Sleep Interrupted

Fairwell, Richard Whiteley. Countdown was an indeleble part of my youth. You will be missed.

I had a great Father’s Day yesterday. We had a barbeque, to which most of our close family came; amazingly the weather stayed fine too. Once I’d finished cooking the enormous amount of food Louise had purchased, I got to sit around for most of the afternoon and chat with people. This might not sound much, but with two small children, this is a rare pleasure.

I was given some excellent presents from Ben and Jess. Firstly, an Acer — evidently I am drawn to trees and plants with pointy leaves, as I also really like Palms and ferns. Secondly, a giant Yorkie chocolate bar. Proper giant: Over a foot long. You can beat big chocolate.

Lastly, I was given a copy of Dancing Barefoot by Wil Wheaton. He’s the author, he didn’t actually give me the book. But that would have been cool. I’ve read Just A Geek and really enjoyed it, so I’m looking forward to this book.

Talking of Wil, he’s posted about how being a stepfather makes him feel like a backup goalie on Father’s Day. My only comment would be that even when you’re a biological father, your children start out as total strangers and it takes time to get to know and love them. All we really get is a head start.

Reading Wil’s post again also reminds me what I should really be saying here — Happy Father’s Day, Dad!

Cool news — for me, at least! My amazing wife has managed to get tickets for us to see the filming of QI… tomorrow! I’m really looking forward to this. QI probably only ranks behind I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and Just A Minute in the list of shows I want to see recorded live.

In other matters televisual, Mark lent us the Robin of Sherwood first series DVDs, which we proceeded to watch entirely in a week. Louise seems to have taken (or rather retaken) a shine to Michael Praed.

The only thing that’s really dated badly is, bizarrely, the sound effects. I suppose they weren’t mixed with 5.1 surround sound systems (complete with active sub-woofer) in mind.

What’s strange is that I have almost no recollection of the plots from when I first watched the programme. I did, however, remember all the characters vividly. Strange what 20 years does to the memory. All in all, very enjoyable, and I hope ITV3 airs the later series.

Finally — and this is something I’ve been meaning to blog about for weeks — I’ve started to re-watch Babylon 5 on DVD. Ten years ago, when B5 was first transmitted, I swore that I would buy a DVD player especially so that I could have all the series on DVD. Yes, I was that much of fan-boy.

What I hadn’t bargained on was Warner Brothers dragging their feet for years and the price of DVD players falling through the floor. What I do have now, though, is the aforementioned surround sound system. Sven!

I do have to admit, now that the fan-boy lust has subsided, that some of the dialogue in the first series is… a bit naff. However, knowing where it’s going, I’m more that happy to sit through it. If I keep up my viewing rate of a bit under an episode a week, you can expect to see my retrospective review of all the series posted here in September 2007. By which time Ben should be just old enough to start watching the first series with me…

I’ve just read an interesting article on Catalyst, an MVC web development framework for Perl. While I’m all in favour of using frameworks to write less (repetative) code, I was slightly dismayed to see their example make fairly unnecessary use of Ajax, which is what the cool kids are calling JavaScript + XMLHTTPRequest this year.

Having suffered for many years on a project that used a precursor to this technology, I fear that lots of impressionable web developers are going to make the same mistakes we did as they jump aboard the next technology fad. I’m not against the use of this technology, but it exposes a slippery slope where too much code is pushed from the server onto the client. It’s too easy to end up with application and (worse still) business logic executing inside a web browser, making for a performance and maintenance nightmare. You don’t think that will happen? Would Sir care to make a small wager?

What could we possibly want that Wikipedia cannot provide?!

Since ITV3 launched, there’s not been anything on it that I’ve been compelled to watch. It’s quality programming, there’s no denying it. My parents and my grandparents really like it and I can understand why. There just hasn’t been anything I’ve wanted to see again. Until now.

This Saturday, they will start showing the 1984 show, Robin of Sherwood. For me, this was one of the most memorable television series of my youth. I don’t know if it was the adventure, the mythology, the haunting soundtrack, or the cool guy who fought with two swords, but it really struck a chord with me. Okay, yes, it was the cool guy who fought with two swords.

I’ll be tuning in come Saturday tea-time; I hope I’m not setting myself up for a disappointment.

One of those great moments in parenting happened today. For months Ben has been interested in listening to people talk to him on the phone. In the last week or so he has started responding to what the person on the other end is saying. Today, I called home from work and Ben got his habitual turn on the phone. When I said goodbye, for the first ever, he said “Bye bye Daddy!”. When that sort of thing happens, you can’t help but grin.