November 2005 Entries
Last Friday, James and I had our 4D scan at a small clinic not too far from home. The results are absolutely fantastic, and can be seen here. Not the prettiest of web pages, but given that I threw it together in an evening on a machine by hand-coding with just Notepad2 for company, I think it works pretty well.
We also have a DVD of the entire scan, where you can actually see him pulling each of those faces and waving his arms around! It was a fabulous experience, and well worth doing. We keep looking at those photos now...
Somewhere among the wildlife in Kings Heath lurks a strange creature with blue paws and a strange liking for toxic fumes...
We painted our garage floor at the weekend (I say we, when I really mean James painted the floor while I provided moral support) with a really cool heavy-duty garage floor paint in a greyish blue. While we left the back door open for ventilation, something - a squirrel perhaps - crept in to the utility area, obviously enticed by the delightful odour of drying paint, and investigated the freshly-painted floor. We now have blue paw prints on the utility...
In our completely over-engineered home network, we happen to be running Small Business Server to host our domain, email boxes, store "My Documents" for all user profiles, host some small websites, and run SharePoint. It's running very happily on my old dual-proc Pentium 3 500 machine, with its 512Mb ram and 27Gb hard drive - a machine that's been working very well for the past five or six years. Given that this machine is currently the life and soul of our home network, and given that it's quite old, I figured I could probably do with backing it up. Especially...
With around 12 weeks to go, I'm now into the final trimester of pregnancy, and I'm now waddling around with a massive bump in front of me. The second trimester flew by, including a fabulous holiday, and quite a bit of work-related travel. I felt great for most of the last three months, but now I'm finding things are getting harder.
For starters, I'm huge - it's official. I'm bigger front-to-back than I am side-to-side. Everyone at the office seems to enjoy pointing out this fact, and we all wonder how big I'll be by the end. It doesn't help that,...
Following a recent announcement by the Children's Minister, Beverley Hughes, numerous news sites and tabloids have whipped up a storm about the forthcoming Childcare Bill. I was first aware of the bill when I caught this link on the BBC site today and was extremely unimpressed with the tone of the report. Then I saw that the tabloid press were ranting about this bill too, so I felt I just had to blog. The basic thread of the story is that there are plans to introduce a curriculum for childminders looking after children under the age of 5 for teaching...
About this time last year, work started in earnest on the next edition of my book, Beginning ASP.NET, timed so that it could be written and eventually released alongside the .NET 2.0 release. As always, working with betas, more betas, and yet more betas meant quite a lot of rewriting was required, a heck of a lot of re-coding, and hours of trawling through documentation coupled with trial and error to find out how the new stuff really worked... we got there in the end, and I'm pleased to say that Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 will be on a bookshelf near...
One of the souvenirs from our recent trip to America included the Lost season 1 box set (which, unlike the soon-to-be-released UK/ Region 2 edition, contains the entire series, not just half of it), and last night we finally made it through to the end. And what an ending! Much peril, cliffhangers, and so many questions left unanswered - the trademark of a JJ Abrams series!
Like the last series of Alias to be shown on UK screens, ending with an absolutely blinding cliffhanger, Lost has kept us guessing throughout, and it's been a lot of fun to watch. As a...
There's a condition that affects loads of pregnant women that is often referred to as placenta brain. I can confirm that this condition really does exist, and it's driving me slowly insane. I forget what I was doing halfway through a task, I forget words in the middle of sentences, and it's very embarassing!
It's not helped when team members decide to capitalise on your forgetfullness and "hide" things from you - for example, I popped to the kitchen here at work the other day and made myself a couple of slices of bread and butter. I brought them over to...