Author: Martin

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Well, now we know

Well, now we know when B will be born: Wednesday 11 April!

We had a visit with the consultant (Dr. MacPherson) from Simpson’s this afternoon. She poked around, and thought that B was lying more breech than oblique breech, which is the way it has been for the last two months. If it had been fully transverse, apparently Abi would have been trundled into the hospital straight away. But the degree if tilt involved, we had the option of trying to get it turned via ECV (External Cephalic Version).

Turning it would be done by a registrar at Simpson’s, in the labour ward, and with full baby monitoring equipment in place. The success rate is approximately 60%, and the risk of the baby getting distressed, and having to be extracted by emergency caesarean is 1 in 1000. However, if it didn’t turn, but instead moved to full breach, the consultant said that they could still try to deliver it normally.

This isn’t quite what we want, though. Abi and I have thought about it a lot, and we would both prefer to just have a simple, straightforward, elective caesarean. A) it’s less painful, and B) we can plan it. The recovery time will be longer, but the whole process is much more controlled, and we both like control. (We consider this whole vaginal birth thing to be a bit, well, primitive. Lois McMaster Bujold writes about uterine replicators in her Barrayar books, in which babies grow to full term outside of the mother’s body. These sound like good things to us.)

So, that’s what’s going to happen. Next Tuesday (10 April) we go in to Simpson’s to see the anaesthesiologist, and to get some blood samples taken (from Abi, not me), and then on Wednesday morning we show up at 09:00, and wait to be seen. We’re third in the queue, so we figure that by Wednesday afternoon we’ll have a baby.

BABYBABYBABYBABY!

I’m so excited! I had to stop myself from bouncing up and down in the doctor’s room this afternoon. I tried to put on my calm, unruffled face, but Abi said I just looked pale and nervous. Oh, well.

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B! (again)

B! (again)

The picture below was taken during the scan on Friday. (And no, we don’t know the sex yet. B has its head stuck under Abi’s right ribs, its tiny little tushie under her left ribs, and its feet planted firmly in the pelvic cavity. This means that the ultrasound wasn’t able to scan B’s private parts. As per usual, B is proving to be an awkward customer.)

In case you’re wondering what the picture actually shows, this B’s head in profile.

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Fixed the home pages

Fixed the home pages and edit pages so they work properly in Netscape 4
now. It’s not identical to what you see with IE4+, but it’s close enough.

Life’s a lot easier (and faster!) now that I’ve got a development version up
and running locally on my PC now. With a combination of MySQL, Apache, and
PHP all up and running on Win98, I can write identical code and deploy it to
the Linux box hosting www.sunpig.com!

Cool.

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Abi fancied some wild rice

Abi fancied some wild rice last night, so I cooked up something a little different: pork loin with a maple syrup and pineapple glaze with wild rice and lentils.

  • Put the wild rice and lentils in separate pans. Fill with water, and bring both to a gentle boil. (Cooking them till soft takes about an hour.)
  • Cut the pork loin into two halves, and sear them in a pan with some butter & olive oil (or bacon dripping, if you happen to have any left over 🙂
  • Put the pork in an oven-proof dish. Pour a generous helping of maple syrup, and a small tin (225g) of pineapple chunks over them. Cover the dish, and put into a hot oven (gas mark 7) for about 45 minutes.
  • When the rice and lentils are soft, take them off the heat, and drain them.
  • Take the pork out of the oven, and put it on a warmed plate to rest. While it’s resting, pour the juices and pineapple chunks into a pan, and reduce until thick.
  • Slice the pork, and pour the glaze over it. Serve alongside, or on a bed of the rice and lentils.

    • Sweet and tangy–rather tasty!

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An interesting (as always) article

An interesting (as always) article by Joel Spolsky on supposed bloatware:

“Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in
1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive
space. In those days we could still remember our first 20MB PC hard drives
(around 1985) and so 15MB sure seemed like a lot.

By the time Excel 2000 came out, it required a whopping 146MB … almost a
tenfold increase! Dang those sloppy Microsoft programmers, right?

Wrong.” (more…)

It includes a reference to a different article on the historic cost of hard drives.

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New home page! PHP! MySQL!

New home page! PHP! MySQL! Database-driven! Easy to update! Automatic links to Everthing2

Aargh!

What is the world coming to?

This does prove to me, however, just how easy PHP is to use. It took me well over a week to do the initial “dynamic” version of the sunpig site in perl/cgi, and it didn’t work nearly so well. I started this new version yesterday (Saturday) afternoon, and by evening I had the edit facility all ready. Today I tidied up the calendar, and did the home pages, so they display n day logs.

Over and done with in a single weekend!

Of course, there are still a whole bundle of improvements to be made:

  • Put a “today” button on the calendar (particularly for the edit screens)
  • Bring the sidebars into the database as well, and make them editable too.
  • Allow uploading of images through the edit interface
  • Allow user to set how many logs should be displayed on their home page
  • Automated backups of the database.

Then, of course, there is Amazing But False to automate as well…

Also, the code is all over the place, and could use to be tidied up. But seeing as it’s my first attempt at PHP and MySQL, I figure I can only get better from here.