In part it's probably a little anxiety. Morris has been sleeping almost continuously and not feeding properly (in my well-studied opinion) and up until today there was a chance he'd have to be force fed (by means of a pipe down his nasal passage into his stomach) to get enough fluids into him.

But this evening he suddenly woke up and put away 50ml in record time. 50ml may not sound like much but trust me, for a little guy like him, it may as well be a pitcher's worth. And a few hours later he did it again. Not hard to tell who he takes after on this front.

I'm unlikely to compile any sort of decent advice for fathers-to-be but there are a couple of things I'd have preferred to have known in advance.

The first may only apply to caesarean deliveries, I'm not sure, but when Morris was first plucked from his mother's womb he honestly looked dead to me. He was a deep blue colour, silent, and motionless. There was a real "Oh shit" moment there.

The second is that you're going to get a lot of advice. A. Lot. And most of it's going to be conflicting advice. Even from the (very nice, and well meaning) nurses and doctors. It makes it pretty clear that this whole deal is a bit of a black art. All of these people who are there to try to help have a slightly different collection of case histories, theories, educations and experiences to draw on. And like any good professional (I know, I do this) they're going to tell you how it is and sound like it's a widely accepted fact.

The trick is to realise this upfront and accept the advice as just that, advice, instead of treating it as the gospel truth.

And for those keeping score: no Men's Health moment yet.

Mom and baby are happy and healthy (although Morris may disagree on that particular point). Mom will remain in hospital until Sunday.

Based on the deluge of SMSes, Facebook messages, and email messages I've been valiantly fighting last night and this morning, the entire world is now aware of his arrival. This is only fitting. He comes from good stock and the world should be proud to hear that there is additional redundancy in that corner of the gene pool.

The doctors needed a hand at the last minute and, recognizing me for the bottomless well of raw talent that I am, asked me to lend a hand. I was only too happy to assist, and show them a few tricks I made up on the spot.

Visitors are welcome but the hospital is quite strict about two at a time. Contact me for visiting hours. I'll post them here if I remember to bring them home (I said talent, not memory).

In my dream last night (no doubt HL fueled to some degree) I dug up (literally) an old corporate wiki. It was a weird combination of digital and physical, in the way only a dream can merge two completely disparate ideas.

The wiki documented the destruction of the company that owned it through a software virus (this is starting to sound like the plot for Resident Evil). As it turns out, the virus had slipped in embedded in a piece of software I wrote.

I spent the rest of the dream bouncing from one reference of me in the wiki to another, trying to determine if they viewed me as a villain or not. All of the references were sufficiently neutral to leave with with no real idea.

The dream ended, as dreams so often do, with me in my kitchen, sunburned to a crisp, eating ice cream.

That last bit is what I believe is known as left-field.

Busy (trying to) play(ing) Half Life 2. Half Life truly was a revolutionary game. I don't do much gaming but HL had me hooked. It was like someone who could do more than rotate vertices and phong shade polyhedra in their sleep had a go at ... gasp ... writing a story.

Anyway, with HL2 Valve introduced Steam. This is basically their way of forcing you to connect to their servers to make sure you're running a legit copy of their game (i.e. one you paid moola for).

Reading through the forums on ways to get around this (purely educational of course) highlights how much of a pain in the ass this is for Valve customers (the people who allow Valve to continue, yes those guys). One guy had to wait for over 5 hours (!) for Steam to update before he could play the game he'd forked cash over for. And I'm sitting here waiting for 15 minutes while it decrypts the files it needs to run the game.

Nothing like modern software to make you feel like a criminal.

Of course, I am a criminal, but that's besides the point. Sheesh.

So yes, despite my misgivings about Facebook and the deluge of "friends" it seems to attract, empirical evidence suggests 1 in a hundred (approximately) are worth wading through the other 99. All of this excludes the core group of friends you see in real life. They don't count as Facebook friends because, for the most part you sign up as an atomic bloc.

I don't do the friends thing well. I'm uncommunicative, often ill-tempered, not given to long rambling emails, don't do phone calls, and despise smalltalk (the activity, not the language).

The only reason people still talk to me is I cook a reasonable potjie (and they think there's a chance I can get free books from Amazon).

I'm rambling and off-topic. Wait, this is my blog, I can do what I want. If you don't like it hit Ctrl-L (this may not work in Opera or Safari, but that's about 1% of the population so who cares), type in http://www.wulffmorgenthaler.com and hit enter.

Enjoy my sense of humour.

My car remote stopped working yesterday. I figured the battery must have died and wrestled with a particularly disinterested key to get the battery out so I could replace it, only to discover it still doesn't work.

It's not even the expense. It's the inconvenience, and in particular the anxiety it causes. I don't like it when stuff doesn't work. It bugs me. I sleep badly, I fret, and I find it hard to enjoy myself in any activity until it's sorted.

I'd gladly pay a monthly anti-entropy fee.

Bah.

So we canceled our flights, called in sick and holed up until we felt strong enough to fly back. We got in this evening, on the mend but definitely not fully recovered yet.

As for the baggage I dragged with me to PTA to think about, I think I've made some progress in some areas but I think there's still a lot of thinking to do in others. I suspect (fear actually) that some of them are going to plague me forever.

Now I'm turning in in a vain attempt to feel human again.

I. Have. No. Idea.

We rode out to Ceres via Du Toit's Kloof and returned via Bain's Kloof. Nothing floods my system with adrenaline more effectively than Bain's Kloof. I think it's the combination of an uneven surface (the road seems designed explicitly to tackle the overpopulation process), the fact that you have to take it slowly (which means you're in a low gear and your throttle is more sensitive which, coupled with the previous issue makes for a challenging ride) or the fact that a significant portion of the ride is spent looking over sheer edges with nothing more than the occasional thoughtfully placed rock protecting you from a spectacular (but ultimately terminal) sudden change in potential energy.

Generally just a great ride.

The nice thing about a ride like this is that you are forced to focus on one thing: not dying (or some variation thereof).

I read an article recently which proffered an interesting technique for suppressing the urge to relieve yourself: think of sex. Apparently this is sufficiently distracting to buy you some time.

I buy that theory because riding is like that for me: while I'm on the bike anything that's been on my mind, or troubling me, or just generally consuming mental cycles disappears. It's just me and the road (and my riding partner, when I remember).

Release 1.0
=====================

  - Support for Java 1.5 improved. Rox will now load different marshalling implementations
    based on the Java runtime version. Under version 1.5 and higher support for generics
    and enumerated types is transparent.
  - Rox now supports optional automatic mapping of HTTP GET requests onto your XML-RPC
    method handlers. See the com.flat502.rox.server.CgiRequestUnmarshaller class
    for more details.
  - Connections from HTTP/1.0 clients are correctly terminated after a response has been
    returned (unless they're using HTTP/1.1-style keepalives).
  - Responses will now mirror the HTTP version of the request and HTTP 1.1 headers
    will not be included in these responses.
  - HttpRpcServer now supports an idle client timer. This is disabled by default. If
    set clients that are idle for a period exceeding the timeout specified are
    forcibly disconnected.

I am amused to discover that I tend naturally towards adjusting my car radio's volume in increments that result in an even number. It feels odd to leave the volume on 17, for example. I'll either push it up to 18, or down to 16. Often I'll find myself thinking about something else, bouncing between two volume settings because neither is quite right. Eventually I'll snap out of it and mentally slap myself because the volume setting I want is the odd number between the two settings I'm unhappy with.

I think I make trouble for myself because I struggle with anything that seems like stasis. It's fine for a period and then there's an inflection point and change, any change, develops a certain allure. I have a good friend who, I suspect, struggles even more with this. Unfortunately, there's always that "Oh, fu..." moment when your feet leave the diving board.

I bounce between being narrowly focused on tiny meaningless (in the grand scheme of things) trivialities (like putting together a pure Ruby HMAC-SHA1 implementation for a set of tools I want to give to some customers) and wondering what the hell it's all about. I'm not religious, not by any stretch. I wouldn't call myself spiritual, I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. I believe we're all made up of the stuff of stars, and that in due course we return to that state, and that when that time comes that's it. Finito. The end. No "next". This used to bother me. A lot. But it doesn't really any more. There are things in Life that just are, and you either accept them or you grind to a halt. It does, however, make explaining things like "moral imperatives" tricky. I don't have a good one for that. But just because you can't explain everything (yet) doesn't make your position unsound. So don't, at this point, try to step in and tell me some ethereal being of light and pixie dust is the force behind that imperative. Frankly, evolution and societal dynamics are a lot more compelling even if they are fuzzy as hell.

Bit of a tangent there. I'll close that lid and open another box. What else is in here ...

I've become a little more wary of what I post here. I just don't have the knack of the "next generation" for total transparency. Or perhaps I fear that the people around me don't have the coping mechanisms. It's almost certainly a combination of the two. These things are never that simple. But it would be quite liberating to be able to just dump here without any concern about who might be reading it, or what they might think. I know a bunch of people who read this, people I work with, people I share a significant fraction of my genetic code with, people who's genetic lineage recently intersected with mine, and a smattering of random people I've collected along the way. I suspect the last group has grown ever so slightly too, given that I recently caved and added this site to my Facebook profile. At least, Google Analytics tells me there's been a bit of a "surge" in traffic recently. Yes, you're reading me, I'm watching you.

A couple of times I've given serious thought to starting a completely anonymous blog. Kinda like a "secret diary" so I can get in touch with my inner thirteen year old girl. An ex-colleague and I even discussed doing something like this just so we could discuss all the taboo topics that invariably come up between guys over a pool table in the wee hours of the morning. Maybe one day I'll get around to it.

This has dragged on for longer than I expected, and I should probably wrap it up before it gets any more out of hand.

To quote another good friend of mine, "Just ignore me. I'm rambling."

"In another place, in another time, I'd be drivin trucks my dear" from Live.

Melbourne has surfaced a number of times recently.

Maroon 5 have made a reappearance recently.

Caught the aural equivalent of a whiff or two of Vertical Horizon earlier this evening which budded into an overgrown tangle of nostalgia. Funny how closely particular music always seems to be tied to a particular time, or set of events. What sets you off?

And the collection just wouldn't be complete without the ubiquitous Counting Crows (sleep certainly didn't come easily last night, and the chorus seems to resonate right now, I just haven't quite figured out why).