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Aidan is getting more and more comfortable in the pool.
He's now quite happy to jump in from the side, something he wouldn't do just a couple of months ago, and most of the photos we have of him underwater show him grinning away!
He can also now comfortably support himself by hanging on to the side of the pool and "monkey" his way round to the steps.
Must be a result of the great swimming teacher he has!
If the requirement for scrutinising legislation in the Senate is legal expertise greater than that of the Attorney General's chambers, as David Burch claimed today, can someone tell me why the PLP have a 26-year-old radio DJ as one of their Senators?
Or is that kind of expertise simply not required on the PLP side, since all they do is blindly nod through Government legislation anyway?
In his article "The case for conscription" in today's Royal Gazette, Al Seymour suggests that the Bermuda Regiment is essential for teaching discipline to some young Bermudian men and women. It's probably the most commonly heard argument in support of conscription, yet it's illogical and disputed by some former senior officers.
If the purpose of the Regiment is to teach discipline, then surely only those who need it, male and female, should be sent there? What is the purpose of sending those whose family, schools and neighbours have already done the job?
The thing is, the purpose of the Regiment is not to teach discipline. Former Bermuda Regiment commanding officer Eugene Raynor, a supporter of conscription, recently said, "The army needs productive people in order to do what they have to do. If you are able to sort out a few on the side that's fine and that's been going on all along. It's not the role or intent for people going into the Regiment to be sorted out."
If the Regiment itself does not see teaching discipline as it's raison d'etre, how can anyone else justify its existence on that basis?
Jay Rosen has posted a great, pithy definition of citizen journalism.
"When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism."
After the difficulty I had yesterday finding out what was going on with the Causeway, I'm again thinking about how to apply this here. What could be set up in Bermuda to allow ordinary people to inform each other about what's going on, without the need to wait for the middle-man (i.e. the media)?
I'm not just thinking about "disaster" scenarios like hurricanes and so on, I'm thinking about how this could be used for all news reporting (even hyper-local stuff that wouldn't even make it into the Royal Gazette, like which kid won the running race at the Francis Patton sports day).
Some things to think about:
I have a few ideas, which I'm exploring, but I'd be interested to hear yours too. Could something like this work here?
After saying all day that the Causeway is going to stay open, at 4.45pm the bloody idiots in the Government issue a press release saying they've closed it for at least the next two hours.
"In the interest of public safety, due to unexpected high winds associated with the TS Bertha, a decision has been made by Government to close the Causeway immediately for a period of about two hours.
The public will be advised immediately once the Causeway opens, which is expected to be around around 7.00 p.m. or there after – until the severe winds have abated.
The Government apologises for any inconvenience caused."
Unexpected high winds? Do me a favour. Surely they could have given people a little notice?
Until it reopens I'm stuck here at work in Hamilton.
UPDATE (5.20pm): Apparently a caller was just on the radio saying she was going across the Causeway right now, and grumbling about the Government's inability to get its story straight. So who knows what's going on. I'm going to hang tight here however until I get more concrete info.
UPDATE 2: Turns out the Bermuda Weather Service issued a Hurricane Watch at 3.50pm. You would have thought that the Government could have started warning people about the likely closure of the Causeway then.
UPDATE 3: While I'm moaning about this, can someone tell me why there's still no official place to go online to find the latest information about the Causeway? weather.bm has nothing and the last update on gov.bm was issued at 12.45pm and is still reassuring people that the Causeway is open. For God's sake, how hard is it? The Bermuda Sun currently seems to be the best source of info.
UPDATE 4 (7pm): Still closed. They're going to reassess at 8pm, apparently.
UPDATE 5 (9.30pm): Causeway reopened; finally home.
Satellite image of Tropical Storm Bertha at 2.45pm today, about thirty miles off Bermuda's eastern tip. Thank God this thing had weakened from a hurricane, or we'd be having a rough time of it. As it is, it's just a very rainy, blustery day.
After spending the last few weeks building an application to manage the bookings and admin for Mandy's swim program, this weekend it finally reached beta quality. Mandy is now using it for the bookings she's taking for August, so I'm hoping that there are no nasty bugs in any of my code that might cause any data loss.
I'm still struggling to come up with a good name for it though. When I wrote a similar application for managing the stock at Godet & Young I came up with the name GYPSUM, which a) sounded cool, b) was the name of something associated with a hardware store and c) actually stood for something (Godet and Young Product and SUpplier Management).
The best I've managed so far for Mandy's program in SIMS (Swimming Instinct Management System), but I don't really like it. It's not the name of anything associated with swimming, doesn't really sound that cool (needs more syllables, I think) and it reminds me too much of a crappy video game.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Had a nasty fright while we were washing up in the kitchen this evening, when I turned around and saw a centipede scuttling across the floor.
I'd heard about centipedes in Bermuda before, but this was the first time I'd seen one alive. Based on the ones I'd previously seen dead outside, and pictures like this and this, I thought that they were pretty small. But it turns out that all these were millipedes. This sucker was completely different - red and fat and about 6 inches long. It looked very similar to this.
While I was freaking out and wondering how to stop it getting anywhere near Aidan's room, Mandy grabbed a knife from the counter and chopped it into little bits. I really hope there's no more where it came from.
GRID is still frustrating as hell. Spent yesterday evening racing again and again on one track, in attempt to complete the objective of finishing at least third in my class. It was the same as one of the tracks in the demo, which I had finally managed to win a race on, so I was hoping it wouldn't take me long to complete the objective.
Wrong. It took me a couple of hours, in which time I suffered a humiliation even worse than coming last: I was lapped by all of the other drivers.
For completing the objective I scored 145 reputation points in Europe, bringing my totals to 200 in the US, 145 in Europe and 180 in Japan. Doesn't sound too bad, until you realise I need 80,000 points in each region to progress to the next level of the game in that region.
I'm going to stick at it, but if I don't improve soon, I fear I'll be abandoning GRID for another game that's a bit more fun.
I've just sent this letter to the editor regarding the Government's free child care bill, which was introduced in the House of Assembly yesterday:
"Dear Sir,
I was intrigued to read in today's newspaper that the PLP's free child care will only be available to Bermudian parents with a gross income not exceeding a "maximum prescribed amount".
While restricting free child care to needy families may be an entirely sensible thing to do, it is nevertheless not what the PLP promised before last year's General Election. On 13 December 2007, the PLP published a statement on its website which said, "The PLP will provide free DayCare for all Bermudians. That's a big difference between us and the UBP. The UBP will only provide day care for so-called 'needy' families."
It seems that the PLP is not so different from the UBP, after all.
Phillip Wells
St. George's"
I pointed out the contradiction with statements coming from other members of the PLP at the time, but the party stood by its statement.
Just another example of the mendacity of our current Government.
After playing GRID for another couple of hours yesterday evening, I finally managed to finish a race in 5th place (I came last in every other race, however).
I found it a bit easier when I decreased the force feedback strength on the steering wheel. Even at 40% it was a struggle to stop the wheel pulling through my hands as the car fishtailed its way along the track. It was also making me under-estimate the amount of effort needed to turn the car, usually resulting in me smashing into the corners (although I suspect I'm still approaching most of the turns way too fast). Knocking it back to 10% made things easier, although now I can't let the car pull itself out of corners by just letting the wheel slide through my hands.
It's definitely my driving that's the problem rather than other cars. One race just required me to get a certain lap time on an empty track - the best time I managed was some 25 seconds slower. By the end of the evening I was definitely starting to get frustrated.
Aidan is slowly - and I mean slowly - warming up to school.
I dropped him off again this morning and most of the way there he was moaning "granny and pop, granny and pop" over and over, despite my best attempts to distract him and cheer him up. Once we arrived he started crying and although he didn't resist when I passed him to the teacher, he was still crying when I left. It was heartbreaking, and inevitably makes you wonder whether you're doing the right thing.
Happily, however, when granny went to pick him up a couple of hours later, he wasn't crying, and was apparently sat watching Sesame Street with the rest of the kids. He'd also been paddling in the school's pool too. At one point the teacher offered him a sugar cookie, which he refused with a "no thank you!", but an offer of a brownie elicited a "yes, pleeeeease!", so I think he must have been feeling a bit better by then. If nothing else, at least he seems to be impressing them with his manners.
Hopefully by the time school proper starts in September he'll be settled right in.
Larry Burchall nails the problem with Tim Wise and groups like CURB in an excellent opinion piece in today's Bermuda Sun. For those who may not know, Mr. Burchall is an older black Bermudian who lived through segregation.
On Tim Wise:
"Tim Wise came to Bermuda to make money. Tim Wise makes his money pandering to a bunch of strangely anguished white Bermudians and inveterate black Bermudian race-moaners."
On CURB:
"Do I need to see white Bermudians walking around in sack-clothes and ashes, wailing and gnashing their teeth about their past behaviour? No!"
On Lynne Winfield's ridiculous assertion that his belief that blacks should move on means that he thinks racism is in the past:
"In 2008, does it matter - to me - that any person, white or black, practices discrimination? Yes! Yes! Yes!"
His advice to "inveterate black Bermudian race-moaners"? To do what he did:
"Bermuda's walls of lawful segregation fell in 1960... That fall provided equal, or relatively equal, access to the playing field that lay behind those walls. Once on that playing field and now playing equally - or near equally - with every other player, I needed the playing skills that they had.
I had two choices. I could sit on the playing field and moan about the past... Or, I could get the skills, get the knowledge, get whatever else it took, then get that ball and start making my own plays...
My choice was no different from the choice that faced every black person who - like me - was born into segregation. The only sensible choice was the choice that I made."
Bravo, Mr. Burchall. If only more people thought like you, Bermuda would be a much better place.
My Logitech G25 steering wheel finally arrived this weekend, so yesterday I bought myself a copy of GRID and took it for a spin. Conclusion: I'm a really rubbish driver.
I must have spent about 3 hours playing last night, and in that time I not only failed to win a single race, the best placing I managed was second to last. And that was on the easiest skill setting, with every driver assist turned on. Most of the time I'd be finishing about 20 seconds behind the car in front of me, and God-knows how far behind the winner. My sole success was in a race where I was the only car on the track and I had to hit a speed of 155 mph.
When I played the demo of GRID using the PS3 controller it took me a while before I managed to win a race, while I got used to the twitchy handling. With the wheel the handling is less twitchy, but I'm finding it really, really hard to keep up with the rest of the cars without smashing into a barrier or spinning off. I think a lot of it comes down to not knowing the tracks - I'm just coming into most of the corners way too fast.
Surprisingly, however, I'm still finding it more challenging than frustrating. There were a couple of tracks were I felt that, with a bit more practice, I could improve my standings. Just a case of getting over that initial learning curve, I guess.
In the last week I've been running, jumping and shooting my way through Uncharted: Drake's Fortune on the PS3. Although it only took me 11 hours to finish it, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time.
Think of a cross between an Indiana Jones movie and the Prince of Persia games, and you pretty much have Uncharted. You play Nathan Drake, a modern-day treasure hunter, trying to find the lost gold of El Dorado, fighting a rival group who's trying to get there first. It's a mix of a platformer and a third-person shooter, and it works really well.
I'm not a big fan of shooters on the PS3 because I find trying to aim with an analogue stick a complete nightmare compared to aiming with a mouse. But I didn't have too much trouble with Uncharted at all. Maybe I'm starting to get used to it. The next time I play a PC shooter it's probably going to seem incredibly easy.
So what was so great about the game? The graphics were nice, particularly the character models, although I still think that top-end PC titles like Crysis have them beat. The story was enjoyable, if predictable, with several hugely fun set pieces (the vehicle chase and the jet-ski ride upriver standing out). I liked the way that finding the hidden treasures scattered around the levels gradually unlocked special features, such as making-of videos and special abilities - it really gave you an incentive to explore. Ammo was rare enough to make you worried about running out, but not so rare that you often did. And auto-save points were sufficiently frequent that I rarely got frustrated.
The few, minor annoyances included quicktime events which sprang from nowhere and required you to quickly press a button or instantly die (which invariably meant that I died the first time), and Drake's unpredictable ability to automatically grab onto ledges when running off them.
But all in all, Uncharted was the most fun game I've played since Rainbow Six: Vegas.
If you're watching Doctor Who, but haven't yet seen the season finale that aired in the UK this Saturday, stop reading now. Major spoilers ahead.
Seriously. Last chance.
OK, well, despite being set up nicely by the previous episode, Turn Left (one of the highlights of the season), the double-parter that closed the season was a huge disappointment with a heavy emphasis on style rather than substance.
The narrative was largely incoherent and mired in technobabble (tell me again how the Doctor suddenly cobbled together than gun that was going to kill all the daleks? or why we suddenly had two Doctors running around?). There were too many characters to follow (at times it felt like a "Greatest Hits" of the characters from previous Doctor Whos), resulting in minimal screen time for each. In particular, the Doctor himself seemed almost irrelevant in the first episode. And while I was overjoyed that the Doctor didn't regenerate into someone new (I think David Tennant is one of the best Doctors there has been, beating my previous favourites, Tom Baker and Peter Davidson), I couldn't help feeling a bit cheated by the mechanic they used to explain why he didn't.
It wasn't all bad, I suppose. Davros was excellent (kudos to the BBC's makeup department), and Dalek Caan was delightfully unhinged. And best of all, they finally got rid of Donna Noble, surely the most annoying companion the Doctor has ever had. But overall it felt bombastic, chaotic and rushed.
Despite the hype, I haven't really been able to see what all the fuss is about with the upcoming game Spore. But after sitting down to play with the recently released Creature Creator the other night, I'm beginning to change my mind.
The Creature Creator is the part of Spore that lets you design a creature and see it come to life. There's nothing more to it than that, and I was a bit cynical about EA's decision to release it as a $10 download (although some stores will then give you $10 off the full game when it's released in September). However they've also released a free version (which has fewer bits to build your creature from than the $10 version), and it's that that I was playing with.
I only expected it to occupy me for half an hour or so, but in the end I spent a couple of hours with it, and will probably go back to it again. It was surprisingly fun and addictive playing around with different creature designs, and it's amazing how the game can then animate your creation.
Most cunning of all is how the designs are actually saved in the image of the creature itself. This means you can just save the thumbnail (like the one above) to your desktop, then drag and drop it into the Creature Creator to see it move or use it as the basis for a creature of your own. Clever stuff.
More of my creations here.
I'm experimenting with a new commenting system for this blog called Disqus.
It's exactly the kind of thing that I wish I'd had when I was running A Limey In Bermuda. Why?
And a whole bunch of other great stuff besides. It even made me briefly think about restarting LiB, with comments, just so I could use it in anger!
The main downside seems to be that Disqus comments are not indexed by Google et al, so you can't use the site search to find them.
Let me know what you think.
Aidan went to nursery school for the first time yesterday.
He's not due to start for real until September, but the school suggested that we might want to send him there for a few hours a week this summer to help him adjust. We debated about whether he was too young (he's only 21 months now and will only just be turning two in September), but in the end decided to go with what most other people we know are doing. Our hope is that it will help to develop his social and language skills, as well as giving granny and pop a break from babysitting duties.
We decided it would be best to break him in gently, so mummy dropped him off at 9am and granny and pop went to pick him up at 10.30am. I thought he'd probably cry a lot to start with, but then be distracted by whatever activities they had the kids doing. Wrong. Apparently he screamed for pretty much the whole ninety minutes.
When I first heard this, my initial reaction was annoyance that the school hadn't called us to come and get him. But apparently Aidan's behaviour was relatively normal. That said, the person who runs the school said she could only remember one child who was worse than Aidan on his first day.
Fortunately, today was a little better. Aidan cried a bit, but it wasn't as bad as yesterday. We're just keeping our fingers crossed that tomorrow will be better still as one of Aidan's friends will be there then too, and hopefully he'll get some reassurance from that.
PC: Mass Effect
Heavily story-driven sci-fi RPG. So far I think I've spent more time selecting dialog options in conversations and reading log entries than I have running around shooting things. It makes for a relatively slow paced game, but one that's much more compelling.
The Dark Knight
A fantastic movie, with outstanding acting by Heath Ledger as the Joker, although it probably goes on for a little too long. It's a dark movie though and definitely not suitable for young kids.
Thomas W. Phelan: 1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12
The opening chapters take a while to get to the point, suffering from way too much self-promotion. Still, as long as it works, I won't complain.
Rachid Taha: Made in Medina
One of the reasons I love the movie Black Hawk Down is the music. I only learned today that this guy was one of the contributors. It's an energetic fusion of Middle Eastern and Western rhythmns. I bought it on the strength of Barra Barra (the track from Black Hawk Down) alone, but I think I'm going to love the rest of it too.
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