Newstocks

Holy Trinity play group

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First Person Strategy

Finally finished playing Rainbow Six Vegas today (the first one, not the recent sequel). I thoroughly enjoyed it - more than I was expecting to, in fact.

The reason was that I was playing in "realistic" mode (where just a few hits will kill you) with the game only saving at predetermined checkpoints. Normally I hate games that don't let you save wherever you like, because having to replay the same segment again and again can be an exercise in frustration.

In Rainbow Six Vegas, I rarely found it frustrating, however. That's because whenever I was killed it was usually because I hadn't planned my attack, and had charged in as I might in any other first person shooter, hoping for the best. In this game, I really had to use cover carefully, guard against being flanked, and make use of my smoke grenades if I wanted to stay alive. That made the game hugely more strategic, and hugely more satisfying to play.

A really good night

When we left yesterday, I was feeling pretty bummed that they hadn't gotten Dad up and out of bed at all. But at 10PM when we called for an update, Karen, his nurse, said very nonchalantly that they had walked down the hall and back. I was totally floored and had to ask for clarification because the distance that I understood at first seemed totally unrealistic. However, sure enough he walked to the main entrance of the ward and back; about a 200-foot walk. That's totally cool!!

Right now he is off the blood pressure medication and off the pacer and his pressure is still nice and high. If today is a good day, they are hoping that there will be a bed available on a regular ward for him to move to. Fingers crossed, as beds on a regular ward are hard to come by on a Sunday.

Quote of the day

I twittered yesterday's quote of the day, but it probably makes more sense in context.

Mom was telling Dad about a person who works at Northrock and Dad asked which Northrock she was talking about. Mom replied "The telecommunications company. Did you think I might be talking about the rock offshore?"

"Well there is a restaurant called Northrock" Dad fired back. Then he said, "Gee, I didn't realize you two girls were so stupid."

What a cheek!! I guess he figures he might as well get in all the smart comments he can while we can't slug him.

Daddy's shoes

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Awake and Saucy

Dad's awake and saucy as ever. He doesn't feel too much pain. He needs to breathe deeply and is doing that all the time. They've sat him up and is popping pills already. They will be getting him on his feet today. Roll on!

When we first arrived, Matt, his nurse, started a conversation asking him whether he knew where he was etc., so we chimed right in and asked what his birth date was and whether he remembered the saga from before his operation - which he did. Well, from then on, he thought we were testing him, so everything we told him, he said "You already told me that. You testing me?". A bit confused, but that's normal.

Anyway, Matt says that he's doing really well. Time to head back in to the room.

Animal noises

Aidan puts on his best moo!

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All done!

The trouper has done great. It's all finished and went exactly according to plan. Only did three bypasses in the end, not four. There goes the gold membership. Oh well.

:-)

Update #1

Dad was doing well this morning, but hadn't slept much. Last night one of the doctors told him that before the surgery he'd have lots of people asking him four questions

1. His name
2. His DOB
3. His surgeon
4. What op he was having

Well, wasn't the bugger up all night worried about the questions and, most specifically, getting his birthday right in American language - 5/11/34. However, somehow he had May as the third month of the year, so he had the wrong damn date! We had a good laugh about that this morning which was nice. Aidan called too, which made his day I think, especially given the last thing he said was "Pop".

We're back at the hotel awaiting a call to say that they've made the first incision. Should take 4 - 6 hours, but could be more and could be less. The nurse will call with updates ever hour and a halfish. We'll head back over in a few hours.

The Bermuda Bypass Club

Well, it wasn’t enough to just join the BBC. Dad’s taking out the top membership. At 6:00am tomorrow morning the doctors and the rest of the team start prepping him for a quadruple bypass. Yes, only a gold membership to the Bermuda Bypass Club would do for Bobby Oatley.

The doctors say that he’s a great candidate for the operation. It’s not an emergency situation, his four veins are large (albeit totally clogged) and his heart muscles are excellent. The doctor continued on with, “So I can have plenty to drink tonight! I’m not worried about a thing.” We immediately knew that he was the ideal doctor for Dad!

By this time tomorrow night, it’ll all be done and over with and I’m sure Dad will be craving an egg sandwich with extra mayo (dream on, Dad!).

Mandy and Verna

Surgery confirmed for tomorrow

Bobby's bypass surgery has been confirmed for 6am tomorrow (Friday) morning. The procedure is expected to take about six hours.

All the best, Bobby. We'll be thinking of you.

So far so good

Aidan was a great boy today.

After his nap we ran an errand to Godet & Young, then I took him to watch the digger and lifter on Penno's Wharf up close and personal. He would probably have stayed there, nose pressed up against the fence, for the rest of the afternoon, had we not needed to go to Whites for some food. When we got home I had barely put all the groceries away before it was time to go round to our neighbours', Craig and Martine, for dinner. Aidan ate almost all of his big plate of salmon, corn, peas and spaghetti, plus a few grapes and a couple of small forkfuls of chocolate cake. We got home just before eight, whereupon he went down without a fuss.

The only minor drama was a leaky diaper while we were at Craig and Martine's, which I had to run home to change, but happily no poo was involved.

With Bobby now needing a bypass, I'm likely to be looking after Aidan for at least the next week. If the rest of the time goes as smoothly as today, that should be no problem at all. So don't worry about us, mummy!

Triple bypass

Verna called just as I was finishing that last post.

The doctors have found the blockages around Bobby's heart, but decided that they're too big for stents to suffice. So he's going to be having a triple bypass operation either tomorrow or on Friday. Apparently they'd rather do it as a scheduled operation than an emergency one, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to act immediately, so I suspect it may end up being Friday. A final decision will probably be taken tomorrow.

Notwithstanding that, Bobby's vitals are all strong and he is apparently feeling fine. Fingers crossed that they can get the operation done sooner rather than later and that he'll soon be back on his feet.

Home alone

Well, Mandy is now on a plane to Baltimore, and Aidan and I are home alone.

As I write, Bobby is being poked and prodded by the doctors in John Hopkins. They're putting a dye into his blood to help them determine where any blockages may be around his heart. If these are small enough then they may just put some stents in, possibly at the same time. Best case scenario is that they do everything that they need to today, discharge him tomorrow and then everyone comes back on Friday's flight. I should know more later, and will post an update as and when I do.

Here, everything is going smoothly so far. Aidan didn't think much of the peanut butter sandwich I made him for lunch, but ate a load of apple, grapes and strawberries instead. He went down for his nap at 1.15pm without complaint, despite being full of energy, and is still asleep now.

What I worry about, in increasing order of anxiety:

1. He refuses to eat anything I put in front of him, and throws it all on the floor. Ah well, I guess he can live on Goldfish crackers for a few days, if absolutely necessary.

2. Him breaking/burning/cutting some part of his body. I have been known to faint at the sight of large amounts of blood, which would be entirely unhelpful in this situation.

3. Explosive poo that escapes his diapers and ends up all over his sleeping bag/high chair/wall. Or poo in the bath. Maybe I'll slip some Imodium into his dinner tonight, just to be safe.

4. A meltdown when he realises his mummy isn't here and won't be home any time soon. This happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I brought him home from Book Babies while granny and mummy ran some errands. He screamed and screamed and screamed for about an hour straight, threw himself on the floor (smacking his head on the tile in the process, which obviously only made him scream even more), and only stopped mummy came home (apart from a brief lull when daddy called mummy to tell her to get back ASAP before we had a full-scale Chernobyl on our hands).

But if I can avoid all of that, I think it might even be fun.

An unwelcome trip

Mandy's dad went to the doctor today complaining about a pain in his shoulder and chest. He was immediately referred to the hospital. A couple of hours later they told us they were sending him by air ambulance to John Hopkins hospital in Baltimore.

It seems that he may have had a very mild heart attack in the last few days, so they're going to run some tests over there. He seems absolutely fine in himself, and his blood pressure and cholesterol are normal, but obviously it needs looking at ASAP and I guess they don't have the expertise to do it here.

Verna's obviously going over there with him and Mandy, Aidan and I may follow tomorrow. Alternatively, only Mandy may go and I may stay here with Aidan.

Fingers crossed that they won't need to keep him over there for very long, and that he'll soon be on his way back to Bermuda.

Vacuuming

Aidan has long been fascinated by our Dyson vacuum cleaner, so when we spotted a toy version in Atlanta, we couldn't not buy it for him.

We finally gave him it on Easter Day, along with several leftover presents from Christmas. It was a runaway hit, with most of his waking hours since then being spent pushing it back and forth across the floor. Yesterday he refused to go down for his lunchtime nap until it was parked next to his crib.

If only it picked up the dirt too!

Good Friday at Horseshoe Bay

Aidan spends a traditional Good Friday at Horseshoe Bay, but isn't too excited by the kites.

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Shopping cart

One of Aidan's favourite toys is his shopping cart. This footage of him pushing it around Granny and Poppa's house was shot at Christmas, but I only recently rediscovered it, still on the video camera. Enjoy.

Me and my BBC Micro

Apropos of my previous post, my parents dug out this old picture of me and my BBC Micro, the home computer we had when I was a kid. Note the cassette recorder hooked up to it - the 1980s version of today's DVD drive (this was back in the days before DVDs, CDs, or even 3 1/2 inch floppy drives)! It's obviously a staged photo since there's no TV in sight (we didn't have a proper computer monitor for some years, as I recall). But still... happy days!

Remembering the BBC Micro

The news that the creators of the BBC Micro are getting together again this week at London's Science Museum has got me feeling all nostalgic.

The BBC Micro was the machine that started my love-affair with computers (if you exclude the Commodore PETs that I occasionally got to play with at school). I can still clearly remember the day I came home from school one Wednesday afternoon (for some reason, in my junior school we got Wednesday afternoons off) to find this wondrous new machine that my dad had brought home.

Initially, we mainly used it for playing games (the early Acornsoft titles being the ones that stick out in my mind: Snapper, Monsters, Planetoid, Rocket Raid and, of course, Elite). But it was also the machine that I did my first programming on, the listings for one of my games even appearing in a national computer magazine (back in the days when computer magazines printed program listings instead of putting the compiled game on a cover disc). Indeed, it was probably responsible for the career that I'm following today.

I'd love to be able to give Aidan a similarly wonderful experience when he's a bit older. But sadly, I think the world is a different place today. The BBC Micro was one of the first home computers, but now, of course, they're commonplace, as are gaming consoles. And I think that writing even a simple game on a PC today would be a lot harder than it was back then on the BBC Micro.

Our first Apple TV movie rental

Just finished watching our first movie rental using the Apple TV: the HD version of Michael Clayton.

The picture was pretty good - the stubble on George Clooney's face seemed particularly sharp - but without the SD version to do a direct comparison with, it was difficult to tell whether it was sufficiently better to justify the additional $1 premium. That said, the HD version did come with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround surround too.

I set it downloading when I went to bed at midnight last night, and by 8am this morning, it was done. That was much faster than I was expecting, although the movie was only 2 hours long.

At $5 for a new release, it's a little pricey compared to the $2.50 you'd pay to rent a DVD from Leisure Time, but the convenience, and the absence of any late fees (which we inevitably end up paying when we rent a movie at the weekend) just about compensate, I think.

As for the movie itself, we enjoyed it, but thought the plot was entirely predictable.

Waiting for Blu-ray

It seems that now is actually a pretty bad time to buy a Blu-ray player. Prices are going up due to the lack of competition from HD DVD and no existing players are yet "Profile 2.0" compatible (which adds internet connection capability and larger local storage to the features offered by the current generation of "Profile 1.1" players). There's also talk about current Blu-ray titles being re-released with advanced profile features at a later date.

I could buy a Playstation 3, which is the only current Blu-ray player which will be upgradeable to Profile 2.0 with just a software update. It's also relatively cheap, particularly when you consider it can play games too. But navigating the menus with a game controller seems a bit naff and besides, I harbour a pathological hatred for consoles of all varieties, PC gaming snob that I am.

So waiting seems like the most sensible option, albeit the most dull.

Mixed messages

Spotted in a Target store in Atlanta. Confusing, much?

The Little Theatre

Had the misfortune to go and see Vantage Point at the Little Theatre last night.

I say "misfortune" not so much because the film was bad (it wasn't as good as I was expecting, but it was entertaining enough), but because it was blighted by both sound and picture problems.

As soon as the first trailer came on, there was a noticeable vertical judder in the picture. I expected someone would correct it before the main feature started, but no-one did. After putting up with it for the first ten minutes of the film, getting increasingly aggravated, I finally went to find someone to complain. In short order, someone came into the theatre and went back to fiddle with the projector, but it didn't seem to help.

Then the film just stopped, and the lights came up. No-one bothered to come in and apologise or make an announcement about what was going on though.

A couple of minutes later, the film restarted, the juddering still present, but a couple of minutes after that it stopped. Things were fine until the credits rolled, whereupon the juddering started again, making me wonder if someone had been holding the projector still the whole way through the movie.

As if the picture problems weren't bad enough, the front right speaker was playing up too. Most of the time it was fine, but every now and then the sound coming out of it would become muffled. It was annoying, but I tolerated it until the end, when I thought I'd better go tell one of the staff members about it.

"That speaker was only serviced a couple of weeks ago," the guy told me. "But yes, it does that. It's perfectly normal."

So there you have it. Crappy sound is perfectly normal in the Little Theatre. They know about it, and evidently don't really give a shit.

It's made me think twice about going to see anything else at the Little Theatre any time soon, particularly as my home theatre setup is now so good.

"Wass dis?"

Aidan currently spends about 90% of his waking hours pointing at things and asking, "Wass dis?"

It's very cute, and exciting to hear him put his first words together, but after the 100th time of responding to him, it does start to get a little tiring. He still isn't repeating any of the words back to us, but most of the time he'll correctly identify an object if we ask him to point to it.

Progress may be slow, but it's progress all the same.

No Blu-ray rentals for now

It seems that Bermuda's DVD rental stores aren't planning to offer Blu-ray rentals any time soon.

This lunchtime I popped in to both Movies 2 Go and Leisure Time to ask whether they intended to offer Blu-ray rentals in the near future. Despite both stores having a small selection of Blu-ray discs for sale, both told me that rentals would not be happening any time soon, saying that there would need to be many more owners of Blu-ray players in Bermuda before it became feasible.

Fair enough, I suppose. But uptake surely isn't being helped by the fact that Blu-ray players almost impossible to find on the island right now. M&M are out of stock and Electronics City only have a single older Panasonic model (moreover, when I asked if they were bringing in the latest model, which seems to be regarded as the best Blu-ray player right now, they told me no).

Here's hoping that it won't be too long before the situation improves.

A new TV

Ever since I graduated from university, I've dreamed about owning a big widescreen TV.

For my first few working years I was renting a tiny room in a house, and I had to put up with the owner's choice of TV. It wasn't until I finally moved into my own place in London that I was able to get a widescreen set, but it was only a 32" CRT, and it weighed a ton.

When Mandy and I moved to Bermuda, to my great regret I had to revert to a 4:3 set, as none of the local stores sold widescreen models(the US being somewhat behind Europe in this respect). It wasn't until yesterday that I finally bought myself the widescreen TV of my dreams: a 46" HD Sony KDL-46XBR4.

That model is reckoned to be one of the best LCD HDTV's on the market right now, and so far I've been very pleased with it. Although I don't have any HD content to try on it yet (a Blu-ray player is going to be my next purchase, when M&M can get some back in stock), DVDs and content from the iTunes store look great on it. Even regular cable isn't too bad.

The only gripe I have so far is the set's auto-dimming "feature" - when the screen is mostly black, it dims the backlight (presumably to produce deeper blacks), brightening it when more content appears on screen. In the situations where this is an issue (credits at the end of movies, for example, or the screensaver on the Apple TV), the switch in brightness is noticeable and extremely annoying. Unfortunately, there's no way to directly turn it off - instead, I've had to do so indirectly by turning Game/Text Mode on. This works, but you lose certain other features of the TV, such as noise reduction. I'm still deciding whether the loss of these is worth it or not.

I might also consider signing up for Cablevision's HD service now, despite the relatively limited channel selection, were it not for the fact that I dread dealing with their piss-poor customer service.

One thing I will be doing more of, however, is downloading TV shows from iTunes. Lost, for example, is currently showing on Cablevision on a channel where all the sound comes out of one speaker (and has been for weeks), and the picture quality is a poor 4:3 image. In contrast, not only does the downloaded version have better picture and sound, it's also available in widescreen format. Well worth $1.99 per episode.