# We had fourteen kiddies, all bar one of whom could crawl or walk, and their mums round this afternoon. It was mayhem - hordes of babies sweeping majestically along the hall, biscuits, breadsticks and toys strewn in their wake. Top fun!
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# Happy Birthday Bean!

He's a year old today. In some ways it seems like a very long time - I can't really remember what I used to do with myself before he was born, for instance. It even seems like a really long time since he started crawling and that was only in December. But it's also no time at all. Babies grow so fast, they're doing new things all the time. In the last week, Daniel's added two new noises to his repertoir of clicks and grunts, started sprouting a couple more teeth, and started pointing at things in a way that obviously means something (although I don't know what). Having a kid is brill!

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# Procrastinate, procrastinate ... It's the Bean's birthday tomorrow. It's also Nat's turn to host the baby group, which means there'll be up to ten adults and fourteen babies rattling round the place tomorrow afternoon. I'm going to be taking most of the day off ... procrastinate ... I should be working now to make up some of the time ... procrastinate, procrastinate ... must concentrate ... ignore fact that Astoria SDK is woeful ... crckl! fizztzz ... concentrate, concentrate, concentrate, concentrate ... what ever happened to Rise and Shine? That was fruit juice concentrate. It was bloody horrible ... it's not working ... should be working!
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# Click my eyeballs to navigate.
Eeeegh. Makes me shiver.

momblog said I'm going blind! AAAh! [added 1st Mar 2001]

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#
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# Here's a good background article on Martian meteorites.
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# Allan Hills 84001, possibly the world's most studied meteorite, yields more evidence which suggests life once existed on Mars.

But some British experts are sceptical, saying the study falls short of absolute proof.

Oh dear. And they were the chaps who did some of the very first work on ALH84001.

Professor Colin Pillinger, lead scientist in the British-led Beagle 2 effort to land on Mars in 2003, describes the Nasa-backed study as very interesting, but says it falls short of absolute proof.

"The bigger the claim, the more perfect the evidence has to be. This doesn't actually prove that the evidence in the meteorite is for life on Mars," he told BBC News Online.

"We cannot say absolutely hand on heart that this is something which happened on Mars until we find organic matter in a genuine Martian sample," he said.

"We have to go to Mars and if there is doubt we will have to bring samples back. If there is still doubt we will have to send a person there to carry out the experiments in situ.

"Our Mars mission experiments are designed to test for organic matter and isotopic fractionation - the best measure I know to detect organic life," he added.

We're often lead to believe the science is a dispassionate business, based on the rational study of objective evidence. That's rubbish - people go into science because they have a consuming interest in something. If they don't, they pretty quickly go off into something else. But it's also very political - labs compete with each other for funds for example. My old boss Colin does, I think, believe there was life on Mars. He may genuinely doubt the evidence of ALH84001 though - but even if he didn't he wouldn't say so. His lab is leading the effort to build Beagle2, a mission to send a lander to Mars, and so he's not going to stand up and say "Blimey, guv, all the evidence we need is already right here on Earth" is he?
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# Read a big pile of Swamp Thing comics over the weekend. (ST in a nutshell - Swamp Thing is a plant elemental - a big, vaguely man-shaped plant who worries a lot. No really, it's great.) In one sequence, he's growing a new body. His friend Abby is looking after him, and she sprays him with insecticide. It stings, so he decides he should concentrate on growing vocal chords so he can ask her to stop.

I'm wondering if the Bean feels like he should get a move on and learn to speak. He's got a bit of a snotty nose at the moment, and he's been waking in the night because he couldn't breathe. To try and make sure he can sleep ok, we've been lathering him up with Vicks vaporub before he goes to bed. It's been hours, I've washed my hands at least four times and I can still smell it on me. Big juju.
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# John Major, speaking on PM, of Saddam Hussein I don't want to put this too strongly, but frankly he's a psychopath.
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# When you're out driving at night why do everyone else's lights seem to be brighter than yours?
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# I'm down at Chrystal's swanky offices today. There is a piece of paper sellotaped to the wall of the gents that says Please flush the toilet It seems remarkable that the good burghers of Slough actually need to be reminded not leave their business bobbing in the bowl, but evidently they do.

catherine said Well, as you know, Slough isn't fit for humans (now). Maybe they've just given up in despair. [added 22nd Feb 2001]

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# Just got my confirmation through for this year's ACCU conference. The programme is absolutely bursting with C++ goodies - including two sessions and a keynote by Herb Sutter, who gave a really good talk on exception safety last year. If you spend any time at all programming in C++ you should think about getting along
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# An email interview with Berke Breathed! Part one, and two

Berke Breathed's Bloom County, a strip cartoon which ran in The Guardian for several years in the late 80s, was one of the things which opened my eyes to what comics were. Breathed ended Bloom County seemingly at the height of it's popularity, going on to create a Sunday strip featuring the same characters, Outland, and then to write children's books. I think he's a star. This isn't the world's most revealing interview (email interviews never are), but it seems he's having fun.
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# Chapped lips + Toothpaste = Stinging Pain
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# What is going on here?

peteychap said Strikes me as just an incredibly pared down weblog of curious things this Amitage fellow has come across. It does look rather sinister though. [added 18th Feb 2001]

Doesn't it. I'm the first entry, and it makes me very nervous. [added 18th Feb 2001]

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# How can a simple thing like moving a modem from one machine to another turn into a hideous hardware/software odyssey involving IRQ conflicts, reinstalling Windows98, a trip to PC World, shifting a sound card, innumerable restarts, memory parity errors and still it won't all play together? The final God exists and he's laughing at you moment came when I dropped my Win98 CD-ROM and it disappeared through a crack in the floorboards.

Bollocks.
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# Just back from watching Dungeons & Dragons at the enormous Star City. It's even more derivative and cheesy than I imagined, complete with whole sequence lifted from Star Wars Episode One. Verily it is Dragonslayer for the new millenium, but instead of Ralph Richardson, it has Jeremy Irons, Richard O'Brien and Tom Baker (as a doctor, ho, ho!). If it had starred Dale Winton too, it would have featured the four campest men in Britain.
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# How do babies manage to do such massive poos? If I'd done one as ferocious as the Bean this morning, it would have been about three and half feet long, eight inches across and weighing approximately three stone. My eyes are watering just thinking about it.

momblog said EEeeaak!! That would need a 4 foot long fragranced nappy sack. [added 17th Feb 2001]

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# I did the deal on my new job yesterday - I'm going to work on Chrystal's Eclipse - and am now enjoying a week off before I start. So far that means I've pulled a shelving unit out of the roof space and set it up in my attic and changed a lot of nappies. Top.

We had a mildly successful trip in the city this afternoon, but the Bean has been a bit off-colour so we only got as far as Waterstones for a big pile of pop-up books. (If you've got a nipper under about two, or you need to buy a present for one, you absolutely can not go wrong with The Wheels On The Bus. It's fantastic!) No new comics for me today, then.

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# Does everyone who reads weblog/diary websites have a weblog/diary website of their own?
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# Once you've mastered basic childcare, you can try advanced exercises :
With the child sitting on your shoulders, pulling your hair with one hand and jamming the index finger of the other in your ear, walk downstairs while pushing the lens of your glasses back into the frame.

vicky lees [e] said eaely years care and education NVQ2

[added 6th May 2005]

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# It's been a long week - desperate (almost successful) rush to finish up my work for Berlitz on Monday and Tuesday, a (mostly successful) trip to London to install the software at a client site Wednesday, down to Luton on Thursday to (who knows how successfully) hand over everything to Peter from the Dublin office, capped off with two (definately successful) job interviews on Friday.

I was looking forward to going to our NCT group shared lunch today and leaving all the work bollocks behind for a while, but the Bean kicked that into touch with a explosive bout of nappy filling then chucking up all his breakfast. So it goes. He's actually been very cheery since then, the odd rectal cannonade aside, but it's best not risk infecting everybody else's babies, so we had to stay in and eat the enormous lasagne we were going to take by ourselves. Feel a bit sick myself now.
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# Hurrah! An email from my old chum Richard. I used to work with him at the Open University, and we visited him in New York after he went off to the American Museum of Natural History. He moved again, to the Smithsonian Institute I think, but we lost touch.

On Sunday I had a (very) minor brainwave. It's all about search terms - he works at univerisities so he must be on a web page somewhere. There can't be many experts on Carbonaceous chrondrite meteorites called Richard Ash, I reasoned. In fact there can't be many at all, and I think I've met most of them. And lo! Thirty seconds later he was found!
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# Yay for Angie! - I am a better person from having a baby of my own, so why did everyone tell me it would ruin my life? It depends on the person, I know, but having a baby is fun and exciting. It’s magical and absorbing.

It's true! Having a nipper is top!
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# Art of Sex is an under construction website with lots of prostitute's cards. The scans are much better quality than mine, so why not freshen your deck?
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# Linkmachinego is pointing to a big fan fiction archive. Fan fiction's always good for a bit of a giggle and seeing that reminded me of this -

Finally, Kathleen caught on. Her mouth dropped open. “He left you for Kitt?!”

Yep - It's Knight Rider slash fiction.

I used to work with Maddy, who wrote this. She kept kind of quiet about it, and it took Steve and I a bit of detective work to track her website down. We teased her about it a bit, but did the decent thing and didn't let on to the permanent staff.
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#Big Head's Amazing Comic Strip Adventure Game!
It's MonkeyFun!
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# According to this story in the Guardian, alsatians are turning into a bunch of jessies that arn't up to police work. Ah, bless.

And now in the style of Linkmachinego...

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#Are you a bullshitter?
Find out with The BullshitAnalyser.
Alarmingly my cv is 470% bullshit.

blue [e] [w] said Go to www.bigbullshitter.com [added 16th Apr 2005]

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# Joined to the throngs to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon last night - it's really rather magical. While the fight sequences seem to have got all the press - they are great (and fast!) with really good use of music - for me the main driver of the film was the conflict between love and obligation. In many respects it reminded me of The Remains Of The Day - it's not until the very end that you realise that everything could have been so different. I burst into tears in the street after watching The Remains Of The Day and wasn't safe to ride my bike back. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon didn't have quite the same immediate impact (indeed I embarked on a lengthy tour of Greater Birmingham taking people home) but's still with me now.
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# I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb and say I think the spam has dried up, as I haven't received any new bounce messages for the last three days or so.

Of course that's probably a cue for the flood gates to open once again.
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