April 29, 2004  

we know his name and he mustn't get away 28 april 2004

I was briefly intrigued by a spam I received the other day. Standard kick-off, free money from the government, etc. Appended to the end of the email was a couple of paragraphs of entirely lucid prose, mainly dialogue. A quick whack with google, and I discovered that they'd just included half a page from this online short story. It seemed to work: it got past our spam filters at work, anyway.

Speaking of spam filters: thumbs up for the internal junk mail filtering in Mozilla Thunderbird. A very nice wee email client, not as hijackable as OE, and quite comfortably usable. Very impressed.

So the US Postal Service have decided to stop sponsoring their professional cycling team, eh? Ah well, we'll be seeing Lance et al in a new strip in 2005, then. Pity, really - USPS was one of the most high-profile non-European cycling sponsors. It'll be interesting to see who picks up the team, as Berry Floor (current USPS co-sponsor) can't really pick up the whole slack themselves. Adds a bit of a frisson to the tour preparation, though. It's looking good for Big Blue this year, with Lance winning the Tour of Georgia (the state, not the country - I didn't know the state was that big!), and Ullrich being accused of being a bit porky (by Eddie Merkcx, who knows whereof he speaks). Is Beloki back up to race form after last year's crash yet? If so, this could be interesting to watch.

And this means that my USPS water bottle (pride of place on my desk at work, next to the miniature Buddha, the toy Westie, and the beanie baby scorpion and spider) will become "retro".

A brief spate of good weather over the weekend saw us taking Rebecca out for her first trip to the park. Milton Country Park, to be specfic; last time we'd been there was about a week prior to Rebecca's birth. This had been an attempt to induce labour by taking Heather for long walks on rough ground. This worked spectacularly - why, she was practically projectile-birthing as we hurried back to the car! Maybe not, but on our previous visit we did see a couple of kingfishers, various coots, a variety of other waterfowl, and a couple of very hapy puppies. This visit was fairly similar (less kingfishers, though), with the addition of a solidly asleep infant strapped to my chest. Rebecca's actual experience of the country park was debatable, as she spent most of the time fast asleep and dribbling gently onto my t-shirt. The glorious sunshine and fresh air will have been good for her, though.

First week as new parent: "There's just been a faint rumble from her bowels! We must change the nappy immediately!"

Fourth week: *brroooooapp broooapp rumble rumble flamp* "Ah, fuck it - she's not finished yet. Give her ten minutes and see if anything else comes out."

God only knows what we'll be like by a year.

April 20, 2004  

dear prudence 19 april 2004

Ever heard that proverb, "the honeymoon is over the first time the groom farts in front of his bride"? Trust me, after a week with a newborn baby, you'll find yourself praying that the loud farting noise that just reverberated around the kitchen came from your partner. They don't tend to follow through, and you don't have to change their clothes even if they did.

We've all currently got colds, leading to a fair degree of grouchiness and lack of sleep. It's Rebecca's first illness, and she certainly doesn't seem to care for the experience so far. Still, it'll be character-forming.

What with the return of sunshine (or at least, long well-lit evenings) I've started cracking out my road bike for the daily commute. I am now much faster (although the relative sense of riding a road bike while wearing a 40ltr backpack carrying 15kg of shopping is debatable), and am certainly in much closer contact with the road. Great fun to ride, though - fast as all hell in a straight line (steering's a bit twitchy, but a bit of fiddling with the ride position should sort that), and brakes to a dead stop in an impressively short distance. Bit of a boneshaking experience: you don't realise how effective MTB suspension is until you get back onto a fully rigid bike, and going over a speed bump kicks the front wheel straight back up at you. Should be good for my riding skills, though: it's improve fast or suffer on the stutter bumps. That said, the frame itself is very nice to ride, and it's great fun going like a greased weasel through the traffic.

Funny thing, but you really notice the difference in handlebar widths. My MTB has a 23" (58cm) wide set of handlebars, with bar ends. My road bike has 44cm (17.5") drop handlebars. I don't so much notice the width in terms of feel, more visually - I'm much more comfortable taking the roadbike into narrow gaps without worrying about whether I'm going to get squeezed in on the sides. Not that I'm doing serious courier-stylee traffic dodging, but I tend to filter up the inside of stopped traffic queues at lights, and I'd rather not collect someone's wing mirror on the way.

By the way, if anyone is stuck for what to get me for Christmas, can I recommend the Rohloff Speedhub. When you were a kid, you might have had a bike with an internal hub gear (such as the Sturmey-Archer hub gear used on the Raleigh Chopper, for instance). Hub gears get bonus points for being very simple, maintenance-free (they either fail catastrophically or not at all, and tend towards the latter: a number of decades-old SA 3-speed units are still going strong), and robust. Minus points for weight and restricted gear range. The Rohloff is still pretty heavy, but it's got a grand total of 14 speeds nestling inside that hub body (and that's 14 true speeds, about equivalent gear spread to a standard 27-speed derailleur set up), and the only maintenance you ever need to do is the odd squirt of oil. Compared to the amount of fiddling required to keep a derailleur running happy, it's a very tempting alternative. Unfortunately, it's also £600. Stuff BMW, that's my kind of expensive precision German engineering.

Alternatively, and continuing the "sexy German hub" theme, the SON (Schmidt) hub dynamo. All the fun of dynamo lighting (wire the lights to your bike to prevent theft! Never run out of battery power!), plus capacitors so your lights don't go out immediately when you stop the bike, with a total drag factor roughtly equivalent to gaining a couple of feet of height per mile. Oh yes. Just what we need for the long winter nights... but again, quite pricey (north of £100, more if you want to run disk brakes).

Still, something to think about when I get around to cashing up the penny jar, eh?

Today's theme: Papa's Got a Brand New Pigbag by Pigbag. Bouncy!

I just got a piece of spam entitled "Stay hard for the weekend!". It's Monday. The weekend is five days away. How big is that bloody pill?

I love this time of year. The plum tree in our garden is covered in blossom, as are the trees outside my office window. Ponds are full of tadpoles, the ducks are merrily getting down to the procedure of producing ducklings, and all is good in the world. I get to wear shorts to work. New life. That sort of thing.

April 18, 2004  

back on the airwaves 17 april 2004

More Rebecca photos now available online. Woo hoo!

April 14, 2004  

taking the pithy 13 april 2004

And we're back. I biked home from work this lunchtime and set up a new PC, got Heather's email working, and changed a nappy. I'm motherfucking Sensitive Dad and a half, me.

Hence, we are now back online. Expect more online updates as soon as I figure out precisely where everything is on this new PC. What the heck do you windows types use for FTP, anyway?

New parent corner: useful kit. All the books and web sites are very big on the stuff you "ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE" for your newborn; and fair enough, you need to know what to get in stock prior to the wee 'un arriving home. However, there's also a fair bit of stuff that comes in handy, but never gets mentioned. With that in mind, here are the odds and sods that I've found very helpful in my first few weeks of parenthood.

• Ambient techno music. Newborns are used to a fair bit of noise within the womb; long silences seem to disturb them. A bit of the old ambient techno on quietly soothes the soul and helps them get to sleep at the same time. I've found middle period Future Sound of London, Richie Hawtin, Miss Kittin, and Dr Alex Paterson to be particularly effective at soothing the savage infant. You just bung Palmskin Productions' Remilixir on the stereo, turn the lights down low and the music soft, rock the cradle gently and chances are she'll be spark out before trouble rides a fast horse.
• Head-mounted torch. Newborns make a lot of nappies - up to a dozen a day isn't unusual. However, and this is what people don't mention, newborns also fart a lot. Loudly. And it takes a while to get an ear for whether that loud rude noise was "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", or if there was a bit of follow-through, know what I mean? OK, peek down the back of the nappy to check. But wait! Your baby is dressed in an all-in-one stretch-and-grow suit! To check the nappy you'd have to undress the infant! The easy way around this is spread carefully pull the nappy away from around the top of one leg and peer in to see if you can see anything untoward. However, it's normally quite hard to see, so a torch is handy. And since you need one hand to hold the baby in place and the other to pull the nappy out, a head-mounted torch is the business. I use Petzl equipment, and can't recommend it highly enough. Available at most tramping shops (and also handy for working in the attic). Of course, after two weeks you'll start just hefting the child up and sniffing its arse like every other parent does, but while you've still got your delicate sensibilities a head-torch is essential.
• Dimmer switch lights. Not particularly because of the ability to dim the lights, but because they're much easier to turn on/off with your shoulder as you walk past with both hands full of squirming newborn. Particularly avoid those hyper-trendy slimline light switches that barely protrude from the fascia: the only way to turn those buggers on/off no-handed is by bending down and doing it with your forehead.
• Baby oil. Otherwise they squeak. OK, maybe not, but just a smidgeon of baby oil can really help if they've got a lot of dry skin. We actually inherited our bottle of baby oil from The Wrestler Now Known As Doctor Diablo when he went back home to NZ (along with a half bottle of Finish Line Cross Country Wet Lubricant, my personal favorite chain lubricant for UK conditions - which, I hasten to add, we don't put on the baby). Straight from the mighty thews of the NZPWI to the slightly red arse of our firstborn - what I believe the UK planning departments might refer to as "change of use".
• Kitchen towels. Simple, disposable, and a cost-effective way of drying baby's damp little keister. You know those special "baby wipes" are exactly the same and cost twice as much.

A few tips for all, there.

The other day, I had a five minute conversation with a coworker, where three minutes of the conversation were dedicated to relative appearance, consistency and smell of infantile excrement, and how it's affected by diet. God help us all.

Today's theme: Losing my Edge by LCD Soundsystem. Possibly edged out by the Chicken Lips' stupendous remix of Playgroup's Make it Happen.

I'll admit to being repeatedly annoyed by a current ad showing in the UK. This ad is some terrible bollocks showcasing the lovely natural ingredients in some new dishwashing detergent. In it, a well known TV chef is shown by various examples of the botanical ingredients of this new detergent. Specifically tea tree and lemon. OK, the lemon bit is accurate: most people know what a lemon looks like, so it's hard to fudge that one ("...the natural grease-cutting power of citrus!" - tosser!). What really makes my blood boil is just before this, when he stands under a tall, flowing tree with long, drooping branches, and waffles on about "tea tree, nature's antiseptic". That's a willow you're standing under, you bloody idiot. Tea tree, better known to our New Zealand listeners as manuka, looks entirely different. I guess that they thought that a shortish scrub tree with pretty flowers wouldn't look as elegant, eh? Wankers.

I was quite surprised to find that tea tree (this magical natural antibacterial panacea) was actually manuka (the scrubby stuff that grew on my grandparents' property and made excellent kindling). The smell of manuka smoke was a staple of my childhood: it's the best stuff for starting fires I've found, short of those white things you buy at the garage. Domestic, household fires, of course, in case you all get the impression I'm some kind of spark bug. I only do socially sanctioned pyromania, you know.

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