Born at 2237hrs and weighing in at 6lb and 8oz. Alfred Phillip John. And he's going to be an Uppie.

At the moment he's in the Special Care Baby Unit at the BGH though it seems to be mainly precautionary. Resps are a little high and doesn't seem to scream very loudly. More news as it comes.

A year ago today Jane delivered Maggie stillborn at the Borders General Hospital. Looking back it is a wonder how we held it together during that time. Today we had her "Birthday." No apologies for the lack of cut here. I'll be brief :)

Early on, Jane, the kids and I went up to the grave with flowers and presents. Katie had a little bit of a breakdown and it all became a bit too much for her but she soon rebounded.



We then spent the day with Nana (Jane's mum) and Jane's two sister decorating the sky candles we launched at dusk. A little bit of drama was involved in the launch but all five lanterns soared off into the sky eventually. Pics are a bit fuzzy here I'm afraid, I'll blame the pregnant lady taking them.




We've been flooded with good wishes from all round the world today, both for Maggie and for Jane tomorrow. For at 8.30am we have an appointment for induction and we could see a new arrival by teatime or as late as Wednesday (yes, that's what the scary midwife told us on Friday)

I don't usually follow my flist birthday announcements but this one has been pretty inspirational over the years from nunnery funnery to cool retro tech.

So it's Happy Birthday feorag

Was just playing around with old xD cards when I found a couple of video clips, so I decided Katie and Tommy with the bubble wrap needed a soundtrack.

No apologies for the lack of ljcut here. I "bumped" into Eddie Izzard on his Sport Relief run when it passed through Jedburgh this morning. I say bumped, more stalked him since I saw him running through Pathhead on my way to work on Sunday night (and giving me a valid excuse for being late). He posted a Twitpic this morning as he came into town and within minutes I'd positioned myself on the A68 to catch him as he came through. He was kind enough to stop and pose for me.

Eddie has been a hero of mine for a long time, I love his comedy, his acting and his writing. He's been running a Marathon a day for the past month to raise money for Sport Relief, passing through the 4 capital cities of the UK. You can donate on Eddie's Sport Relief page here.

The BNP has a policy proposal at their upcoming London conference. If anyone had any doubt that they are Nazi Scum then perhaps the idea of ( concentration camps for teenage mums will start warning bells ringing. )

I wonder what they propose for the fathers of all these children?

Normal service is sort of resumed. I tried all sorts of things with xjournal to get it working and was about to trash my global preferences plist when I found an alternate download from the sourceforge one. I had my suspicions about the sourceforge download for 1.06b as it seemed to be an older version than the one stated.

And now it works fine. I must report my problem on the xjournal community here at lj.

While I've been away I've been setting up a Wordpress blog, mainly as an experiment to see what it can do (which is lots) and will probably cross post here on a filter. It's going to be mainly non-canon Traveller stuff set in a human polity a thousand years from now. As Mr. Stross points out in his notes for Missile Gap in Wireless, it's really difficult to write about humanity so far in the future (though he was talking a million years rather than a thousand), so much can change. Imagine trying to describe early 21st century Western society to an 11th century Monk and we can see problems arising. I reduce the amount of massive change by introducing a 400 year dark age so now we're only having to describe things to Elizabethan clerics. :)

Lots of family stuff going on. My outlaws had their ruby wedding anniversary. We all (in-laws, Jane, her 2 sisters and all our associated partners and baggage, sixteen in all) went to the Caddyman Restaurant near Jedburgh. The food there was fantastic (though lacking in a vegetarian main course, I don't doubt they could have created something wonderful on the spur of the moment). I've eaten some wonderful meals in my time but I rate this as one of the best. We presented Phil and Sue their anniversary present, a trip to the Isle of Man (where Phil's family comes from originally and many a family holiday was spent there). As Phil's weird and wonderful muscular/neuropathic wasting syndrome prevents him from driving the youngest daughter is taking them over and helping out whilst she conducts business over there. Talking of Phi's disability he finally
was given disability living allowance and mobility allowance. He was loathe to apply like many who have worked all their lives but we made him. I idly pointed out that he could get a car using the motability scheme and now he is looking to pick up a brand new car at the end of the month.

Pregnancy continues apace. All is well and the care intensifies. Jane will be expected to have twice weekly appointments with her consultant soon as well as weekly ones with the midwife. The scans show the baby to be average in every way and that can only be a good thing. 11 weeks left.

On the roleplaying front, not really had much time. Hope to play something again real soon. Savage Worlds, Traveller and WFRP seem to be my flavours of choice at the moment though I would not turn down a game of 4e D&D. Hell, I'd even play GURPS right now (note: nothing wrong with GURPS just not played it in a while and I don't like it for modern/SF settings, imperial measurements feel wrong). Talking of WFRP I'm a bit stunned by the travesty FFG are calling 3rd Edition WFRP. It looks to be some kind of hybrid card/dice game with RP elements tacked on. And it'll cost £60 just to get started. Ouch. As usual the fan base are generally reacting badly but it looks quite interesting. As grimachu apresvie pointed out to me, if it were not for them trying to call it WFRP I'd be right up for it.

Been feeling a bit down at work and thinking about requesting a transfer. I've been weighing up the pros & cons and it really is hard to decide what to do. Edinburgh is starting to become quite dangerous for ambulance personnel, the police are overstretched and cannot be relied to come to our aid (though they make a damn fine effort). More and more people are using 999 as a supposed shortcut to treatment. Can't get a doctor's appointment? 999. Got a sprained wrist? 999 will get you to the front of the queue at A&E (it doesn't by the way). Alcoholic and lonely? 999 and we'll keep you company for at least half an hour. Anyway, once in a while it does all become too much and I need to step back and reflect a little.

Back again soon.

ETA xjournal not working as I remember. Struggling to add html tags. Better than nothing.

I’ve been a little silent of late but now I’m back with a brand new toy. A 15“ MacBook Pro 2.66Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and twin 256Mb NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards (9400M & 9600M GT). It is teh shiney.

I’m still ploughing through attempts to migrate things from my powerbook with mixed success. xjournal isn’t working for me despite various trashings of file and reinstalling so I’ll be using MacJournal from Mariner for the time being (I must see if they’ve managed to integrate Dreamwidth for it yet).

And of course after a 6 month hiatus I’m back on World of Warcraft. I’ll try to just stick to 2 servers, Earthen Ring being my world of choice. Redheugh went out last night and this morning in anger for the first time which saw him go from 63 to 65. Great fun. Having a free trial of EVE online. Jury is out at the moment.

Of course games are not the only benefit of the new hardware. My CGI stuff is had a huge boost. Renders that previously took several hours are completing in five minutes. I’m going to get some serious modelling in too.

So when I’ve finally completed migrating all the important stuff from the powerbook it’s going to be given to Jane. Though she’ll happily have a MacBook if ever they bring a Home Computing Scheme back at work.

The Royal Mint is offering £50 for undated 20 pence coins.

Needless to say I shall be checking my pockets and all change very carefully. I've heard reports of these little beauties hitting £7k on e-bay (must check up on this). Perhaps I'll nip down to the bank and take out £100 in 20p pieces. :)

Oh yeah and I've had my bloody debit card compromised again last week. Aaaargh! this time I've no clue how it happened. I've been really careful.

We got the all clear re possible human p virus infection for Jane. She obviously had a childhood infection and was immune. Still a long time waiting for the results which somehow got lost. Next up is blood tests for me, or more exact blood typing for me. I'm pretty sure I'm bog standard O+ve but we are checking and if I'm Rh-ve then Jane will be allowed to turn down anti-D injections.

Also on the baby front we got our 20 week detailed scan and everything is healthy and in the right place. We got the baby sexed as well so Jane and I are now having friendly arguments about names. Good fun.

( Baby's sex announced under the cut. )

I've been out of the loop a bit. Nothing to write about. Plenty to talk about on Twitter but I don't believe in polluting my journal with that (though I have considered posting a log of my tweets but purely as an archive and for my eyes only).

Anyway, to Dreamwidth. So far not really used it to it's full extent but then I haven't managed to adapt either of my two main blogging clients to it. Strange since it is built on LJ's code. Ah well. So by means of an experiment I'm going to see if I can crosspost a pic from Dreamwidth to LJ.

This is Erik Rustad, Team Leader of General Survey Party "Malvik" from the Terran Exploration Service Vessel "Ibn Battuta". In the background is a CAC VX-121 Mastodon crawler, the mission support vehicle. Erik finds the glare from the F3 IV star, named Hastur by the Battuta's Captain, to be a bit harsh but not incompatible with colonisation efforts and is authorising a full survey of the planet.

Maggie's Flowers at JustGiving.com

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Jane started knitting flower brooches with hopes of selling them at car boots for charity. We then caught an appeal for help to raise funds for a new birthing pool at the BGH where Katie, Tommy and Maggie were delivered. Tommy was born in the birthing pool in a quite amazing experience for Jane (and me too!).

So we've recruited Jane's Mum and loads of others from around the country to knit and crochet flowers. Jane is now putting the pins on, backing and bagging and making postal runs every Monday.

There are a lot more styles and colours than you see here, this was just the first batch I took a shot of a couple of weeks ago.

If you would like a flower just mail me through livejournal or at dc.somersATbtinternet.com. There you can give me a postal address and if you have a colour preference. We look for a minimum £2 donation per flower and don't charge anything for P&P but be aware we only post on a Monday. We prefer it if you donate through justgiving as it goes straight to the fund for the birthing pool and you can add gift aid too (if a UK resident).

If there is one thing that gets my goat worse than a badly researched news story it is a lazily written news story. The latest furore over the Scottish Sunday Express front page article on the Dunblane kids turning 18 is a case in point.

For those who do not know about the Dunblane Massacre you can look it up on Wiki but to summarise, a handgun afficianado entered Dunblane Primary School in 1996 and let shot and killed 16 children aged 5 & 6 and their teacher. 10 children and 3 adults were wounded. Of the class of 5 and 6 year olds first targeted all but one was either killed or wounded.

Now a stupid bitch named Paula Murray with the Scottish Sunday Express has printed a front page follow up to the story now that the surviving children have turned 18. And what does she do? Interview them? Get some poignent story about the difficulty of growing up with survivor guilt? No she trawls their Bebo and Facebook accounts and gets pics and quotes of them doing the things that most teenagers in Britain would call the norm decrying them as drunks and thugs.

I'm not going to get to far into insulting that c**t Murray as someone else has done the hard work for me. Bloggerheads has done a fine knife job on her credibility here. There are other stories all over the blogosphere and the Press Complaints Commission has received over 30 complaints. This is much more worthy of a lynching than any Brand/Ross scandal in my opinion.

By now many of you are either in Coventry or on your way. Wishing I was there too but unfortunately I'm working this weekend.

Worse yet I went to check the dates and times for this year's Conpulsion in Edinburgh and found I'd booked the wrong weekend off. Not strictly my fault, I based it on shoddy info from an RPG board before the Conpulsion site was up and running. I am gutted.

That leaves Eastercon, which feels a little intimidating to a con virgin like myself and trying to justify running off at Easter to Jane. Ah well, back to the drawing board.

Despite the BBC refusing to place a Disasters Emergency Committee ad on as it would affect their "neutrality" veteran firebrand Tony Benn strikes!

"Space travel is shit"

I found that line in Saturn's Children and it has inspired a few illustrations that have absolutely nothing to do with that book. Here's the first. A Face Full of Hot Plasma.

Clan Corporate down, Saturn's Children started. Old Man's War in progress. 4th edition Players Manual and Traveller Core Book started once again in earnest. The Temporal Void has been sidelined and the Year's Best SF has been put on temporary hiatus.

I need to pick up a new copy of Emergency Care on the Streets by Nancy Caroline but have difficulty justifying the expense. One day I'll have some kind of pda with all the British National Formulary, Tox Base, ECG Made Incredibly Easy all available on pdf. Now that would make the job simpler. It would need to be ruggedized though. I don't think the procurement folk in the service realise how much we abuse our equipment. I think I go through at least one hard drive, one multi-cable and one telemetry cable a month. Of course this expense could have been spared by investing in the more expensive options right from day one.

It arrived two days ago and seems to be a massive step in the right direction by Mongoose. I can't help but feel that many of the previous books (including the Core Book) were rushed out. Still this one seems to have got it right.

High Guard starts off with expanded chargen for Navy Characters. IMO Mongoose Traveller excels in chargen and this is no different. Unlike Merc which concentrates on military careers outwith the regular Army and Marines, HG looks to give us additional options for Navy Characters.

We have;

Crewman: Planetary Navy, Subsector Navy, Imperial Navy.
Support: Training, Medical, Administration.
Engineering: Damage Control ,Mechanic, Electronic.
Gunnery: Fire Control, Turret, Countermeasures
Flight: Astrogation, Helm, Sensors
Pilot: Fighter Pilot, Shuttle Pilot, Special Ops
Command: Commander, Aide, Tactician.
Naval Intelligence: Analyst, Planner, Black Ops.
Naval Engineering: Sensor Engineer, Ships Architect, Researcher
High Command: Legendary Captain, Fleet Commander, Daredevil.

Remarkably there are only two new skills; Engineer (Naval) and Discipline. The former appears to be a replacement for Naval Architect with the advantage of substituting for other Engineer skills in the field.

Next comes Spacecraft Options. Can't fault this at all. An array of component, additional rules and optional rules all of which seem perfectly well thought out, mesh fine with the core rules and capture the Traveller idiom nicely. I'm sure if I was to sit down and think really hard about it I could pick fault in it but I'm not going to. It all makes sense to me on first reading. I can't think of anything obviously missing other than perhaps including KE guns for space combat.

There follows design additions for Capital Ships up to 1Mton and for small craft. I've not cranked anything out using these rules yet but they sync with the corebook design rules and that is a big plus.

Expanded space combat is interesting but I'll reserve judgement until I've tried it out (probably a while before this happens, I'm having a bit of a timeout ). Some nice touches as well as optional vector movement rules.

The penultimate section is a selection of Small Craft and Capital Ship designs. These include deckplans which is very impressive when you realise that this includes deckplans for a 200 kton Sylea Class Battleship.

Finally as small selection of tables for generating naval themed adventures. Nice but ultimately of limited use to many, I'll personally find it handy.

So overall? I say buy it. And the pdf when it appears. And a copy for your friend. Probably the most useful of MGT's release schedule so far which beggars the question, why was Mercenary so bad? Rushed? But this one gets 10/10 from me.

I've been laying around creating characters in Daz|Studio and one thing is irking me. All the female forms I create are just soooo bloody perfect. I want to try and make them a bit more realistic. Heavy hips, breasts too small or too saggy.

So I'm going to experiment with the morphs available to see what we can produce. In the mean time here is Shimi Venlaw, navigator of the scoutship Flarestar.