Cake! (by alaric)

Sarah made me a nice cake for my birthday. It was quite an involved process:

It's really nice - it tastes of honey! The icing came out runnier than we'd expected and ran straight down the sides and pooled around the base, but that was only a minor issue.

Jeany counting (by sarah)

Jean is now counting its a bit erratic but today she counted up to five completely on her own with no reversals, repertitions or skippings of numbers!

How long before I get to do geometry with her properlly? Al told me off like a year ago for drawing shapes like a two dimensional repressentation of a three dimensional prism - he said slipping it in with circle, square and triangle wasn't on :/

Earthquake (by sarah)

Last night at 0:57 according to my alarm clock there was an earthquake. It woke me up - at first I thought my back was spasming but there was a marked abscense of pain so I thought the cat must be cleaning herself vigourously on the bed next to me except something didn't seem quiet right with that either.

Then I realised it was the building shaking, it was like being inside a bell, ting ting ting, high pitched and full of harmonics - all the vases and trinket boxes not to mention the glass door cabernates where resonating, chinking and ringing with a sort of strange music. Perplexed I still lay in my bed scrabling for my glasses, then the light switch clicked but alas the shaking had dimished so that I could not rate it on the ....... scale. The motion had been decidedly sideways and I had heared no plane or anything plus the motion was... sustained.

However I know sufficiently large explosions can cuase tremors so I phoned AL to make sure he was ok and too try and convince him to twitter and blog the event but he wouldn't. I phoned my mum whilst doing the rounds to check that Jean etc... was ok - no one else had awoken and I begian to doubt myself especially when Mum said 'you sure you didn't have a dizzy spell.' I answered that no it couldnt have been as there was the sounds I had heared.

Al had asked if there was any other sound and this was a hard question for me to answer as due to having spent my early years almost completely deaf (untill 4 when I had an op) I 'hear' sound with motion such as thumping floor boards - the reason I loved my dads heavy metal initially and not the more melodic sweet music of my mum - I could feel the music. To me the undulation motion was a sort of noise but I don't think there was an actual audiable noise.

Alaric was suprised I was so excited but I was like - its a geological phonominon and I never thought I'd experience my first earthquake in a bed in Gloucestershire! I had sort of assumed that that honour would occure when we finially got to visit places like Japan!

On the news this morning they reported the quake to be 5 on the rictor scale and occuring at 1 in the morning - did anyone else feel this? Which fualt? What depth etc.... more info greatly appricieted!

Experiments on animals (by alaric)

I was doing something in the kitchen; Jean was toddling around playing with a hair grip. The kind that's two plastic jaws closed by a spring. She was gripping it on to bits of her clothing, and various objects around the kitchen, experimenting with what it would hold onto well.

She wandered out of the kitchen into the living room, then came back a bit later, looking thoughtful.

"Cat no like it" she said, waving the hair grip at me.

I'm amazed she wasn't crying and nursing a scratch!

Mental modes (by alaric)

Hmmm, it appears I have two mental modes when working.

1. Deeply focussed into something. I block out distractions to hold onto the focus. This is what I need when I'm programming. Once I get into this mood, I get a lot done, since I have all the pertinent information sitting in my head and all the correct windows open on my computer, but it can be an uphill struggle to get started.

2. Event driven. When I'm dealing with emails, phonecalls, broken servers, and that sort of thing, I'm in a very different mode, agily flipping between things. I come across problems that will clearly need some deep focus, and I have to put them off for later, since it takes me a while to get out of deep mode and into event-driven mode.

This morning I've been event-driven, catching up on email, dealing with a down server, and now I really ought to try moving back into deep focus mode to work on something else, and I'm finding it hard; my thoughts just keep jumping around!

I really want to decrease my dependence on lots of deep thought mode for earning money; part of this revolves around getting an underling to do more of the programming so I can be event-drivenly mentoring them while doing the considerably easier form of deep thought required to design software architectures for them to implement... which is a work in progress as we speak...