Tile engraving (by sarah)

I thought this might interest people - when we were on the Centenary Camp I was incharge of the tile 'engraving' which I had to work out as I went having only been left the equipment and no instructions!

Anyway the results are on Salaric including the Polyp tile I made for Alaric!

Screaming Tantrum (by sarah)

Yes Jean threw one yesturday and she hit me - evidently she didn't want museli for breakfast!

It was a real tantrum as well - I was shocked to say the least but turned out she was really tired and went fast asleep when we put her in the cot reguardless of the fact she hadn't eaten anything - she eat the musili quiet happily for lunch.

She is acting in every way like a two year old and has been for a couple of months - sigh.

Of Hernias and Blood Clots (by sarah)

I came back from seeing the surgeon on Friday not very happy - she proded my stomache lots but as always the damn lump chose to hide but thats what scans are for.

But then came the problem - what did I think my general health was like? Good/poor - I answered and she rapidly flicked through her notes - nothing there.

I gave a brief summary which all seemed ok until Al says, 'Oh and there was the heart trouble during the pregnancy...' She grilled us with questions looking more and more agitated as all we could say was we don't know and yes my notes are still missing from Essex and yes I was on blood thinners and no things didnt show up on the scan but no we dont know what it was all about.

So this leads her to pronounce that she can not operate on me until this is sorted out - even if there was a suspicion of clots during the pregnancy she wouldn't want to operate without a blood expert being involved and she would not be happy doing it unless things are life threatening.

So she's chasing things and if she doesnt hear back within eight weeks I have to go for blood tests and to see a heamotologist and stuff as if I am a 'clotty' person I'll have to go on blood thinners and stiff before any operations and I'll be risking death everytime I have a procedure done.

As you can imagine this didn't exactly make me or Alaric very happy especially as she then went on to say that it will affect future pregnancies and stuff and that someone should have spoken to us about this as things will have to be heavily managed and stuff.

It's all a big crashing wave again, I thought oh this is a simple procedure with little risk these days and I should recover fine - but no things never work like that for us do they?

On the plus side though it might just be a beniegn lump thing which obviously they would normally remove but wont if the clot stuff makes it too risky. Also it means that I can have treatment (blood thinners I assume) to help prevent any early strokes or heart attacks so maybe its a good thing really.

The issue with operations as far as I recall what she was saying is that clots will tend to form in the legs and then go zooming off around the body lodging in the lungs and and stuff so if I do have an opp it will be sexy stockings like during the pregnancy all over again!

Another thing I hate about Web application frameworks (by alaric)

They have basically zero support for reusable components.

Right now, I'm writing an app that lets you claim phone numbers from a pool. It has an interface where you can see what numbers you already have, and a page you can go to to claim more numbers by doing a search, then clicking on a number you like to claim it.

This page is implemented by a server-side script (actually, it's a Rails controller, but that's an irrelevant detail at this level) that spits out a search form and a list of matching numbers. The form posts back to the same script; if you hit Search it re-runs the search and displays the new results; if you hit Grab it claims the selected number in your name, and replies with a redirect to the details page for that number.

But now I need to add to it so that new users, when they sign up, get to choose three numbers, which are stored slightly specially in the database, differently from numbers they subsequently claim.

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Cloth badges (by alaric)

As I mentioned before, I have a cloth badge sewn onto my coat of many pockets. Now, Sarah is an avid collector of most things, including such badges; she has bags and boxes of them, generally not sewn onto anything. I don't have the urge to collect like that, but I wouldn't mind a few more to sew onto my coat.

I wouldn't want just any badges sewn on, though; I'm not even keen on picking up badges from places I visit and sewing them on to mark the event.

I think I'd probably like some nerdy ones, to be honest. A NetBSD logo or a hacker emblem would be pretty cool. But I'd really like something Lispy, so I designed the following:

Now, I've found places that will make badges for you, but the minimum orders tend to be in the realm of 100, at a cost of 85 pounds or so... and I don't know if I can sell the spares on to anybody 😉 Perhaps I need to set up a "nerdy cloth badges" business...

The SVN source is available for download, BTW. It was made on a Mac and uses an Apple font for the nice curly lambda, but I'm sure other platforms will have a good font that can be used instead.