Sleep Interrupted

Ever feel you’re losing the battle against entropy and chaos? Well, it’s certainly feeling that way around here at the moment. My boss is on leave at work, right when an important client is making a tricky hardware transition, leaving me to do the tidying up. Then I get roped into a sales meeting in the US, so I’m going to be away from home for two days, which will no doubt mess up my body clock nicely.

And at home? Well, the hard drive finally broke so I had to rebuild the PC, which was actually quite painless — thanks Ubuntu! Then the kids managed to break our bed this week by jumping on it too enthusiastically, meaning the mattress is on the floor until the replacement arrives next Tuesday, when, of course, I’m in the US and unable to put it together for Louise.

So, I may be losing the war at the moment but there’s one battle I can win: With some help from the Google Reader Widget for WordPress I’ve added the contents of my news feed to the right-hand side of the blog. Sweet. Hope you find the links interesting.

Also making an attempt for the most categories for a single post here.

So you have to love what you love. Well, I love Radio 4, which happens to turn 40 this year. Louise says I was born about 40 years old, so clearly that’s where my affinity comes from.

I love the news coverage, I love some of the classic comedy shows on a weekend lunchtime, and I love the sheer randomness of what I learn. I go through cycles of listening to Radio 4 and at the moment I’m listening to it every day on the way to and from work. This week I’ve learnt that Mark Knopfler worked as a lecturer in English, that parliamentary elections are decided by drawing lots in the case of a dead heat, and that you can drive a rat by remote control. It’s like having Wikipedia on random play.

I just got my car insurance renewal through. The letter included an alternative quote that costs a little under 10% less. However on closer inspection, I noticed that all the excesses were increased by 25-50%. If I do nothing this alternative cover is automatically selected for me.

Now, I understand that I am getting what I’m paying for in each case. What I object to is the way it is implied that the cheaper quote is better, when in fact it is a compromise.

I’m fairly sure this is not uncommon (wow, there’s a non-committal clause for you) in the insurance industry but I should probably name and shame given that that’s what blogging is supposedly all about. The focus of my ire? The AA.

One of the reasons for my recent posting hiatus — thanks for filling in Louise! — has been the near demise of our desktop. Recently, when I rebuilt it with the latest version of Ubuntu, I took the opportunity to put in a new, larger hard drive. Well, I say “new” but it was… liberated, shall we say, from its former home. Anyway, it turns out that it was a bit dodgy and one day when Louise booted the desktop it went into a tailspin, ending in a rather unglamorous text-only black-and-white screen á la WarGames.

I was able to maintain my tech-guru reputation by a few incantations of fsck, bringing the desktop back to life. However, I don’t think the drive will last much longer, so I’ve plugged the old drive in as well and I’m using rsync to make daily(ish) backups.

We nearly lost a large batch of our photos because of this… Do your backups, kids! This was a sobering experience and backups is something I’ll be taking more seriously in future. If you’re an Ubuntu user and you’re not sure where to start, you could do worse than read BackupYourSystem.

Saturday 23rd June 2207, will go down in Smith family history as the last day of changing nappies. The next day Jessica started wearing “big girl” pants, and hasn’t looked back. She has been showing signs of being ready for ages, was fine using the potty, but put some pants on her and she wet them. I tried the pull-up pant method, but these just seemed to confuse her. So we bit the bullet, and Sunday went nappy-free.

Since then she has had a few soggy mistakes, but nothing too bad at all. No more nappy changing is great, but like any new stage there is a down side. Every ten minutes she needs a wee. Every time she goes for a wee, she takes off shoes, socks, pants, trousers, and any other piece of clothing she can manage. It is then a battle to get them on her again. Also we now have to plan trips around her needing a wee, and I am thinking of keeping a potty in the car; this wasn’t such a problem with Ben as men and boys have it easy when it comes to emergency roadside stops. But little girls can’t do it standing up.

As soon as we can conquer the “getting dressed” afterwards, then Jessica will be well and truly on her way. And with Ben dry at night times now, our nappy shopping bill has gone way down, not to mention the amount of black bags for the dustbin men. So everyone’s a winner.