marramgrass

(PAW2009 48/52)

Yup, I missed 47/52 last week. I’ll make it up.

Jings, it’s a while since I’ve done one of these. I still haven’t posted a photo this week, either.

• The Ultimate Productivity Blog. Aye.
• Apps.ie, showcasing Irish (of whatever variety) mobile software. There’s some excellent work in there.
• After I posted about a U2 track a while back, the Smashing Pumpkins cover it well.
• Sweet Child O’ Mine on the fiddle. Really.
• A thoughtful post on teachers using social networks.
• I’ve discovered a new comic — Dresden Codak. Check out Caveman Science Fiction, then read the beautifully whimsical The Sleepwalkers.
• We recently met photographer Emma Boyd. She’s good.
• I was invited to write a guest post for TotalApps. Check out my Five Apps Friday.
• Mike Johnston gives us an interesting essay on the ethics of reviewing.
• A postie’s perspective on the disputes and industrial action at Royal Mail.
• Every time I stumble across a post at Dooce, I think I should subscribe. This time I did.
• Mig does it again.
• Matt Gemmell on real-world usability.

That’s all for now.

(PAW2009 46/52)

(PAW2009 45/52)

Yes, I’m very late this week. A shift in working patterns (I’m now freelancing full-time, although still doing some project work for my previous employer, which is nice — I like working there) means the last couple of weeks have been hectic while I get everything bedded in.

This was taken in one of the conference rooms on the top floor of Belfast’s flashy new Fitzwilliam Hotel. The view from up there is also pretty class.

(PAW2009 44/52)

It’s my intention to avoid becoming a daddyblogger. That is, in part, why posting has been so light here for the last, oh, six months: it’s six months today since Reuben was born. (He’s a bit younger in the photo.) Forgive me if I mark the occasion with a momentary relaxation of that policy.

Everyone told me that life wouldn’t be the same. My officemates at work seemed to take great pleasure in telling me all the things I wouldn’t be able to do anymore. They were right, to a point, in that having a baby boy in the house has comprehensively changed the shape and rhythm of life. To tell truth, I’m still figuring out how the routine of work and rest fits around his waking, sleeping, eating and playing. Something tells me I’ll spend the next eighteen or twenty years still figuring that out.

It’s not easy, especially to someone so sensitive to disruption of his sleep, but it is great, and wonderfully fulfilling in a way I find difficult to articulate. Every week he does something new and responds to the world around him in a different way, and every day I learn something new about how to approach that world. We’re blessed with a good-natured and sociable wee boy who, these days, is very quick to grin and laugh. He’s growing into himself as a person, even this early in life, and I’m excited to discover who he becomes.

I was nervous, maybe even reluctant, about becoming a parent. I was very fond of life as it was, and not keen to see it changed too radically. I had the (possibly common, I suppose) worry about how I would feel about the baby; expected to love this person I’d never met, what if I didn’t? I couldn’t see a clear way through the financial consequences of maternity leave and parenthood. All these things and more kept me subdued for months. These days, I’ve discovered — gladly — how completely a child changes your priorities and your outlook. None of those worries is a problem for me now.

Six months down the line, it’s easy and true to say that having Reuben around is the best thing ever.

(PAW2009 43/52)

(PAW2009 42/52)

(PAW2009 41/52)

Sometimes the power in music is in the associations it makes with what else is going on when you hear it. This week’s tune, “Remains” by Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon, is a great track by itself, but I enjoy it more for how I came across it.

Whedon’s brother Joss is the man behind some of the most interesting genre TV of the last decade or so: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Firefly and the current Dollhouse. The fraught first season of Dollhouse ended with an unexpected and initially unaired future-set episode called “Epitaph One”, in which the writers were pretty cruel to their characters in order to lay out some of the darker ideas the show plays with. Revolving around a couple of powerful scenes, “Epitaph One” is very good TV (much better than unfortunately large chunks of Dollhouse‘s first season).

The sadness and hope of the final scene of the episode can be heard in the song.

“Remains” [YouTube]

There seems to have been a glut of good, smart TV over the last number of years. I hear The West Wing and Battlestar Galactica talked about a lot, although I haven’t seen any of either of them. (I’ll hear about that, I know.) As in books and in film, I find some really high quality hidden away in genres where the mainstream might never find it. That’s a shame, I think.

(PAW2009 40/52)