Author: Dave

Daddy daughter day

Today Simone is off doing some surgical assisting, and so thanks to a few bottles of pre-emptively expressed milk and a minute-to-minute timetable for me to adhere to (already Charlotte is lamenting having been born to two type A personality organisation freak parents) we get to have our first proper day together alone.

Admittedly due to her love of sleeping, and feeding, and sleeping some more, it’s not exactly high adventures at the Ramsay house, but still, it’s nice.

Social butterfly

Charlotte is now a few days over a month old and now thinks she should be allowed to expand her social circle.

So she went out to dinner with a few of our friends.

And did lunch at a local italian restaurant with the parentals.

And had a friend over for a play date (our friends Tim and Renee had a little boy a day after Charlotte).

And have taken the Rolls out with the chauffeurs for a day touring the coffee plantations and vineyards (ie we took a day trip to the Atherton tablelands).

Next week it’s champaign cocktails before the Gala ball…. (And her designer dress is just divine don’t you know).

Wow, Vista REALLY sucks..

I’ve just been involved trying to do some stuff on a computer running vista, and even after everything I’ve read, I was still quite startled how completely hopeless it was.

It’s slow. I mean really really slow. I think there may have been another system task running in the background, but I still managed to get the graphics to stutter while playing solitaire.

It asks me to confirm almost everything I try to do. After the fifth “Windows needs to check whether you really want to do what you’ve just asked it to do” dialog box in as many minutes I began to move from finding it comical to just outright irritating.

It arrived with absolutely tons of bloatware and trialware, which I suppose I can at least in part blame the hardware vendor for, but it was still an annoyance in that it took windows ages to uninstall it all.

It remains difficult or impossible to do even simple things (like resizing a photo to be a desktop wallpaper without having it stretched so the people in it look short and fat…).

And as advertised by so many other tech blogs, it just doesn’t work with other company’s software. I won’t even start with the fun I’ve had already in this department.

Suffice it to say that if you’ve got XP, for god’s sake don’t “upgrade”, and for myself I’m profoundly glad I made the switch to a mac. OSX is soo much nicer than vista.

Wiiiiii!!

I have a Nintendo Wii, and so far I have been a little frustrated by the variety of games available, but perhaps the tide is starting to turn.

I intend to acquire Super mario galaxy and Simsons game, to compliment Hit and run from the gamecube.

Recently I also saw that a game called Destroy all Humans that had previously been available only for playstation has come out in it’s latest iteration for the Wii as well, and I’m keen to try it out.

And today I also ready that the new Wii specific version of Mario Kart has been released, and there is a Wii version of Mario golf in the works as well.

Happy happy joy joy.

It has a light side, it has a dark side…

 I ran into a rather cool little story that I had not previously been aware of, about how on the Apollo 17 mission one of the fenders had fallen off the moon buggy and they had to repair it using Duct Tape.

It reminded me of a quote I found a few years back that went:
Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, it has a dark side, and it hold the universe together.

Log of amusements

On thursday and friday I was at a conference, and it was attended by quite a number of Queensland Health Big Wigs.

Now following afternoon tea they got a couple of people in to lead us through some Tai Chi.

Needless to say a hundred and something mainly middle age white folk (because there were quite a high proportion of women as well as men) stumbling their way through a directed group relaxation session is a highly amusing sight to behold, and it’s also amusing how many people will do something because everyone else is doing it..

Food critic

Well Charlotte is 10 days old and finally seems to be getting the hang of the breast feeding thing, and is (by and large) sleeping well also. Initially she didn’t seem to get it, and would get on, suck a few times, and then just sit there not doing anything more. Thankfully however she seems to have decided that she likes the menu at the all you can eat Mummy’s restaurant and has been latching and suckling for 30 or 40 minutes at a go.

Currently she is lying curled up against my chest listening to massive attack with me and overseeing my blogging, and she hasn’t objected to anything I’ve written so far. It’s already a pretty foregone conclusion that she’s going to grow up immersed in my computer activities, and as well as overseeing my blogging she got her first introduction to gaming the other day, helping daddy play Sam ‘n’ Max for an hour or so.

She has been on a few trips into the outside world with mummy and grandma and grandad, including a trip to the hospital to meet mummy and daddy’s work friends and colleagues (everyone wanted to give her a cuddle, and there were extensive “Oh, isn’t she cute”‘s from just about every nurse we saw), to the mall for a bit of shopping (Charlotte wanted a new outfit or four, and was working pretty hard at trying to convince mum that she also needed a matching handbag…), and out to Palm Cove to sip coffee at the beach.

Meanwhile daddy has been slaving away at work. Poor daddy :-(.

Anyway we remain quite pleased with her. As one of my coworkers commented yesterday, she seem to be a generally superior product.

With luck I will get some more photos of her up sometime over the weekend.

Enlightening

I’ve always been a little curious how the money from the price of a CD gets divvied up, and I recently found something that gave some indication. Apparently on a US$15.99 CD it breaks down as follows,

$0.17 Musicians’ unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists’ royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead

Interesting.