I’ve just realised that I never wrote about Ben’s latest tricks! He’s into animal noises at the moment, and is really good at matching animals names and pictures to the noises they make. Ok, he doesn’t always get them right, and you do sometimes need a little bit of imagination to distinguish between them, but he does them very sweetly.
“Ben, what noise does a snake make?”
“ssss”
“What noise does…. a dog make?”
“ooof”
“What noise does…. a crocodile make?”
“nap nap” (accompanied by a hand opening and closing like a mouth)
“What noise does a cat make?”
“eee-oooo-UUUU”
“and what does does an owl make?”
“ooo-ee oo-ooo”
“what noise does…. a cow make?”
“mmmmmmmmmm” (occasionally “mmmooooo”)
“What noise does a monkey make?”
“oo oo” (accompanied by bouncing up and down)
“What noise does a lion make?”
“RRRRAAAAAA” (with big grin – his first noise and still his favourite)
“What noise does a sheep make?”
“baaaaaaa”
I think that’s all the ones he knows at the moment. We’re trying to teach him to say “please” and “thankyou”, and the former seems to come out as “more” at the moment 🙂
Anyway, I tried to get him to be able to say the word “thankyou” by assking him what noise a Thankyou Monster made, but I got told off for doing that. <g>
He’s definitly getting more words though – he obviously does “mumumumum” and “dadadad” (which I think also means A and me, rather than “generic big person” which it did before), but also “door”, “water” and one or two others. Not that I’m a proud dad or anything. 🙂
The sheep noise also reminds me of my last holiday as a bachelor, that I went on with a very good friend of mine. It was a Christian holiday in Turkey, run by Mastersun, and quite family oriented so they have a creche type arrangement for little people. One of the things they do in the creche is to sing memory verses like you do in Sunday School, and we made friends with the young lady who was running said creche. She was telling us that there was this one little boy or girl (can’t remember which now), who couldn’t really get the hang of the songs, but liked to join in where he could. There was this one song in particular, that starts “Your the Sheep (baaa) Jesus said (baaa) …. ” and so on, where everyone can join in the “baaa”s even if the other words were too hard. Course this little lad just loved this, and would build up all his energy and shout “BAAA” at the top of his voice when that bit came along. 🙂 So of course, we all started walking around going “BAAA” randomly to each other, especially as a response to teasing or wind-ups. “The only thing I can say to that is BAAA”. Maybe you had to be there. 🙂
I’m starting to feel like an old hand at this travelling game; or is that just old? 🙂 Anywhere, here we in Oxford for our annual project workshop, sort of a bit like a mini-version of the jolly in Nottingham last week.
My talk is a bit more involved here, as I’ve got a 30 minute slot to fill (plus various live demos), and we actually spent most of the train journey finishing it off, which was time really well spent – my boss had great suggestions that improved it no end! Mind you, he was talking about using it in one of his lectures this term… 🙂 The train itself was fine, except for a mixup in the seat reservations which meant we had to turf someone out of our seats – but they managed to find seats just behind so that worked out ok. The main reason for wanting to sit (beside the obvious) was in order to get the laptops out and do some work, so we didn’t feel too bad.
Supper yesterday was courtesy of Browns on Woodstock Rd. I’d never actually been to a Browns before, and it was ok. It was extremely noisy, but the food was very good. Probably a little more expensive then I’d ideally be looking to pay for a meal out, but by no means extortionate. I had spare-ribs, which I love having and haven’t had for ages. In fact the last time I had ribs was at the meeting in Edinburgh in April. Perhaps it’s an e-Science thing. Anyway, it was a good opportunity to talk a bit about work, and find out a bit more about each other.
Oh yes, I’m staying in St. Anne’s college, which seems very nice. First thing I did on arrival was to plug the laptop in hopefully to the RJ45 socket lurking on the wall, and lo and behold here I am. Well, there I was – it’s obviously morning now! But I bet the boss is doing the same thing next door… Ooh scary thought; maybe even reading this?
Closing thought; am a little disappointed that apparantly nobody has tried to sell their cuff-links on eBay yet. There were something like 650 of us who got them (several ladies amoung us!), so you’d had thought someone would have flogged ’em by now!
Found an excellent but under-advertised tool called Synergy, which lets you control multiple machines from a single keyboard and mouse…
Ah, you say – isn’t that just a KVM (keyboard video monitor) switch. Mais non, because with this handy bit of software you have a monitor per computer, and seemlessly change which one you’re controlling using the mouse.. So if I go off the right hand side of this screen, I end up on the monitor next to mine.
Even this is borderline passe, until you realise that the computers can be running any combination of Linux, Windows, and MacOs. For instance, right now my ‘master’ computer is my main Linux box at work (a FC2 jobbie), on the left is a laptop running RH9, and on the right is a Windows 2K – all of which I control from the single keyboard and mouse attached to my FC2. OK, so it means I have two monitors (and a laptop) on my desk, but I can live with that.
In fact it’s such a nice solution, I’m considering digging out my old monitor at home, and doing the same thing there (at the moment it’s a KVM scenario).
My new passport arrived this afternoon, and I have to say it looks much the same as the old one. One thing that’s quite amusing is that I spent ages agonising over whether to put “Dr” as my title. On the one hand it would be cool, but on the other hand it might attract unwarranted atention, especially if I happened to have a medical doctor as a travelling companion.
So I decided against it, and sent off the renewal form. So what’s funny? Well new style passports don’t have any space for title anyway!! (although perhaps they squidge it in somewhere?)
Here I am at the University of Nottingham, in Cavendish Hall (one of the students’ halls of residence), and I must say that the connectivity has been fantastic – good wireless coverage everywhere in the conference centre, and wired network in all the rooms.
A major part of the All Hands meeting is the ‘booths’ that house all the major players in the e-Science business, and there seems to be an unofficial competition to see who can give away the best freebies, and I must say they’re pretty good!!
PPARC (who are particle physicists) were giving away “Micro OpticalMouse” USB mice, which are tiny but fab, especially as the touchpad on this laptop is more than a little ropey. CCLRC and GOSC had T-shirts on offer, everyone has pens, and OMII was also pretty good, with stress-cubes, mints, and insulated travel mugs – although to get the latter you had to install the OMII client, which took me the better part of 2 hours. To be fair, this was mainly because (a) I was trying to download everything over the wireless, and (b) I didn’t have Java SDK installed and it was very picky about which version it needed (which it didn’t tell you in advance, so my process was 1. install Java-2 RTE. No joy at all. 2. Install Java2 SDK 1.5.y – no Joy; requires 1.4.x. 3. Install SDK 1.4.x. Success and travel mug.)
Mind you, it took me the better part of day 1 to get the wireless going on the laptop, due to driver issues in Linux. Still, download and install the new module and firmware and it’s solid as a rock. Well, as good as you could expect, in any case.
But as usual with these things, the main useful outcome is meeting up with other people, particularly the project partners in my case. It is also interesting to hear the keynote speakers give their overview talks, and in this case most of the speakers were vey senior academics (heads of funding councils, that sort of thing)
Off to Nottingham for most of this week, for all the “All Hands” conference. This is an annual get together of all the EPSRC e-Science projects, where we demonstrate our work and have various talks about e-Science and Grid Computing stuff.
I’ve not been to one before, but I’m not a huge conference fan at the best of times and by all accounts I’ve heard this one is a particular circus. Still, it’s a good opportunity to catch up with the other project partners, and even to see what other people are up to.
I’m planning to slope off to bed early every night tho, and all things being equal should get in a few nights really good sleep. 🙂
So the wife and I have been watching Lost on Channel 4, leading to much speculation as to what exactly is going on. One possible urban-legend doing the rounds is that every characters back story incidently features one of the other characters from the crash – so in the background, or on the TV, or something.
This got me thinking about what all the characters have in common, and of those whose back-story we’ve seen so far on UK terrestrial (Jack, Kate, Sun and Jin, Charlie, Locke), they all have two things in common; namely (1) they were on the flight under ‘negative’ circumstances or to put it another way wished they weren’t on the flight in some sense, and (2) that they all were nearly not on the flight at all (which is not unrelated).
Jack – (1) Was on the flight going home with his Dad’s body – obviously he’d had rather have found his Dad alive and well. (2) He was very nearly refused the flight because he was transporting a body.
Kate – (1) Had been arrested. (2) If she’d have left at night instead of waiting ’til morning for a lift with the farmer, or indeed had not stopped to pull him from the car crash, she wouldn’t have been on the flight.
Sun and Jin – (1) Clearly Sun is very unhappy in her marriage, and Jin appeared to be in Oz on a “job”, so I guess neither really wanted to be there at all (2) Sun very nearly ran away just before getting on the flight, which of course would have stopped Jin getting on too.
Charlie – (1) He wanted his brother with him to reform the band, but his brother refused, so Charlie left “in anger”. (2) He had the opportunity to stay with his brother and get clean, but chose instead to go back to LA.
Locke – (1) Was refused from the “walkabout”, and so forced just to fly home. (2) He equally well might have been allowed on the trip, hence obviously not on the flight.
The flaws in this thesis are the Sky Marshall, who was clearly delighted to be on the flight (but arguably wasn’t a survivor of the crash, and who nearly wasn’t on the flight for the same reasons as Kate), and the reasoning for Jin is a little ropey, as he probably somewhere between indifferent and glad to be going on the flight to wherever they were going; unless it was to another job, I suppose. On the other hand, we know that Michael and his son were on the flight under sad circumstances, with the death of Michael’s ex-wife, even though we haven’t had his back-story yet.
There’s been a “piece of research” recently that says that we all lots of gadget appliances lying around our kitchens that either never have come out of the box, or have only been used once or twice. Things like toasted-sandwich makers, food processors, coffee makers, bread machines, ice-cream makers, etc.
In one sense I’m not too surprised, but we actually don’t have too much of this sort of stuff just lying around. The only complete diaster was a yoghurt maker, which never worked reliably, and even when it did left you with litres of yoghurt to eat within two days. We’ve got a toasted sandwich maker, which admittedly doesn’t get used very often (a few times a year), but when it does it’s because a toasted cheese sandwich is exactly what you want. To be fair, its crown is in danger from croque-monsieurs, which I discovered you can make by dry-frying a cheese and ham sandwich, and ends up absolutely delicious.
On the other hand, our bread maker has been a huge success; I make a loaf somewhere between once a week and once a fortnight, and it’s great. You can experiment with all sorts of stuff too – we’ve banana bread, chilli bread, rosemary bread, potato bread, carrot and coriander bread… all lovely! And the smell is just heaven… waking up to the smell of freshly baked bread. The only disaster I had is when I got the sugar and salt the wrong way round, and ended up with a salty brick! 🙂
The food processor and blender get plenty of use, although I would concede the latter was mainly used for a certain young man of the house, and now he has “grown-up” food it doesn’t get used nearly as much. It’s still great for smoothies and milkshakes, however. The food processor tends to only be used for soup now, although we did make parsley pesto a couple of weeks ago.
The coffee maker – H’mm, now that has had a lot of use in it’s time, but these days does just live in the cupboard. Its problem is two-fold; (1) It’s a pain to clean, and (2) cafetierres make equally nice coffee IMO. If you want to the whole frothy milk cappuccino thing, or indeed the expresso thing, then it’s top – but we hardly ever do. Maybe if we had room on the worktop for it, it would be used more?
And, I would admit, I’m sorely tempted by the prospect of an ice-cream maker… I’ve made ice-cream once or twice, and I’m a huge ice cream fan in any case. I got my sister one for Christmas, so I might have to see if was a good idea, or is just a white elephant…
Going out to a Barn Dance this evening!! A couple at church are both celebrating their 40th birthdays this year, and so decided to have a big party – should be fun. Feel like we’ve earned an evening off as well, after another bout of painting today (ceiling finished, tester colours up and under consideration) and I even mowed the lawn. In amongst all this was a trip into town to buy Ben an outfit for the wedding on Saturday (A’s cousin in Bristol is tieing the knot).
Other news is fairly thin on the ground, although I’ve added a new friend to my links (Yay!). Andrew is a PhD student in my department who is about to go off to the states for a month, and has decided to keep a blog thing of his adventures. Who knows; perhaps he’s the next Bill Bryson, and I can say I was there when it all started.
So the Sony PSP was released today. I had to come home a bit early for reasons that I won’t go in to – but ended up wandering through town; past Dixons, Woolies, Game and the like. It must be said that all of these retailers appeared to have stock (they certainly had the empty boxes out) – but they had a few on display, and they just look lurvely. Seem plenty of pics and vids online, but not the same as actually seeing one doing it stuff. Didn’t actually get to play with one (felt a bit naughty when there’s zero chance of me buying one), but just drooled over the display case.
With a small-but-definite toy budget deficit, a PSP is not on the cards for many moons yet – which is a shame as I’ve got several long train journeys coming up (oh well). On the plus side, it may well be cheaper by then?
