It was "sibling" group for Jessica yesterday. This is a group she got involved in through Social Services. It's designed for the siblings of children with special needs. I suppose it's intended to give them an outlet for their feelings outside the family environment.

Jessica seems to quite enjoy it. That said, she does let out some feelings which show she can quite churned up. She brought home a drawing showing how unhappy she feels about herself sometimes in her relationship with Alex. I suppose a lot of this is just normal brother-sister stuff (any of my sisters care to back me up on that one?). It does make us feel a little uncomfortable though.

That's it for the moment. I'm busy in Accrington, but probably back in Birkenhead from Thursday. I've got a load of job applications to look at for when this job finishes in 5 weeks, and I've got to get them sorted sharpish before they shunt me back onto an operational team.

First week of school over and done with. Alex is now in Year 2 - his final year at Infants. Jessica has moved to Year 4 - her second year at Juniors.

All seemed to go well. Both children seemingly a bit relieved to have something to do. Alex in particular seems glad to have all his routines back. Unfortunately, like last year, this almost certainly won't last very long. At least it's going well for the time being.

We're still pretty worried that he's behind his peers. Jessica was much further along with her reading, writing, and possibly maths too at his age. I suppose you'd just say that's a 'boy' thing. Maybe it is. But it doesn't stop us worrying about what will happen at the end of the year when he has to move schools.

As for Jessica, Year 4 has immediately brought harder homework. She was given homework on Day 1 would you believe it, that had to be completed by Friday on the first week! Still, she gets to go swimming once a week this year, and she seems settled at school. (Shame she's like a 13 year old with a sore head at home!) We've started her on Judo, which she seems to enjoy. Currently working towards her Yellow belt.

Well, that's the latest update on life in the Harrison household. More to follow later...

Accrington again today, and it's all going horribly wrong. Half the computers which should have been installed on Friday to be up and running today aren't functioning! Desperately trying to get this sorted out with the appropriate engineers at the moment, but I'm going to get ripped to shreds on a teleconference this afternoon about it.

Oh well, we're doing what we can.

A colleague of mine has pointed out a place down in Hampshire called Hollycombe. Looks just like Alex's sort of thing - the only problem being it's so far away. That said, my colleague has a contact there who says he'd be able to show Alex how to drive one of the miniature steam engines! I wonder if we could get down there for a weekend at some point?

Time for another entry to the blog. This time, I'm tinkering with my latest gadget. It's a folding keyboard for using with my Palm. It doesn't half make entering a lot of text easier. Graffiti handwriting recognition is OK for a little while, but is tiring and time consuming if you're trying to write much. Picked one up on Ebay for �20. I'm calling it a birthday present.

Apart from that, we're winding up for the return to school for Alex and Jessica. For Alex this means counting the days down on his calendar so that he's prepared. For Jessica it's just dragging ourselves through the last few days.

I'll post again to let you know how Alex gets on in Year 2.

I'm travelling to Accrington every day in work at the moment. We've been doing a moderately large IT and Telephony installation and have had all lsorts of problems. Hoping for it all to be completed over this weekend so that I can go in on Monday and find all is well. It's about an hour and a half's journey each way, so I'm spending 3 hours a day in the car. The M6 is now my friend!

I've opened the blog up now so that anyone can leave a comment, so let me know what you think. I'll post again soon.

Holiday time!

I've been on leave for a couple of weeks - spending some time with the kids now they're off school. Deb is off for the whole summer - yikes! I was glad to come back to work for a rest.

We were in Menorca for 1 week. We went to the same hotel as last year in Ciutadella. It's an all inclusive and reasonably nice. The old town is wonderful - tiny narrow streets and little squares. Although it was very hot (90F +) we still managed some time to sight see - mostly in the evening when the heat had gone out of the day.

As usual Jessica went hell for leather playing in the pool and had worn herself out after 4 days. She ended up quite grumpy by the end. Alex also got tired, and finished wanting to spend a lot of time in the room.

Still we had a good time and were lucky to miss the airport chaos last week.

Back at work now and likely to be spending quite a bit of time in Accrington. Lucky me.

GVIM and fonts

Tip #914 - Looking for the perfect programming font ? : vim online:

I've been struggling to get my preferred text editor GVIM set up according to my taste for ages. I'd given up basically until I found this note at the VIM homepage. I downloaded the ProggyClean font and installed it as instructed. I then recompiled VIM to use GTK2 (can't believe I was still using GTK1!) and now everything looks cleaner and is much more usable than it was. Woohoo! I'm using it to now to work on my draft for a website. This is planned to be for parents of autistic children on Wirral to share thoughts, interventions, things that have worked for them. It's still a long way from being finished. I'm currently struggling with the mechanism for adding links to content. I'll have to post more detail when I've got time.

See you soon!

Byzantine Studies Page

Byzantium: The Byzantine Studies Page:

Quick note to add this page to my blog. If you're interested in Byzantium, then this is as good a place as I've found on the web. I haven't done nearly as much research through this page as I would have liked. This is the best portal that I've come across - although I'd happily hear of a better if you know one. If nothing else, this site can point you to a translation of the full text of Michael Psellus' Chronographia. I haven't read all of it, but for the period of Byzantine that I'm interested in this is probably one of the best sources there is.

Time for another update. I've been extremely busy in work with my new job, so I'm going to blame that for not writing earlier. I've moved into a project job - at least for the time being. This week I provided assurance on a spend of �2.5 million (!).

In terms of FreeBSD, my laptop (Dell Inspiron 1300) is now basically fully up and running. It's on 6.1-STABLE as of 23/6/2006. All the hardware works apart from the sound and modem - neither important for me. I'll blog some howtos on what I did later.

I've also set my Palm Tungsten E to connect to the web. This note is being written with Plogit and I'll upload it later.

My family is OK. Alex is doing well at school, we're preparing for Year 2. Jessica is OK but grumpy. We're using a Handle massage technique to relax her. Early days but it seems to be effective at helping her relax at night. We initially used it on Alex, but stopped some time ago as he seemed to be through that phase. Jessica has real problems going to sleep at night. She can't seem to relax. This massage technique is helping, but she's not there yet - often not going to sleep until 22:00. See you later.

I'm in Blackpool today - not for fun I hasten to add. I started a new job recently & I'm now working with some colleagues in Blackpool. Lots of fun travelling up the M55!

My new laptop arrived recently. It's a new Dell Inspiron 1300, the cheapest I could find. It'll replace the IBM 600e I bought from ebay a year ago which no longer boots - and is now listed on ebay again to see if I can make some money back!

I've successfully loaded FreeBSD on it - and upgraded to 6.1-PRERELEASE over the weekend. The onboard Broadcom 440 is detected as bfe0, but I'm using an Asus WL-167G usb wireless adaptor. Took some research to find one that works with FreeBSD - this is seen as ural0 and worked first time. I now need to get WEP and X working. See you later.