Jack's in bed

I've just put Jack to bed. Kim usually gives him his bottle and tucks him into his cot for the night, but this evening she's has gone to pilates and swimming.

He expects to play when he's with me, because that's when we're usually together - when I get home from work, when I bath him, and on weekends. Kim does most of the serious stuff like the feeding and putting him to bed. So when I put him to bed he wants to play rather than cuddle and go to sleep. Though after I'd fed him his bottle and burped him he got sleepy on my shoulder, and once we'd got through the worst of a bout of hiccups I put him in his cot and tucked him in. So far he's been quiet...

Dualies

Seen my webcam? Dual monitor setup on my big PC. It really helps with just about any application, but particularly image work and web design. Gonna have to get another NEC to match my current main monitor :)

Jif Updates

Nobody really seems to be using the Jif website. The counters are telling me I'm getting hits, but no-one is using the comments system. At least it's dead easy to update now with the PHP news management system.

There are (I think) a couple of stylesheet bugs, so if you notice any problems, email me.

Llandaff Cathedral

We all went to a christening today. I got dragged to church for the second time this year, God dammit!

Smart

Aren't we smart?

Trolley Dolly

I went shopping with Jack today, breaking my rule of "never go to Tescos on a Saturday". How did Kim get me to do that? I obviously wasn't paying attention.

Jo and Jack

Jack was in work last week, and gave everybody his cold. They've all been coughing and sneezing since.

Cardifftri.net

Fasthosts have finally put cardifftri.net back online, after 3 DAYS without service. Most of the website HAS NOT been transferred to the new server. Luckily I don't think we've lost any data because I had a backup, but this is seriously screwing up my weekend. I've got a big pile of other crap to do - I don't need to be restoring this entire website and using up all my upload bandwidth. I am so not fucking happy with this situation. What's worse, Fasthosts promise a reply to support emails within 24 hours and I'm still waiting to hear back from 2 emails I sent them yesterday.

Nasty

After swimming with the Triathletes this evening I was sat at the traffic lights in Ely, waiting to turn right, listening to the excellent John Peel. "Why's that bus sat there with its hazards on?", I thought to myself. Minutes later I turned, and saw the remains of a dead dog behind the parked bus. Oh jeez. I guessed it was a dog by the size, and the black and white "fur", but it could have been anything. It looked like it had been through a mincer - crushed by the bus.

Now, you see something like that, and it slows your driving right down. Who couldn't see that and think, "What if that had been a kid?" Or, "What if I had been driving?" That'll slow you right down. It reminds you that driving a car is a method of getting from A to B, and we're all doing just that. So cut out the aggresive driving, the speeding and the lack of attention when you're in the car, and just get where you're going without incident. You don't want to be sat in the car at the side of the road with your hazard lights on and a bloody mess crushed on the road behind you, do you?

Still Down

God damn it! CardiffTri.net is still down!

I've emailed Fasthosts tech support, but got the expected answer of, "our engineers are working as quickly as possible to complete the server upgrades, yada, yada, yada". They're usually such a superb company that I just cannot understand why my websites have been taken down for so long at such short notice. There must be a very big and important reason, right? Hackers? Virus?

On the flip side, Graeme at Kustom PCs emailed me straight back this morning to say I can send back my faulty wireless keyboard under warranty. They'll even cover my postage costs or get a courier to collect it! I think I'll take the latter option - I'm so busy at the moment I'm not going to get a chance to go to the post office for a few days.

Kustom PCs are one of the best companies around for customer care. I've been amazed at how Graeme has sorted out my problems, responding to emails at all times of day, and even on Sundays. Go buy your shiny PC modding kit from them.

HL2

Nooooooo! Half Life 2 has been put back to a December 1st release date! It was supposed to come out at the end of this month... I guess I knew in my gut it wouldn't be ready in time. What can I play instead?

Commando

Jack did his first commando crawl today. Oh no! He's mobile!

He's dragged himself forward to get to the remote control in this photo, and is shaking his prize.

Jif & Tri Websites

Apologies to users of cardifftri.net and cardiffjif.com for the outage today. I only got the warning email at the last minute, but our service provider, Fasthosts, have found it necessary to urgently upgrade the servers we host the websites on.

Jif is back up, but Tri is not. They assure me the outage will last less than 24 hours. More hassle for me because the scripts are hard coded to the server location.

Students

The students are back in Cardiff this week.

You get so used to the university during the summer from May to September. It's quiet; it's just us researchers, and you forget how many students the university teaches. When they come back the whole city is changed. This week is fresher's week, so you can't walk 10 metres down Park Place without getting leafleted by blokes in bear suits and girls in tight t-shirts.

And they're getting younger. Or is this a sign that I really am 30 next year?

New case for big PC

The black one? :

Or the silver one? :

Dines

Heh heh. I just found out why Malcolm Dines left Cardiff. It's to do with his stay at Keith & Ruth's.

I can't imagine that's actually why he moved to Swansea though. Sorry Malc. Hope the link to your site makes up for it, although I see that it's not often updated...

Kim o rock

O ly the 2 d time Kim's clim ed si ce last August.

Jack at Penallta crag

Jack watches his mum gear up.

Jack goes clim i g

We took Jack rock clim i g today!

Keys

The " " a d " " keys do 't work o my key oard.

Walking the boy

I meant to take a pic of us walking in the park with Jack, but forgot and ended up taking a photo of us on the bridge over the Taff, but you can't see the river.... only tarmac. Oops.

TGIF

Poor Jack has got a cold at the mo. He's waking up at night covered in snot, and of course waking us up too, so I'm knackered. I've bought some Karvol capsules for his bed tonight (thanks Janet from the finance dept!) so maybe we'll all get a better night's sleep tonight.

Over the last week I've been prodding and poking the cardiffjif.com website with the Fusion News PHP script, like I did with the cardifftri.net website. It has finally fit, and is now live on "the Grind", the main news page. Hopefully people will use it, and it'll take some more work off my shoulders.

If you've bookmarked www.cardiffjif.com/grind.html, change it to www.cardiffjif.com/grind.php.

Mousey mousey

I've ordered myself a new mouse. The Logitech MX500 fits in the hand beautifully, and should cut down on some of the hand-ache I've been getting from putting so many hours into web design recently.

I didn't go for the cordless version because 1 extra cable is no problem, and I can't be arsed with recharging the thing. What happens if you're mid way through some stuff and the battery goes and you have to stick your mouse in a recharging cradle because you forgot to do it last night? And it's £20 cheaper.

CardiffTri.net News

Everybody's loving the new news system on www.cardifftri.net. People have been posting comments galore, and Jeff has started posting his news items himself. I should have done this years ago!

On-site polls and gallery next. Thanks PHP Fusion people!

Collagen

Remember the experiment the other day? Result:

The red dots are cell nuclei, the green stuff is labelled type II collagen.

One of a million photos I've taken/am taking.

Emma climbing

Emma climbing - being belayed by her new bloke and novice climber. He was learning how to belay last night. Easy.

Dave climbing

I actually went climbing indoors last night. Its too dark too early to get outside in the evenings. I had to update my subscription fees :( So I'd better go regularly this winter :)

IHC

The day job. I want to find out whether my transplanted cells are making type II collagen, so I'm doing a 2-day experiment to find out.

Today: fixing, washing, digesting and labelling tissue sections on slides with a type I collagen antibody.

Cycling the Taff Trail

Cycling and taking photos means you'll probably drop your phone.

Oops. Minor scratches only...

Cycling to work

Gorgeous morning cycling to work today.

Aaaaaah

Relax, don't do it

Time for some booze.

Instead of the relaxing weekend fishing I had planned, I ended up working. I got a fair bit of the South West Implants Centre's website done though. Just a few more pages, a navigation bar, maybe a search bar, and finish up the logos and bits and I'm almost finished. It'll be nice to get my spare time back.

So now I need to relax.

Kim and Jack

Jack's got a bit of a cold.

He did, however, sit up on his own in the bath for the first time today, and played with his ducks. He has gone from splashing with his feet to splashing with his hands. He loved it, and I got soaked.

We also spent a load of money on him - he's now got a new car seat and a high chair. He was *just* growing out of his car seat, and he just about fits into the next size. I put my foot down and got the one I wanted - it matches the car's upholstery far better than the one Kim wanted.

Cardiff Tri PHP'd

Phew. I've just finished the first stage of updates to www.cardifftri.net.. I've added a PHP news manager to look after the news postings for me. This means I can get other people to post news, and I don't have to faff about with HTML any more, except for updates to the other pages, which apart from the gallery are few and infrequent.

The plan is to use the same news manager (from FusionPHP) for the Jif website later on. I'm getting some of my workload off my back.

The next major upgrade will be a PHP managed image manager for the photo galleries, but I'm still looking for something suitable. Know of one?

Gonna have a beer and a DVD now.

Jack's Fan

It is so much fun looking after this little fella. How much entertainment can you get from a fan and a 7 month old little boy?

Fair play, he's his father's son. I can't keep him away from my keyboards and mice, and he's just infatuated by remote controls. He switched his first computer on last week - the mini-itx box on the floor in the living room. He was drawn by the bright blue LEDs, and rolled (he's not crawling yet) his way over to it and eventually found the on/off switch, so he switched it off and on a few times. Even my mum struggles to do that ;)

Me and Him

It's just me and Jack again today. Lunch for two.

Jack's tooth

I promised a pic of his first tooth:

That's almost as good as it gets. Trying to get him to give a toothy smile is nigh on impossible.

Boat fishing

I've just found out that our sea fishing trip tomorrow has been cancelled :( The skipper has put his back out. I was looking forward to that!

I was toying with the idea of going back to Cheltenham and going lake fishing instead, but Kim has planned to do other stuff, so I might just sit down and try and get the first part of version 2 of the CardiffTri website live. It's not changing its design much, it's just getting its code tidied up and a PHP based news admin script which will look after the news page and archives for me. It's a fair bit of work, but will anyone notice? It'll make my life easier, and I'll be able to assign logins to other people to add news items so I don't have to do all of them.

Bouncy Jack

Check out Jack's first climbing harness:

Kind of. He loves bouncing!

Lil Sis

It's late. I've been updating the Tri and Jif websites and writing this new dental website for the South West Implant Centre and Downend Dental Practice.

It's 12.30am in the UK, and my sister is on a plane flying to Sri Lanka to begin her 7 month round the world tour with her boyfriend Lee. She's going to miss Jack's first Christmas, his first birthday, his first crawl, and his first steps. And we're going to miss her too.

They have a website detailing their plans here, but it's not working for me right now.

Tooth

Hey, Jack cut his first tooth this week! It's as sharp as a knife. He likes toothpaste and chewing on his new toothbrush when I give his tooth a little brush after his bath :)

I'll try to get a photo up in the week, but it's a bottom tooth in the front of his jaw, and he is less than cooperative about posing without sticking his tongue out.

TCES day 2

Another day, another series of seminars.

All went smooth as silk today :)

Mobile tech boy

Heh heh. Today reads like some mobile tech advert.

"I got to work early, with just enough time to sync my Palm Tungsten T and grab my email and latest news from the internet with AvantGo.

After some instruction from the conference organiser I go to the conference's lecture theatre and log into the networked PC there. Presenters begin to appear and I set up and test their talks for the first couple of sessions.

Just before the first presentations begin I check my email. A rejected paper - some good notes from the reviewers though, just not good enough for the journal - I make notes on my Tungsten of what to do later to address their issues. I forward the email to the other authors using Versamail, and reply to a couple of other emails. I send them using the bluetooth connection to my Ericsson T68i and its GPRS connection to Orange.

The presentations begin and I'm busy swapping presentations and laptops around for each new presenter. As the day goes on the process of preparing and running continues, with some problems with older Powerbooks. The new Apple Powerbooks are great. They autodetect the projector and configure themselves. A little Panasonic tough book feels incredibly lightweight, but the owner says it weighs a kilo - the same as my iBook.

As I get a chance I take photos with my Ericsson Communicam attached to my T68i. I could upload them to my blog now, by sending them to my iBook using blueooth and then connecting to the internet again with GPRS, but I don't have time so I save them for later.

The seminars end, and I'm thanked. I go back to my desktop PC and resync all the notes, emails, to do items and diary entries I have made today on my Tungsten. After finishing up a few things in the office I pack up my mobile kit into my bike bag and cycle home.

After playing with, bathing the boy and putting him to bed I pull out my iBook from its neoprene slip case and look at the photos I took today. Nice. I'll upload a selection to my blog. I connect to my home network using my wireless Apple Airport card and connect to the internet via NTL's broadband connection. My internet connection is down.

MOTHERFUCKING BITCH ARSEHOLES PISS FUCK BOLLOCKS!!!!!!!!!

(Hmm..... that's not how those tech adverts usually end)

Registration

Kirsty (TCES organiser) and Becky at the registration desk. Easy day compared to my job ;)

Macs

And play with lots of these:

Yeah, my job was to set up all the presentations and look after the presenters. It went OK. Just one troublesome older powerbook. It worked fine in testing but at the second slide decided it didn't want to display full screen on the projector any more :( We fixed it though.

The only other hassle was swapping over macs and PCs (no bother) and sorting out one guy that brought his talk solely on a USB stick. All our lecture theatre PCs run NT, which of course doesn't work with USB, at ALL. Sorted it over the network though - it put us 2 minutes late.

Maybe I'll be luckier tomorrow?

Seminar room

To spend my day in here:

Off to work

I left Jack to go to work at about 7.30am.

TCES conference

Tuesday and Wednesday this week we (our research group, and the Cardiff School of Biosciences) are holding the Tissue and Cell Engineering Society conference. I put together some graphics for the covers of the handbook (below), some signs, badges and bits.

So today we've been busy getting the final preparations together, and it's down to me to set up the lecture theatres and all the presentations for the speakers. So far, so good. An early start tomorrow morning should give me enough time to smooth out any wrinkles and fix bugs in presenter's powerpoint slides. I'll try to get some photos with my phone's camera.

Running again!

I went running today for the first time since I twisted my ankle. What's that, 6 weeks? Blimey.

Sore, and limpy, but OK. A bit of running will probably do the ankle good.

TCES front cover

Here's the front cover for the TCES meeting handbook, which I just finished:

TCES back cover

I've been designing the covers for the Tissue and Cell Engineering Society meeting we're hosting in the Cardiff School of Biosciences next Tuesday. Here's the back cover:

Ironwoman Lisa

Ironwoman Lisa, always out in front.

Cycling

Me and Stu actually out training!

Lisa & Stu cycling

Lisa and Stu, out cycling together. Aaaaah.

Radeon 9800

Jack's checking out my new graphics card.

As usual, "I like the box best, Dad!"

Wireless home LAN

Hooha! I've got a wireless network running at home now, as I got a bunch of new toys today, and this is my first post from my now wireless iBook. Top! I can just open the laptop and do what I want to do.

I had to be a bit sneaky though. I've added a wireless USB adapter to my server in the attic that acts as a router for all my other PCs by using Windows' internet connection sharing. However, with ICS you can only share the internet connection between one network, and not via the 2nd network on the wireless network adapter. So I added a proxy server for the wireless network, and all works peachily. The ICS is still up, and I only have to configure one computer to use the proxy instead of all of them.

Evening carp

This was how I ended Saturday evening's fishing. This little 7 pound common took 20 mins to land on my light float tackle. There's loadsa fun to be had from all these hard fighting commons in the Crippetts.

I had a couple of these, and a nice sore arm the next morning :)

Fishing

I spent my weekend on a sunny lake, catching loads of bream and carp on light float tackle with dog food, corn, luncheon meat and chick peas, watching carpers sleeping behind their bite alarms. I definitely had the most fun.

Bream

Lots and lots of these:

Roach

A few of these:

My weekend

Now this is how to relax.

Big PC gets an upgrade

Haha! I've done it! I've ordered a 17" flatscreen and an ATI 9800 video card for the big PC. That'll let me get some web design work done AND let me play HalfLife 2 if it does indeed come out at the end of the month.

They should arrive tomorrow.

Server woes

Aaaaagh! The first trial of running my own web server has hit me.

We went away to Cheltenham this weekend, and just as we were leaving the house the electricity died. As people started appearing outside their houses we learned that the whole close was affected. Fine. So we unplugged everything and drove back to Cheltenham, expecting the power to come back on later that day, which it probably did.

Of course, my server and the cable modem both went down. And as I didn't restart my server until I got back on Sunday night, it was assigned another IP address by NTL. No biggie, change the redirection to www.samwebster.net and jackwebster.net. Remind myself again to set up a DNS server so I don't have this problem again.

Ah. None of my photos show up on www.samwebster.net. Because they're all linked into the blog using the old IP address. So I spent the whole morning changing them all by hand. I really, really need to sort out a DNS server so this doesn't happen again :(