The Goldfish Chronicles

I’m struck with a newborn about the monkeyness of it all. He’s currently shedding his birth layer of skin, it’s a light covering of small body hairs, including hair on his ears. A ‘down’ would be the correct word, though you have to look closely to see it. Apparently it’s sometimes very noticeable. Very monkey-like.

Babies come out with the instinct to grasp things, especially hair. It’s almost as if they’re expecting to hang onto their mother’s belly as she swings through the trees. They like swinging motions too, have agile toes and parents are always impressed at the strength of their newborn. I wonder how well a human newborn could do the monkey thing if their parents just had the genetic grace to still have copious body hair. I wonder when newborn monkeys are able to hang on on their own.

There are two very human things [I think] that strike me about newborns. The first is ’shhh’. I’ve read that this works so well because it’s similar to the sound of a mother’s heart while the baby is in the womb. Many cultures have the word ’shhh’, and it’s because in this case, the sound came first. We say “SHHH” in cinemas not because that’s a word that evolved, but because it’s the first sound we heard. I wonder if any monkey’s say shh, and I wonder if that was our first word.

The second thing is melodies. I also recall reading that for premature babies, babies born before the hunger reflex exists, researches have found that playing melodies is a sufficient reward structure. That is - we like hearing melodies before we know to feel hungry. Levi definitely likes melodies, I swayed monkey-like to Pink Floyd’s Division Bell earlier this morning and he happily fell asleep in the sling [his first Daddy sling wearing, and his subsequent first walk out into the cold to post some bills]. That begs the question - do monkeys like melodies, is it a human trait. If a human trait, it seems an early one. I seem to recall some memory that ape mothers will sit and croon to their baby, but whether that is a shhh, a melody or another noise I’ve no clue.

Must search the internet, for it will not lie to me.

As to the title of this post… I pondered earlier while Levi cried; “What would a monkey do?”. Pick fleas was my answer, so I sat and rubbed and picked at the hair on his head. He quietened up and fell asleep in my arms.

BBC says:

“The US Federal Reserve has cut interest rates to 2.25% in recent months to try to stimulate the housing market and consumer spending.”

and yet the mortgage interest rate continues to slowly climb. So I guess we’re using ’stimulate’ in the needle-in-the-heart sense.

More of a pre-announcement than an announcement. Pictures aren’t up, movies haven’t been edited, the middle name is not 100% decided upon, but Levi was born yesterday evening (Friday 18th). Carrie’s doing well, and Nathan adores his baby brother. Levi’s taken to feeding and filling his nappy with equal talent, and we’re looking forward to when he stops being nocturnal. Carrie’s tired, but it was a relatively quick delivery so she’s doing very well. We’re extremely glad to have Carrie’s mother here - taking care of Levi, Nathan and trying to catch up on sleep would be a losing battle with only the two of us. He was a 8 lb 12 oz baby; 20 inches long. More details, picture and story once we are a bit more recovered.

An actual fun blog meme, so I’ll take part. ’sup’ is svn update, and ’ss’ is svn status. I use tabbing a lot, and tabbing and history files do not work together, however there’s no reason to suggest the %age breakdown below would be wrong. ‘open’, is an OS X command to do the equivalent of double clicking a file.

124 vi
82 cd
79 ls
47 svn
30 grep
27 ss
20 more
15 mvn
10 sup
9 open

First - there’s an advert that points out that kids usually take too much, especially toilet paper. Then they go on to explain how their new lavvy roll is ultra soft and you can take less off.

I throw my hands up in despair - apparently the plan behind the advert is to state the bleeding obvious, and then make a claim that is utterly unrelated. “Oh.. I’ll just explain that to my child and I’m sure he’ll take less off. Now he knows it’s nice and soft, we won’t find a toilet bowl full of paper when it’s time to flush”. I guess as long as the name sticks in your head (and maybe some idiot blogs about it) then they think it’s good advertising. Don’t make people believe your product is good - just make them remember the name. Brand advertising is so irritating.

Now over to Football. The Welsh sports minister has pointed out that he’d like to see the Welsh national anthem played at Wembley before the FA Cup Final, given that Cardiff have qualified. They won in 1927, which was the only time a non-English team have won, and the last time one was in the final (Cardiff were also runners up in 1925, and Queen’s Park of Scotland were runners up in 1884 and 1885).

My first thought - “Too right”. My second thought - “Hang on, what about the English national anthem?”. In those short moments I feel I’ve pretty much described the UK national question from an English point of view. “Sure”, and “What about us?”. Currently every game starts with the British anthem of God Save the Queen.

The various options listed over at Wikipedia are interesting. Cricket have been using “Jerusalem” since 2004. Rugby used “Land of Hope and Glory” for a while and then reverted back to “God Save the Queen” (though the fans seem to like “Swing Low Sweet Chariots”, or at least used to). The page also suggests “I Vow to Thee, My Country” and “Rule, Britannia!”. Interesting page to read - I think I edge in favour of “Land of Hope and Glory” with “Jerusalem” in second place. The Commonwealth games plays “Land of Hope and Glory” for England, so that one seems to be the closest to a national anthem, and the tune is definitely something that we’re used to.

I like giving my opinion. I can be quite logical at times, but often am happy to let my gut take over and make instinctive leaps. Both modes are fun and can assist in flow. I also tend to talk in trees, hoping to return back to the branch point and continue on.

Something I’ve had to learn over the last few years is to do that less. Due to the parallelization abilities of email such a habit lends itself to being the maintainer of long threads. Nowadays it has to be - less is more. Is that statement really valuable? Just because someone has pointed out that the proposed Commons J2ME should have a different name, would there be any value in my saying “Hey, Commons Mini!”. Often the answer is no. For a while this lead to enormous amounts of time spent writing emails; 90% of which was a hidden iceberg of text that was never sent. Not because I didn’t want people to know I’d written that text, but because I kept refining the focus of my text.

I don’t claim to be good at that yet btw. Screwing that up is still a regular offence, but I’m trying.

Part of learning to let it lie is at the heart of delegation. Trust others to have expertise in the area; chances are they have more expertise than you anyway. Figure out where your focus is most effective. An equivalent OSS part is delegating to a community of people - you know that the group are going to come up with the ‘right enough’ answer. It won’t be the one you personally wanted, but it will be one that after a discussion you’d have accepted as a compromise. So here the aim is to choose your discussions.

One other thing I seem to have a knack for is starting huge threads. I’m not sure if that’s because I have a social inability to understand that there is a white elephant in the room, or if it’s because I don’t do a good enough job building the foundation for a focused discussion.

On a related topic - something I need to start figuring out how to do is weaning myself of my achievement addiction. It might be okay, just once, to have an evening in which all I achieve is relaxation without feeling guilty.

Frustratingly Nathan didn’t get into the preschool that he’s been top of the waiting list for for the last year. Everything was seeming like it would happen until the last minute when the rug and carpet vanished. Very frustrating, and leaving us feeling that the poor blighter’s parents have failed him.

We’d heard about how hard it is to get your kids into daycare/preschool/school of your choice and how, back in KY, parents were signing up before their kids were born. Sadly that was something we could never do as our location is still very fluid - we knew we were leaving KY, and we know we’re not going to be in our rented apartment close to downtown Seattle indefinitely. Given that it costs money to be on waiting lists, the strategy of whoring yourself out does not work well (well, literally it does work well as that’ll pay for the lists, but you know what I mean). With N top of the list for the very nearby preschool, it seemed silly to find other lists to be lower down on. Who’d expect no one to leave eh?

The downside of that is that N enjoys the company of older kids hugely. If he does goto this preschool in a year, it sounds like he might be the oldest kid if all the other kids are the same age and leaving for school. That’ll suck.

So we’re left with a young boy whose life is about to have a younger sibling sucking up his parent’s time, and who isn’t going to get a regular involvement with other kids unless we pull our tired arses into gear and come up with some ideas. Of course he’s old enough to have a measured opinion now, so we also need to talk with him about what he wants to be doing.

Swimming classes are one idea I’ve had; though the easy to get to nearby pool has one on one training, not classes. So a good idea as swimming is a good thing to get early (like riding a bicycle… which Daddy needs to adjust and then make taking N and bike somewhere a regular event), but not a useful idea for the other-kids need.

Soccer class is another. I need to look into the tiny tots classes and see if there are any I can take N to. It looks like Lil Kickers over at Arena Sports has a Saturday schedule. The lad calls it baseball for some reason, but otherwise seems to enjoy kicking a ball around.

Lastly there’s the need for education - he wanted to write his name this morning so I was a bit late getting in to work after an effort to give him some help. Need to make sure we don’t slack on being there for those urges.

Anyone else been in this spot and had ideas work out?

Watched Children of Men tonight - very good. Oddly, the first movie I try to compare it to is 28 Weeks Later, which we saw the other week. Not because they’re at all similar in feel, but because it’s one a recent epidemic of “it’s all gone pear shaped” movies set in the UK future. This one has some nice touches and a good story line.

Oddly it was one that both Carrie and I wanted to watch. I was going through sci-fi award winners and adding to our netflix list, and she’d already added this having heard it was good (but no idea what it was about). Anyway - very recommended if you’ve not seen it already.

I know… you’re shocked. Just released a set of bugfixes for Simple-JNDI, along with the ability to pass parameters down to DBCP.

Here’s the google group announcement.

Download the release here, and read the release notes here.

We just got a computer to be our “under the TV” machine. That means that things like watching the latest shows on nbc.com, and old stuff on joost.com can be done.

We’ve watched Transformers and GI Joe on Joost so far. It’s under my account, and so far the advertising is not impressive. Having the little popups that can be clicked on is good - though we don’t have a mouse attached so can’t do much. It also keeps ’selling’ us Windows Server 2008 (with one of those lame adverts that has no actual valuable content about the product). Given that so far I’m watching the desires of a young child, seems like it’s not doing a good job so far. In fact it keeps doing the same advert again and again - bet how unimpressed that makes me as a user.

It also likes to say “GIJoe will be back after these adverts”, and then immediately comes back without showing me adverts.

Free is good though - and unlike My Name is Earl (which I watched from nbc.com last night), it actually fills the screen. Downside - the Joost UI is sluggish and slow on this new machine. Frusrating having to wait while the mouse moves around. Oh… and here’s the same useless advert again. *yawn and mute*