Sleep Interrupted

Both Ben and Jessica came down with a vomiting and diarrhoea bug before the weekend, so we’ve been having a fun time of it. Jessica is over it now, but she was really withdrawn and unhappy. I even spent a couple of hours “sleeping” on the sofa one night, she was that clingy. Ben’s just about through now too, but that didn’t stop him gagging on his dinner this evening and bringing it all up. Combined with Jessica’s continued teething troubles, it’s very far from fun right now.

Our nice shiny new wood laminate flooring was fitted with much (gratefully accepted) help from our fathers this weekend. Very nice it is too and considerably more practical, as evidenced by the fact it’s already survived both cat and child puke intacted. Work to complete the (now hidden) surround sound wiring continues slowly — it’s not too clever to do drilling after the children are in bed — but should be ready in time for the Ringathon.

Have you seen the Bravia advert with all the bouncy balls bouncing down the street of San Francisco? They did it with computers, right? No, they just used tens of thousands of real balls. Fired out of mortars.

It was ten years ago that I first grew my Van Dyck (Goatee) beard and I’ve never been without it since. Criminy!

When I grew my beard, it was a sort of right of passage, where I changed my image from specky geek into… err… beardy geek! Well, it made me feel a bit cooler and that helped my self confidence no end.

The style doesn’t seem to have gone out of fashion yet, so I don’t feel the need to change it any time soon. I wonder if I’ll be blogging about this in another 10 years?

I sent my Road To Rouen CD back and got a full refund. This was the first Copy Control CD that I failed to circumvent, but having read Bruce Schneier’s article — via Wil — on the Sony rootkit evilness, I will in future refuse to purchase any “CD” containing this sort of “technology”. I hope you will too. It makes me sad they consider us all criminals and worse, stoop to criminal acts themselves to try and police us.

There’s always a little bit of my brain devoted to setting up and running my own company, so I like learning about the business activities I know nothing about, such as “marketing”. Two words that make it understandable to me: demand generation.

On the subject of starting things, Mark, you need to take a look at FCKeditor and TinyMCE. I think I prefer the latter, not least because its name is less silly, but also because it seems to have more of a focus on producing good XHTML.

The last few weeks have been pretty tough, with both Ben and Jessica each waking up several times a night. Coupled with both of us having long-running colds, it’s been hard work. But today, the reason for Jessica’s grouchiness became evident — her fifth tooth and first canine to boot. Three teeth cut in a month, that cannot be fun.

In the same day she also started crawling. She’s been threatening to for weeks but has just given off an air of general indifference, just happy to watch the world go by. So different to Ben. I don’t know why, but I expected to them to be the same, but even after a few months it’s clear their personalities will be different.

I got round to watching Broken News yesterday. It’s a great satire of rolling news stations, of particular note to me because it features Claudia Christian.

Tim and I played our “fairwell to our twenties” gig at Afroba on Monday night. It started off quitely, but soon picked up. The mixing went pretty well considering how rusty we both were and the CD decks were good fun — not something I’d done before. I only wish I’d switched off the compilation CD earlier, because the number of great tunes I didn’t get round to playing was criminal. You know, I don’t feel quite so certain about selling my decks any more…