Ed Jakeman's life blog

I am a Web Octopus

2010-02-28T22:25:00.001Z

We were watching a program called the Virtual Revolution on BBC1 tonight when it mentioned that on the BBC website we had the chance to do a few tests and find out what kind of we user we are and then be told what kind of web animal we were.

Of course Heather and I both had a laptop on top of our laps at this point and the programme became a victim of its own success as we both started doing the test and completely ignored the TV.

Anyway, I am apparently a Web Octopus and Heather is a Web Leopard. The main difference appeared to be that I was better at multitasking.

I haven't looked at this on Wikipedia, but I am fairly sure that in the real world there are more fundamental differences between the leopard and the octopus than their degree of multitasking.

So thanks BBC for making my brain hurt at the end of a busy weekend with the kids by encouraging me to do a series of mind games! To thank me they produced this very complimentary summary of my personality.

Toby's Christening

2010-02-02T20:58:00.001Z

Thanks to everyone who helped us celebrate Toby's initiation into the Catholic church (I just do this to get a kick out of getting all my almost exclusively non-churchgoing friends in a church and singing All Things Bright And Beautiful - now I'm married and the kids are baptised this hobby might dry up though) at Northampton Cathedral last week, we had a great time and had lots of tasty food (not at the church you understand, I meant afterwards). Thanks to Goals Northampton as well for being a very good place for a party afterwards too.

We still had lots of cake left afterwards and a bit of spare time last weekend (and Heather knocking the head off the icing Teddy on the cake) meant I had the chance to make an extremely pointless animation.

Rice Cake eating as a social ill

2010-01-12T13:45:00.001Z

Recently I started what I thought was a commendable attempt to reduce my snacking on chocolate, sweets and (most seriously) biscuits in the office. This would have many benefits on my weight, energy levels and the number of pointless conversations in the office on which was better - Rich Tea or Digestives?

Clearly Digestives.

Anyway, after researching low calorie snack alternatives (its not realistic to just "not eat", or even simply "stop eating when no longer hungry" - that'd never work) I settled on the inoffensive rice cake. They are cheap, I think they are tasty, best of all they are virtually fat free.

After two days of this new regime I have had to abandon my new snack after what I can only describe as a vicious campaign of hatred and intimidation by my previously benign work colleagues. Little did I realise how smelly these things were! I was informed in no uncertain words that I was indulging in an anti-social activity and should stop.

Now that I am aware of the seriousness of this issue, I think action should be taken. Clearly it would be unfair to just introduce a rice cake ban, but I would like to suggest the following:

Banning of consumption of rice cakes in enclosed public spaces, including pubs and other workplaces
A labelling system on packets of rice cakes - "Rice cakes harm those around you" and "People will like you less if you buy these" should do
Raise the minimum age for buying rice cakes to 16
Provision of outdoor shelters for the eating of rice cakes near workplaces. These should be separate from smoking shelters, in order to protect the smokers.
Introduction of rice cake patches to allow addicts to reduce their cravings
Punitive taxes on all rice cake sales

Hopefully these simple measures will stop others making the same mistakes as me.

Alternative Cutlery

2010-01-09T20:49:00.001Z

Toby has continued his development from a baby into a crazy toddler with a recent bizarre trend in not wanting to use cutlery to eat with but using toys instead.

To be honest he was not very good with the whole spoons thing anyway - he had developed spoon control that was 90% perfect - it was the last 10% where the spoon was nearly at his mouth and turned upside down that was a problem.

Still, the latest issue is that he chooses something random he can see off the table and eats with that instead. It started with just the spoon the wrong way around. Then it was a favoured penguin (or "wenwin" as he says), then a more random seal - and today a small wooden church tower.

In case this wasn't immediately obvious, eating with a small wooden church tower is not efficient. I don't think its going to catch on.

Snowy Britain

2010-01-08T12:30:00.001Z

Excellent snowy picture of Britain by NASA - a very good use of the American's tax dollars.

If you zoom in a bit you can see people stuck at home, slipping about, complaining bitterly about the lack of grit and saying crazy things like how things were better during the war.

Meanwhile I've been taking slightly smaller snowy pictures than NASA.

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Prophecy Generator

2010-01-01T15:25:00.003Z

Since it is now the new year, all kinds of predictions are inevitably going to be made - most of which will probably be nonsense. We'll also year about what ancient civilisations and mystics who couldn't fortell their own demise managed to fortell ours, over the next year.

Since these have a nicely random chance of coming true, I've written a page to come up with some new ones...

http://www.edjakeman.com/prophecy.aspx

The dangers of having time off over Christmas!

First attempt at pumpkin carving

2009-10-31T20:09:00.004Z

Sorry, time for some showing off (people with their own fairly pointless websites based on their name can be prone to it). I've been given a few random assignments since becoming a father, and the latest was carving a pumpkin. Being an IT sort and not being familiar with what is cool in pumpkin carving, I hit a certain well known search engine for info.

1 hour in the bathroom with two very incompetent toddler "helpers" later, I was quite impressed with my creation! Okay, so the eyes and nose were as a result of a printed out template but the mouth was all ad-libbed!

Heather suggested the picture might work better with the lights off. Fair point, really.

Naming bath ducks

2009-10-31T19:26:00.005Z

Oh, to have the imagination of a toddler. We have just bought Harriet and Toby 4 new rubber ducks for the bath, mainly to distract her from her main bathtime occupation of spinning round as fast as she can, which can get dangerous. The ducks caused great excitement, mainly because they change colour when put in hot or cold water (ooooooooohhhh! wow!).

Harriet has since started to name them. They appear to get rebranded quite often, but their initial names were:

- Golden White How
- Bhaji bhaji
- Pointless
- Mars

Toby did not join in this explosion of creativity, but then he only says about 10 words and one of them is "papple" (apple).

15 months of baby insomnia

2009-10-25T13:59:00.004Z

Well, last week Toby made it to 15 months. This is an important age as it has been previously voted (by us) as the perfect child age. They are not so old that they either stay out late, smoke, swear or talk all the time about Thomas the Tank Engine (only one of these has been achieved by our oldest, Harriet, so far), but they aren't an immobile baby either. They're walking (or crawling really well - we have a walker finally), saying some words quite badly and generally is peaking on the cuteness scale. The older children (just Harriet in our case - three and a half years of fun) are interested in chasing the newly mobile kid.

But our happy family hides a dark secret. Dark because its about the night - Toby is an insomniac.

In 65 weeks of nightly sleeping opporunties Toby has managed to sleep through on about two occasions, which given we weren't expecting it didn't help us. We have in the meantime tried just about everything, including but certainly not limited to:

Co-sleeping (baby in bed)
Banning co-sleeping (baby ushered back to cot for excessive crawling)
Feeding to sleep (works in the short term)
Banning feeding at night (since he started waking for the milk)
Controlled crying
Constant attention
Back rubbing (his, not ours - he likes it but its hard without Mr Tickle hands)
Ear plugs (us, not him)
Cuddle blankets (him, not us)
Dummies
Pleading

The main problem appears to be that he is teething more or less constantly. But basically, he appears to have raging insomnia. Maybe he has worries we're not aware of - where his next teddy is coming from perhaps.

Of course, every cloud has a silver lining and in the case of the parent with a insomniac baby its complaining. Its great to list last night's waking times to non-parents and watch their look of horror at what they might have to endure in the future. It can even get competitive with other insomniac baby parents, seeing who had the worst night last night ("Awake from 4am? That's nothing, I went to sleep at 3am and was up getting breakfast 10 minutes later!").

If we've said it once we must have said it a thousand times since last July. Its a good job he is cute...

Films with no women in.

2009-08-18T06:59:00.002Z

Dave at work (hi Dave) came up with a very good game this morning - naming films with no women in them. We did not do very well. This was the pathetic list we came up with, most of which we have since debunked ourselves. Feel free to post comments with more suggestions.

- The Thing
- Silent Running
- The Hunt For Red October (damn, forgot Jack Ryan's wife...)
- Saving Private Ryan (apart from a little girl saved from the ruins. Oh, and his whole family in the present day at the cemetary. Damn again)

That's about it. There must be more...

Toby - one year down...

2009-07-21T12:01:00.007Z

Well, its been a year since our dreams came true when our second child emerged screaming into our lives in the middle of the night.

Some things have not changed since then.

He's still the lightest sleeper ever (but better than when he was 6 months old and was virtually an insomniac) and is no stranger to 3am. He appears to have been teething more or less constantly since he was 9 weeks old but only managed to grow 6 teeth, 4 of which appeared in the same week. He's a clingy little monster as well, something of a shock after Harriet, who while fond of us appeared to only tolerate our presence rather than requiring it for at least the first two years.

He has come on since birth in some other ways though. Standing happily since 3 months and crawling very well since March, he has finally taken his first step this week, albeit reluctantly. He also appears to be moving away from his inate clingyness copying his sister in having an "adventurous spirit" - i.e. he can cover the whole staircase in under 15 seconds holding a toy car and wants to climb on the roof of the playhouse rather than just play in it.

He has accumulated an impressive vocabulary for one so young. He can now say (in order of firstwordness):

Tick tock
Bubble
Tiger
Hiya (as in hello, not a karate chop - though he does seem to like hitting, being a boy)

I'm not sure where conversations can go with just those words. We think he is trying to say "ball" and "book" as well, but they just sound a bit like "baaaa". Give him time.

And he is a cute little boy and good on the photos, which we have found is enough to get us through the bad days as we have lots of nice pictures to look at and remind us of the good bits. Especially with those scary blue eyes. My newhew Matthew told me in great detail how Heather and I (both with brown eyes) must both be "carriers", which sounded quite frightening.

So broadly speaking Toby, well done for getting through the first year, being basically good natured, friendly, interesting and happy and not being a little baby anymore.

We'll keep you after all.

Less is more- decluttering in the Internet age

2009-07-17T20:45:00.006Z

It has taken a long time to get to the point where I'm ready to acknowledge that actually its not more possessions that will make me happy but considerably less of them! Ebay is great here of course (what a good deal - lose the junk, get paid) but there is all the hassle of taking pictures, communicating, staggering to the post office and hoping you get good feedback. The tip is fine too by the hoarder in me just can't throw away things that "might be useful someday", even if they clearly won't be useful to me.

So the "third way" which we've settled on is some tipping, some ebaying and quite a lot of Freecycling. Freecycle is a site where people offer things they don't want anymore and other people ask for it for nothing. No postage, no feedback, no... okay, no money. Its like ebay where everything is collection only and goes for nothing. Anyway, the junk has gone down a lot, I can actually see the cellar now, and I don't feel like I'm wasting things. Freecycle is great and everyone should do it.

We did find that a few people on the site are, well not very clever and just after some good things without either paying for them or being arrested. We offered an old TV table and even went to the trouble of putting up a picture and someone immediately said yes. And then he contacted later and pulled out of this FREE transaction because he had previously only seen it on his damn phone and thought it was solid pine. Actually it was just some cheap MFI thing so he felt he was above it. I think he was missing the point of the site. Anyway, when a few people all ask for something we offered we choose which one to give it to based almost entirely on how good their grammar and spelling. Its eliteist, but it works...

Ol' Blue Eyes

2009-07-14T21:24:00.003Z

Really Toby, where DID your blue eyes come from?

Well, they're very cute. And I read that they can change colour (say, go brown, just like his parents and sister, for instance) until up to a year. Which gives him 4 days.

Girl in a Bag

2009-06-24T21:01:00.001Z

Had a nice trip to Abington Park to watch the Sunday band a couple weeks ago, and after Harriet spent some time pretending the buggy lying on its side was a boat (in her defense the wheel made a pretty good ship's wheel) she decided that she wanted to be carried about (and as it turned out, swung about) in a Tesco reusable bag. The bag is apparently strong enough to carry a three and a half year old child, so I guess that makes it reusable.

I think that in the future that everyone is going to want one of these, they're a great accessory.

* Please don't try this at home

** No children were harmed in the production of this blog posting

Crawling baby fascinated by floating ball

2009-06-21T18:17:00.000Z

To be fair Toby, I would be quite impressed if I saw a ball floating 4 inches off the ground as well...

Northampton lift tower in Gorillaz video?

2009-03-24T12:57:00.003Z

Was watching music TV a couple of nights ago and "Feel Good Inc" by Gorillaz from a few years ago came on. As I was watching it something looked a little familar about the tower in the video - its the Northampton Lift Tower (or Northampton Lighthouse as its sometimes known!).

With a massive sign saying "Feel Good Inc" and a window with a monkey of course but we have to allow them some artistic license...

Toby finally gets mobile

2009-03-22T21:46:00.004Z

After enduring 8 months of broken sleep and a small amount of whinging during the days (it was loads - seriously Toby, we love you, but there have been more content babies!) Toby has finally done what he has been trying to do since about three days old and on his 8 months birthday managed to crawl. I say this as if it was a first, actually he had been crawling for a good week but only backwards - clearly not as satisfying, though he did amusingly keep getting stuck under things. Still, he did cheer up immesurably since he could finally do what he wanted and attack the world, one toy, sister and cable at a time. No more whinging, just time to find the stair gates.

Anyway, since we only seem to only produce intrepid children he was happy for a good 48 hours and is now trying to walk. And climb the stairs.

But they were a happy 48 hours...

Northampton Balloon Festival cancelled

2009-02-18T22:12:00.002Z

What an enormous surprise! Northampton takes another faltering step towards being just another faceless boring town as the Balloon festival goes the way of St Crispin's Street Fair and the Northampton Show in Abington Park and gets cancelled by the Council to apparently save an astonishing £3 per council tax payer. So this leaves us with ... yes, the Carnival is the only fun to be had in the town now unless its just snowed or you're out for a curry on the Wellingborough Road.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/northamptonshire/7895364.stm

My New Years Resolution not to moan on my blog is going badly. But my other one not to just use the blog to mention which child has which tooth is going better (Toby has two, and he can give a right nip with them...)

Snow finally arrives and nearly destroys civilization

2009-02-02T21:34:00.000Z

Thanks to the weather for providing the first proper snow since about 1870 and the chance for me to play in the snow. Sorry, I meant for Harriet to play in the snow, with proper parental supervision. She made a couple of lovely snowmen - okay, so I made them, she is only three and it would have taken ages. Its only a shame that the wet and dull weather has returned and the snowmen have disappeared, leaving their carrots behind of course.

Toby reaches six months and own feet.

2009-01-28T13:22:00.003Z

Toby (also known as "the boy" or "child number 2" if he is in trouble, which is often) has reached his 6 month milestone - Happy Half Birthday Toby!

In that time he's proved to be a bad sleeper (slept through twice so far - the last time about three months ago) and a clingy baby, but on the upside he has a lovely smile and very bendy legs, as seen in this photo. I'm not sure what career this is going to lead him towards!

Free entertainment for car obsessed toddlers - Coventry Transport Museum

2009-01-10T20:50:00.001Z

We had a brainwave today about what to do with a toddler who is obsessed with cars, buses, tractors and the like - take her to the Transport Museum in Coventry to run about.

She enjoyed this greatly overall but ran straight past 90% of the cars. The highlight for her was not Thrust 2, vintage tractors, the De Loreon or old Formula One cars. It was a broken old Peugeot 106 with no front doors that she was allowed to climb in. She was in it for ages, giving Heather and I a rare chance to actually read the information on some nearby cars, including Princess Diana's actual red Metro!

Toby - the Amazing Teething Baby

2008-10-20T21:02:00.012Z

Well, after 13 weeks of hell (sorry, 13 weeks of getting to know our little bundle of joy - not to mention getting to know 3am, alcoholism and premature ageing) we have finally worked out that the current problem is teething. In fact we reckon he was teething by 8 weeks, which was about 10 seconds after he got over the shock of being born. The current evidence is:

Constant dribbling
Keeps going off his food
Night waking just when we think he's got over all that nonsense
Hands permanently in mouth (see photo)
The two teeth that clearly have about one layer of skin over in his mouth.

At least at this rate he should have all his teeth by about 7 months!

Controvesy over who won the Olympics

2008-09-02T18:31:00.001Z

Okay, so there isn't any controversy, but I am trying to stir it up anyway.

Basically, it was China. They got the most golds, they got the most points, they won.

Unless you ask the Americans when they might well say they won since they got the most medals. A friend of mine over there at the moment said their media were pretty much saying just that.

Then what if you work out who got the most medals vs their population, or even better their land area. Surely, Team GB would win - or at least we'd be statistically certain to beat China, the US and that chilly top half of Europe and Asia, Russia.

But what if the EU was a country. Now I am not the most ardent EU supporter, but if we are talking about winning here, perhaps we can set aside our differences, not to mention centuries of hostility, warfare and not knowing what each other are saying without a guide book and lots of pointing. So I did a dig on whether the EU would have won if it was a single country, and it turns out we would! So here is the PROPER medal table from Beijing 2008:

Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
EU - 27	85	99	89	273
China	51	21	28	100
US	36	38	36	110
Russia	23	21	28	72
Australia	14	15	17	46

Thanks to this site for saving me all the adding up.

Now the pedants will point out we would not have been allowed to field 27 countries worth of competitors if we were a united Europe, but that's just picking holes. Let's unite for victory in London 2012!

Northamptonshire Ironstone Railway Trust - for train obsessed Toddlers everywhere?

2008-08-26T12:23:00.006Z

Just a quick note on a very good attraction that Heather found in Northampton - the Northamptonshire Ironstone Railway Trust (or NIRT - I think they could have thought of a better name myself). Its in Hunsbury and Harriet, in the middle of a Thomas the Tank Engine obsession as she is, thought it was super. They have a pile of pleasantly decaying rolling stock, a small crane that looks like it will never move again, a tony model railway and a working deisel with a little run of track it can trundle up and down on. £5 bought me and a very excited toddler a nice little run through the woods. Overall the whole thing was highly recommended!

Sadly this did not terrify her obsession out of her, instead she seemed to think this was worryingly normal.

Anyway, here is a lovely picture of her staring adoringly up at a rusting crane (she called it Cranky).

See www.nirt.co.uk for more details!

Toby Edward Jakeman is born

2008-08-11T12:25:00.003Z

In what must be a textbook case of not learning from our mistakes, we've produced Child Number Two. Toby was born on the 18th August and has lovely blue eyes, which have no hope of remaining blue with all the brown eye genes in my family ganging up on them.

Here, have a nice (if admittadly slightly Photoshopped) picture of him trying to make a phone call on a rattle. Hopefully his technology skills will improve over time...