November 2006 Entries
We upgraded one of our machines to Vista this weekend (click, wait several hours / pack several boxes while waiting) and it does indeed look gorgeous. Thing is, though, the box we installed it on is a small form factor machine - Shuttle box size, with a beefy graphics card to make it possible to have pretty glassy windows. It's an Intel box with a 3GHz proc, 512Mb RAM (yeah, not enough, I know)*, a plentiful hard drive, and a Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card. Vista will run, but as predicted, the extra demands on the system are causing the...
I very much enjoy watching Doctor Who, so I was pleased when they announced a more adult spin-off series. Sadly, though, Torchwood is turning out to be really rather odd and quite disappointing.
All through the last series of Who, we had to put up with the name Torchwood being shoved down our throats during almost every single episode. In the rather excellent showdown between the Daleks and the Cybermen, we even got to see the London branch of the organisation - a rather intriguing collection of people with departments for studying alien artifacts - it all looked quite impressive, and...
We've known for a while now that Nathan wasn't going to be satisfied until he could get around the house on his own, so he's been crawling furiously for the past couple of months, and over the last two weeks, he's managed to start walking short distances on his own. Mostly, he stands up by the sofa, then heads off into the middle of the room, taking about ten steps before sitting down. He's getting stronger by the day - earlier today, he walked half way across the lounge, nearly stumbled, managed to stand still, then changed direction before sitting...
A really wierd thing has happened to my Windows Live Messenger (v. 8.1 beta) - I'd not noticed it before, but every message I type with a quote mark (single or double) is using smart quotes instead of straight quotes. While many people may like this, I hate it - back at Wrox, we used to fish out all the smart quotes from chapters so they didn't end up in code extracts (smart quotes in code = yuk!), and I'm really much happier without them.
Now I'm not sure if it's the new version or the fact that Nathan was playing...
As Nathan approaches the 9 month marker, he's starting to take his first steps. This weekend he managed 6 unaided steps as he walked from my arms to James, and he's now confidently climbing the stairs on his own (with one of us behind him to help him if he stumbles, of course!) He's also making sounds that are much closer to real speech, and we're really looking forward to him understanding what "mama" and "dada" mean.
On top of all Nathan's moving around, it's getting closer to the day when we have to move house. We're buying a house in...