Simon Julian

Well, December has apparently been a bit quiet (read busy) since I haven’t gotten anywhere near writing anything for a fair while!

Might get a bit of time later on today to do some work around this blog, will have to see how it goes!

Having moved across to Reactive a few weeks ago (might have spoken about that, think I did), I want to start to point to some of the excellent work that is being done by the team.

First of the bat is the Metro trains website, which went live a couple of weeks ago now.

http://www.metrotrains.com.au/

Metro are the new metropolitan rail service for Melbourne, having inherited the network from Connex.

Have been reading a bit from Harrison Monarth’s ‘Executive Presence’ blog recently and have just bought the book – a very good read I thought and I like a lot of the ideas and strategies put forward in his writings.

I’d recommend the blog, extremely good read.

Found this yesterday…

From an article on newteevee.com by Janko Roettgers:

“Remember how iTunes popularized podcasts? The same could soon happen to TV torrenting, thanks to a new BitTorrent application called TVTrigger. Windows-only TVTrigger is like an iTunes for your torrent downloads. It sits on your desktop, giving you access to a programming guide with a few thousand TV shows, complete with torrent links to download each one of them.”

Full text of article here: http://newteevee.com/2009/11/11/tvtrigger-is-like-itunes-for-tv-torrenting/

Looks interesting so far, seems like it does what it says it does!

http://www.8yseven.com/TVTrigger/Home.aspx

Thought that I would put up a few more shots of Finn from yesterday and today.

Finn manages to get out 0f the Humidicrib and get some cuddles going – yes he’s also managed to unhook himself a bit more as well so he’s doing  well!

Okay, I live in the land of the boring title, can’t help that right now, will try to come up with some more interesting ones as I post some more photos!

Day #2 was great, Finn seems to have decided that he was coming early, I’m assuming that it was boring where he was or something as he seems to have gone incredibly well once he was born. He came out of the ICU today and went into what is called ‘Special Needs’ at the Women’s, which is basically the rest of the Premature baby ward. The fact that he got out of there so fast was great, but even better that he came off the CPAP as well, which means that he is fully breathing on his own and doesn’t need any assistance.

His colour got a lot better based on the fact that he was basically living in a little tanning salon (under the UV lights) for the night. He still has a feeding tube and will for a few weeks until he is ready to breastfeed, but apart from that he’s doing really well.

Some more photos of the little tacker.

Okay I’m going to backdate this a bit as I have a chunk of photos of the wonderful new arrival that I want to add. Here are a few shots from his first day in the world. These are slightly confronting if you haven’t ever been to a prenatal ward – which we definitely hadn’t before Finn.

Suffice to say that there are a lot of machines and wires and tubes etc all in a halo around the humidicrib, which is where he spent his first day. There are also a huge number of really great people who you automatically knew that you could rely on and who really know what they are doing, so that side of things was absolutely amazing.

Another one

Well, so it has been a pretty big couple of weeks, necessitating me committing the cardinal sin and backdating some blog posts to when they should have actually happened (hey, I had a few other things that I was doing at that point!).

Finn  Oliver Julian was born on the 1st of November 2009 at 8.12pm, after a very quick (one and a half hours) labour – I think I was lucky to make it at all, if it hadn’t been for the handy ‘lightspeed’ feature on the Golf I might not have. Disclaimer for Victoria Police: I never speed, ever, even when attending my son’s birth. Well, maybe then…

Finn was very early (31 weeks), so he got the full Platinum class treatment and went straight to the ICU. All as well as it could be at that point – he was hooked up to a host of machines and given an IV, also put onto the CPAP, which helps to keep the baby’s lungs inflated so that they get some help in breathing. The staff at the Royal Women’s are incredibly competent and we really got the feeling that they knew what they were doing – plus they were very warm as well, which you need at a time like this.

Trace came to see him after an hour and a half or so of getting over the birth and having a shower etc, we both sat with him for a fair while as they checked him and looked after him – again it was really good and he was doing very well, which was great. Trace stayed at the hospital and I went home for some well-earned sleep after all the excitement…big day!

Okay so I started reading this because I loved the slightly creepy flavor that it left in my mouth…people tend to do some weird shit when confronted with things like dating sims and this was an interesting look into that world.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/27/advisor-my-husband-h.html

Plus I always did like Boing Boing. But I digress.

The thing that really got me thinking was one of the comments at the end of the story;

“I have a box of dead Tamagochi from my kids I feel weird throwing them away the kids loved them so much but being kids moved on to other things and you you can bring them back to life I guess but its weird”

I loved the whole feeling of this post – in the end the kids went beyond the bounds of the virtual, got bored and moved on to something else – and yet the slightly weird feeling of harbouring the dead remains (even if you CAN bring them back to life!).

Virtualisation of both pets and relationships doesn’t change our basic frameworks for dealing with existence, and as such we still place the same mores and values around the virtual relationships (and lives) as we do around the ‘real’. So we can end up in some very strange situations (but the Tamagotchi is DEAD daddy!).

I wonder at how this is going to affect us as virtualisation becomes more entrenched in many aspects of society and we get more ‘virtual’ relationships…