Just in case anyone has managed to avoid seeing this all over Facebook, here’s a little video clip of Mary throwing herself off the vertical drop slide thingie at Wildwood, our local wildlife park.
The slide is good fun, though you wouldn’t know it listening to the shriek of fear in this clip…
The video is from my HTC Desire HD, which does a half decent job when I stop waving it around like an idiot.
My photography took a bit of a hit last summer when my well worn and well used Canon EOS 300D finally went to the big Photoshop in the sky. It seems sea and sand don’t mix well with D-SLRs… who would’ve thought?
Well, all that came to an end last week when my darling wife came into a small amount of money and decided that our walks are much more fun when I’m pre-occupied with taking rather geeky pictures, or something like that. I’m now the proud owner of a Canon EOS 550D, and I think it’s rather good. The recent batch of pictures here and on my Flickr photostream are all taken with the new beast, and it appears to be a few steps up from the 300D.
One of the things that caught my eye on the spec sheet was its max ISO rating of 12800. Twelve thousand!? Surely you’re not going to be able to get any useful pictures with that?
Well, here’s a sample, straight out of the camera (apart from the border… gotta have some kind of house style…)
And here’s a 100% crop:
OK, it’s not gallery quality by any means, but it did mean I could get a shutter speed of 1/1000s at F/9 in rather dingy light, which I suppose could mean the difference between getting a usable shot and not.
The first one is here.
Things James has now:
In general, he is a happy, inquisitive little soul. He’s growing in personality all the time, and acquiring new skills at a blistering rate. I’m well aware that just about every parent in the land would say something similar of their own offspring, but I make no apologies for that. Our boy is special, because he’s ours, and we love him to bits.
I have just sat with my good lady wife whilst she added a veritable forest of content to the Drupal installation we’ve been procrastinating about for ages. It’s cool to see the site starting to take shape and even cooler to see Mary tapping away at HTML with the odd pause and question like: “so the ending tag has a slash, right?”.
I think I may need to throw a few spanners in the works. She’s picking it up way too easily, and at this rate she’ll start wondering whether this web stuff is difficult at all!
So… since I’m laying the blame for the lack of activity here at his door, let’s kick off the new batch of updates with some news on how the little time-sink himself is doing.
Well, he’s almost seven months old now, and overall I think we’re really quite lucky. He is sleeping through the night (mostly), and gulps down pretty much whatever food we put in front of him. He is, however, showing his dad’s tendency for any cold or sniffle go straight to his chest, so he has his own Ventolin (complete with scary volumiser / gasmask attachment, which used to freak him out, but he’s used to it now). He started to crawl about a week ago and though he’s still pretty flat on his stomach, he can get some speed up when he wants to, which is usually when something potentially deadly is in view.
For the first 6 weeks or so he was quite difficult to settle, and would only sleep if Mary or I were there with him, even if we were just resting a hand on his chest. At about 6 weeks though, something changed and he decided that sleep was a good thing. We moved him into the cot in his own room, and ever since then we have been blessed with a relaxed, happy baby. We chill him out further with a bout of baby massage now and then (he loves his legs being done, not so sure about body and arms).
He melts my heart every time he smiles at me, and I do that new dad thing of gushing about his latest skill to every one who’ll listen (or at least pretend to…). Someone emailed me about being a new dad and ended a sentence with “…but you love him more than you thought possible, right?”. Right.
I’m going to stop now, as I hear murmurings from his room upstairs (that’ll be the ‘mostly’ sleeping through the night, then…). I suspect he just needs someone to find his dummy – he has a habit of launching it into the corner of the room a couple of times each night.
Here he is with my dad. I’ve converted the photo to black and white in an attempt to disguise which football team’s colours he’s in (ner ner 
)
In a rare blog entry with text, I’d like to introduce my reader(s) to my new son, James. Here he is alongside a handy ‘scale-device’:
James was born on Monday the 2nd of June at 1:13am, weighing 7lb 13oz (or the same as about 3 and a half bags of sugar). We have been somewhat inundated with kind words, presents and facebook wall-writings from friends and family, for which I would like to say a huge “thanks“. I think, all things considered, we’re doing pretty well. Mary isn’t getting much sleep at all, and I’m getting an awful lot less than I’m used to, but we are alive, and we’ve even managed to venture out of the house as a whole family a couple of times.
James’ big brother is sliding into the role beautifully, with the confidence that comes with having “magic big-brother fingers”. He has, of course, been spoilt rotten, and will no doubt expect the same ‘double-birthday’ effect this time next year; that might be a hard lesson to take…
The birth was at Canterbury Birthing Centre, a midwife-led unit based at the Kent & Canterbury Hospital in Canterbury. Mary and I cannot recommend this place enough; the staff were wonderfully supportive, helping us to give birth to our baby rather than have him delivered. After the birth, we were tucked up in a double bed with tea and toast from the kitchen down the hallway. Later that day we were free to welcome our visitors, make them cups of tea, and relax in the large lounge. Despite being in a hospital, the experience wasn’t medical in the slightest, and we couldn’t think of a better way to welcome James into the world.
For those of you wanting a blow-by-blow account of the birth, please bear with me; I’m working on it. It’s a busy time at the moment, and I’m finding it a little bit tricky to put feelings into words.
Many congrats to Mr & Mrs Ant & Cally Hogbin who tied the knot on Wednesday in North Wales. As was to be expected, there are somewhere in the region of ten thousand images of the day in various places around the interweb, with a central repository in the pipeline (but let’s let the poor sysadmin guy have his honeymoon first, eh?)
It was a lovely day – well done to all involved
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…or “Pimp My (Brother’s) Site”
Whilst playing around with Garry’s bookmarking site I came across some old links which could do with an airing. The first of these is a transcript of an interview on Nicky Campbell’s radio programme involving Will Self and journalist Richard Littlejohn. Will Self just about wipes the floor with Richard Littlejohn – it makes an amusing read.
Ooh, Firefox 2 RC3 now has builtin spellchecking (as long as you download the dictionary file) – cool
