Gruffydd

I'm a big advocate of using flash in indoor photography to make sure you get the photo. I hate the disappointment of reviewing afterwards and finding blur in the photos which, when corrected in Photoshop still doesn't look right. Visiting Leicester yesterday we were at my Grandparent's house which gets a good amount of natural light in through the conservatory and managed to get some excellent results without using flash. Indeed, this photo, when put through Photoshop for colours/levels/contrast didn't require anything at all - essentially as it came off the camera. The same also applied to this photo. Hopefully with the sun making more of an appearance now, I'll be able to play with natural light a little bit more.

One of the issues I'm slightly concerned about with regards to Gruffydd growing up is that my parents - indeed, most of my family aren't going to see vast sections of this, as they live in Leicester, over 150 miles away. We're doing a lot of stuff with photos, and some stuff with video as well, but the video stuff is merely snapshots.

I've spent today playing around with: o QTSS (Quicktime Streaming Server) o Quicktime Broadcast

Quicktime Broadcast is a funky little bit of software available from Apple for OSX that takes a feed either from an iSight camera, or from a Firewire input. I've rigged up a Canon XM2 to the Firewire port (the same camera that's used for the snapshot videos). Broadcast then has various options for encoding the video and audio - as well as framerate and so on. There's various network options - if your network supports multicast, then there's an option for that. You can also do manual (single) unicast, and automatic unicast. I'm using automatic unicast via the server in London.

The server is running QTSS which compiles quickly and easily on Debian Etch (make sure you've got a qtss user added before you run ./Install otherwise it won't work properly - this doesn't seem to be mentioned in the documentation, but you do get an error whilst it's running saying that the script can't chown some files because the user doesn't exist...)

From here, it's simply a matter of tuning the setup against what you're wanting to do. My parents have been happily watching the stream using Quicktime Player from Leicester, which is what I'd intended. I've tuned our setup to 2fps - the reason for this is it gives the overall best frame quality and audio quality at 320x240. This takes around 28kB/s which is pretty much the size of the upload path over our DSL.

The reason I chose to use the server in London is there's a chance my Grandparents (and obviously, anyone else) will want to watch at the same time as say my parents. The London server obviously has the bandwidth to cope with this. In essence, the London server offers the ability to have more than one client viewing the stream at any one time.

Photos of the setup are here.

There's a saying amongst techies that gaffer tape can fix pretty much anything. That, and that it holds the world together. We've been having some difficulties getting the baby to sleep recently as he doesn't seem to like lying flat. We'd also noticed that he's taken to sitting in his activity chair really well. He'll happily spend all day in it, and, importantly, likes to sleep in it.

The difficulty we've got is that we have a sleep apnea monitor. Each sensor for this is rigid, and roughly the side of an A4 piece of paper. The activity chair is soft on all sides. Trying to put the two together was clearly going to be difficult.

I ended up gaffer taping the sensor across the back of the chair, so his back is on it. The top is gaffer taped in place, and the bottom held in place using cable ties (so that his weight doesn't cause the tape to stretch and thus lose contact with the sensor). The top is gaffered because the top of the chair is circular and cable ties won't hold on it without slipping.

It looks rough and ready, but it works. All those years of working in theatre have taught me something...

I mentioned previously that my trusty Leatherman Wave has been away for repair. Just to close this off, after getting back this morning, I found a package from Kendal containing a brand new Leatherman. Turns out they'd discontinued the model I had, and instead of repairing it have given me a new one. Yay!

So - where did I get back from? We've been out this morning to register Gruffydd's birth. Lucky him, he now gets to pay taxes when he starts earning. :)

During the week I usually get up around 0720 and head in to the office, so attempting to keep with the routine, I got up with Sioned & Gruffydd at around 0700ish, did the usual stuff (feed, change), had some breakfast and whatnot before the midwife arrived. Straight after that, we headed over to Bangor and dropped in on a few people, including the offices I work for, all in all taking around two hours. This afternoon, we had the audiologist from the hospital over to check Gruffydd's hearing, which was all fine. Immediately after that, we had the Doctor over (he's sort of a family friend) to do more tests. Straight after that, Sioned's parents came over - I'd asked her Dad for a hand with a wardrobe we'd bought from Ikea which is, frankly, crap. I was having problems hanging the doors on it - they wouldn't hang straight. He pointed out this is because one bit of wood is warped, one bowed, and the whole thing seems to have twisted. Top marks to Ikea on that one, then. We made the best of a bad job before they headed off and we had some tea. Gruffydd elected to have his tea just as Sioned was serving up. Whilst this was happening, I was wondering why my laptop had lost the DHCP lease from the server, but thought I was doing something a little odd.

No. Wrong. Way more than a little odd. The UPS in the rack had switched off. I suspect we'd had low incoming power most of the day due to the storms, and the batteries eventually ran out. On powering everything back up, I seem to be one disk short of the quota - fortunately it's a backup drive, so it's not all bad. The issue being it's the one with the bootloader on it. Arse.

I'll have a quiet day tomorrow, please.

Do all babies smell like barbecue and look like Furbies, or just this one?

Sioned had to stay in the hospital overnight as they were concerned about how she was healing. She was adamant she was fine, but decided that their advise was best heeded. I ended up getting to bed about midnight, got up at 0715 and headed over to the University to drop some bits off, before getting to the Hospital at around 0830. Fortunately, the nursing staff held true to their promise yesterday of getting us out quickly and we were heading out to the car at 0945. Mum, Dad, Laura, Grandma and Grandad have come over today to visit us, they arrived just before 12. We spent some time at our house, and have been at Sion's Mum & Dad's for the rest of the day. Lots more photos, lots of video - pretty much everything is as you'd expect it to be. Still quiet, though, which is good. :-)

Sioned woke me up at 0411 and said that she was suffering some pain and said that she wanted to call the hospital for an opinion on if what was being experienced was the early stages of labour. The result of the phone call saw us dressed, in the car and with the required stuff and heading for the A55 at 0431. After driving at speeds around *cough*, we arrived at the hospital a mere 15 minutes later (yep, I'm quite pleased with that). After heading to the required ward, we were put in a side room where examinations took place and the on-call Doctor gave us the two options: Sioned could delivery naturally, or they could start to organise a Caesarian section. Since there was a schedule for the section tomorrow, it'd take some organisation to get this ready in time. They suggested that, at this time, she was 8cm dialated. Between us, we decided it'd be best for a natural delivery. At 0705, Gruffydd Cynan Smith was born, weighing 7lb1/2oz. Head-toe length was 50cm, head circumference 32.5cm. Photos are at http://photos.gruffyddsmith.com, and video will appear shortly at http://video.gruffyddsmith.com. Sioned is fine, and now able to eat normally again. Baby is fine and seems to respond to stimuli as expected.