family - 1

Wow, we've been busy! Has it really been that long since we last uploaded any photos? As a bonus here are photos of Brooke between 5 and 8 months.

The current exciting news is that Brooke has started crawling, not very fast yet, but she is getting faster!

Andrew's Mum has also uploaded some more photos.

We have another instalment of photos of Brooke.

I've decided to move to a monthly posting of photos instead of every 4 weeks as I had been doing.

And yeah, a bit late this time... However, Brooke rolled for the first time a couple of weeks ago. That was pretty exciting!

Update: Err, weeks, not months.

We have another instalment of photos of Brooke.

Wow, not that overdue this time...

And a big thank you to Andrew & Heather for the loan of their digital camera which most of our photos of Brooke were taken with, we really appreciated it.

Also, Jill (Andrew's Mum) has put up some photos as well. Thanks!

After some peer pressure (i.e., Susanne telling me I had to) I've finally submitted and signed up to Facebook. It is quite surprising how many of my friends are already on there!

Wow!

What is kinda cool is I've got a news feed from this blog going into Facebook, and have our PicasaWeb photos going in there.

Oh well, off to see who else is on Facebook...

Somewhat late, but I've uploaded another batch of photos of Brooke.

Update: Correct the title...

We normally see quite a few people finding this blog via Google. It can be quite amusing to see what search terms led to us.

Earlier this month I decided to check it out again, there were no hits from Google. At all. This was kinda odd, as the googlebots (both for the search engine and for reader) normally hit us quite often.

Looking back through the logs the last time Google hit us was the 14th of March. Which is quite some time ago.

I cruised over to Google and checked Reader, and sure enough the most recent article from our blog is dated the 14th of March. I then tried telling Google to index blog.etc.gen.nz using the WebMaster tools. No dice, it says:

General HTTP error: Domain name not found

Two things happened on that day:

1. I moved from DynDNS to FreeDNS,
   
2. I added AAAA (IPv6) records to some of my hosts, which is why I moved to FreeDNS. DynDNS doesn't support that.
   

It appears that one of those changes caused Google to start ignoring us. And in fact, it is the change to FreeDNS.

Damn.

I think it is finally time to bite the bullet and start running my own nameserver. Which I want to do anyhow to start using DNSSEC...

Some further investigations with the help of a mate (you know who you are) I've discovered that FreeDNS is rejecting DNS queries from Google. I'm not the only one to have encountered this problem.

Update: The issue is FreeDNS. Updated entry to reflect that.
Update 2: Okay, the FreeDNS maintainer is now allowing Google to access our DNS entries again, so we're back in Google. But still, bizarre.

Due to popular request I'm hiding the majority of the geeky blog entries from the front page of our blog. Anything that is only in the Catalyst category won't be shown on the front page, you'll need to click through to that category to see the geeky Catalyst related things.

I'll need to update a few of the blog aggregaters to handle this change...

Last wednesday Susanne, myself and Brooke went along to the Babes in Arms sessions of Shrek the Third. It is pretty cool, a 10am screening of a movie where babies and young kids are made more than welcome (in fact, the tickets are half price as well). No one cares if they cry and/or scream because their own kids might be doing it as well!

It was quite nice to be able to go to a movie again (it has been a while). Brooke (actually, all the babies in our group) slept straight through the movie, which made it even more pleasant!

We all really enjoyed the movie, it was definitely good fun!

On a geeky note, I did notice the amazing job they did on animating the hair of the characters. A few days later I was reading the latest issue of the Linux Journal and read the article titled Linux Feeds an Ogre, where they discuss how the hair was one of their achievements in creating Shrek the Third!

I've just uploaded some more photos of Brooke, who is now 8 and a half weeks old. Wow!

Update: As of 2007/06/14 Brooke is 12 lb (5.45 kg).

Okay, I've finally uploaded some photos of Brooke. I've decided to try out PicasaWeb, so the photos are here.

Debbie (Susanne's sister) also has a gallery with some photos of Brooke available.

Annoyances with F-Spot exporting to PicasaWeb are that it doesn't upload the tags or the comments. Oh, also it doesn't synchronise, it re-exports all the photos each time.

Update 1: Actually it does upload the comments, but I didn't notice because the export exports a new copy. So I had to copies of each photo. One with comments, one without.
Update 2: And, look, only 6 weeks after Brooke was born, not a year!
Update 3: Fix the first link to PicasaWeb.

We have a new arrival, a little girl, Brooke Ruthven!

She was born on Saturday the 14th of April at 9:10 am, weighing in at 6 pound 8 ounces (2.95 kg, but the metric system seems wrong for babies...). Mum and Brooke came home on Monday evening, and are doing very well. A proud Dad managed to survive the labour experience with both hands intact, just.

We're having fun settling into a life style that involves sleep deprivation and smelly nappies.

We'll hopefully post some updates to this blog over the coming weeks. Photos should start to appear on our gallery sometime soonish. But to show off our little girl, here are a few photos.

(Why the LCA2007 tag? Check out the t-shirt Susanne is wearing...)

Update: Thanks to Graeme for putting some photos up here!

Sigh, comments are currently broken. There is an issue with Serendipity using sequences in PostgreSQL...

I'll hopefully have comments fixed soonish.

Update: Okay, it seems that posting comments from an IPv6 address is beyond the abilities of Serendipity at the moment. I'll look in that sometime soon. It only affects 2 people that I know of, unfortunately one of them is me...
Update 2: Changing the database slightly has resolved this issue. Bug report on the Serendipity site. It'll be fixed for 1.2 correctly.

After just over a year (we celebrated our 1 year anniversary a couple of weekends ago) we have finally uploaded the photos from our wedding!

Unfortunately due to copyright we can't reproduce the fantastic photos from our fantastic professional photographer, but we do have a stack of brilliant photos from family members which we can reproduce!

They are available here in our gallery.

Susanne and I have been spending the last few months setting up the nursery in preparation for the baby. This has involved sorting through some clothes that we've been giving (in the photo the t-shirt says "I love Daddy" - thanks Naina!). We have a cot (no mattress yet, that is supposed to arrive this week), a change table and lots of other bits and pieces. It is amazing how much paraphernalia is required, just mind boggling!

A task which we still need to carry out in the nursery is to paint it. We think we've finally decided on a colour, that has been incredibly difficult. We never imagined it'd be so difficult!



Susanne's belly is a continually growing thing which seems to have a mind of its own. One of Susanne's favourite games is to play "where's the baby?". i.e., try and spot where the baby's head is at the moment based on where the bulge is located around her belly. Her belly can get really lopsided! The changes around her belly button have been quite funny as well, as you can see in the photo, it is almost poking out. The photo was taken during week 24, 6 weeks ago. It is a lot bigger now!

We're now at week 30, 3 quarters of the way through. It is still kind of hard to come to grips with how our lives will change once the baby is born. Kinda scary, but also very exciting.

So, the late breaking news of the day is that Susanne is pregnant. Woohoo!