Monthly Archives: January 2012

Evie, No More Bottles

Photos

Evie Lattimore wearing a floral party dressOver the last couple of months, Claire and I have been adjusting Evie’s bottles.

According to the formula, her age and weight she was meant to have two 250ml bottles a day however that rarely happened and she seemed more comfortable with around 200ml.

During September we thought it was time that she moved on from formula and onto cows milk so we made the switch. Of course that didn’t go down all that well, so we reverted to formula and started weening her off it by reducing the amount of formula per bottle from four scoops to three and then to two.

While all this was going on she was quite inconsistent with her bottles as well, sometimes she was drink all 200ml and want more and the next time she would protest after 50ml. As we got down to two scoops of formula in 200ml of milk, we thought it made sense to reduce the volume down to 100ml as well.

Not that long after we were down to a single scoop of formula, started introducing cows milk and Evie was happy as a lark. Next we stopped adding the scoop of formula all together and Evie didn’t seem to mind to much but another month or so later and she decided that she’d had enough of the bottle all together.

Claire and I miss giving Evie her bottle but they can’t stay little forever. Now we give her a sipper cup with milk in it and she is happy to drink smaller amounts of that periodically throughout the day and in the evening after she has had a bath.

Now it won’t be long before she is out of the cot and into a big girl bed!

Shh, The Dinosaur Is Asleep

Photos

Returning home from work on Tuesday evening and Hugo meets me in the garage like normal. However instead of “Hi Dad!” followed by something very interesting that he has been busting to tell me about, he raised his index finger to his mouth and said “Shhh, the dinosaur is sleeping!”.

Kids Dinosaur Costume Sleeping With A Blanket

At the time I had no idea what he was talking about until I walked inside and discovered his kids sized dinosaur costume sleeping on the tiles with a blanket – it makes perfect sense really, dinosaurs get tired too you know!

Dusty

Hardware

Intel CPU & Heat Sink Clogged With DustI got home from work and Hugo met me in the garage like normal and he says to me:

I’m grumpy!

After checking with Claire about why he might be grumpy, it turned out it was because the computer kept freezing when he was trying to watch one of his favourite shows via ABC 4 Kids.

Claire tells me that it did it a few times and that at some point, the computer was giving her a temperature warning – which I haven’t seen since the days of overclocking CPU’s.

A quick investigation shows that the fan & heat sink for the CPU are covered in dust. The photo probably doesn’t do it justice but the heat sink is completely filled in with dust and the fan blades are coated as well.

I clean everything up with a small stiff bristle paint brush, which Claire graciously let me use and we’re back in business. Claire walks past the computer and on the way to the bedroom tells me that the computer is making a weird humming sound.

Further investigation shows that it isn’t anything usual except that the CPU fan can actually spin properly now as it isn’t being restricted by the dust between it and the heat sink and the additional weight of it caked on the underside of the fan blades.

2011 Blogging Statistics

Blogging

At the beginning of 2011, I wrote about how my 2010 blogging efforts and in keeping with that trend – below are my 2011 blogging statistics.

POSTS AVG. POST LENGTH TOTAL POST LENGTH COMMENTS AVG. COMMENTS
2004 1 478 487 0 0.0
2005 82 1949 159835 511 12.9
2006 103 1837 189259 865 4.5
2007 127 1977 251150 229 1.3
2008 68 1597 108623 78 0.8
2009 77 2114 162804 104 0.9
2010 81 2147 173969 105 1.4
2011 58 1737 100779 144 1.5

In 2009 I had aimed for between seven and eight posts per month, which I didn’t quite make and in 2010 I thought if I had pushed myself I could average slightly over eight and break through the magic 100 posts per year marker but I still haven’t managed it yet. While my number of posts is down, along with my average post length – I am happy that the number of comments has increased slightly over previous years.

For those that are interested in doing the same, I’ve made the blogging statistics SQL script available for you to use.

30 Day Report: Drink 2 Litres Of Water Daily

Life

For the month of November, I attempted my first 30 day challenge and it was to drink 2 litres of water daily.

I didn’t think it would have been that hard to drink 2 litres of water each day but I found it to be quite a lot of water to consume during a normal day.

What I did find was that it was really easily to consume the water in days that I attended the gym, where in some instances I’d do over three litres in a day but then over a weekend I’d do a bit less than 2 litres.

Over the course of the month I averaged 1.95 litres per day, so I didn’t reach the challenge goal. However, given that it was such a massive increase from my close to zero daily water intake, I’m actually going to chock it up as a success.

One thing that it didn’t seem to slow down was my coffee intake and I mentioned to Claire that might be one of my next challenges – no coffee or caffeine for a month, yowzer!