Since the blog post about Jack’s walking, he’s getting better and better as each day passes. His confidence in himself is probably what is increasing, as I think that he’s physically been able to walk for a little while now – when we used to hold his hands, he’d be fine, but he’d start to panic as soon as you let go, even though he was fine. Either way, his walking is fantastic. It means that he can make the other side of the house before you know that he’s gone, which is a worry! People used to say: “ooh, when he can crawl, then you’ll be on your toes…”, which later turned into “ooh, when he can walk, you’ll be on your toes even more..!” True to form, now that he can walk, he’s off. But it’s actually ok, as it’s as though now that he can walk, he’s expanded the horizons on where he can go, in that, beforehand, we didn’t really want him crawling on the grass, but now that he can walk, he’s able to wander over to the trees in the garden, or chase Alfie (the dog) around, albeit slowly and with arms flapping around. Also, the fact that he’s up on two legs now rather than crawling around on all fours, instantly makes him look… more grown up? Does that make sense? Obviously, he’s still garbles his words and dribbles a fair bit, but the walking thing certainly helps. The Beach
Friday afternoon, as the weather was really nice and we were both off work, Claire and I decided to take Jack and the dog to the beach for a walk. We weren’t expecting a great deal, in that we took the buggy/pram too, expecting to have to push Jack along the beach, but getting some fresh sea-air in the meantime. Yeah… he was off, and wasn’t hanging around for us!   
I think he really liked it, as we let him wander off where-ever he wanted to go, as there wasn’t anything (or anyone) around to bother him, except of course the billions of litres of sea-water that was gradually coming in-land. Other than that, he was fine, occasionally tripping over something that wasn’t there, but that was probably because he was trying run after the dog and that his flappy little feet couldn’t keep up with his head! I don’t think that the dog who wasn’t overly impressed about it all though. We also took his shoes and socks off and he and I went into the sea. He was splashing around, getting wet, getting me even wetter, all whilst giggling about it the whole way through. He kept trying to go towards the crabs that were floating in the shallow waters, but they still looked quite alive to me!   
The weather there was brilliant that afternoon. The sun was shining, but it wasn’t baking hot, there wasn’t very much of a breeze at all, and the best thing was that the beach was empty! We kept Jack’s coat on in case of him getting cold, but in fact it more helped in keeping the sun off his head more than anything! Also, true to form, we did manage to take about 200 photos that afternoon, the better ones of which Claire has uploaded to Jack’s mini-site.
A little while ago, I blogged about the flash-cards (part 1 and part 2) that I had made using photos of vehicles from the internet, and stuck them around the playroom for Jack. Well, I’ve added to them recently, to build up his collection of modes of transportation:       
I think I picked the obvious ones last time, and now to make it a little more interesting, I thought I’d add a few non-standard modes of transportation. Such as a tank, or dumper truck. He’s getting really good at the ones he has already – he’s only a year old and so can’t pronounce the words properly, but he’ll look around the room for the one you ask him for and point very definitely at it. It’s practise really, that’s all. He’s got toys that are trains, a digger, a dump truck (Tonka Truck) and I thought he might like them. But what’s next? Do I try and find more obscure means of transportation? Or do I try to specialise in each category? i.e. Ferrari, Porsche, etc? Hmm. I’ll have to think about that and see how he gets on with these. But I’m starting to struggle with more types of vehicles I can get him – any suggestions?
Oh my word. … … It’s finally here. Jack is one year old tomorrow. A whole year old, 365 days and all that. I wanted to write something here about the fact that it’s his birthday, not because it’s his birthday, but the fact that it’s here, upon us. He’s grown so much in the past few months, its unreal. He now stands up taller than the side of his cot in the mornings when we go to get him up. He can even reach the drawers on the unit beside the cot and bang it shut when he’s bored! Little monster. Some of his clothes seem to have shrunk too. The older stuff I mean. The clothes that he had several months ago, seem to be a bit tight, especially the baby-grow/jumpsuit type of clothes that go over his head and get his feet in too, stitching together between his legs. However, the alternative is the newer clothes that are still too big for him that make him look like Maggie from The Simpsons, where her blue clothing drags behind her and trips her up every other minute – Jack’s just the same, as it’s his ‘feet’ in his new baby-grow/jumpsuit thing that are too long and drag behind him. Claire and I were just talking about this being a weird year, and that it feels like a really long year in one respect, as we’ve had almost zero sleep, but then on the other hand, it seems like the days/weeks/months this year have literally flown by – once we’ve got home from work, had food, sorted out Jack and got him to bed, there’s a bit of time left to clean up, or in some cases, make his food, and then it’s midnight. Kapow. But, as I might have mentioned earlier, tomorrow is indeed Jack’s birthday. I have the day off work and we’re off to Rhyme Time in the morning and then off to see how much the little fattie weighs. We’ve noticed that there’s a few photos missing from the SkyDrive photo collection and we’re in the process of uploading them. Same, too, for the video clips on Jack’s website: my mum constantly has her digital camera set to video mode, and has helped in almost doubling the video clips that we have of him to process, and upload to YouTube, and then linking to the website. I have days occasionally where by it’s great to do something like that, but at the moment, finding the several hours to sit there and vet them isn’t possible! Oh, one other really important fact for me to record here, is that we have officially taken… 4806 photos of Jack in his first year, which averages out at about 13 photos per day!! That’s quite worrying really..!! But we’d rather have them and look at the occasionally, than to have not taken them at all and wish that we had. So – tomorrow, Jack stops begin none-years old! Wahey!
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 mentioned in the past about the ease of taking too many photos with digital cameras. Well, I have been busy uploading the past few weeks worth of photos to the SkyDrive account (free online storage) and it crossed my mine to check the amount of photos, to see what sort of disk space we’re consuming online. On the computer in our house, there’s 10 Gigabytes of photos related to Jack. That’s 10,000 Megabytes – 12.5 CD-R’s full, or just over 2 DVD’s full of images. In all, there’s 3833 photo of the little tyke. Admittedly, not 100% of the photos we have are online as, believe it or not, we do actually vet the photos before we upload them, removing - any blurry or pointless photos
- any that make Claire or I look bad
- any that are almost exactly the same as the ten before it
- any with Jack’s tinkle in them
In terms of the online storage aspect, I’m not really worried at the moment, as I believe that Microsoft give you 25GB of free storage space these days with the SkyDrive accounts, which is up from the 5GB that I had when I first created the account a year or two ago. Maybe in another 8 months when we’re nearing the 20GB limit, we might have to look at creating another account maybe!!
It’s fair to say that we have taken a number of photos of Jack already. If anyone has been around to visit since he’s been born, we have tried to get a few snaps of them with him, as there’s no cost to the photographs themselves, and they’re an instant memory for many many years down the line, providing that the photo files are still around!
I have recently got a Digital SLR camera and have been taking some fantastic photos of Jack, whilst at the same time feeling a member of the paparazzi, which is good fun for me, not-so-good-fun the person in front of the camera! Either way, the quality of the photos are immense, as it’s a 10.2 megapixel camera, compared to the 3.2 megapixel point-and-click camera that we’ve been using for the past couple of years. When we had that, the photos that it was creating was fantastic, so it shows that when you think things can’t get much better, they do!
We still use the point-and-click camera, as the size of it means that it is pocket size and much easier to carry around.
The photos from either camera are constantly uploaded for family and friends to my Skydrive account, mentioned a while ago here.
I have just checked our photos folder, and we have currently 869 photos of Jack and he's only 9 weeks old! Blimey!
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