Andrew's blog

Wow, another 3 months, time for some more photos! Brooke has really started walking now, she has two speeds, standing still and 100km/hr. She is definitely keeping us busy!

I've also discovered that I'd forgotten to upload her birthday pictures. I've uploaded them (and a few others) to her 9 - 12 Month album. Oops.

In other news, we're now living in Belmont, and enjoying it, even though the lawn is really a swimming pool.

We've had some exciting developments with Brooke, she's been crawling and "cruising" for a few months now (she can even crawl up and down stairs!). She finally has teeth! 4 weeks ago a tooth appeared and 6 days later another one popped out next to it. And it looks as though another two are about to come through on the top. Brooke has settled into daycare 5 days a week now that Susanne is back at work, and both of them seem to be loving it!

Brooke's 1st birthday is just over 2 weeks away, wow! Where has the time gone? Here are some 9 - 11 Month photos. I'll upload Brooke's 12 month photos into that album shortly after her birthday so I can include some birthday pictures.

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.

On the topic of birth announcements, at Catalyst we have an internal IRC channel for general chit-chat and communication within teams. We now have a habit of setting the topic of the main channel to announce new staff members. On the 14th of April the topic was set to:

New staff: François, on L7, New person: Brooke Rose Ruthven, 9:10am, 14/4/2007, 6lb8oz (congratulations Andrew & Susanne)

Thank you karora for setting the topic!

At some stage Brooke might move into the "New staff" classification, who knows?

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.