Sleep Interrupted

Jessica has been really grumpy these last few days. Usually, you just have to look at her and she’ll crack into a big grin, but not since Wednesday. Today, it became entirely obvious why this was: She’e been cutting her fourth tooth.

And as if that wasn’t making life interesting enough, we’ve just moved Ben into his first big boy’s bed. I think he’s gone to sleep… I only had to put him back down about ten times, which isn’t too bad considering he’s already worked out there’s nothing keeping him in his bed.

…

Nope, I’ve just had to go up and help him go to the toilet for the second time. This could be a long night…

Today we took Ben to see Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. We chose the 10am showing, as we thought that at that time the cinema would be full of kids and Ben would blend right in — and we were right. I don’t think I saw a single adult there without a child in tow.

The film was excellent, a worthy entry in the Wallace & Gromit series. Ben enjoyed himself and was superbly behaved, although that may have had more to do with the large bucket of popcorn we gave him to eat. Apart from the six trips to the toilet, he sat still (often on one of our laps) for the entire time. Clearly his concentration was waning towards the end, but pretty impressive all the same.

I’m not sure what gave me more pleasure, watching a great film or watching Ben watch a great film.

Louise and I saw Supergrass play at the Hexagon on Thursday night. It was the warm-up gig of their current UK tour, but it didn’t show because they seriously rocked.

Like the last time we saw them, their performance was really tight. They didn’t hold back, pulled off all the harmonies and Gaz didn’t cop out on any of the high notes. A really good evening, and I’d recommend seeing them live if you haven’t.

They played a lot of tracks from their new album, which I only got hold of on Wednesday! The only downside is that my copy has this stupid Copy Control that prevents me from listening to it on my computer at home or ripping it to MP3. I’ll have to send it back and find a copy without it. EMI are idiots.

Yesterday, Ben was playing with a cup-and-ball game, mainly by just spinning the ball round really fast. I thought I’d show him how to play with it “properly”. The string on the ball, however, was a little short, so I was far from successful. After a while, Ben turned to me and said, “Daddy… Try with hand”, before grabbing the ball and putting it in the cup with his hand. Smart kid.

I’ve been stockpiling some links to interesting articles, loosely programming related, so here they are in no particular order.

First up, an interesting article on the Laws of Identity. This discusses the requirements of a successful identity system for the internet. Among other things, this includes why Passport didn’t succeed — normally not worth mentioning, except this is written by a Microsoft employee.

Donald Norman, who brought you The Design of Everyday Things, tells us why Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful. While browsing round his site, I noticed he has a new book out, Emotional Design, which will certainly be on my to-read list.

Joel Spolsky tells us how to achieve Painless Software Schedules. Interesting in that it largely matches the lessons I’ve learnt over several iterations of a project I’ve had to produces estimates for recently.

Now, I’ve not actually read it yet, but I do want to be able to answer the question What Is Business Process Modeling?

All of the above have certainly come from posts on Planet Mozilla. My apologies for loosing track of the originating posts.