Firetop

Now that the trauma of birth is well behind us, and all the fellow NCT mums have had their babies, I think it’s safe to post a diary of events from the birth of Maria back in July. Prospective first-time parents across the country don’t really know what to expect so this might be a useful ‘difficult case’ guide. Of course I’m sure service levels vary dramatically from NHS Trust to Trust, and lots of births are plain sailing (apparently), I wish however that somebody had given me a detailed breakdown of a difficult birth so that I could have prepared myself for the eventuality. I also had no idea of how responsible I would need to be in a maternity culture where nobody takes charge. (more…)

Facebook is a great platform, not only can you find long lost friends (or enemies), you can share all your personal information with them. However, with such a powerful tool comes a few concerns about identity theft or even personal safety – much of the information we use for banking security such as home address and data of birth is readily available on our profiles. The good news is that the privacy settings within Facebook allow you to restrict the levels of information that are available to your network, friends or even specific individuals. The alternative default makes almost everything available to everybody via member search – friend or not - so it’s worth reviewing in my opinion. (more…)

On Saturday morning, with a baby to send off to sleep, I popped down to Dorking Museum to see the long awaited Dalek which is featuring as part of the Doctor Who exhibition. Not the most mind-blowing Dr Who exhibit I ever came across; a collection of old toys and memorabilia in a large glass cabinet, as well as costumes which had seen better days (from the old episodes of the 1980s). No cybermen - just lots of monsters I didn’t recognise - nothing that would pass for special effects these days! However - for an entry fee of just £1 you can’t really go wrong, especially taking into account what else is on exhibit at Dorking museum. (more…)

This evening I attended my first British Interactive Media Association event at the BT Centre in Central London. I finally became a member of BIMA last month so that I could attend this event entitled ‘The Great Facebook Debate’. Facebook has seen phenomenal growth in the UK in the past twelve months - now at ten million users according to one of the evening’s slides. However, it’s not really clear to me how anybody is going to monetise this social networking tool without impacting on the user experience; yesterday whilst logged into Facebook I was delivered a leaderboard ad for ‘Phoenix University, Arizona’ – you would have thought that my detailed profile would more than adequately provide a better optimised advertising experience for my demographic! Where’s Google Adsense or Amazon ‘related products’ generating referral commission? (more…)

An eleven day gap in blogging deserves an apology, so sorry folks - just been incredibly busy juggling all the duties of a Father, Husband, Employee, Business owner… and Halo 3 addict! One evening last week, after some extremely heavy rainful in Crawley, the drive home to Surrey delivered a stunning sunset which lit up the sky with vibrant pinks and reds. I was listening to the super new Armin Van Buren album which seemed to complement the moment perfectly, and as I hit the A24 at Ockley I looked right and saw the most unusual cloud formation. What resembled huge jellyfish (or enormous alien space craft) were floating across the eastern horizon - I drove home extra quickly to take some photographs before the formation vanished. (more…)

A week ago I began to pay a bit more attention to the political conferences and the responses of the various leaders to all the speculation of an autumn general election. Yesterday’s speech at the Tory Conference in Blackpool by David Cameron had me persuaded to vote for him by bedtime. One key reason is that speaking for an hour without supporting notes on a subject you aren’t passionate about and aren’t knowledgeable on is quite tough, so he comes across as somebody who will do what he says. I also found many of the subjects raised and suggested solutions rang true with me. Of course I’m not stupid enough to think it wasn’t all very well planned and researched, but even his joke about Facebook amused me despite being a blatant attempt at winning over young voters. Gordon Brown doesn’t seem to have made any effort, he has an air of complacency about him and I don’t trust his eyes… and I already blogged the irritating Brown chin. (more…)

I’ve managed to give Halo 3 at least an hour on arcade mode and two on Xbox live since I received it after last week’s release date. Can’t say the arcade mode has blown me away - it’s not significantly different from Halos 1 and 2 and I really couldn’t care less about the background story told through trailers. Call me a heathen but I would have quite liked to have ditched the original theme track or given it to Paul Oakenfold to jazz it up a bit for the third installment. I’m never one for arcade modes on games generally though, AI munchkins just never come close to the difficulty of playing against experienced (and often stoned) human players on Xbox Live. (more…)