This is Wilfred Hugh Ryan. He was born at 12.09 on 22 June 2008 by emergency Caesarean section after 18 hours of mayhem, during which we tried everything the NHS has to offer for getting a baby out into the world. We started off at home before heading to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary to try the new Birth Centre, where things progressed nicely for a bit before grinding to a halt. From there were transferred to the delivery suite where my wife was given an epidural and hours of syntocinon and examinations and did some serious pushing before heading off to theatre for the grand finale, which was terrifying but successful. For an encore he decided to develop some breathing problems and got himself taken off to special care where he spent the afternoon in an incubator, but he’s now back with mum and both are doing very well. All of the various twenty-plus NHS nurses, midwives, doctors, anaesthetists and surgeons who looked after us were brilliant, professional and reassuring and lovely throughout, and I am in awe of them all. I’m even more in awe of the little chap in that picture though. I’m quite absurdly pleased with him, and with his mother. They’re both incredible.
4 comments 2008-06-23 06:26 Categories: Personal
I really like snow. A decent covering of proper snow, delivered overnight, preferably with a howling gale, deep enough to prevent anyone going off and doing boring things like work or school, and of the correct consistency for snowmen and sledging, is one of the very best things known to mankind. Obviously it would be unpleasant to contend with these conditions on a regular basis, and I don’t particularly envy those people who happen to live in perennially snowy climes and who probably get a bit sick of having to excavate half a tonne of frozen water every few days in order to get to the shops. But the occasional blizzard in a normally temperate climate is a wonderful thing, and we definitely used to have them here in the UK, and I think they were marvellous.
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2 comments 2008-03-24 17:12 Categories: Personal
We got here by train, an interesting experience, if not one that I can wholeheartedly recommend: sleeper trains could perhaps be more accurately designated shallow-and-fitful-dozer trains, and the facilities for waiting passengers at Bruxelles-Midi are somewhat spartan, so I arrived in Berlin running at rather less than full capacity.
Not feeling up to anything more demanding, we spent the first day strolling along and around Unter den Linden, looking at landmarks and monuments and memorials. Sightseeing in central Berlin seems to tend towards the serious and sobering, you can barely turn a corner without encountering some reminder of grim events past. A visit to the zoo might be in order at some point, I think, by way of contrast.
Full Berlin photoset.
0 comments 2008-03-09 16:43 Categories: Personal
Warning: the following tale contains unsolicited, forthright praise for a large corporate public transport operator. Some readers may experience feelings of dizziness. Do not adjust your browser settings, there is nothing wrong with your computer.
Last weekend an opportunistic individual, I know not whom, somehow managed to abstract a number of envelopes from the locked steel postbox that was until recently bolted to a stake outside our front gate. Said envelopes contained various train tickets for a holiday we had just booked, most of which were tied to specific trains and seat reservations, and were therefore useless to anyone other than me or my wife. One set of tickets, however, booked with National Express East Coast, were valid for use on any off-peak train for a month after the initial booking date. At some point on Saturday morning a helpful passerby found our holiday travel documents scattered around about our gate, gathered them up and replaced them in our postbox, all except the £158.80-worth of open returns to London, which I can only presume are now in the possession of some thieving, Royal Mail-molesting northern pissbiscuit.
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6 comments 2008-02-15 18:22 Categories: Personal, Rage
Back in the last millennium I used to spend much of my free time messing about with programs like Cubase and Sound Forge and a selection of analog synth emulators, making agglomerations of sound that could, loosely, be termed music. Making bleepy music is, in fact, what first got me into computers*, and it was ace fun, but I got out of the habit after I started sharing accommodation with human beings whose tastes did not encompass listening to fragments of amateurish breakbeat-based instrumental electronica over and over and over again.
Earlier today, however, I was pleased to rediscover a stack of old CD-Rs containing a multi-volume zip archive from the old Windows 95 PC upon which I composed my masterpieces. For your listening pleasure, then, here are four tracks that I have managed to salvage from the depths of history:
- 24 Feb
- Double
- Corner Case
- 24 Feb (Original Mix)
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0 comments 2008-02-07 18:34 Categories: Computers, Geek Stuff, Music, Personal
Anyone can avoid buying a house. Simply by not doing any of the things that lead to a successful property transaction, starting with looking for a house to buy in the first place, almost everyone in the world doesn’t buy houses every day. Not buying houses, at its most basic, is an easy thing, regularly accomplished by everyone from new born infants to newly dead corpses. There are, however, a few individuals in this world who have elevated this easily mastered non-skill to the level of an art-form, even to the exalted heights of a science, and it is their methods that I will detail here for anyone who might want to investigate the process of really, definitively not buying a house, in the most spectacular style possible, whilst annoying the hell out of everyone involved, and doing yourself and others out of thousands of pounds and months of precious life. (more…)
7 comments 2008-01-09 19:04 Categories: Personal, Rage
At some point in November last year, I forget exactly when, I embarked upon an experiment. Now, those who know me will be aware that, even on a good day, I am not naturally predisposed towards happiness and joy, and on top of that, me and autumn don’t see eye to eye: autumn seems to like gloom, rain, mould, death, and roadworks, whereas I don’t, so I never expect much from the soggy end of the year. But as winter approached I noticed that I was even more than usually grumpy and miserable. I won’t go into great detail, because that sort of thing is deeply boring. Suffice to say, it wasn’t pleasant, and I needed to do something about it. (more…)
5 comments 2008-01-08 12:47 Categories: Personal, Rage
- Literary event of the year: Kittenwar: The Book. The launch party was brilliant fun, thanks to everyone who turned up.
- Best book about cats not written by me and Fraser: Cat Getting Out of a Bag by Jeffrey Brown. This is a smashing little book, endearing and beautifully observed. Chronicle are clearly the quality cat-book publisher.
- Best book not about cats and not written by me and Fraser: Oystercatchers, by my mate Sue, read it now.
- Album of the year: We Can Create by Maps. Lovely.
- Most overrated album of the year: Neon Bible by Arcade Fire. Am I the only person in the world who thinks this is a load of whiny rubbish? And I liked Funeral, too. Deeply disappointing.
- Best animated feature, and about time too: Futurama - Bender’s Big Score.
- Best computer I have owned to date: 15″ Apple MacBook Pro. Not quite perfect, and Leopard is a bit crashy still, but much nicer than using Windows on some shonky PC.
- Depressing non-event of the year: our house sale. The current state of this almost eight-month long transaction is so fragile that I’m wary of discussing it in public for fear of the remote possibility that our buyers might read what I think of them and take offence, so I’m going to leave it until the sale has fallen through entirely or (unlikely, this) completed before relating the full saga. It’s a cracking story though; the whole experience has led me to believe that English property law needs serious reform, perhaps involving the statutory deployment of stocks and public floggings as deterrent measures for recalcitrant parties.
- Scary number of the year: 30.
That’s about it, see you next year.
5 comments 2007-12-31 14:05 Categories: Animation, Books, Cats, Comics, Computers, Consumerism, Geek Stuff, Kittenwar &c., Music, Personal, Rage
It’s my birthday! I’m 30 years old. How did that happen? Time to abandon all ambitions of becoming a rock star, I suppose. It would seem that climbing Everest isn’t technically out of the question yet, though. And apparently I’m still a young adult, which is reassuring.
Upon investigation it turns out that 30 is actually a more interesting number than I thought, being the third primorial, a square pyramidal, “the largest number with the property that all smaller numbers relatively prime to it are prime“, the first sphenic number (I’d never even heard of that one), and the first Guiga number (I’m still too hungover from celebrating last night to even start to think about that sort of thing).
Also, no-one I know will get this but I’m posting it anyway because it’s ace: fantastic birthday drawing of Avatar characters as Futurama characters by my brilliant wife (the Deviant Art links might not work first time, that site still runs like it’s hosted on Commodore 64s full of mashed potato).
4 comments 2007-12-09 12:11 Categories: Animation, Geek Stuff, Personal, Science & Maths
