Bedtime Reading

We've had a bit of a break from the usual bedtime stories that Nathan has over the last 3 weeks as we've been reading “the Hobbit” night by night. It was actually at his request but I guess that's really my fault. About 6 months ago he wouldn't sleep, so I was asked to read him a story to try and get him to settle. The only problem was that we didn't have any of the books he liked to hand. So I gave him an oral version of the Hobbit as he lay in bed and ever since then he's asked me to tell them about Smaug the Dragon and Bilbo Baggins.

It's been great fun, and he's only been scared once. He asked me to stop doing Smaug voice when Bilbo met the Dragon. Anyway we should have finished it tonight but he fell asleep 3 pages from the end, just before the hobbit returns to Bag End to find all his personal effects being auctioned off by his over-eager relatives!

Jill and I were struggling to decide what story to try next and we're now tempted by the classic "Swallows and Amazons" as he loves the Lake District.

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Produced with Dragon Dictate 2.5

Achievements

We went out on the Harland Way, a national cycle route that runs behind our house, in the direction of Spofforth village. I kept on asking him if he wanted to stop but he always said no. In the end we went all the way to Spofforth and back again. There is a great little pub at the end of the cycle path, but I didn't think it was appropriate to go and buy him a celebratory pint, even of lemonade. He was ever so proud when he told his mum that he'd managed to cycle for 5 miles in total. He keeps asking me when we can go for a "longer" cycle ride so he can have a “bigger number”

Aidan is also doing well, in both his speech and walking. He is now standing freely and doing little walks when he thinks we are not looking and otherwise surfing around the room using the furniture for support"

There are very clear names and phrases coming out now which can be startling on occasion.

"Hello Der", is a favourite!
“I did dat", is another that he takes great delight in, especially if he's being a bit naughty!
And scarily, “what dat?", is getting increasingly common.
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Produced with Dragon Dictate 2.5

TravCon 12 Report

This is a short report that I originally prepared for the Tavern about BITS excellent convention, TravCon. Slightly amended.
I had a great weekend. Arrived on Friday night fully planning to update the scenario characters from CT and MT to Mongoose Traveller and ended up being persuaded by Tom Z to come and play Striker 2 instead. I suspect that he may have regretted that when his G-Carrier popped up to be hit with a missile under opportunity fire from my hidden hover tank. The G-Carrier made an impressive addition to the swamp it was flying over. I enjoyed the game, even if I did end up being wiped out.

Saturday saw me up early to convert the characters. This was unusual. I normally write new scenarios for Travcon and BITS but this time I decided to run a scenario from Challenge called 'Snowblind' and the classic White Dwarf scenario 'Tower Trouble'. I am also usually more prepared. It was also amusing when I got a text from the con team at 08:55 checking I was okay to run when I'd been up since 07:15!

I spent the morning running the game, and the players seemed to enjoy it even if the ending was somewhat anti-climatic (in the sense we all agreed to narrate the big show piece combat rather than play it out). The scenario also reminded me how long starship combat takes - but it was kind of fun.

Saturday afternoon was one of my highlights. I had a quick trip to the pub with a number of old friends for some food, and then went and played Tim Collinson's excellent 'Signs and Portents'. This was the first con scenario he had run and was truly awesome. Absolute classic Traveller style and a rare gem in being a science based scenario with lots of human interest. It was a scout mission to carry out an in-depth survey. This is one I anticipate that BITS will publish. The draft copy that Tim had went in the charity auction and made £70 for 'Help for Heroes'.

Saturday evening I cried out of games to complete the characters for the game the next day. This meant I skulked in the bar with a laptop and access to the real ale brought to the con by Derrick Jones (Continuum - you should get this man to come and visit!). After I finished the game we played Mag*Blast (the annual BITS championship in which Andy Lilly - BITS director - was destroyed first and me soon after) which ended up being the longest game ever. We also played Star Fluxx which was a great variant on (duh) Fluxx and a group tried out my copy of 'The Stars are Right' which had been gathering dust on my shelf for far too long.

Sunday morning was more leisurely and I ran Tower Trouble. It's a Marcus L Rowland heist scenario built around raiding an orbital tower. The team included the Guvnor (a transport expert) and a number of others who decided to avoid the main thrust of the scenario (stop the shuttle car on the beanstalk) and instead hack and do a really clever heist that involved a cargo switch at the down port terminal. Brilliantly done, but I hope it wasn't too much of an anti-climax. It was also the second scenario at a Travcon when the players have planned their approach with a flip chart!!!

Sadly, it was time for the awards ("Starburst for Extreme Heroism" and "Ping F**k It!") and auction which went well and then the con ended and I spent the next 125 miles running up the A1 away from the grim cold wet and snow South to the sunny North.

A great weekend, all in all.

What happened to February?

You may wonder why no posts in February besides this?

It’s quite simple - I wrote a substantial rant and managed to delete 3/4 of it, and then reality bit hard with my NEBOSH Diploma, which has eaten a lot of time. Normal service will resume.

300 years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds

This video is a really good overview on why burning toxic dinosaur residue to produce toxic dinosaur gases (so I stole that from The Infinite Monkey Cage) can be bad for us. It’s worth five minutes of your time. It presents what’s one of the biggest threats(*) to humanity at the moment, one that most politicians seem to be completely detached from the science and realities of the issues.

Tip of the hat to James Robey for spotting this and posting on his Facebook.

(*)The other big ones being a ‘flu pandemic – especially as we’ve engineered extremely lethal avian ‘flu variants in labs – and a big coronal mass ejection taking down the electrical infrastructure in the developed world (more likely in 2013 when the solar cycle peaks).

But, unlike something like a Yellowstone Supervolcanic Event, these are all things that we can do something about, if only we have the will and the vision.

Oh, and a Happy New Year to you all! ;-)

Lego Star Wars Battles

Team Daddy

Team Nathan

I bought Nathan some Star Wars Lego after we watched Episodes I to III. He also saw IV a while ago. I was chuffed when he wanted the Episode V Empire Strikes Back stuff.

Anyway, I wrote a quick and dirty war-game he seems to like. Very much a work in progress but you can find it here.

Naturally, he wiped me out, both games we’ve played so far!

Happy New Year.

Turning 40

Birthday Meal at the Muse - I stress that it was my 40th, not these two!

This is a blog entry I have been meaning to write for a while, but I kept putting it off. I’m not certain if that means that I’m in denial about the ageing process, or if it just means that I have been silly mad busy over the last two months. I’ll stick with the latter for now. I know that a 40th was the first significant birthday of my parents that I remember!

Significant birthdays become a problem for me, ever since my 30th. Being born on September 11 means that you share the birthday with one of the worst terrorist atrocities ever committed. As I was born in 1971, it means that Al Qaeda’s attack on the twin towers will always have a significant anniversary when I have a significant birthday. 9/11 will always cast a shadow.

Putting that aside, it is fair to say that both my 30th and 40th birthdays were great fun, in no small measure because of Jill. She’s great at plotting and scheming very memorable events. My 40th celebrations were spread over a full month, and the final event was a complete surprise.

One of my pics of the couple

My parents came over to visit a few days before my birthday as my birthday-weekend had become quite complicated due to the fact that some close friends were getting married on Saturday the 10th (Hi Katrina and Tom!) and I had agreed to be the photographer for them. This ruled out any idea of a weekend away from home. The weather was fantastic, and we had a great time. There was a creché for the children during the wedding breakfast so we had somewhere that Nathan and Aidan could stay while I took pictures. Jill had also arranged the wedding cake through her sister Paula, who is superb at such things. Of course, that is to be expected as Paula is a chef in her day job. A great day, with a wonderful couple.

Paula and her fiancé Mark had decided to use the trip to Yorkshire to have a small break and they offered to take Nathan with them for a treat. So he disappeared off on Saturday night, leaving Jill, myself and Aidan to our own devices. As a result, the day of my birthday was quite lazy. We had a very relaxed meal at a local bar restaurant called ‘the Muse’. Aidan was very entertaining as he kept on trying to steal my beer. It’s a habit he shares with his older brother. We had cake and party tea when Paula and Mark returned to Wetherby.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I got a wonderful gadget from my birthday, an Amazon Kindle, from my parents. I love reading, always have, hopefully always will and this is really to carry a lot of books out around at once. It’s perfect for holidays especially with sunshine. The Kindle app on the iPad is good, but doesn’t really work in bright light. However it definitely has the edge in the darkness thanks to the backlighting. The only thing the Kindle is missing is the tactile experience of the book as an artefact.

Jill’s presents to me were experiences rather than gadgets, books or other media. The first was a couple weeks later with a visit to Centre Parcs at Sherwood where we met up with some old university friends of mine; Ceri, Nick and their Daughter Nia, and Jon & Becky.

We went there for a long weekend as there is plenty to entertain the kids. Highlights included my birthday meal as Jill had booked it like a children’s party but with the option of cocktails (Mojitos!), a badminton match between Jon and myself, and a fantastic afternoon at the spa for Jill and I to relax and chill out without the boys. All in all, we had a brilliant time.

The final surprise was possibly the most memorable as I wasn’t expecting it at all. I’ve long been a fan of John le Carré, and Jill had outdone herself by having the small local cinema in Wetherby for a private showing of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”. By “private” I mean the two of us and some close friends. This included my parents and some family friends who had travelled across from Cheshire, plus people from work, the church, and gaming. It was a wonderful experience. The cinema is pretty small and it is of an old-style. But, in reality, it was perfect. The people running the Wetherby Cinema were very welcoming, and even gave us an option of whether we wanted an interval or to run straight through. Unsurprisingly, we opted for an interval with ice creams.

It was a fantastic end to my 40th birthday celebrations and a memory I’ll cherish for a long time. I’m blessed with a wonderful wife, lovely kids, a great family and generous friends. Thank you, one and all. (*)

(*)And, in the light of the weekend’s news of the death of a family friend far too young from cancer, this means more to me than ever.

Talking to myself

I've always been deeply sceptical about the utility of voice recognition software. There's always seem to be so much that was a pipe dream about it. The background noise, differences in the user's voices and many other complications such as processing power all combine to make it very difficult thing to do.

My scepticism weakened a little when I tried the free Dragon Dictation application for the iPhone. Although the processing for this was done via the Cloud, the results were deeply impressive when I tried it. Apple's Siri voice detection system and personal assistant also showed great promise. So when I heard that Dragon had released a new application by the App Store, called Dragon Express, which mirrored the iPhone application using local processing I couldn't resist trying it.

I'm dictating this using the internal microphone on my MacBook. There is a stage of about 2 min of training for Dragon Express it adjusts to my voice, the microphone, and the typical background noise. The accuracy of the voice recognition is quite impressive. You do have to speak slowly and clearly, but that actually encourages you to think about what you are saying. If anything, it clarifies your thought processes. There have only been a few stumbles in translating what I've said. An example of that will be the word "free" which could get mistaken for the number "three". Indeed, I did have to manually alter that word to correct it.

The software does suffer from the problem are shown by Isaac Asimov's "Second Foundation" scene involving Arkady where an entire conversation is inadvertently recorded for posterity. If you leave it open and running it will listen to you and assume you're talking to it. However, I could actually see a use for this. Maybe not when the children around, but now it's quite an evening with the kids in bed it means I can be quite lazy in preparing material. All in all, so far I'm impressed. Well done, Nuance, this could change the way I work.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dragon-express/id458613689?mt=12 Requires Lion.

Kindling my reading

I was very lucky for my 40th (more about this to follow) and was given a Kindle by my parents, and some lovely skins and covers by my sister, not to mention lots of Amazon vouchers by a wide variety of people. Whilst I still have a fetish for paper, it’s a great device to read on and reading on is what I have been doing. Here are nutshell reviews of the first five books that I’ve read:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mohsin Hamid)
I heard parts of this and the interesting discussion on it on Radio 4's Book Club and it seemed intriguing. It's effectively a monologue, as you only have the words of the protagonist. It isn't necessarily the most realistic tale, but it sucks you in. Effectively, it's the tale of a Pakistani man who starts by embracing the American dream, but then is slowly repelled by it post 9/11. Well written and a page turner as the protagonist's life and background are unfolded during a meal and a walk with an American stranger.

The Coming Convergence (Stanley Schmidt)
Non-fiction looking how the interaction between different rivers of technological development leads to huge changes. Part of background reading for Singularities.


Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
Stross' latest near future police tale (effectively revisiting the same vibe as the earlier Halting State) set in Edinburgh with a murder investigation. Good stuff - I'll say no more lest I ruin it. You can google 'rule 34' to get a hint at what underpins the plot. Or you can read the first three chapters on Stross' blog.


Zero History (William Gibson)
Gibson wraps up the ideas he's played with in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country in another really strong near-future thriller. Great stuff as you can savour every word. It has forced me to start to re-read Pattern Recognition as it's too long since I last read it.


Hull Zero Three (Greg Bear)
A tale set in deep space onboard a slower-than-light starship. The protagonist wakes to a world of cold and horror with limited memories. His journey is significant to the future of the ships as he rediscovers who and what the mission was and what has affected it. Very good stuff.