, I used to enjoy talking to my friends down the pub over a pint. But as time passed, many of them moved away — I doubt James and Vicky will be making the Reading to Sydney trip for a swift half — and now that I have a young family of my own, I don’t get many evenings off.

It’s a cliche, but I really didn’t realise how much I missed it until it was gone. The infrequent times we do meet up seem to pass in a blur and there’s so much left unsaid, on my part at least.

This weblog is my solution — it might even work! Emailing just doesn’t seem right any more, and my growing sense of pompous self-importance demands that I stake my claim in the blogosphere. And of course, you will be hanging on my every word here. Or something.

The plan has been circulating in my head for about the past six months. The catalyst for actually doing something about it was my wife, Louise, giving birth to our second child, Jessica. So, rather than the pub-talk topics I originally intended, expect lots of pictures of Jessica and her brother Ben. At least for the time being. If you’re not interested, don’t read. I’m not the boss of you!