My old N73 had a broken ‘1′ key so I took it back to the O2 shop. As in was still under warranty they swapped it straight away for a new phone. Pretty good service. Fortunately, they didn’t have another N73 in stock so I was offered an E65 instead. It’s a slider phone, still based on Symbian v3, with much bigger keys (the small ones on the N73 were beginning to annoy me) and built-in Wifi!! Sure, the camera is only 2MP instead of 3MP but frankly, who cares? I’ve got a nice shiny new phone for no additional outlay. Now I’m off to move to Vodafone so I can actually get mobile reception at home
Norah spent last night in the Children’s Ward of Cork University Hospital with Erythema multiforme.
It started as a small rash under her chin on Saturday morning, and eventually spread with small spots on her body and legs. The GP said it was just probably an allergic reaction, perhaps to a bacteria or virus. Anyway, the rash continued and had obviously got very itchy on Sunday night as no one got any sleep. On Monday we were back to the GP and referred to the on-call Paediatric doctor at CUH. At this stage, the rash covered most of her body.
All the doctors and nurses were quite impressed and, after several visits by every grade of doctor from houseman to consultant, she was diagnosed and admitted for the night. I walked over to Tesco for supplies (the furthest I walked since the accident, and possibly too far) and stayed til midnight, whilst Hilary slept in a chair for the night. It’s was a brief insight into life with a sick child and my heart goes out to those parents. As it was, the rash had almost completely gone by the next day as the antibiotics did their job and she was discharged this morning.
The Original Slumber Bear contains the ONLY actual intra-uterine, recorded womb sound to help lull your Baby to sleep in minutes!
The fact is, it actually works. Norah was very restless any time we put her down in the cot and would only sleep in our arms, which wasn’t very convenient. With the bear playing these intra-uterine sounds we can put her down with a soother after a feed and have a reasonable expectation that she’ll fall asleep. It doesn’t work miracles though: if she’s cross or upset then it won’t put her to sleep. The bear was mentioned to us by another satisfied parent whose twins were successfully being lulled to sleep.
The only downside is that Norah has to cry really loudly to activate the bear (by which time we’ve usually woken up) but if the bear is positioned near her, she’ll usually whack it and activate the motion sensors. A pretty cool little invention really.
Facebook just isn’t working for me — I think it’s designed for people with friends. If you’re happy to have all your updates, photos, conversations etc on the one site, and share that info with just your “friends” then perhaps it does work. But the fact is that I don’t want to keep all my info on Facebook, and I don’t want to just share it with only the my 4 Facebook friends. Smugmug or Flickr are better places for sharing photos. Gmail is better for chatting and email. GoodReads is probably a better place for ticking off the books you read. Perhaps the problems is that I’m pretty exclusive with my Facebook “friends” because I figure they should actually be real friends/family, not vague acquaintances, colleagues, distant relative or people I’ve met online.
FriendFeed is a pretty cool site which aggregates all the information from disparate sites into a single RSS feed for anyone to subscribe to. It works with Smugmug, Flickr, GoodReads, your Amazon wishlist, Last.fm, Twitter, etc. Here’s my feed. It seems like a better alternative to Facebook for just aggregating online info together. And I can even include my FriendFeed in Facebook for my few real friends.
Is FriendFeed the next Facebook-like fad? Yeah, probably. But I’ll go with it for the moment cos it doesn’t lock me in like Facebook.
I’m big into anything that means I don’t have to walk up and down the stairs at the moment. One of the annoying things was getting the laptop in the same place as the backup drive, which meant that I wasn’t actually making any backups. With lots of priceless baby pictures that kinda worries me. So I bought a 500GB Freecom Network Drive Pro which I can mount as a network drive which makes backups nice and easy, if a little slow.
The pro version also has some great features: you can mount an external USB drive to extend the storage (so I can make use of my old 320GB drive); you can FTP to the drive; there’s even a BitTorrent client to download your movies directly to the drive, if you’re into that sort of thing); and coolest of all, you can SSH into the drive since it’s just running linux. SSH is cool because it means that you can move files around the drive (or between the external and network drive) without incurring any sort of network overhead. Pretty sweet piece of kit.
As of yesterday, I’m off the crutches and learning to walk again. I broke my other femur as a child and had to learn to walk again when I was 2, so this is my third, and hopefully final, attempt. Currently my gait is quite similar to Edgar (Vincent D’Onofrio as the bug) in Men in Black
So, I’ve been out of work for the past 3 months since the accident but recently I haven’t been entirely idle. I’ve finished off the personal finance site I first talked about almost a year ago and I’ve also written 2 other Ruby-on-Rails websites and got them deployed. These aren’t fancy sites but they fill various personal needs. I’ll announce each site when I’m happy to let others play with them.
Ruby is actually a pretty cool language and Rails is certainly a reasonably quick framework to use (once you figure out the documentation and various magic incantations). It took a lot longer than I was hoping to learn the Ruby language and understand the Rails framework, but then I was only working on it occasionally and I’m not a web developer. It’s certainly better than writing Java code and adds another feather to my l33t programming skillz ;-) Java for work; Ruby for pleasure.
I’m not a big petrolhead and really don’t care much about fast cars but I always appreciate innovation. When Daewoo first entered the U.K. market they innovated not through product design (the cars were all bad Vauxhall knock-offs) but through customer service: Salesmen were paid a flat-rate instead of commission to encourage honest advice; and their warranties were something like 5 years, much longer than the competitors. Still, the cars were crap so I’d never consider buying one (although we drove one into the ground for 4 weeks across New Zealand).
Our old ‘99 Renault Clio was the most basic model going and yet still had a sunroof, CD player, steering wheel mounted radio controls, and an airbag (which saved my life). The corresponding Ford Fiesta wouldn’t have had any of those. Now we have a ‘06 Renault Scenic and some of the innovations really please me:
The radio/CD volume increases as the car goes faster to compensate for road/air noise.
There are storage compartments everywhere. Seriously, we found a new one last week. Drawers under the seats, compartments under the floor, pockets in the armrests, etc…
An electronic handbrake which replaces the manual one. For a hill-start, you put the handbrake on and then increase the clutch/accelerator and once the engine has enough power to hold the car, the handbrake automatically releases. Very, very handy.
The windscreen wipers come on automatically, as do the headlights.
The speedometer is digital. I wasn’t sure about this initially but we all know from school that radial gauges are great for showing rate-of-change over continuous values but digital is ideal for a family car where you’re most concerned about keeping to the speed limit than the acceleration.
The dashboard display shows exactly which door is open (so you don’t have to play lets-guess-which-door-is-open, is-it-this-one, no-its-not …). It can also
There’s no “key”, it’s just a card that slots into the dashboard. You push a big start button with the clutch depressed to start the engine — very futuristic. Also, if the drivers door hasn’t opened, it won’t start (I guess to prevent children starting the car)
The key card can also be used to open the car doors simply by touching the door handles.
The rear windows have built-in sun visors which pull up out of the doors to keep the sun off the children
Sure, some of these features are in other new-ish cars but it strikes me that innovation and small features that make the users life better are top priorities in Renault. In contrast, recent Fords aren’t half as innovative because they have a much bigger default market share .
P.S. yeah, I guess I could’ve summarised this post as “I love our new Scenic, it’s so cool”. And I haven’t even driven it yet.
