ɔimoɈɒ

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything here and that’s because the day is filled with work and I’m spending any spare time in my evenings learning Java.

I’m meant to be creating a web page with all the baby photos but I’ve not done it yet. Must be a bad person! I guess I’ll wait til Saturday and do it then. On saturday Meggan will be 4 weeks old and that’s a good time to start.

I feel like I’m holding a lot of secrets and confidences at the moment. I also checked out the possibility of working for Apple in Cork. I don’t hold out much hope but it is something I’d like to do. Lesley wants to move to Cork but I guess I’d need to check out what sort of DSL or Cable coverage they have there.

My back hurts a little from feeds and staying up too late on the computer. My own sodding fault.

I’ve neglected my journal due to another little life event. She’s beautiful if a little bit of a handful. I remember that things do have to continue and whether I keep in touch with friends via email or chat, help Bob get his drivers for his Ms mouse or just generally be there for people – all is well.

I’ve changed a few dozen nappies in the past days. Meggan has a talent for filling them just after they have been changed. She’s healthy too – above her birth weight only a week old – it usually takes longer.

I”ve a hundred things I want to say and a thousand that I should say. Right now, though, I’ll say goodnight.

Kieran asked me what it was like being a Dad.

I answered: The same as it was before except you have a feeling of panic in your gut ALL THE TIME.

Introducing Meggan,

http://smythehall.homeip.net/Meggan/

And in the pink corner, weighing in at 7 lbs, 14 ounces….
Arrived 16:40 pm, 23/3/2

I’m knackered so I’m off to bed. Kudos to Lesley.

No sign of the nipper yet.

On other news…bought a new mouse. My old Apple optical was on it’s last legs having already had a fault in the cable once and having been fixed by Kieran once but it’s not really usable. So, I plonked down 25 quid and bought a Microsoft Optical Wheel Mouse. It’s a nice mouse – not as “solid” feeling as the Apple one and the scroll wheel – although extremely cool and something I have on my work PC – seems a bit wobbly. Can’t complain really. Mac OS X, despite being designed to work with a single mouse button, works great with the second and the scroller.

And while I was in Curry’s, I took 5 minutes and picked up the controller for their demo XBox. THIRTY MINUTES LATER I put it down. The game running was Halo – a game that was meant to be out for the Mac and PC two years ago but it has been delayed and had to be written from scratch for the XBox. It’ll not appear for the Mac til the XBox with Halo has sold well in every country in the world. It’s not technology holding it back…it’s Microshaft.
Anyway – it’s a good game – it’s not 360 quid good – but it’s fun. The controller is awful though as FPS games are meant to be used with a mouse. It just is annoying the way that it is. Made it a lot harder to play!

Also…the old Curry’s store is going to be turned into a PC World. That’s not much of a surprise. I’ve been harping about that for flipping ages.

Wednesday 13th has come and gone and I’m still not a Daddy.

There’s something annoying about that and I’m not sure what it is. Part of it is wanting to see the face of the person I’ve been prodding and poking and part of it is wanting to see the person who’s been kicking my darling wife all these months.

The other morning I was woken by a mighty kick and moving my hand around on Lez’ tummy I felt what was definitely a foot – I could even tell the difference between the ball and the heel.

Life, of course, will be turned upside down.

ClubMac are arranging a tour of the Apple plant in Cork and we do want to go – but I’m not sure that bringing a 1 month old child to a factory is entirely appropriate yet Lesley would be gutted at not being able to go. We really enjoyed ourselves the last time we went – ESPECIALLY the lovely B&Bs in Cork. The breakfasts have to be experienced to be believed. But – again – we’re not sure if we can go.

So manu things will change and I guess we’ll change with them. I’m looking forward to it. My parents are very excited. I’m sorta freaked that they’re so keen on the idea of being grandparents. Anyway. Time enough.

04:32 woken up. Lesley is having contractions. Try to calm her and time them. Fall asleep.

06:00 woken up. Still having contractions. Time them. Every 4 minutes. Turns out that while I was unconscious Lesley had shower and made coffee. Was unaware of all of this.

08:00 dressed and about to hit the road. Have had egg and pancake for breakfast. Zip up to the hospital where they start to monitor and do tests.

09:00 go out to make calls about the event and to cancel an appointment at the bank.

09:45 released from hospital as no dilation and it could be hours or even days. So tired.

10:10 remake appointment to see financial advisor that we (comically) missed at 09:30. Pop in, seems okay.

11:30 arrive home. run bath. check email. call folks.

12:20 people seem to have stopped calling and some people had to be told twice. Looks like it is not going to be today. Pity as the birthdate would have been 4/3/2 and if the little on was born at 13:00 it would have been 4/3/2/1 which would have been funny. about to start to make the lunch.

Today looks like a weird day to me.

Today I played about with Device Manager. I’m trying to trace my steps through it for the next outage.

I also installed a Quadra 650 with A/UX 3.1. It’s really quite phenomenal what they managed to do with UNIX and the Mac back then. It’s not really a shade on Mac OS X but the machine is quite quick despite the fact it has a 33 MHz processor and only 24 MB RAM.

Lastly but not leastly I watched “Once Upon A Time In China”. Jet Li and Rosamund Kwan (aka Guan Zhi Lin) have a sort of backstory romance in the films (I have three of them on DVD) which are all about the growing pains experienced by China as the West began to encroach upon them. The subtlety of the romance is certainly of the level seen in the critically acclaimed ( and frankly brilliant ) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon except that it is stretched across the films.

Course, as Rosamund Kwan is flippin’ gorgeous, I don’t understand why it takes Wong Fei Hung so long to notice her character Aunt Yee.

Crucible Design released The Project Sourcebook: Web Edition yesterday. I wanted to do something with it and it was better to be out there than just sitting on our hard disks. People can download the book from http://www.crucibledesign.com/
You can use it in any conspiracy-type game and there’s heaps of good stuff in there but it’s a shame that we couldn’t get it properly published. i’d have loved to but not one of the others was interested in doing that bit.

It doesn’t include the cover, internal maps or even the “Project War” statistics that I’d written. It just includes the text which, for free, is fair enough. Lesley thinks that it will create more work. I don’t mind work – I’ve done plenty before and I’ll do plenty again – I dislike people who break promises.

I feel let down by the rest of the group. I expected at least one of them to show a little bit of enthusiasm and maybe argue the point but everyone just went with the flow. Why rock the boat.

The interesting thing will be Q-CON and afterwards. Will Crucible have a trade stand? Will I turn up at all? Do we continue with CrucibleDesign.com or just let it lapse?

You could argue that it’s all my fault that it’s gone pear-shaped. I stopped doing work and things went downhill. I berated one guy for consistently breaking promises and now, despite knowing him since I was 11 years old, we’re still not talking. I’m probably impatient in my old age but I got sick of the lies and nonsense. At least some people were honest about their level of commitment and you can only respect them for it. Why lie about something like this?

Thinking about CrucibleDesign tires me out these days. Years and years of emotional investment and now, it’s worth nothing.

I haven’t gamed in months and I just want to have some escape – just something to think about other than work and computers. I’m sitting here now and know that when I go home I have to write a 2 hour course for the people I’m teaching tomorrow night. It’ll take 2-4 hours to write and then two hours to teach tomorrow night. When I’m not working on that I’m thinking about my training course in Mac OS X and also the effort I’m putting into setting up my own network-and-Mac-based training and consultancy company. On top of that I’ll be in work on Saturday doing some unpaid overtime.

I’m so tired of it all. I’m especially tired of not having good news and great cheer for my livejournal. It’s just depressing. After tomorrow night is done and dusted I’ll be in a better mood. You’ll see.

But it’s time to go home now. Time to cook the dinner and then get stuck into writing the materials for tomorrow.

i’ve fallen down.
or was i pushed
i can’t get up