Archive for the 'General' Category:

If you’ve not already heard the news, then my apologies - Lily Elizabeth was born 02:32 on the 07/07/08.

I’ve now been a father for a week and I can safely say it’s great! Physically I’m the same (albeit tired), mentally I’ve gone through a lot to get where I am now. I thought I was prepared for the big day, after reading books and internet articles on the subject; shopping for essentials many times - but it’s a pleasant surprise once it all falls into place.

For those of you looking to become a father, I’ll let you know that the first few nights will be sleepless, or heavily reduced in terms of shut eye. But once Baby has settled into a routine you begin to claw back some of those precious hours. We’re getting about 6 hours of interrupted sleep, whereas I previously enjoyed a full 8 or 9 hours.

I’m now into my second week of paternity leave and the three of us have had plenty of time together, to enjoy being a proper family. I’ve got nappy changing down to a T, with it often taking less than a minute. However, I’ve had plenty of practice, with Lily getting through lots of nappies, on one occassion requiring 4 changes within the hour!

I’ll be writing more articles soon, as I’ve been experimenting with WSUS, backup configurations, FreeNAS and other geeky things during the past few weeks.

As The Lounge is becoming full (464+ comments) and summer is pretty much here, I think we should move conversation outside into the sunshine. Hence, The Summer House. Feel free to talk about anything, as before…

Jump to the last reply!

For those of you that don’t already know, the title pretty much says it all!

I’ve scanned pictures from the Ultra-Sound scan that we attended today and can also reveal the project that has been under-wraps for the past few weeks:

Baby’s first blog.com

We’re going to be using it to blog all about the Little Baby, so that family and friends can keep up-to-date with the progress. It’s yet another WordPress blog, but I can’t get enough of them - the theme is scratch-built and the site will soon feature a forum for others to share their experiences too.

Let me know your reaction to the news, if I’ve not told you in person!

For those of you running Vista 64 (or XP Pro 64), you may have encountered the error message iTunes was not properly installed when opening iTunes. The message is followed with another stating that you wont be able to burn CDs until you re-install iTunes.

I’ve had the message pop-up since upgrading iTunes about 3 versions ago. It has proved to be very annoying, as it forces you to click OK prior to iTunes loading. Re-installing iTunes didn’t resolve the problem though - so I turned to Google.

Apparently I’m not the only one encountering this problem with iTunes - as the Apple forums show.

The fix for this issue is simply to install a Driver Update for GEARs. I hadn’t heard of GEAR Software until this evening, but it appears that many larger software manufacturers license GEARs in some form.

So, that’s that problem out of the way - iTunes starts with no error messages of any form. However, Anneka and I have both experienced problems with our iPods and iTunes. The other night I had to reset both iPods in order for them to work with iTunes - without causing the program to crash upon start-up. But it appears the library that we both share, has become too big or corrupted - as it constantly crashes when trying to add any more albums to it.

It looks like I’ll have to start again and import the music from the XML file.

Apple may well have the upper hand when it comes to designing products, but their software is becoming bloated and slow. If only there was a decent alternative to iTunes, that supported iPods; the iTunes store (with podcasts) and had the library management features.

I suppose many of you internet users are familiar with the above message?

Inspired by a smashing magazine article on 404 Error pages, I decided to modify the standard WordPress error message on slickhouse, to make it slightly more useful.

At the same time, I opted to finally create a graph of slickhouse - using a great site that Simon brought to my attention. Simply enter a URL and the java applet will create a graph of the site, with plenty of interesting dots.

Hopefully you wont encounter slickhouse.com’s 404 page, but if you do - expect something that looks like this.