Month: April 2007

Taking advantage of a chance to type…

…and trying desperately to remember all we’ve been doing in the last month or so!

Bob took a week off, then went back to work because we thought the time would be more useful for moving, so the children and I have been doing a rather laid-back form of HE (I mentioned elsewhere how bad I felt at them not doing “proper” HE and it was pointed out to me that they are actually doing childcare 101 – a very useful course 😆 ) and quite a few trips out, which I guess if I’m completely honest are only partly because there happen to be lots of things on just now and largely because I feel a bit guilty at them missing out…

w/c 25th March
A’s first trip out was on the day after her birth, when she and I took the boys to Z’s birthday party. The boys had a great time, A was much admired and I was able to sit down, drink tea and eat chocolate cake 😀

My sister phoned on that (Sunday) evening to ask if she could pop in to see us the next day as she happened to be coming over for a conference. Bob’s parents were also visiting and we had J as usual, so the house was a bit crowded, but it was lovely to see everyone and Polly had brought Christmas presents for the children (shows how often we see her!) which went down very well. We saw her again on Tuesday between conference and train and Bob introduced her to the wonders of flickr :mrgreen:

Wednesday found the children and me at Bouncearound (just squeezing in before the Easter break) while Bob stayed at home to do jobs. We had a bit of a late start due to waiting for m/w visit, but were in time for songtime, when L was presented with a gift for A and a book for her to say well done on bringing her new baby sister. We stayed late so the boys could help with the tidying up, as usual – if only they were so eager at home 😆

Thursday was p&t but Rebecca had offered to do it for us, so we only had to turn up, show off the baby and offer a little token help, which was great.

Friday club was another chance for Bob to do jobs while I took the children out. We had a drama teacher in to do a session with the children, which gave the mums a chance to sit and chat (and coo over A) and then did an Easter egg hunt, which made us late leaving but I think the children felt was a necessary part of the last session before Easter! Having left late we then got stuck in horrendous traffic which made us even later so that L missed her French class and we arrived only just in time for music. Bob met us there so I was able to sit back and rest again. Tea was quiche kindly given to us by one of the Friday club mums.

The weekend is a bit of a blur – will have to come back to that if I think of anything, especially as I’m now NAK so typing is trickier 😕

Power to the people

I had a phone call this evening from a friend who lives on the other side of town. It was an ordinary conversation about normal stuff. But afterwards I was a bit freaked out by the whole thing – even forgetting the miracles of the phone network there are amazing things happening.

  1. The sound waves from her mouth travel through the air to the microphone in her phone.
  2. The sound waves wobble the diaphragm in the microphone.
  3. The moving diaphragm moves one part of an electromagnet relative to the rest.
  4. The moving electromagnet acts like a dynamo and generates an electrical signal that is an analogue of the sound wave that hit the diaphragm.
  5. Some of the signal is fed back to the earpiece in her phone – too little and it doesn’t sound natural, too much and it’s off-putting.
  6. The electrical signal swims its way through the phone network to my phone.
  7. When it gets to my phone it hits another electromagnet in the loudspeaker, which acts like an electric motor to wobble a cone or something big and flattish like that.
  8. The wobbling cone generates a sound wave that is an analogue of the electrical signal.
  9. The sound wave travels through the air to my ear.

While we were having our conversation I wasn’t thinking about any of that. The sound transmission was so good that I realised that it was a woman, speaking English, with my friend’s accent, in fact sounding just like my friend that I jumped straight to “it’s my friend Joy” without noticing any of the physics or neurological wonders going on. The phone network usually just does its job and gets out of the way so well that it’s as if she was in the room with me and not the other side of town. Sometimes it breaks down and the phone network gets in the way again – things like talking to someone on a mobile phone when they’re losing their signal – but most of the time it just works.

It then struck me (I was doing the washing up during all this thinking, which seems to encourage my mind to wander) that all the Web 2.0 hooplah does have substance. Email’s been around for ages, but blogs and fora allow people to be together when they’re not. Katy talks to friends in the evening via fora, and so has friendships that she probably wouldn’t have had without them. Often the main thing is the people and what they’re saying, but sometimes servers need fixing and the technology gets in the way again. We can share photos of the children with friends and family and they can see what we’re up to even though we haven’t met up in person, but occasionally Flickr doesn’t let us upload photos and gets in the way again.

Another thing that gets in the way is other people. Criminals try to steal control of my blog’s server so that it can join their army of bots, so we need to keep patching the blog software rather than using it to post content and take people’s comments. Greedy, sleazy and lazy people try to vandalise my blog by putting adverts for dubious products and services – if I wanted ads on my site I would carry adverts from something like Google – so I have to install Spam Karma and then occasionally check through the spam bin. And finally the nosy and worse may use what I post in ways I wouldn’t want, so we have to talk in code a bit and not mentioned our children’s names in full etc. Maybe another sign of a technology’s maturity is that it’s worth being used by criminals and scumbags.

Huzzah for St. George!

Yesterday we went to Wrest Park in Bedfordshire for an English Heritage thing to celebrate St. George’s Day. It was like a mini version of the Festival of History, with extra St. George. As is becoming traditional with English Heritage outings, I got us lost on the way there, but not too badly. English Heritage is all about England and tradition, and so I show us more of the lovely English countryside and road network.

The first thing we saw were some Medieval jugglers who were fun, juggling clubs around a line of volunteer children. Then one of them did some cringe-inducing but impressive lying on a bed of nails – fortunately he knew his stuff and there was no blood. Interesting quick discussion with Katy and J about pressure – I think he initiated it.

After that there was an excellent show about Nelson. It was narrated by an actor who got children out of the audience to dress up in silly clothes and take on the parts. The Battle of Trafalgar was recreated by children wearing hats with ships on the tops thwacking each other with foam truncheons. Occasionally the children had little speaking parts, with the actor whispering and the children repeating. This was J’s favourite bit of the day, apparently.

It’s a bit of a blur after that, but we wandered about a bit avoiding a squad of Romans who were marching back to their tents, looking at the stalls and the very impressive lawn that was so big that it had 3 croquet lawns set up on it. We saw an excellent display of birds of prey – they were beautiful to watch, and the falconers were dressed up in Victorian gear as it had to be Historical. They did talk about the history to be fair – apparently larking about comes from using the birds to hunt larks rather than proper prey.

Next J and K joined the Roman Army, although they didn’t have to stay the regulation 25 years (just half an hour or so). A Roman re-enactor played a sergeant major and did the proper shouting, shuffling the troops around etc. The children had wooden shields and swords and lined up in rows and followed orders explained in English but given in Latin (sin[ister] and dex[ter] for left and right, smash your shield into the face of the enemy, stab them with your sword etc.) Its shoutiness and gruesomeness were pitched correctly for children, although we did have to explain afterwards that some of the nasty things that the Germans supposedly did to the defeated Romans might not have happened but were just told to other Romans to make them angry and fight hard! They did the tortoise with the shields which looked very impressive, a slow menacing march banging swords on shields, and a charge. Fortunately no-one got hurt and later on when we watched adult re-enactors being Roman soldiers the boys could appreciate it more as they’d done it themselves.

There was a fairly poor Medieval thing, some kind of play including dancing and fighting but we couldn’t hear any of the words. Another show from the Nelson people, but this time about Queen Elizabeth I (Don’t Mess with Bess). This was as good as the first one.

At the end of the day there was a kind of panto on horseback, with St. George defeating a dragon. While waiting for it we bumped into the Beans and the Manor born posse, which was very nice. (Us Dads discussed the type-casting of dragons and deleted enough space on our cameras for even more photos.) As the poor dragon didn’t breathe fire, bite, scratch or fly it was a fairly quick and one-sided fight. So that it wasn’t over too quickly there was a warm-up villain in the shape of a Saracen on horseback. He at least had a sword (and a ridiculously large nose for some reason) and temporarily defeated St. George, but the shouts of the crowd healed him 😕 and he came back to dispatch the baddy. Huzzah!

Discovering things

Yesterday the children who can speak were finding out about bees, and when I came home from work I was treated to a slightly random recap of it all :). Also Katy and I discovered that Tim Tams are even better than Penguins for sucking hot chocolate through. If you try this at home, don’t forget two handy hints:

  1. Nibble the chocolate off the ends to expose the biscuit.
  2. Bale out earlier than you think – when it starts to get too soggy to stay together it’s definitely too soggy to stand being tilted up to be gobbled up.

Apparently this is known as a Tim Tam Slam, and you can vary it by nibbling off just opposing corners. If you’re unable to compare the two kinds of biscuit yourself, someone has already done that for you.

There’s a nice supermarket-based video from Travis, which reminds me of the bit in Shawshank Redemption where Andy Dufresne locks himself into the office that contains the microphone for the PA system, and plays a bit of opera or something which the inmates are all transported by until the Warden breaks down the office door and stops the beautiful music. Apparently the mystery guest in the video is a big fan of Travis.

We’ve also rediscovered the boys’ ears as they have finally allowed Katy to cut their hair. K said he was going to have it done when sheep were sheared, but that wasn’t going to be until June or so! Katy did her usual excellent job – I’d be terrified of doing it myself. Also K took some nice photos around the garden. Digital cameras are great – instant feedback, and once you’ve bought the camera, computer etc, the cost per photo is practically zero.

Whew!

You can smell the gun smoke coming from this article from Wired about blogs. Normally I find blogging about blogging (or even blogging about blogging about blogging, which is what I’m doing now 🙂 ) vacuous and self-obsessed, but this is worth a read. I find myself agreeing with many things he says on previous posts too – just call me Victor Meldrew.

I also recently discovered that, of course, YouTube has loads of Cocteau Twins videos, although I think that Cocteau Twins music works best as the soundtrack for your own imagination so try watching them with your eyes shut. I saw them live once, and they had a wing of guitarists on stage like an advancing line of rugby players, to try to reproduce the sound adequately. Plus the marvellous Teardrop by Massive Attack 🙂

Anglesey Abbey

I’ve lived in the area for an embarrassingly long time given that I hadn’t visited Anglesey Abbey before today. We ended up having a lovely time, which was great as the day went downhill very badly at the beginning. I was tired and grumpy, and so the children (particularly L) being hard work rubbed me up the wrong way and we ended up not leaving until just before lunchtime.

Anglesey Abbey is good value (particularly for free – good to occasionally actually use the NT membership) as there’s the Abbey itself, nice grounds that have formal bits, big informal lawns, and planted walks, plus Lode (Water) Mill which was running today. K had a good time playing with the hand mill and getting his dark clothes covered in flour, we saw all the huge cogs and the lovely wood everywhere and the calm rumbling sounds.

J saw the mill stream and asked why it was flowing slowly even though the water wheel was whizzing round. (Excellent observation, I thought.) I guessed that it was to do with Boyle’s Law, (explained in terms narrowing the spout of a tap with your finger to make the water spurt) with the river being forced through a shallow channel to get passed the wheel judging by how much the buckets stuck out from the main wheel – to paraphrase Calvin and Hobbes: there’s a science lesson everywhere! We bought some flour – it was very nice to know where it had been milled, but rather heavy to carry given that I already had L on my back in a sling and various boy hands to hold.

We went around the house and counted the clocks (over 30) and my initial worry at the children (particularly K and L) touching or even breaking things that they shouldn’t was proven unfounded. There was a table that looked like it was topped by a painting, but it was actually an incredible mosaic made of tiny pieces of glass. It took the maker 5 years to create. J and K were suitably impressed, and loved hunting for the clocks. There was one that Katy thought had a little stream of water flowing out of it but it was actually a glass rod cleverly made to look like flowing water, and another one that had a tray with a zig-zag path on it going through a line of arches up the middle – the tray tipped up one way and then the other every 15 seconds so a ball bearing travelled backwards and forwards along the path. It was beautiful and told the time too.

After the house we mooched around the gardens for a bit, and found a splendid formal garden full of hyacinths, and then an informal bit designed by the Tellytubbies with lots of mounds and ditches which they all found excellent fun to run up and down. Back to the car tired but happy for a short drive home – and I wondered why hadn’t we come before.

Katy had the excellent idea to get J a half sized guitar for his birthday. I’ve finally got around to helping him learn – the idea is that we do 5 minutes or so every night just before bed. Tonight I think he got the names of the open strings by spelling out words like EDGE and AGA, plus C and F. It was strange in a very nice way to see him do all the things that I did when I started the guitar – having to lean it over to look at the strings, trying to make it make odd noises by rubbing your fingers up and down the strings or plucking the little bits of string up by the machine heads… I need to get him a proper book of lessons as pretty soon he’ll need to be learning simple pieces.