"Come and have a go...

... if you think you're hard enough!"

Well, that's pretty much what Bill Gates said when launching Windows Vista! The BBC reports: 'Windows Vista is "dramatically more secure than any other operating system released", Microsoft founder Bill Gates has told BBC News.'

Frankly, I think that's tantamount to laying a challenge down to any hacker or virus writer who feels like taking a shot at Vista. Fortunately for me, I intend to stay with Mac OS X, and within that I run anti-virus software anyway.

–

I'm typing this downstairs on the laptop, while Jill and Nathan are asleep upstairs, shattered after their day out. They went to the pub at lunchtime to meet up with the group of new mothers whom Jill describes as 'the ladies who lunch'. It's great because it's go her out of the house and it's allowed her to share worries. At the moment, her worst worry is the fact that Nathan has only put on 1 oz in the last week. The thing is, he had a cold for a big chunk of the week, and she's feeding him on demand and regularly, so I think that it's probably a mountain made out of a molehill by the health visitor when she weighed him. If he hadn't put on more weight in a few days, then that's the time to worry. He's clear of the cold and feeding well now.

The last few nights have been hell as Nathan has been very grizzly. Three hours sleep has been fantastically long when we can get it. To paraphrase Shakespeare in the Scottish Play:

Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!
Nathan does murder sleep," the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast. (2.2.32-37)

But then he smiles and it makes it all alright and fantastic. He's opening his eyes up a lot now, and being very alert. Looks gorgeous as a result!

–

Tonight has been the first night when I've had time to actually do some writing for BITS, but I'm feeling too tired. I had hoped to start trying out Scrivener to see just how good it is. Instead I'll probably mooch for a bit and read Squadron UK, a British Superhero RPG (effectively a rewrite of the game 'Golden Heroes' published in the early 1980s). There's a really nice toucjh in this, as it is dedicated to Matthew Bond, a fellow gamer and friend who died very prematurely last year. Apparently he loved Golden Heroes as much as he loved Traveller.

Over the last few days I've been giving some support to Ad Astra Games for their new Traveller miniatures range which will support Power Projection. They look absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait to get my hands on them. There are some pictures on the Power Projection site which show how fantastic they are.

I've also been reading the initial draft of one of the new BITS projects; it's an adventure by Dave Elrick set in the Spinward Marches just after the Fifth Frontier War. Dave is a master of writing for Traveller, and really captured the feel of the 'classic' era. I shared some feedback, and can't wait to read the next instalment.

–

I don't do work here on the blog, but I can report that I've actually got a date for the interview to replace the first of two missing people in my team. I can't wait for this to happen as I feel a little like butter spread too thinly on toast, especially as a third team member is off after an operation. It should make life a little less fraught.

Currently feeling: Tired but strangely happy.
Currently listening to: 'Brave' by Marillion.
Currently reading: 'At the Edge of Space' by CJ Cherryh but also 'Squadron UK'.

The pictures are up!

 

Well, it took a while bit there are a load of new photos up on Flickr.

Last night was a bit trying. Nathan didn't want to sleep, so I got three hours in total, which I caught up on earlier tonight when I got it. It's looking like he's being a bit better tonight, and as soon as I have uploaded this I'm off to join Jill and him in slumberland!

On a happy note, we've just heard that one of our friends from work, Mike Fildes, has become a daddy for the second and third time tonight with his two little ones being born safely. His wife Lisa is doing well too. Congratulations! 

Starships

I've taken a load of photos this weekend, and once I've gone through them then I'll post them. 99% of them are of the usual suspect (Nathan!) and some of them are already up on Flickr if you want a sneak preview. Anyway, instead of the normal blog, I thought I'd add some pictures of a little project that has been kind of on hold for 12 months or so, as a recent email exchange with Nick Bradbeer reminded me of it. 

I started painting miniatures some time ago, once I was on the route that would lead to the publication of Power Projection. I always wondered what fleet I'd do, and was hankering after something different. I do have a great selection of GZG's Full Thrust miniatures, but I wanted something different. One of my friends suggested that I take a look at some of the Games Workshop models, but most of those were to chaos-death-spikey to consider for use in a reasonably hard SF game. And then, Forgeworld was mentioned to me.

Forgeworld is Games Workshop's specialist minatures shop, using resin casts rather than metal. I found the Tau starships and fell in love with them. With some minor modifications, they'll do nicely for the Solomani Fleet in my Traveller universe!

The first ship is a modified Emissary Class (inappropriate features removed).

The second ships are a Warden Class Gunship and a Manta Class. Sadly, due to the fact that I have just seen the Forgeworld site again, I've spotted some more ships that will look really good and help flesh out the fleet a bit more.

Anyway, that's pretty much all for tonight. Hopefully Nathan will be ready to sleep now. And I must price some more RAM for this laptop sometime soon. Playing with large image files is really slowing Rapidweaver down on the Powerbook with 512Mb in a way that the 1Gb equipped iMac doesn't, and the Powerbook has the faster processor!

I N S O M N I A...

It's been a hard few days. Nathan's sleeping hasn't got much better (although he did manage several hours in a row last night) even though the cold is clearing. Now it's nearly gone, he has got very hungry (he wasn't eating a lot at the weekend) and last night we had the joy of him discovering that he could get full and that it wasn't a pleasant situation. It's been especially wearing on Jill, even though my mum and I have tried to help as much as we can.

My mum arrived at the weekend after Jill's mum had gone home. Looking at the picture here, I've just realised that we didn't get many pictures last week and none with Nathan's maternal gran (or Nan) so I need to rectify that. I have uploaded what we did take.

Anyway, it is (touch wood) looking like we are heading out of the woods at the moment and sleep may return to living memory. Today, Jill and my Mum went out with Nathan, his first non-medical trip. They went to The Kestrel, a local pub that does pleasant meals and apparently had a lot of ice cream. Well, that's my mum and Jill, as Nathan isn't quite that developed. Apparently he slept through the whole thing and was much admired by the people in the pub. He's going to break hearts when he's older! It's great that Jill got out of the house, as I think she may slowly go stir crazy otherwise. I spotted this when she got excited during our recent trip to Morrisons!

Oh, and I was right. The day after we visited the doctor's Jill was told off by the Midwife for feeding Nathan the water exactly as the doctor had told her! Go figure! I guess we're bad parents because we carried on that day as it was obviously helping and in the case of treating a cold I think we'll take the route of common sense and medical opinion.

Currently feeling: Tired.
Currently listening to: Nothing, but the last albums I listend to were the Chemical Brothers' Surrender and Simple Minds' perennially good New Gold Dream.
Currently reading: 'At the Edge of Space' by CJ Cherryh. In theory.

Fiddling while Nathan Cries...

Look above if you want the latest baby update - this entry addresses my inner geek! In spite of the recent spate of sleepless nights (the joy of Nathan's cold!) I've been playing with some computery related things. The first is the complete rebuild of the Power Projection website. In reality, it was done before Christmas, but the domain name registrar took far too long to redirect to the new server.

I'm pretty pleased with the site. Ever since I created the Power Projection site way back, it's never been quite what I wanted. I was surfing BlueBall Design's website and saw their MaxLight theme for Rapidweaver. The moment I saw it, I knew I wanted it for PowerProjection.net, because it was so, well, Star Trek like. Something just made me think of space. Anyway, I bought it, and started to build the site while we were waiting for Nathan's arrival. It needed a little bit of hacking to get exactly what I wanted (some tweaks to the theme) but I got there. I should also mention Charlie Lockhart from BlueBall, who was incredibly helpful when there were some code issues. Anyway, I'm pleased with the site, and happy that it is finally off the Pipex webspace which this blog is on, because it is a real pain to update.

The other big IT related find is Scrivener. Writing Power Projection on the Mac taught me the limitations of Word for creative writing projects, in much the same way that writing Delta 3 is Down taught me the limitations of Windows (NT 4 in this case) as a stable OS you can rely on. The problem is, Word really stops you seeing the wood for the trees, and you end up spending a lot of time thinking about the programme rather than the words.

I tried a number of solutions to address this issue with the workflow before layout, but none of them have been entirely satisfactory. My first attempt was a program called Copywrite, which promised a lot but seemed to be unstable as hell on my G3 iBook and G4 iMac. (It may be better now, but I have no burning desire to check it out again!) I eventually gave up on it and went back to Word. My most recent solution was to use Circus Ponies' Notebook to capture notes on projects, and then drive the projects themselves through the excellent OmniOutliner using an outline with embedded documents and files. This worked reasonably well, but didn't quite click. Then I happened upon a reference and review of Scrivener on 43folders.com, which instantly peaked my interest.

Scrivener takes what I was using Word and OmniOutliner for and merges them with some really intuitive tools. The full screen editing and structuring tools are excellent and it is very 'Mac'. It hangs together beautifully and after a few days playing convinced me it was a must have. I've registered a copy, and will be using it for my next two writing projects; Power Projection: Reinforcements, and a Traveller scenario called This Fear of Gods. I recommend you take it for a test drive and have a look. You can use it for 30 days before it locks down.

(Edit 2025: dead links pruned)

Neurotic, eh?

I'm typing this with Nathan fast asleep in my arms, and the laptop perched on my lap (duh!) on the sofa in the lounge. We've been to the Doctor's today (sent by the midwife) to have him checked out because his hands and feet were a little swollen, and he was suffering with a really blocked up throat. Turns out that he has a cold, and maybe we aren't as neurotic as we thought. We've fed him with expressed milk and a syringe, and he's had more in a sitting than he's had for the last few days. We were treated with a big happy sigh, and now he's fast asleep in my arms. Jill has been told to give him some water if he is excessively demanding. I'm sure that will get her labeled as a 'bad mother' by some of the more militant midwives we met, but he seems happy enough.

Currently feeling: Justified and Annoyed! :-/
Currently listening to: Radio 4 in the background
Currently reading: 'At the Edge of Space' by CJ Cherryh

Official: we're Neurotic!

And that's a good thing! We've had ups and downs the last few days, enough to make it feel like we're on a roller coaster ride! Where to start...

Tuesday - an old friend, Phil, came around to meet Nathan. They hit it off well, but that was to be expected as Phil is a charmer! We patted him down before he left to make sure that Nathan hadn't decided to run off with him!

Thursday, I had to go to another site with work, over on the Wirral, for a meeting. I had to pick someone up on the edge of Manchester on the way, so was planning an early start. Things started to go a little wonky when I met Jill's Dad on the landing, and he told me that Gillian (his wife, not Jill his daughter) had developed a bad cold during the night, so they were planning on going home that day, rather than wait to the weekend. They wanted to minimise the bugs that Nathan was exposed to, and I can't fault that at all. Anyway, the meeting should have finished by 3pm, so they would wait until around 6pm when I would be back before they left.

I left the Wirral to return home at 2.15pm and finally got in our front door at approximately 10.30 pm. It was the trip from hell, and the weather warnings were – for once – very justified. I won't bore you with the details, but each of the following was shut just before we reached it; the M56, the M6 Thelwall viaduct, the M60 Barton Bridge. On top of that, Manchester Gridlocked and took perhaps three hours to cross rather than go around. It wasn't a fun day, but I guess at least I got home, unlike 11 or some unlucky souls. I was absolutely knackered.

Friday had the greatest ups and downs. Nathan started to sleep a lot longer (three and four hours) than ever before, and was showing very little interest in his food. On top of this, he was very nasal and sounded like he was struggling to breathe. Needless to say, this was quite worrying, so we phoned the midwife out of hour number after we couldn't find any descriptions of what he was doing in the baby manuals, and the next door neighbours with more experience than us were out. They told us to go to the Out-of-Hours doctor service at Harrogate Hospital, so Nathan had his first trip out, to the very place he had come from six days before!! Anyway, the doctor checked him out and he was okay. It's probably just a change in his sleeping pattern combined with the fact that he is taking his milk a lot faster. We were officially labeled as neurotic, and then told that the doctor felt that this was a good thing for new parents, and that we should do what we did if anything else changes again. Phew!

There was one disturbing thing. While we waited in the reception, we couldn't help but sit there and listen to twenty minute argument between the reception staff on what to do about an asthmatic who was choking. The Doctor had said to send a car out immediately, but the staff coordinating and the staff in the cars were being somewhat chaotic in trying to agree who would go. They couldn't even decide whether to call an ambulance. If it was a serious asthma attack, the patient could have been in a very bad way by the time they resolved it. I hope they weren't.

Another positive point is that we seem to have got the car seat fastening technique all resolved now! We go it in pretty fast last night, and the initially complex looking threading of the seat-belt becomes second nature very quickly.

Currently feeling: Neurotic (and that's a good thing!)
Currently listening to: Radio 4 in the background
Currently reading: Pulp Egypt (an RPG book)

Night Shift Again...

I'm writing this as Jill is feeding Nathan, the last feed of the evening with the two of us. The last few days have been an interesting experience; returning to work was great, but I was instantly hit with a wall of work with a surprise audit that needs to be prepared for by the beginning of next week. I've managed to get out on time every day since we got back, which I think has surprised us both.

Beyond the late nights, the big change to our schedule is an early evening sleep (maybe for as much as two whole hours!) while Nathan snoozes off his meal. Jill's mum and dad are here at the moment, which is absolutely fantastic. I think we both really appreciate the support. Next week, my mum is coming over as well (kind of a shift change)!

The cat remains bemused by the whole situation!

Currently feeling: Tired, as I have an early start in the morning
Currently listening to: Nothing, as we are watching 'The Riddle of the Sands' on DVD.
Currently reading: Pulp Egypt (an RPG book)

Two days into the Sleep Deprivation Programme!

It's been an interesting few days, mainly comprising feed, sleep, nappy change, feed, sleep, nappy change.... Jill is struggling with lack of sleep, and it's not been too much fun from that point of view. Of course, it's everything that people say it is, but when Nathan smiles or chirps, it kind of makes up for it all.

I'm due back at work tomorrow, so Jill's parents have come over to give her some support when I'm not around. She's doing pretty well overall, but the breast feedings is hard work, especially on her left side.

I've uploaded the final few pictures from the hospital to Flickr, as usual. You can get to them via the photo album.