So, we’re in!

Jack was pretty much oblivious to the whole moving process as he stayed over at each of his Grandparents house the day before and after the move, which bought us enough time to get his bedroom furniture all assembled again.  

I think that the first day that he was here, he wasn’t aware that this would be where we’d be living, as he was throwing those sorts of tantrums that he would when he was tired and wanted to go home to bed. 

He’s got much more space to put his toys now – not that it mattered before, as Claire and I have become used to having a small bundle of his toys in each room of the house. Some were intentional, like the toy cars in our bedroom that he could play with whilst we got dressed, or made the bed, but others were of Jack’s doing; he’d slowly distribute stuff that would marked his territory.  Who knows where it would stop, maybe with the taking over of the world, one bedroom at a time.

We’re running on 10 year old internet connections at the moment (56k dial-up) and have only just got that, so the uploading of photos, videos and even blog posts have been heavily restricted.

Jack spent his second-ever night away from us the other night, staying with my folks and… it was great!  The dog was at Claire’s parents’ too meaning that we didn’t need to get up early or in the middle of the night or anything! It was absolutely fantastic! The house was silent!

My parents really enjoyed having him over to stay for the night too, which was good.  My mum said how surprised she was at how well behaved Jack was, even after we had tip-toed out of their house Friday evening! She said he almost cried a couple of times when he’d realised we had gone, but he soon got over it with the prospect of two old grandparents to run around after him! It probably didn’t help when she’s showing Jack photos of all of us, saying ‘who is that?’… doh!

On a serious note, it’s really good that we’re able to leave him like that, that both sets of our parents are willing to have him, and that he’s good in their company. We’re really lucky in that respect, as some folks don’t have their parents close-by, or some people’s parents aren’t willing to help as much as ours, and of course, some aren’t willing to help at all.

My folks had moved to Wales not long after I was born and so had neither sets of parents within at least 300miles of them, so I appreciate that it must have been difficult. But then, I suppose, it’s a case of just getting on and doing what’s best really.

Claire’s drafted her mum to help a couple of days a week with Jack, as Claire being back at work, too, makes the normality from before we had Jack, come back into our new normal life with Jack.  Claire has always really liked working but really likes being with Jack too, so working a few days a week is good all round. It also means that I get to spend loads of time with him too.  All good fun.

So, it turns out that I’m getting into this blogging thing!

I know I’ve have my moments where I haven’t blogged anything for a while and then suddenly there’s a whole rush on things, but, as the title suggests, I’ve started another blog!

Why? Well, basically, because I can.  The very first post on the new blog explains in detail as to why I wanted to have another blogging area, in addition to this Baby Blog, but the short version is that I wanted to be able to blog about things other than specifically baby-stuff, and have tried that in the past on here before and felt it wasn’t the right place. An example of this, is the posts about backing up photos, or using online services to host pictures, etc. These were all related to Jack, as they are photos of him, but were a bit… techie.

It’s over at http://brettrigby.blogspot.com and there’s a few posts there already, with a whole load more in the pipeline.

But, for the record, I do intend on writing more blog posts for the Baby Blog.  It’s just now, I’ll be able to separate out the geek from the baby and have them both out there, but if a post happens to cover both areas, I’ll either post it on both blogs, or will heavily link to it, so it’s easy for you to get at.

If you’ve got nothing else better to do, please have a look. Despite it’s ‘geeky’ sub-title, it’s not aimed at blowing people’s mind with techie info (too much!) and if it does, simply skim over that blog-post and there’ll be another one on there one day that you might like.

Let me know if you start reading it, as I’m curious to hear your thoughts on it.

Bit of a wide-ranging topic/title, but still quite appropriate, and here’s why:

Jack is getting to that age whereby he’s listening to what you’re saying, and although he can’t talk back, he pretty much knows what’s going on.

He’s able to point, or at the very least ‘stare’ at various objects in the room that you ask him about, such as the clock hanging on the wall in the kitchen, the telly on the sideboard, where his high-chair is, and so on.  And they’re things that he understands what you’re talking about and will move to look for them.

These objects in the room have come in quite handy when he’s been having a tantrum or not eating his food, distracting him from what he was doing and allowing you a moment’s breathe to win the fight. Dirty tactics? Maybe. Does it work? Mostly.

On the other hand, there are those other distractions in the house that take Jack’s focus away from what Claire and I want him to concentrate on.  The main culprit for this happens to be our friendly pooch, Alfie, who must know when to come marching into the kitchen when we’re trying to feed Jack, or stand there whimpering by the front door wanting to go out and bark at something.  Jack is quite taken by Alfie and we’re really glad that they’re not scared of each other, etc, but when you’re trying to get things done first thing in the morning before getting ready yourself to go to work, it’s not the best of help you could expect from the dog.

In terms of me, this blog site and distractions, I’ve had a little too many of them myself recently.  (Hence the radio-silence on here and then all of a sudden a burst of activity!)  I think it’s too easy to let something like blogging slip, especially when tired after getting up at silly-o’clock in the morning with Jack and then going to work, etc, etc.  Excuses, I know, but I know I enjoy writing these posts, so I’ll try to make a conscious effort!! 

Maybe another problem, is that we’ve started an internal blog at work and I think it’s fair to say I’ve contributed to it enough recently, and maybe that’s taken away my blogging concentration-quota recently, (or at least the desire to blog at home), despite the topics being totally separate.

In addition to all of this, the actual amount of spare time I have is significantly reduced; something that I was fully aware would happen, and I’ve ‘tried’ to cater for it, but it’s not until you literally have *no* spare time that you appreciate it.  So, when I do get a little spare time, I’ve got work/projects that I want to get on and do, and this ‘playtime’ comes mostly at about 8pm – 10pm. 

I’m not moaning or complaining about any of this, it’s just that I think that this is a key area of being a parent that I think is worth highlighting for those who have not yet had the joys of being a parent.  Maybe this is why parents look forward to shipping their children out when they’re old enough to move out, as the spare time factor returns? Only another 18 years left then…

Ok, this post might be a little geeky for some, but it’s all in the cause of the baby. Honest.

I’ve been re-working a photo album for Jack that I made earlier in the year, using a Microsoft tool called Deep Zoom Composer. 

Basically, the result is a wall of photos that you, as a visitor to the site, can zoom right into any of the pictures, and move the wall about by simply dragging it with the mouse.  It’s really clever and the results are fantastic.

You need to have Microsoft’s Silverlight installed in order to be able to view it, but this is a quick and very easy thing to get installed, and once installed, it stays there for the next time you need it, very much like the Adobe Flash Player does.

The Hard Rock Cafe chain used it a year or two ago to show-off more of the memorabilia that they’ve collected over the years – have a look at their site to see exactly what I’m re-creating here, but with photos of Jack instead of electric guitars and leather jackets. When you visit their site, just double-click and drag the main section of the page.

What I’ve done, is created a blank project and then simply gone through our millions of photos of Jack and dragged several from each collection into the library inside Deep Zoom and then started to arranged them however I liked.

I’ve gone for a time-based approach, meaning that the older photos are nearer the bottom, with the latest being right at the top.  It works quite well, as by dragging the wall up/down, you can really see how much he’s changed over the past months, etc.

I haven’t added all of the photos that we have of Jack, as that might be silly, seeing as we do have literally… lots.  But so far, I’ve added 327 high resolution images. The higher the resolution, the better the result, but the bigger the output; last time I did this, I added about 85 photos and that resulted in two thousand output images, as the program generates different ‘layers’ of each image, making the total number quite high.  I dread to think how many I’ll generate with this one.

The other problem, is that ideally, for you to be able to see it, I’ll have to upload the output webpage and all of the output images to my webspace… So depending upon how many images are produced and what the total size is, will depend on

     a) how long it’ll take to upload

     b) if i choose to upload them or not.  If not, I’ll try to reduce the output quality to get a manageable size, in terms of disk space on the webserver.

But, for the record, the whole program is done in a point-and-click-style, or WYSIWYG if you please.  Either way, it’s very easy to use and it’s also free to use.

One thing I have noticed, is how much difference the number of megapixels on a camera can make to the photographs;  The smaller camera we have is what we’ve had for a little while now, which I think it’s a 3 or 4 Megapixel Canon camera, and takes some great photos, but also has the benefit of being pocket sized, which is brilliant.  The newer one that we’ve had since March this year, is a 10 Megapixel Sony DSLR camera and is a much bigger and bulkier camera, but the file size of each photo is much bigger, because the quality of the photo is higher, which means that the amount you can zoom into those pictures through Deep Zoom is certainly noticeable.

Already this photo album is out of date, as Claire’s been taking yet more photos on both cameras during the day, but I’ll try and keep this all up-to-date.  It’ll be available on Jack’s website in the next week or so, depending upon how long it takes to finish. 

One thing is worth noting though, this many images in one place can be a little worrying… My PC is at present only processing a preview of the output, and just to do that, both cores of my processor are maxed out at 100% usage and have been for a while… This, in layman's terms, means that the computer is working *very* hard to do whatever it’s doing, so if you’re going to try this, the better your PC, the quicker it does things like this.  I have an Intel Core2-duo 2.66Ghz Dell PC with [only] 4GB of memory and it’s doing ok. The newer PCs out on the market now are being sold with quad-core i7 processors, which must love stuff like this, but I think they’re only available for the uber-geeks at the moment… (naming no names!)

But for a free piece of software that has truly remarkable results that pretty much anyone with a [decent-ish] PC can do, I think it’s absolutely brilliant.  But that’s just me.

Update: I’ve just finished exporting the project, and it’s produced a staggering amount of images… 59,800 to be precise, and weighing in at 885 MB in size! I don’t know how long it’s going to take to upload the best part of a gigabyte of information to a remote webserver..! Blimey.

I have been re-reading some of the very first blog posts that I had written to get the ball rolling on this whole ‘blogging’ thing, such as What’s the story so far? or some of the posts leading up to the FINALLY – He’s been born! post, and ultimately, The ‘Package’ has arrived..!, which I’m really glad I wrote about as now I’d struggled to remember that day in such detail!!

It all seems like such a long time ago since The First Night, and even though it’s only 7 or so months ago, it is if you consider what’s happened in the mean-time.  Jack has not only been born, but has learnt an awful lot about the world already, including that gravity exists each time he tried to move and that crying usually results in a mummy or a daddy to come running in.

As I said all that time ago, I wanted to start a blog to '”take note on the joys of becoming a father for the first time…” and all that, and I’d like to think that I have in some ways done exactly that. 

I have just looked on the bottom right, beneath my mug-shot to see that this will be blog post 101, which I’m also surprised about, as I didn’t think I’d get much time to do this, but also I didn’t think I’d have the patience and concentration to do this, as I tend to get caught up in the new and interesting stuff to do, and sometimes let the stuff I’m meant to be doing drag on a little. Something Claire and my folks might express an opinion on!

People have read some of the posts on here and commented about how nice an idea it is, to record some of the details that might have been forgotten.  Admittedly, I haven’t blogged about every little detail about what’s happened, but I’ve tried my best so far, and it is tough to do this.  I’m slightly worried that Jack will not like this in the future; I don’t know how I’d feel about it if my folks had recorded a public diary like this.  So if you’re reading this in 10 or 15 years Jack, the blog wasn’t actually for you, it was for me, you just happened to be the topic of conversation!!

As most of you might know, ages ago, I created a parallel site to this blog, which is full of almost all of the photos and videos that we have of Jack to date, give or taken the odd day recently.  Having a public site (this one) and a private site (that one) has made it easier really to divide the world; I wanted friends and family to see our little man growing up and how much he had changed without making our photos public to the world. Although, admittedly, I didn’t envisage having quite as many photos of him, as we now have 2998 photos in our Juniper folder, now consuming 7.5GB of disk space.  Yes, we still make the occasional reference to the codename! But thinking about it, if we’ve taken that many photos in just 7 months, that’s an average of 428 per month.  So by the time he’s a year old, we’ll have over 5,000 photos, and by the time he’s ten years old, we’ll have 50,000 photos! I just wonder if Microsoft’s SkyDrive will allow me to hold that many photos online!!

If you get bored at work or even at home, have a look at some of the earlier posts – yes, some of the things I have written make me cringe a bit and others make me look like a spoon, but you’re still reading it so it can’t be that bad!

So – I haven’t blogged recently.

I have been having to work more for work to meet a project deadline, and so some nights I have either been staying late in the office, or working from home which isn’t as bad.  Either way, I have managed to clock up lots of time-in-lieu, and so I am currently ‘spending’ some of that time accrued this week, which is the up-side to doing it.

Also, the last weekend or so, as I have been away on a Stag Do in Spain, no less. One of the lads on the stag do co-owns a place in Cazorla in Spain, and so it was the place to have the bash! The windy streets of the town of Cazorla kept us all on our toes, and probably helped to walk off most of the beer consumed over the weekend. (Cheers to Ian for that, by the way - much appreciated.)

In total, seven of us went (two dads, the groom, myself and three others) and all seven returned safely without prosecution or hospitalisation of any kind, as I think I was expecting before we went.

The weekend itself was great – totally non-touristy, and so we even had to explain in broken-pigeon-English to the locals why one of us, namely the groom, was dressed in a pink spandex legs and a matching tutu.  (Isn’t ebay a wonderful place!)

Anyway, reason I mention  this stag-do, is because it was the first time I have been away from Jack and Claire – we pretty much moved Claire and Jack out of our house and into her parent’s house for the long weekend, and the amount of baby-related fodder that needed taking was crazy.  Everything that could be taken, was. Literally. The boot on our new car was put through it’s paces, as things were rammed in there.

I know her parents were there to help her out, but I did feel bad for abandoning her when Jack is still quite young and a handful at times.  Claire even admitted that she now looks forward to me coming home at night after work, as it’s a time when she doesn’t have to sing ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ to keep Jack entertained when he starts to flag. So me not being there obviously has an impact on her, but also that I haven’t seen my little baby for a few days. (I am reading into this and see the fact that prior to Jack not being here, Claire didn’t look forward to me coming home… thanks, wife!)

At my old job where I was the IT Manager for an international sports event management company, part of the job was to go away on the weekend projects and not only oversee the IT side of things, but I would also pitch in and help the work of setting up to be done, as well as helping to drink all the beers afterwards.  Anyway, the least I’d be away was around 4/5 days at a time, and part of the reason to leave there and work where I do currently, is because of the time away from home and from Claire, which takes its toll after a while.  Now with a baby in the frame, there’s another face in the back of my head.

In terms of actually writing these blog posts, I have recently found a new tool that has made this all much easier! It’s called Windows Live Writer (part of the Windows Live Essentials tools) by Microsoft, and it’s everything that I have been wanting without me knowing about it!

I used to write the blog posts in Microsoft Word for it’s spell checker facility and then copy and paste the text into Adobe Dreamweaver, as Dreamweaver is an HTML-editor and since blog posts are essentially HTML, it’s easier to format the text, etc.   I would also have used Adobe Fireworks to modify or scale any images I wanted to use, to make them small and lightweight enough for use on the web.  Back into Dreamweaver to apply the changed images, and then once that part was finished, I would then upload any images to my webspace manually and then go back into Dreamweaver and re-link to use the online versions of the images.

Then… I would make sure that everything looked right, and then copy the raw HTML from Dreamweaver into the hidden part of this blog site when I had logged in.  Then, I’d re-read it (sometimes), add category tags, change minor little things here and there, before pressing the ‘Publish to Weblog’ button, which makes it live.

Until now.

Windows Live Writer takes note of which blogs you publish content to, namely this one, as well as any settings for it, such as the web address, username and password for it, and then it goes off to your website to find out what it needs to let you do everything inside of Live Writer!  When I say everything, I mean everything.

Right now, I am working on my computer in my house, on Live Writer.  In here, I am typing in the font that I would expect when published online, and can add things like images, photo albums, etc and I can also preview it on my PC too. When it ‘previews’ a blog post, it actually shows you everything that you’d expect to see when it appears on the internet, namely the header, navigation and so on.  Great – previews. Wow… No, there’s more.

Inside here, I can also set the same tags that I have configured inside my blog, which makes navigation in a particular topic much easier now that I’ve turned on the Navigation box (top-right of this page).  I can also publish this directly to my blog site and it appears instantly, without me needing to log in! OR, I can publish it in Edit Mode, which means that it will send up what I have written already, but not make it ‘live’ online until I press the aforementioned ‘Publish to Weblog’ button. Fantastic.

It does loads more stuff too, but these are enough to mean that I’ll carry on using Live Writer – I have also installed it on Claire’s laptop, so I can use that to make blog posts too and whack them up in exactly the same way.

The only downside was the installation – I wanted Live Writer, and when you download it from the Microsoft website (for free) it downloads pretty much all of the Live Essential tools – none of which I wanted – and then you pick which ones you want to install.  It also tries to install the MSN toolbar as part of the process, and you have to actually un-select it from the list.  None of these points are a pain, but I just thought I’d point this out really in case anyone wanted to try it.

Yeah, why do I write a blog?  I’ve been asked this a couple of times, initially by my wife who soon gave in and just let me get on with it.  Simple answer: because I wanted to.

I’ve never kept a diary as a child, or anything like that, so I really don’t know why I felt compelled to start writing something, let alone a public-facing weblog and why I’ve decided to share a few personal moments with you, the reader (all with Claire’s full permission, of course).

Blogging is quite enjoyable though - somehow relaxing almost, allowing you, the writer/author, the time to focus on particular areas of the day/week that you feel you want to write about.

It’s also quite difficult, as there is absolutely no feedback loop – I carry on writing these blog posts but have no (or little) idea as to the reader’s response or reaction to it.  The comments on each post are one way, but it is by no means brilliant.  But my point is, there’s no real way of me finding out how many people are actually reading the blog as a whole.

I have come to hear of friends and family members who have mentioned that they’ve been following the blog, for which I am a mix of being pleased, surprised and sometimes a little embarrassed too!

Some people have asked about how they go about getting a blog started and what I’d suggest they blog about...!  I’m not saying that I am, by any means, a form of authority in the world of blogging, as I’d be the first to admit that I’m still learning about all this too, as writing the posts can be difficult sometimes, especially if you’re short of material!  But having something like the pending birth of our first child is my ‘focused topic’ that I’m learning about on the job and something that I thought I’d like to cut my blogging-teeth on.  Two birds, one stone, and all that.

But I am pleased that people take the time to read it.  Some read it on their computers as and when they can, maybe catching up on a few posts at a time; some, including my mum, have my blog address entered into Outlook 2007 and get notified within minutes of me posting the article; some even get updates sent to their iPhones and Windows Mobile devices (which I tend to do for other blogs I follow).

I’ve been asked if I would write a bit of a techie-post about how this blog system works and where I’ve got this all from.  But I’ll hold off on that until I can get a few screen-shots or something to make it interesting as well as informative. And maybe after the baby is born!!