Grabbing things (by alaric)

Jean's getting better at grabbing things.

She can now quite proficiently pick things up and feed them into her mouth; she's been doing so for a while, but now she manages to orient things correctly for insertion. Previously, she'd grab something in her fist, with the thing ending up poking out of the bottom of her fist, and then shove her fist in her mouth fruitlessly; now she'll rotate her fist to get the protruding morsel.

Also, since I change her in the bathroom (Sarah's father made us a most excellent changing table that sits on top of the bath, since we are short of bathroom space), I've been teaching her to pull the bathroom light switch cord. At first she'd just grab at it when I lifted her up to it and try to eat it, but with a bit of demonstration, she now manages to turn the light on or off without help about two thirds of the time. She now eagerly twists her head to find the pull cord whenever I pick her up from the changing table, looking forward to turning the light off as we leave.

Van! (by alaric)

Well, last weekend we picked up our van from Sarah's parents, who have been looking after it, and I drove it home.

I like my van.

For a start, all three of us can sit in the front, with Jean in her baby car seat in the middle, Sarah on the left, and me in the driving seat. This makes it easier to entertain her and supply her with milk than when she's alone in the back of a car.

Also, the van has manual transmission, which I'm more accustomed to and generally find easier than the automatic transmission of the car. I'm not quite sure why, but I find it really hard to maintain a speed with automatic cars... the speed seems to creep up or down unless I'm watching it all the time. With a manual, I get it into the correct gear, then just listen to the tone of the engine to regulate the pressure on the accelerator, and it stays at the same speed.

The van is more fun than a car, since you're sitting very high up and can see far ahead. The road seems to be moving much slower beneath you since it's further away; everything seems to happen in slow motion compared to being down by the ground in a car; you can plan further ahead and think about things more carefully.

There's a big comfortable soft steering wheel, hooked up to a power assisted steering system with an impressively tight turning circle for such a large vehicle. You can almost drive it sideways; I can stop the van with the nose about one or two metres away from a wall in front, put it in full lock, drive on, and end up parallel to the wall without needing to reverse. You can tell the van was designed for delivery drivers in London!

I've yet to do a complete test, but it seems more fuel efficient than the car, which is a surprise considering that it's a large cuboid of a vehicle with a 2.5 litre engine compared to a small streamlined thing with a 1.3 litre engine.. The car uses about 16 pence worth of fuel to drive a mile. It was nearly empty when I put about £45 worth of fuel into it, and it's driven about 240 miles since - but the fuel gauge is showing about three eighths full. When I next fill it up and reset the odometer I'll know for sure, but it's looking something like 10 pence per mile.

And, needless to say, being a van, it has a 'boot' ('trunk' to you Americans) about the size of my bathroom, into which one can chuck things without having to go to great lengths packing them down.

The only main downside is that there's only room for two passengers, not the four that can squeeze into a car...

Updates! (by alaric)

I'm being lambasted by distant friends for not updating the blog!

Truth is, I've been rather busy. A project (let's call it Project A, since I'm under NDA for most things I do) was delayed due to the required hardware being slow to arrive in the first place, not working, new hardware being obtained, Linux drivers being a pain, and so on. So it overran into time I was planning to spend relaxing, meaning I'm still somewhat worn out - and time I was meaning to spend on another project (let's call it Project B), and catch up on something I was doing nearly a year ago when Sarah started getting really ill in the pregnancy, and have shamefully kept the client waiting on for ages since all I get for finishing it is £500, and I've sadly had to invest my remaining time in struggling to rebuild our savings after the period of no work and expensive house-moving. Let's call that Project C.

In the meantime, I'm still being paid by the hour to look after Client D, who have a wide range of jobs on the go. TOO wide. Client D are a bit of a nightmare to work with due to the management being somewhat technically challenged, which causes all sorts of problems, but hourly working with a "to-do" list that grows faster than any one human being can do the work (I used to be full time with them, and have open todo items from years ago...) means that it's a reliable way to make some regular monthly money when I have time, and if I stay employed with them, I may yet get to vest my share options (which would come to a very tidy sum, if things continue as they are).

So there I am struggling to deal with projects overlapping each other when they shouldn't, while at the same time supporting Sarah and Jean; Sarah is still in a lot of pain so she needs me to help with physical stuff, including taking her to various medical appointments during the working day; and we've had to go to London a lot lately, which takes out who blocks of days at a time.

Still, I've now finished Project A. I'm now sorting out Project C and doing what I can on Project B, while somewhat coasting on Client D, just doing the things they really need me to do ASAP. This will cost me when I get paid next month, but I have some money from Project A now, so will survive.

And we'll go on holiday to Wales next week!

Of course, all clients want me to devote ALL my time to them, and get upset if they schedule a meeting with me and then find out I can't make it because I'm doing something else, and get upset I didn't tell them I was going on holiday. I need to find ways to gently remind some of them that I'm a freelance contractor, not an employee...

Anyway, having got that off my chest, I will now proceed to blog some fun stuff!

Lazy eye (by alaric)

I have a lazy eye. I was born long sighted and astigmatic in my left eye, and therefore my developing retinal ganglae and visual cortex have taken much more notice of the clean signal from my right eye rather than the fuzzy one from my left.

Now, opticians have always told me that this is incurable. They can set up lenses that make the vision in my left eye clear - I can tell the edges are sharper, rather than fuzzy - but still, thanks to the lack of neural development, I can't process the image properly. I have to close my dominant eye to see my left-eye signal properly, and even then, a pall of blackness from the closed dominant eye is obscuring everything; my left-eye signal comes murkily through amongst the blackness. On top of that, because the normal blurry signal from my eye doesn't have good edge information in, I can't see edges properly. Even with the optical issues corrected, the edge-detection stuff hasn't properly developed, and I see an odd hard-to-describe world of patches of colours and textures; yet when I try to concentrate on where the boundary between two patches is, it eludes me.

The opticians tell me that even though lenses make the image in my left eye noticeably sharper, the neural stuff will never get better, so I'm refused glasses these days (even though I have a hunch I might get less headaches with spectacles, since my left eye still seems to try to focus on things and then aches).

However, today I read this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4849244.stm

Apparently, VR researchers have been treating this kind of thing by putting people in a VR game, while feeding incomplete visual signals to each eye. Eg, one eye seems some objects, the other eye sees others. This forces both eyes to operate together, rather than the old patch-over-the-good-eye technique, which often ended up causing difficulty in co-ordinating both eyes together.

This fills me with hope. For a start, it looks like the optician's statements that there was no way of fixing the neural issues is poppycock...

So as soon as I get time, I'm going to an optician and demanding spectacles, this time with this article to show them!

MOT (by alaric)

Well, the car passed its MOT, despite needing to have various bits of suspension-related mechanism replaced (nearside front MacPherson strut and rear wheel bearing), and a hole in the exhaust piping.

Although it seemed better at first, it's still a bit stuttery when started from cold. It no longer seems to stall when the brake is applied, so the general tuning and servicing probably helped a bit (carburettor adjustment?) - and I've found that running it for a minute or two when first started, then bringing it up to 4000RPM for a second or two, makes it then run smoothly. It also runs on a little after stopping; it's been suggested that these two things are both due to buildups of carbon in the cylinders.

So I'm considering finding some of that stuff you can put in that eats it all away, but I'm also mindful that the carbon layer may be compensating for two decades of cylinder/piston wear, so it might not be such a great idea...

Perhaps I should just replace the engine with an oil-fired Tesla turbine, with a Stirling engine to recover waste heat - both feeding generators, with electrical transmission to individual wheel motors via a compulsator energy reservoir for sudden acceleration, and to power the coaxial railgun.