Three Fingered Salute

Little Miss is crying for feed every two hours. LSW is exhausted both physically and in milk supply. The cold is still there but she seems much better, however I am getting worried about LSW’s mental state.

She’s trying to finish of some higher qualification Diploma and can’t concentrate on it when Little Miss is demanding feeding. LSW is putting herself under a lot of unnecessary pressure and she vents off at yours truly.

In retrospect, the venting is not all that bad; it just feels a lot worse than it is when it actually happens.

A little progress has been made with both the game and the FIL’s website. Hopefully I’ll have the Fil’s website up and running by the end of the week, even sooner depending on how hard the setup process is.

The artist got back to me saying that they’ve started work on the pages that I asked for, so I’ll paypal over the relevant cash tonight. Progress on the game is slow and It’s hard to concentrate on it when there’s so much else demanding my attention.

It seems that as soon as you get a few good nights in a row, it lulls you into a false sense of security. The last few nights for both myself and LSW have been nice. Then Little Miss decides that tonight’s the night to keep us up.

Little Miss is improving; she slept for two three hour sessions last night. Pity she had a two hour break between them. I got woken up at 5:00 am last night by this strange noise coming from the baby monitor. Rushing up stairs in a panic, there are no words to describe the relief I felt when I discovered is was LSW’s snoring.

Little Miss’ cold is back. This will mean more sleepless nights over the next week.

I’m going to knock most of client two’s issues on the head today, just to clear these items from their list and keep them sweet. Most of the work I would have done seems to being assigned to foreign parts so I’m slowly bringing the CV up to date. It’s taking quite a while because I have to restart the thing from scratch. I didn’t realise how many jobs I’ve actually had.

I wrote a few lines last night with the game code last night. I’m writing in a semi-unfamiliar language using API’s I’ve never used before and to be honest it’s slow going!

The glass people turned up today but said that they had the wrong parts. All that lugging heavy stuff about, for nothing. LSW is spitting tacks and I’ve got to go home and face that!

I’ll have to move all the stuff back this lunchtime.

Well, we have the glass people coming today. I spent most of last night moving furniture out of the conservatory and into the living room, covering blinds and generally performing heavy lifting. I’m knackered, fall asleep and then get woken up by Little Miss. It’s a bit like BBC News 24. On the hour, every hour but with more tears

The code I’ve written for the last week has now started to come back with bug reports and there are complaints about the names of the reports. The bugs I can actually handle, it’s the bun-fights over things about names and functionality. TMCM wants things one way and the Doctor wants things another and I’m really stuck in the middle. User Interface Tennis I call it.

Got a little coding done on the game last night, which makes me feel better but I suppose my priority must be Fil’s Website. I should try and get that working by the weekend.

Little Miss is still not sleeping properly (again) and so it was another bad night for both LSW and I. I don’t know if the problem is with Little Miss or LSW is being so negative that she causing a self imposed problems. Trying to maintain LSW’s confidence is challenge to say the least.

TMCM is trying to rock the boat. He wants new functionality going into our product before the fixes and client four’s requirements are complete. Oh well.

Still no new work on the Website or the Game but I have got a few new concepts round my head with the networking.

Little Miss had her jabs yesterday. She’s kept both of us up for most of last night. LSW is exhausted. It really does break your heart when Little Miss cries in pain, we both do our best to reassure and soothe her but it is very tiring. On top of that, the washing machine broke yesterday, so I was up to my elbows in dirty water whilst I unblocked it. The bathroom’s still in a mess and I think the bath is still leaking. I’ll have to look into that as well tonight.

I’m too tired to work on the game, the story or sort out FiL’s Website. Hopefully, MiL will come up tomorrow and help out. I doubt she’ll miss out on her granddaughter fix. I don’t know what the latest situation is with LSW’s grandfather. The hospital is happy to let him go home as long as he has a home help. Unfortunately, there isn’t one available, so the poor guy is having to wait in the hospital.

Thankfully, work has eased off for the moment, there was a panic last night when client five switched the servers and one of our American team hadn’t prepared the new server properly. Talk about seat of the pants coding! But I’m back on some easy going Client Four Code at the moment. Could do with the rest to be honest!

The tiredness is taking its toll. I’ve spent a lot of time just staring at the screen and moving the mouse really. Although Little Miss had a good night’s sleep, LSW and I did not. Every hour she seemed to have a grunting fit, so every hour we turned the light on and saw she was still asleep.

Personally, I think she was awake and then pretended to be asleep we checked on her.

Everyone at work is running around, stomping and shouting. I’m just keeping my head down and quietly working on something for Client Four. The piece of code I’m working on has been claimed as impossible to do in the time period. Sometimes, I amaze even myself because its almost done!

Will I get any appreciation because I managed to achieve it that quickly? Will I Gonads!

The game is progressing slowly. It’s getting the concepts round my head for the Multiplayer side of things that’s the problem. Friday is always a good progress night so I’ll see how I feel about the whole thing.

We have a visitor today. MIL is coming up for a visit. This has thrown LSW into a real cleaning frenzy. Apparently I make mess therefore all the mess in the house is mine. So it’s my entire fault! Q.E.D! Hopefully, she’ll have calmed down by lunchtime.

I’ve been digging through the HR notes for work. Things seem to have calmed down a lot but it looks like I’m stuck here till February, (Damn Paternity Leave) so I’ll have to be a good little dogsbody till then.

I’ve had an email from a gentleman about the game. He works for big mobile phone company and they’re asking if the could us the game for their Bluetooth Testing. I’ve said that they can download the demo, once it’s finished (hopefully in a couple of weeks) and that might be a useful contact in future.

I’ve even had time to work on my story a little. I’m now on the fourth draft of the final chapter and getting the tone right is very important but very difficult to do. I’ve even had a review of the story by one of the other menus. He sounded quite angry about a wasted opportunity, which I felt quite offended by. This story was not written for them, it was written by me for me.

Well last night was eventful. Little Miss had her usual screaming session at about 7:00 till 8:00 and then thankfully dropped off. The baby monitor has given us a new lease of life, so we actually had a meal together. She slept through until 10:00, and then woke again at 1:00.

There was an almighty kick at the front door at 2:00, which I went out to check. A police car went flying by round to a neighbour’s house. After checking outside, I finally got to sleep at 3:30 and then Little Miss screamed about 4:00. So I emailed in that I would be late, but forgot to send it until 9:30 when I woke up next.

Work is not happy about the lateness and I’m not happy there anyway, so I’ve been updating my CV and checking the HR website to see if I have to repay the paternity leave.

I’ve been sorting out client four’s data and problems for our Vietnam client.

It's now 8:30pm. Little Miss has just gone to sleep. She was screaming scine 4:30 pm. I'm beginning to wonder if there's something else wrong.

Little Miss had a bad night, so did LSW and so did I. I got woken at 6:00 am by the baby monitor. To tell the truth, you didn’t need a baby monitor when she’s that loud. She can’t stand having this blocked nose. It’s only when we put the nasal drops in, did she begin to quieten. She finally seemed happy by 8:00 am, which finally got me to work.

I was late for work because of all that, but thankfully there was only some small work for client four and consulting on other people. To be honest, I’m pretty much in a daze at the moment.

Then there’s this problem with a client in Vietnam. I have to fix their problems here so we can export it back to them. However, the code in question was written by Crusty and there’s no error handling or comments or any help from Crusty (“Oh it’s been that long ago, I can’t remember!”). I’m drowning in Sh*t code !!

Little Miss has been grumpy and screamy all night since I got home at 5:30. She seems stuffed up with the cold and so we're back to the problem of her not sleeping. I suppose the writing was on the wall when she didn't smile during her bath, something she usually enjoys, but at least she was quiet.

Still nothing on the FILs Website. I'll go over my notes tonight and we'll take it from there. The Single player portion of the game is now complete, this just leaves the hardest part.

THE MULTI-PLAYER !

Da -Da - DUM !

After all the bricking I was doing over this meeting, it got cancelled. It mustn’t have been that important. At some point I was expecting a P-45 or written warning. Turns out I’m just paranoid, either that or they’ve got something stored up for me this weekend.

Little Miss didn’t have as good a night as the previous three. She woke at 1 am and stayed awake until 3. I slept through the whole thing much to LSW’s disappointment. Mind you I did clean up the first nappy this morning. LSW has taken her to meet everybody at her work. There will be so much cooing and awing that I’m glad I’m not there.

Another quiet night from Little Miss. LSW is over the moon! I've even managed to fix the bath and put in the new DVD writer in my 'puter. Created a DVD from the MPEG we'd made up from kenya and it's so much better than the VCD.

However, I'm having trouble sleeping because of this meeting with Scooter. Trying to rack my brains to see if there's anything else I've done wrong lately.

Finally got the single player and the hotseat version working with the game and hopefully, I'll have FIL's Domain name and webspace set up by tomorrow.

What an exciting Satarday night I’m having. Hopefully, we’ve managed to turn a corner with Little Miss. We bath her and put her to bed before seven and that seems to help her sleep longer. LSW is in good spirits because she’s getting more sleep. I’ve just got to sort out the bathroom because the bath has sprung a leek.

This means that something else in my life is going to go wrong and yup, Scooter asks for five minutes. He then tells me my work Internet activity has been monitored and I’m visiting far too many non-work related sites. Typical, I don’t even know what a work related site is. Most of the Activity involves monitoring programming forums for the latest techniques; quite normal for a programmer you might think!

I’ve got a meeting with Scooter on Monday to review the progress of some new functionality, it’s not looking good. It’s taking me a little longer than usual to get things up to standard with this one so finger’s crossed that the meeting will not go bad.
Good news is I think I’ve cracked the practice single player problems with the game. This lights the way for the final stages. The Bluetooth Multiplayer section, probably the hardest section to write. Got to finalise FIL’s website tomorrow as well !

I wonder what’s up with Blogger? I’ve had trouble uploading my entries onto the website for the last few weeks. I wonder if my feed is corrupt?

I haven’t managed to get myself together to write the CV. Little Miss started screaming about 7:30 and didn’t stop until 9:00. We were too knackered by 9:00 to do anything else but bath her and then sleep.

We have a new Baby monitor, which seems a lot more reliable than the one we had to replace. It does have its down side because between 3:30 and 4:30, Little Miss got an attack of wind after feeding and the baby monitor woke me! I was very tired when I got in this morning, not even a Columbian strength coffee got me awake.

Client One’s server is still out. I’m going to leave this until I get a chance to have an uninterrupted attack on it. Client Four has priority at the moment, there’s this functionality that’s constantly been shoved to the back burner for months now which I’m finally getting a crack at. Still feels like I’m getting interrupted every five though.

I’ve got to make a final effort on FIL’s Website because it feels like it’s a complete pain. There are only a couple of small modifications he wants me to make but it’s just finding the time. I’m debugging the single player version of the game, which is fun (NOT), but hopefully this will be working by the end of the week.

Great Grandfather is doing fine. It seems he’s over the worst of it. He’s upset that he has to give up the birds he keeps, but he seemed very strong when we visited him on Tuesday.

Our new Hi-Fi arrived yesterday. The speakers are huge, compared to the actual playing unit it’s self. I’ve also got to look at recording something off the telly using the digital camera. I’ve going to test the new DVD burner as well.

Things are now a lot more on an even keel. We found a Nasal Aspirator, which you use to extract mucus from Little Miss’ nose. We haven’t extracted much but it seems that just by the use of it has helped.

Thank God for my parents, just the fact they were there helped LSW relax. We’ve had about three nights of reasonable sleep, although for some reasons, the nappies have been a nightmare. It just seems that now LSW is going down with a cold or a chill

I’ve done a couple of pages of story and coded in the single player version of my mobile game, still got to test it and then play test it though and I’m a bit scared of that.

However, I’m back at work after a couple of hours and I think I’m going to start work on my CV over the next few days. Be prepared !

I’m surviving on two hours sleep and LSW is worse off than me. Little Miss can’t sleep. This cold is getting worse, so she’s not sleeping. We can’t clear her nose so she can’t breath when we place her on her back. I panicked last night, she started throwing herself violently about the place because she couldn’t breath.

I managed to pick her up and clear her nose but it was that scary, I phoned the NHS Direct and the local Doctor’s night-time service. There was nothing they could do. I guess we’ll have to tough it out but Its going to be a long couple of days. My parents are coming down over the weekend. It’s going to be a long couple of days.