The World According to Tim Skipper

It’s a boy!

William Louis (pronounced “Lewis”, after his great granddad) Skipper was born at 23:48 on Thursday 4th December, weighing in at a whopping 9lb 9oz.

It wasn’t a great delivery for my wife Francesca; her waters broke at 0845, just as I arrived at my desk in London.  So I made a mad dash back to the train station and finally got home at 11:15. Her friend Helen had come to sit with her and was keeping her distracted, but by 1pm the contractions had started.  The hospital told us to go the PAWS clinic at 2pm and that most likely she would be sent home again, despite Francesca’s protestations that it was coming!

We ended up sitting around in a small room with three other couples, with no pain relief, for an hour. Eventually they did an examination and discovered Fran was 3-4 cm dilated, so at that point we were moved into a very nice room in the delivery suite.

The little man was back to back and didn’t want to come out of his own accord. They ended up having to take her into theatre at 23:30 and we were told they would have three attempts at a natural birth assisted with ventouse and if that didn’t do the job then it would be a c-section.

I have to admit I was terrified at this point, seeing my wife trussed up on the operating table was a sight I never want to see again particularly, especially when for the final push they got two big blokes one on each leg and hoiked them right back almost up to her shoulders.  Horrible horrible and I’m so proud of her for going through it without complaining too much (epidural and then the industrial strength anaesthetic helping there!).

The ventouse cap came off, so they tried a kiwi, which with some manipulation and an episiotomy got him out (his shoulder was stuck). Poor little man was blue and looked utterly lifeless when they flopped him onto Francesca’s tummy, so they whisked him off to a mobile resus unit in the corner of the room. A few minutes later I could see him turn pink, and heard a few a little gurgling noises. The doc gave me the thumbs up and I could go and meet my son for the first time.  A few minutes later we were able to give him to Francesca to cuddle while they sorted her out.

He had a really pointy cone head from the efforts of the ventouse and kiwi. He’s the spit of Francesca when she was a baby and has her lovely black hair and almond eyes.

His APGAR score was quite low, but they tested his cord blood which confirmed he had not suffered any loss of oxygen and everything was ok.

We went back to the delivery suite room for an hour or so and then at 2 am moved Francesca and William to the ward, and sent me home.  I went back at 11am and we eventually left hospital at 5:30pm.

He’s a lovely little boy, but is a bit jaundiced so we’ve been told to put his crib by the patio doors and get as much sunlight on him as possible. Feeding was a bit hit and miss for the Friday night, much better Saturday night but last night he was demanding every 2 hours and Francesca is only just keeping up.  I went out and bought a breast pump yesterday on the recommendation of the community midwife who came, to ensure he gets every last drop available. It seems to be working ok.

I love them both so much I can’t tell you.

Tags: Family, william

I’ve just been outside and taken some final pictures of our Nissan 350Z GT before it goes in part exchange tomorrow for a 2004 BMW 535d M Sport. It’s a bit grubby but it’s too damned cold and windy to contemplate cleaning it.

My wife and I have covered 12,800 miles in the Zed since it arrived in September 2006, with most of those being local journeys with my Wife going back and forth to work.  It’s a bit of a shame we never got around to taking it on a jaunt through France to my parents home, but with fuel economy in the low 20s and a Diesel Golf capable of doing the trip on half as much juice, it’s no surprise really.

Similarly, I never took it on a track day, which is a shame.

The Zed is a great sports car. It’s everything you’d want in such a vehicle; it’s fast (300 bhp, with 160 mph easily reached and low 5s to 60 mph); it makes a fantastic sound from its 3.5 litre V6 engine and it has brakes and handling in epic proportions.  It also has a limited slip diff and with the ESP switched off will happily indulge you in all sorts of over-steer antics – great fun in the right place.

Despite this though, it’s only really happy being driven in one way; as hard as possible!  Sounds great, you say, but in reality it’s not really. That razor sharp throttle response and firm suspension are truly fantastic when you’re on it, but when you’re just cruising around, in town or in heavy traffic; it’s a pain in the backside.

The fuelling at low revs is terrible – I guess this is emissions related – but if you let the revs drop to fewer than 2,000 rpm you get a sudden jolt as it can’t decide how much fuel/ignition it needs.  It makes smooth low-speed progress very difficult, and this is the single most annoying thing about the car.  You forgive it of course, when you open up the taps and let rip through the gears, but nobody (despite what they might tell you on the Internet) really drives like that all the time.

The brakes are some of the best I’ve encountered this side of Porsche, and the gearbox has a short positive throw (although it was never happy moving between 1^st and 2^nd).

I appreciate that buying a sports car with a 300 bhp 3.5 litre V6 engine and concerning yourself with fuel economy is a bit retarded, but it has to be said, the Zed likes a drink!  On a long journey with the cruise on at the speed limits, and being afraid to touching the throttle, you can just break into the 30s to the gallon.  But normally very low 20s or high teens are really what you can expect.  I’ve even seen it fewer than 15 on a very spirited cross-country drive!

So, the Zed is going in favour of a bigger more family oriented car. Are we sad? Well yes, the Zed has been great fun to own and drive and we love how it looks (metallic blue was definitely the right colour). But we’re ready for a different kind of driving experience now, so on it must go. We’ll enjoy the memories enormously.

Tags: 350Z, Nissan

Since I got my iPhone I’ve been really enjoying its slick user interface and ease of web browsing, but I started to notice that Safari was for some web sites loading pages very slowly. In fact for some web sites Safari would not load pages at all.

I found that if I switched WiFi off I could load these stubborn pages no problem over GPRS/EDGE. I thought I had found the iPhone Achilles Heel; WiFi browsing was just not all that it was cracked up to be. I could browse these web sites just fine using Firefox or IE on my Sony Vaio Laptop over the same WiFi connection. It had to be the iPhone that was at fault.

Resetting the Safari cache, cookies and history made no difference. I tried turning off Javascript too, to no avail.

Now my WiFi network router is an old Buffalo unit I’ve had years. I wondered if it was somehow not compatible with the iPhone, but it supports 802.11g so why should that be the case? Most odd.

I started going through the configuration for the WiFi router one setting at a time and considering how it might affect the iPhone differently to my Laptop. Nothing jumped out at me, until I got to the network settings.

No DNS information!

My network looks like this: Broadband Router –> CISCO Firewall –> WiFi Router –> PCs/Laptops/Consoles etc (either using WiFi or hard wired into the WiFi router).

Once I had filled in the IP address of the Broadband Router into the WiFi Router’s configuration, it resolved my problem. Safari on the iPhone was browsing any web site I liked at full speed.

I’m curious to know why none of our WiFi laptops or Nitendo Wii etc have had a problem with this, but I guess the iPhone is just very sensitive to DNS information.

So If you are experiencing slow page load times in Safari over WiFi on your iPhone, double-check ALL the DNS settings throughout your network.

Tags: DNS, Safari, WiFi

So a few days ago my wife Francesca upgraded her N95 to an iPhone. She likes new gadgety phones and usually upgrades when something new and whizzy comes out. I was a bit “meh” about it to be honest. It’s just a phone, after all. Right?

Until I played with it for a while.

Now I have one too!

I didn’t mind ditching Vodafone for O2 as there’s better O2 reception in rural Norfolk/Suffolk than with Vodafone (although Orange is better still), so the single provider wasn’t really an issue.

The touch interface is amazing. My previous experience with a touch-sensitive phone was the truly awful LG Chocolate my wife had, but this is a vastly different proposition. Even fine control of cursors is easy and accurate, and the pinch-zoom feature works incredibly well.

Web browsing is not a problem, in fact I’m posting this from my iPhone right now. As we have come to expect from Apple, everything just works in an intuitive and natural way. I am impressed.

So, what don’t I like about it? There’s a few things:

Bluetooth. Although it syncs seamlessly with my Parrot CK3100 car kit, and my TomTom 710, it will only interact with headsets and hands-free devices. So I can’t sync it to another phone (even another iPhone) or my laptop, or more disappointingly the TomTom Traffic feature. The O2 contract for iPhones has an unlimited data use, which would make TomTom Traffic a very attractive feature as it’s more accurate and reliable than the RDS based signal. I hope Apple upgrade Bluetooth to allow data transfer with future software releases.

SMS. With a new phone number, the first thing I wanted to do was send everyone in my contacts list an SMS with my new number. Unfortunately you cannot send SMS messages to multiple recipients, so I had to do it one at a time. As a result, I only told the most important people in my list rather than everyone. It is also not possible to forward SMS messages, but this isn’t something I’ve ever used before or likely to need.

Safari Web Browser. Why no home page? It just shows you whatever page you previously browsed, but I would really like a Home setting, or at least a button. The ability to remember logins & passwords would also be really useful.

In the big scheme of things these are small gripes, and things which I hope will come into play with later updates. Overall, the iPhone is a big winner in our household.

Tags: Apple, Bluetooth, SMS

What’s happened to Google Adsense earnings?

I run Google Adsense on all of my non-eCommerce web sites. It’s been a nice little earner with fairly consistent monthly results over the past couple of years.

Last month, Google changed Adsense so that the clickable area was restricted to just the ad title and url lines, instead of the whole ad block.

It’s devastated my earnings, which for November were down by a factor of 10 over September & October, despite increased impressions. Has anyone else seen this since the change? It won’t be long I’m sure before people start to abandon Adsense because of it. What knock-on effect will this have on Adwords prices I wonder?

Tags: Google Adsense, Google Adwords