Isaac walks! November 29, 2006
Posted by a1291762 in : emily, isaac , 1 comment so farIsaac is walking! He has to concentrate hard on walking and will trip over toys on the floor. Compared to Emily his balance is better. I think it’s because he took longer to walk.
He got half way down the hallway last night before falling over. Emily was jealous of the attention Isaac was getting so I got her to walk down the hallway too. She didn’t really understand what the big deal was but managed to act like she could only just walk. It was quite funny to watch ;)
Isaac has been eating toast with vegemite for week or two now. I gave him some of Emily’s one day on a whim and he seemed ok with it. We have to cut it up into small pieces because he doesn’t have any molars yet.
I sold my piano November 21, 2006
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentThat’s right, my companion of almost 20 years has finally gone. It was sad but I don’t play it enough to justify the space it takes up and the cost every time we move. I was quite surprised that it was in such good tune considering it’s been moved 3 times (2 inter-state) since it’s last tune up, around 7 years ago! I guess I’ve managed to keep it in well-controlled environments or something.
The sale itself was simple enough. I put it up on eBay for $1 and luckily it sold for a bit more than that. Of course, nowhere near enough to cover the cost of even the P-70. Getting it out was fun. With no piano trolley, it was up to 4 guys (including me) to lift the thing through the door, which has 2cm clearance! Worse was to come since they had a trailer but no real plan on how to lift the piano into it. They ended up pushing it on while it was held up at an angle. Scary stuff but the piano seemed to be ok after loading.
I’ve been planning to sell the piano for ages. The photo I used on eBay was taken more than a year ago. My plan was to sell the piano to help raise money for something more suitable for me now. Something like a Yamaha P-90 or a P-70. The P-70 is half the price but only has 32-note polyphony which could be a deal breaker for me. I think a play test will be in order.
Something's up with Emily November 12, 2006
Posted by a1291762 in : emily, isaac , 1 comment so farEmily has become fully self-aware in the last two weeks. She now refers to herself as “me” instead of “Emily” and says “you”/”your” instead of “daddy”.
Perhaps related to this, she’s also become a bit strange. She’s been doing things that get her in trouble at home and has something like an attachment issue but it’s not consistent. My theory is that her new-found awareness has made her feel alone and she’s trying to hold onto what her memories tell her is normal. The worst reaction we’ve had is at swimming. I’ve already mentioned the problems we had. This week I went in the pool and while that helped to calm her down, she was still clearly agitated. I think she didn’t trust that I wouldn’t leave her in there by herself.
We got Emily a new pair of shoes. They’re like sandals but with velcro and an enclosed heel. They gave her blisters so she’s now wearing Wiggles band-aids on her ankles. We saw a lady on the bus today that also had band-aids on her ankles and Emily was fascinated by them.
Isaac is taking his first steps and should be walking any day now.
NWN stuck, Boot Camp drivers suck November 5, 2006
Posted by a1291762 in : eve , add a commentI’m stuck in Neverwinter Nights. It seems that loading a game and then going into an outside area kills the game. I noticed it once before but I had been wanting to restart anyway (to change my character around a bit). Now I’ve completed a quater of the first quest and unless I can get the game to stop crashing, I’ll have to start again!
I updated to the Boot Camp 1.1.2 drivers recently but something screwed up and they didn’t install properly. Worse, the installer refuses to work again, giving some cryptic error about a missing file (it’s present, I checked!).
I’ve just managed to re-install the Boot Camp 1.1.2 drivers but it wasn’t easy. First I removed everything, even Input Remapper (which might have been part of the problem anyway). Then I blew away all the files I could find relating to Boot Camp drivers (eg. c:\Program Files\Macintosh Drivers…). There were a few other ones. Like “Apple Keyboard Driver”, Realtek (sound), Sigmatel (sound) and ATI. Then I searched for “Macintosh” in the registry and blew away everything I found. Finally, I rebooted and ran the installer. It worked!
Interestingly, handling of fn + Fx works now. Input Remapper used to handle that so perhaps it was conflicting with the new Apple driver.
Now to see if NWN is still crashing…
D’oh!
But.. playing with the video settings suddenly made it right. Then it crashed while running around. I tried tweaking things and I think it’s the use of skyboxes that’s causing the game to crash. Considering the default views don’t even let you see the sky, I think it’s fine to turn it off.
I’m now in the middle of the next part of my quest. I got a henchman because I could actually afford one, after all the prize money from the first quest. It’s a psycho dwarf monk. I found a magic staff lying around. 100GP to get it identified. 2000GP to sell it. wOOt! I’ve traded in my tower shield for a Large Shield +1 (expensive but lighter). I found 2 magical armours that were a bit lighter than my half plate but with equivalent AC. One of them even looks kind of nice. Yay.
Isaac is different to Emily November 5, 2006
Posted by a1291762 in : emily, isaac , add a commentIsaac is different to Emily. Here are a few I’ve realised lately.
- Isaac has developed his fine motor skills more than Emily did. He can catch a ball that’s rolled past him.
- Isaac is much more temperamental than Emily is. He can cycle from happy to sad and back very quickly. Emily never really threw tantrums but Isaac does all the time.
- Isaac prefers Bree. Emily prefers me.
Something’s strange about Emily. At swimming last week she started crying. I wasn’t there but everyone says nothing was happening. This week, she was crying the whole lesson and even made herself vomit a bit. I’ve never seen Emily so obviously affected like that before. To see if it was specifically the pool at swim school, I took her to my dad’s place today. Actually, we ended up swimming at my auntie’s pool because it’s indoors and it’s not freezing. Again, Emily seemed scared of the pool but with the whole family there, we managed to get her in and having fun. I’m hoping that she’ll be back to normal at swimming next week.
Isaac came in too. It’s his first time in a pool and he had a blast. Oh yeah… we had his birthday party yesterday. It ended up being just him and skyler (2 months older). Some of mine and Bree’s family was there so the adults just sat and watched the kids play. They had a great time. We were inside due to all the rain so we’d moved all the furniture to the wall. It’s quite a big space when you do that.