Rowan and Jacob are back from the hospital now, which is great. It was
very odd having to go in and visit them every day.
I have experienced my first baby-induced sleepless night. I expect to
have many of these. Rowan is taking the late shift from midnight to 5am,
and then I’m getting up and taking him downstairs so she can get some
sleep.
He’s feeding better (early babies don’t feed too well, and you have to
really persuade them). He’s even started crying for his bottle, which is
very good. Of course, now he’s got all sorts of reasons to cry: hungry,
too cold, too hot, wet, covered in poo, want a cuddle, want a burp, and I’m
sure there’s more. We’re in the process of distinguishing one from the
other, so we don’t have to try everything every time.
The “I’m covered in poo” cry is quite distinctive, I think because it
gets even worse when you pick him up. We have to change him ASAP, since
the cleaning is easier. Amazing how many nappies they go through - he’s
doing 10 or 15 a day.
The cats have been fascinated. Lots of coming up and sniffing. They’ve
not been able to work out his place in their world-view yet. Initially
they were wondering if he was prey, but they’ve decided against that. I
think they know he’s not competition (he doesn’t eat cat food or bask on
the shed), so I expect they to decide to ignore him soon. We’ve got a cat
net for the crib, in case they decide he is a special moggie
hot-water-bottle.
Our son, Jacob David Winter, was born at 2.30am on the 21st
May. Mother and baby are both well and will hopefully be home soon. He
was 3 weeks early, and weighed 5lbs 1oz (2.3kg), which is a little
underweight. He’s fine though, and should catch up quickly.
Being a dad is great, by the way :). There are some photos of him in
the gallery.
There’s a vote in the EU Council of Ministers tomorrow about changes to
European Patent law. A bunch of vested interests and clueless EU types want
to introduce Software Patents, thereby allowing great big companies to make
even larger profits, whilst royally stuffing smaller companies, individuals and
free software developers.
Of course they dress it up in the same old language they always do, but
that is pretty much the size of it. An initial proposal was put together
by an EU committee. This proposed to make software patentable with no
limits (it currently isn’t, there is a specific exemption for software from
being patented right now). The EU Parliament in a sudden vicious attack of
democracy, that I think surprised even itself, slew this proposal wholesale.
Those who support the bill went all quiet for a while, and are now
introducing it virtually unchanged to the EU Council of Ministers, ignoring
all of the amendments from the European Parliament. Originally this was
listed as being accepted ‘without debate’ tomorrow, but intense lobbying
and some very good press briefing has led a number of EU Governments to
decide they want to debate the bill. There is still every chance that it
will be passed though.
I find the whole business rather surprising myself. Both sides of the
argument have been firmly colonised by vested interests - huge
megacorporates who see monopoly rents as a new and profitable line of
business, and smaller independent coders who want the freedom to write
whatever they want.
What doesn’t seem to have been shown by any of the actual legislators is
any attention to the rest of society - what kind of society they wish to
construct. The entire business has resembled the US model of pork-barrel
government, something that doesn’t happen nearly to the same extent here in
the UK.
For the second and absolutely final time I am changing my vanity domain.
The canonical name for the site is now
href=”http://adju.st”>http://adju.st.
Any comments on how sad this is will be ignored 
The old domain name
will continue to work as-is for the forseeable future, since I don’t want to
break inbound links.
I was quite impressed by the third definition Google provides for
Zaibatsu:
href="http://www.google.com/search?q=define:zaibatsu">define:zaibatsu.
They seem to be well ahead of the game.
Courtesy of ratx: Perl Hating
Debian produce a community-supported
Linux distribution. It’s a very good one, in fact, although that is
tangential to this. Long long ago, for some reason that never became very
clear,
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2000/07/msg00206.html">someone
emailed their developer list (debian-devel) and asked for some sheet music
for “Duelling Banjos”.
Why they did this is lost in the mists of time. However, Duelling
Banjos Sheet Music was not a very common request, and so google decided
that in fact debian and duelling banjos were somehow related. A few months
later,
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2000/12/msg02427.html">someone
else emailed debian-devel asking for Duelling Banjos. This confused
the Debian developers, but that was about it.
However, Debian and Duelling Banjos were now inextricably linked in the
mind of google. Google being the font of all knowledge, that was it.
suddenly
everyone
was
after
duelling
banjos
music!
Of course, I am just making this worse by posting this. And I don’t
even know what a Duelling Banjo is, or why one might want one.
Courtesy of ratx: Perl Hating
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