jonbeckett73

<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonbeckett73/3857487968/” title=”More Hilarity from Deepest Darkest Cornwall by jonbeckett73, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2540/3857487968_ff21aed95b.jpg” width=”500″ height=”333″ alt=”More Hilarity from Deepest Darkest Cornwall” /></a>

We had a final “official” meeting with our social worker this morning, and bade warewell to the amazing woman who has accompanied us along the journey from being prospective adopters to somewhat experienced parents.

If you are a recent reader of my blog, a little back story is probably required.

After two years fighting our way through the red tape, being repeatedly interviewed, and having every aspect of our life turned inside-out and upside-down, last February we became the adoptive parents of three little girls. Our big old empty house became a big old noisy, untidy, crazy house overnight.

In the early days the spectre of social workers was ever present – weekly visits of both our own and the children’s social workers became bi-weekly, monthly, and then stopped.

Today marked the very end of that withdrawal.

It feels quite odd.

As much as we yearned for independence from the meddling hand of the state in the early days, the increasingly infrequent visits by our social worker became the return of an old friend – somebody with perspective that remembered us before children.

She is now gone. We now stand alongside the variety of parents we have come to know through school, brownies, and work as equals; with no catch net. In some ways we are more fortunate than many; our exposure to the potential issues we may have had to confront caused us to become better informed about attachment, loss, and the behaviour of children.

Like all parents, we know our kids. We know real tears from fake, we know the sound of delight, the murmerings of disappointment, and the silence of fear.

There is, and will always be a part of our children that is not ours though; the time they spent with their birth family, and their various other siblings spread around the country. Who knows – perhaps our having dealt with that thought from day one will stand us in good stead when they one day fly the nest.

Our children are never really “ours”, are they. From the moment they begin making decisions for themself, answering back, protesting, and manipulating us, they are very much their own person and we are just along for their ride.

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

I haven’t so much gone “full circle”, as started another lap. Hopefully this will be the last.

After thinking about it all afternoon, and much of the evening, a few things occurred to me;

Why am I paying for blog posting ?
Why am I not using WordPress.com ?
What kind of idiot am I ?

I’ll tell you what kind of idiot I am – the kind that can’t stop fiddling with stuff – can’t stop tinkering. It has to stop some time, and now would be a good time. After trying out all manner of homes for my words around the internet, I am returning to the once-host for many moons of them – WordPress.

I do not write to make money – therefore I have no need for advertising. I am in the business of making friends though, and it makes much more sense to be part of a community to do that. Better to be on the train, looking out, than on the platform trying to look in. Hosting my own WordPress blog highlighted many of the professional dangers I have to deal with in my “other life” – constant updates to the server, constant re-installation of plugins and widgets, and constant defence against spam. That all comes to an end through the use of a hosted blog – it becomes somebody else’s problem.

Here’s to the future, and being a boring ass blogger on WordPress, who throws out badly written words like confetti in the dark of night – that nobody can see.

Those who have read my various writing online will know I have had blogs at pretty much all of the more noteable hosts – Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous, etc – and of course I have hosted my own blog – most recently here at Cheese and Beans.

Having come “full circle”, it’s become obvious that the platform doesn’t mean anything. Neither does brand building. Personal blogs are all about us – people – our shared experiences.

I really don’t know any more what to think – what to do – or even if to do it at all.

There is a thought in my head at the moment that November 2009 could be the end of me writing a personal blog – or at least a regular one. At the moment it’s a scary thought, but it isn’t preposterous at all.

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

It’s 11:34pm on Sunday night, and I’m scraping inside the deadline for NaBloWriMo (I have to post every day this month to get away with it). I know I could alter the times/dates of posts, but I would still know I had cheated, which would drive me mad.

I found myself back in town today with our eldest, while the younger children went to various birthday parties. We saw the new version of “A Christmas Carol” at the cinema in 3D. Movie was absolute rubbish, but I was very impressed with the 3D bit – first movie I have seen in 3D in years. The technology has moved on a lot.

Other news? As part of the enormous decluttering effort going on in our house, I bought an Apple TV box. We are selling nearly all of our DVDs. The thought has also crossed our mind to rip every CD we have, and put them in a box in the loft. They sit on the shelves in the lounge for months on end… there is no reason for it.

Next on the chopping block could well be the video games machines gathering dust in the attic – pretty much all of the retro games consoles are up there, along with their variously famous games… a NES, a SNES, a Megadrive, a Saturn, an N64, a Gamecube, an XBox, a Dreamcast… you name it, it’s up there. The reality is that I just never play games any more, and the kids are not interested. I guess they might be one day, but I wouldn’t bet on it – the presence of video game stuff all over the house has pretty much taken the novelty out of it, and given their background they always choose games and activities with us over the television every time.

Anyway… I’m off to sit and watch rubbish with my better half for an hour before crashing into bed.

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

From the moment I woke this morning until the moment they fell asleep  this evening, I have spent the day with the children – it’s the first time I have done it in months, and it was wonderful.

We packed quite a lot into the day; a bus journey into a big nearby town (for some reason the children think going on the bus is the most exciting thing in the world), new shoes for each of them, a new set of clothes for each of them, lunch at Nando’s (their favourite eatery), a DVD each from the bargain bin in HMV, and a small pocket money toy each. Quite why the younger two chose to buy Playpeople circus elephants is anybody’s guess.

Arriving home, Wendy had been busy building flat-pack IKEA units, and sorting through clothes, toys, dressing up costumes, and various other assorted brickabrack. Little Miss 5 very proudly showed off her new party shoes (which will inevitably become her school shoes at some point very soon indeed). They are black patent, shine like a mirror, and the heals light up when you step – she demonstrated by dancing like a 1920s vaudeville act.

I made dinner today too; pizzas all round. While this might sound like the easy option, it never is in our house because our eldest daughter is Coeliac (gluten intolerant), meaning I have to make the pizza base – and given the pecularities of dough minus wheat, it’s damn hard to make it just right. More by luck than judgement it worked, and she ate enough for a small football team. One of the more strange effects of being Coeliac is that she never really feels full, so we have to also watch how much she eats too.

It has been tiring, but it’s also been good to give Wendy a well deserved day off. She’s out now with her brother, having a drink and some grown up conversation. Hopefully they will be arriving home soon with Indian food. I’m starving!

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

Over the course of the last month, I have been investing a little more effort than normal into both writing hopefully interesting posts for my personal blog at Cheese and Beans, and marketing it – with the idea that I could look back after a month or so, and reflect. It’s an odd thing to do because I don’t have a huge narcissistic streak in me, but the availability of free tools to give easy data makes the task of reflection a lot easier than it might have been (read: I am lazy, and this is an easy post to write).

Publishing the nitty gritty will probably be interesting to those who are just starting to write online; to show the kind of audience you might garner if you exploit obvious avenues. It does come at a cost though, and I will get to that towards the end.

What did I do?

• Write every day – not just post photos, and no single sentence comments on the state of the/my universe.
• Post the URL of the post to StumbleUpon
• Post the URL of the post to Reddit
• Post a titled link to Tumblr
• Post a titled link occasionally to Facebook
• Make sure the blog was listed appropriately at BlogCatalog
• Invest some time in reading other blogs at BlogCatalog, and take part in the community
• Install the MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog widgets in the sidebar of my blog
• Try to catch up on my blogroll
• Allow replies to comments in my blog – and use them to respond to comments from visitors

What happened as a result?

• 6,241 visits
• 5,091 unique visitors
• 9,130 page views
• 73% Firefox, 11% IE, 8% Chrome, 6% Safari
• 13% of traffic was direct to the site (not via a link)
• “Cheese and Beans” was the most searched for term

I guess if I can take anything from the above, it’s that the name of the blog has become the most searched for term. Rather than being sought for it’s content, it is now being sought as a destination. I’m quietly happy about that, but suspect that as my effort wanes (which it will), that trend will reverse itself. In reality, StumbleUpon has massively skewed the figures – but perhaps it’s a means to an end. I exploited a very popular traffic seeding tool, knowing that the bounce rate (people seeing the site and not reading any further) would be very high indeed. Some of those random visitors stuck though.

I will carry on pushing the posts out and publicising them throughout November, but following that only write during November – to see what effect it has all had on the baseline traffic. It feels strange in some ways – playing the marketing game. You’re intentionally manipulating real people – I’m not comfortable about that at all.

If you have any questions, ask away.

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

You know the photo I took the other night of Jupiter and it’s moons?

Today curiousity finally got the better of me, and I installed a rather wonderful application called “Stellarium” on my netbook, to figure out which moon was which. Rolling back the clock to about the right time-frame that we were in the back garden, the magic box of tricks tells us the following (click on the pic for a bigger version via Flickr);

From left to right, they are Callisto, Europa, Io, and Ganymede.

It also occurs to me that I should have pointed out that the pictures from the telescope are of course upside down and back to front – it’s a reflector telescope!

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

For generations (the last 400 years in fact), English families have taught the rhyme to their children “Remember, Remember, the 5th of November”. The rest of the world has little or no idea that this marker in history exists, and given that I know many people from far flung places read my blog, I thought perhaps a post about this was timely.

So what is significant about 5th November? Wikipedia tells us the following;

Guy Fawkes, also known as Guido Fawkes; the name he adopted while fighting for the Spanish in the Low Countries, belonged to a group of Roman Catholic restorationists from England who planned the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Their aim was to displace Protestant rule by blowing up the Houses of Parliament while King James I and the entire Protestant, and even most of the Catholic, aristocracy and nobility were inside. The conspirators saw this as a necessary reaction to the systematic discrimination against English Catholics.

The Gunpowder Plot was led by Robert Catesby, but Fawkes was put in charge of its execution. He was arrested a few hours before the planned explosion, during a search of the cellars underneath Parliament in the early hours of 5 November prompted by the receipt of an anonymous warning letter.

Guy Fawkes Night (or Bonfire Night), held on 5 November in the United Kingdom and some parts of the Commonwealth, is a commemoration of the plot, during which an effigy of Fawkes is burned, often accompanied by a fireworks display. The word “guy”, meaning “man” or “person”, is derived from his name.

In modern times, the evening is marked by visiting bonfires and firework displays up and down the country (or having your own – more on this later). The celebration has also become skewed somewhat – nobody really knows any more if we are celebrating the fact that Fawkes nearly got away with it, or that he was caught.

We are incredibly lucky to live next to a school that stages the most impressive bonfire and firework display for miles around, so shepherded the children out at their normal bedtime to stand in a cold, rainy field for a couple of hours along with hundreds of other parents and children. The conditions were of course repaid when the show started, and the various choruses of “oOOOoooo”, “aaaaAAAAaaa”, and “BLOODY HELL!” rang out.

As I said – many families choose to buy their own fireworks, and have their own bonfires (its a great excuse to get rid of rubbish – turning it into ash that will be deposited across neighbouring gardens). It’s the only night in the year in UK law when a person in the street can light fireworks – which are not so different to high explosives really. They are incredibly expensive, incredibly dangerous, and I can’t quite understand why people would bother; spending a huge chunk of money on a few crappy bangs in your back garden doesn’t really compare to several hundred people pooling resources (at a school display) to both help fund the school, and have a professionally built display with huge fireworks that you or I are not allowed to buy.

Anyway. Our kids were suitably excited about the entire evening. They cheered, they jumped up and down, and were probably the loudest on the entire field most of the time. We bumped into friends, stamped our feet against the cold together, and actually had a really great evening.

I would tend to celebrate that Guido Fawkes nearly got away with it of course – but then if he had, the world might be a very different place – and you or I probably wouldn’t exist (chaos theory being what it is).

Interesting note – the mask of the character in V for Vendetta is modelled on Guy Fawkes, as is the underlying plot of the story

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

Given that I wrote a rather philosophical post a few days ago about the attachment of labels to people, the irony has not escaped me that I bought a Dymo label machine this morning.

It’s the classic sticky label machine we all remember from the late 1970s that punches letters into sticky plastic tape, which can then be fastened to any object you might care to imagine; plugs, drawers, folders – you name it.

The label machine is part of a far bigger jigsaw; my other half’s attempts to begin de-cluttering our house. Since adopting the children a couple of years ago, our house has slowly filled up with stuff. Well meaning friends and relatives have given us more stuff that we could ever have dreamed of. There comes a time though when the children are growing, and we figure out what happened.

Our friends weren’t just being kind – they were offloading their junk on us.

We are of course now doing the same. In the UK a wonderful use of Yahoo Groups has sprung up called “Freecycle” – where people create and run their own local yahoo groups offering things they are giving away. It’s very much a case of “first come first served”, and you always have to collect.

Freecycle has opened our eyes to an interesting human trait – it’s amazing what crap people will be interested in if it’s free. In no particular order, this is some of the stuff we have offloaded;

• The rotten facia off the shed that used to be in the back garden
• Offcuts of carpet
• The tent that got destroyed in a storm
• A cheap wire shoe rack
• A half-complete set of Poirot DVDs
• A box of obsolete computer books

Given the slow re-emergence of our house from the heaps of stuff, Wendy headed off to IKEA last night to buy ever-more storage units. She also emptied my wallet before leaving (something I only discovered at lunchtime today). I have visions of our house resembling a safety deposit box store when I arrive home this evening – with walls covered with multitudinous shelves, doors, and boxes.

And you think I’m joking…

Hence the requirement for a Dymo machine. Every one of the many, many bins and neatly stacked boxes will be adorned with a sticky label; “Jonathan’s shoes”, “Wendy’s shoes”, and so on. Of course it will also be tempting to label abso-bloody-lutely EVERYTHING in the house; “Jonathan’s Toothbrush”, “Jonathan’s Left Wellington Boot”…

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

A couple of evenings ago I slotted a spare hard drive into my ASUS EEE 1000H netbook, and installed the latest build of Ubuntu Netbook Remix. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Ubuntu Netbook Remix is a distribution of Linux purposely designed for small form factor computers. I was very, very impressed.

• Everything worked immediately.
• I didn’t have to configure anything.
• It is FREE!
• You can install thousands of application for it – and they are free too.

Here are a few representative screenshots to give you an idea what it looks/works like;

Desktop

The Ubuntu Netbook Remix window manager is deliberately simple, but given the use most netbooks are subjected to, it’s not a problem at all.

gPodder

Showing a typical application running – in this case a podcast download tool called gPodder.

System Monitor

Why can’t Windows system monitor be this good ?

Terminal

Proving that (just like Apple OSX), behind the surface lurks Linux…

Overall, I like Netbook Remix a lot. As a utility operating system, it’s fantastic. Of course it’s not as pretty or as polished as OSX or Windows 7, but given that all I had to do to get a perfect installation was plug a USB stick in and hit the power button, I’m almost laughing out loud.

You can see where Ubuntu are headed with the application install tools too – instead of the age old APT-GET interface you used to see in Ubuntu, there is now the “Ubuntu Software Center”, which reduces most software installs to a single click. The roadmap for the software center points directly to commercial applications being available in there (at the moment it’s all open source software)… App Store, anybody?

I’m guessing Ubuntu are racing to claim some ground before Google Chrome OS arrives – which will undoubtedly have integrations into the coming Google book store, Google music store, Google movie store, and so on…

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

Having a membership at Tumblr sometimes pays off in the strangest ways; this cross my path this morning, and I thought it was too good not to share;

• A man will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating but will wince when a woman tries to clean his wounds.
• Kitchens don’t have light switches. When entering a kitchen at night, you should open the fridge door and use that light instead.
• If staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noises in their most revealing underwear.
• If you find yourself caught up in a misunderstanding that could be cleared up quickly with a simple explanation, for goodness sake, keep your mouth shut.
• A cough is usually the sign of a terminal illness.
• All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red readouts so you know exactly when they’re going to go off.
• When in love, it is customary to burst into song.
• One man shooting at 20 men has a better chance of killing them than 20 men firing at 1 man.
• All computer disks will work in all computers, regardless of software.
• When they are alone, all foreigners prefer to speak English to each other.
• You can always find a chainsaw when you need one.
• Any lock can be picked by a credit card or a paper clip in seconds -unless it’s the door to a burning building with a child trapped inside.
• When driving a car it is normal to look not at the road but at the person sitting beside you or in the back seat for the entire journey.
• The more a man and a woman hate each other, the more likely they will fall in love.
• The hero never gets the flu or a cold or any illness that would force him to “take a day off”.

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

While cycling home from work this evening it struck me how clear the sky was; signalling not only the coming of winter, but also of opportunities to get the telescope out once more (or at least, to get the telescope out at a sensible hour).

After dinner each of our children trooped out into the frosty air of our back garden, and took a look at the Moon, and Jupiter. Only the eldest really understood what she was looking at – I think we may now have an amateur astronomer on our hands.

While doing it, I pointed our tiny point-and-shoot camera down the telescope eyepiece. Hardly scientific, but the results were pretty spectacular;

The Moon

Jupiter and it’s moons

Apologies for the camera shake, and lack of focus – through the telescope they are pin sharp, blow-torch bright, and incredibly impressive. I really must buy a camera mount, and a manual focus lens.

(For the technically minded people out there, the telescope is an F8 4.5″ Newtonian reflector, and had a 15mm eye piece in)

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

If a child is not the most academically gifted, it cannot be because they are not the best – oh no – it’s because they have ADHD, mild autism, dyspraxia or some other such affliction.

If somebody is not happy, it can’t be because they are unhappy – it’s because they are bi-polar, or suffer from manic depression.

If somebody cannot get up, and get on with things, it’s not because they are lazy – it’s because they have ME, or some incalculably rare immuno deficiency affliction.

Why are there so many labels? Has political correctness gone so mad that we cannot use plain english any more? While there are of course some people who do suffer from real conditions, and their life is made difficult because of it, invariably these people are the most humble, the strongest, and the last to complain.

Some perspective is required.

I am colour blind. It doesn’t mean I have some inner eye dysfunction with a five syllable name that I “suffer” from. It just means I see things differently than you do.

I have crap balance. This doesn’t mean I have an inner ear disorder that I’m going to pay doctors thousands to investigate; it just means I hop comedically around the room when putting socks on (I know, I know… I could sit down to put socks on).

I was rubbish at school. This doesn’t mean I had any sort of learning difficulty what-so-ever. I did like daydreaming though, and have never been the most clever person on the planet.

I DO have a genetic defect somewhere in the billions of chromosomes that comprise my DNA. It explains our eventual route towards adopting children, but it is not something that has changed me, or my outlook, in any way, shape or form. It does not explain me liking a glass of wine, or not going to church.

I don’t go to church because I personally don’t believe any of it. I don’t push this view on anybody else, and I while I respect other people’s beliefs, I don’t expect them to push theirs on me. I will never make statements about my “lack of faith” on public forums (this blog post excepted).

What am I saying?

If you don’t label me, I won’t label you. I might describe you; interesting, clever, wise, funny, valued. These too are labels, but I am thinking about you when I conjure them – not that you are one of the interesting people, or one of the funny people.

There’s a difference.

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

I sat down to begin writing this evening with memories of a stereotypically draining and stressful Monday morning running through my head. While contemplating the title “Monday Monday”, the Mamas and Papas song burst forth somewhere in my brain, and my mood transformed.

Applying liberal dollops of hindsight to the day, I can’t really complain about much.

The kids drove us up the wall this morning – Little Miss 5 decided that 4:30am was a great time to be getting up, and waking her sister up.  She walked in to ask us pointless questions 4 times before 7am (our normal “scrape out of bed” time) – I lost it following a particularly explosive volley of shouts and burst into her room – not quite knowing what I was going to do when I got there.

I burst in at the precise moment Little Miss 5 was performing some kind of elaborate gymnastic feat between the two beds – about 2 feet in the air, cheered on by Little Miss 4. She spotted me mid-flight, and somehow landed in a lying down position in her own bed, arms at her sides, looking as guilty as a puppy next to a pile of poo.

Given the 4 hours of sleep I had managed to get, and thoughts of a full work day ahead, you can imagine my mood while attempting to make packed lunches. After putting the wrong thing in the wrong sandwich for the wrong child, Wendy barged me out of the way and told me to go and get ready for work.

I returned to find her patience exhausted too – fighting a running battle to get hair brushed, and various school books, coats and shoes found.

I became hair salon for five minutes. Our eldest (9) claimed she had already brushed her hair. I begged to differ; unless “Neanderthal” was the new fashion statement in the playground. Two hundred “Ow!”’s later, she no longer resembled Stig of the Dump.

Bizarrely, the walk to school was calm. You could surmise that it’s the house – our house from hell – that infuses the children with it’s unique brand of chaos. The same force that causes the kitchen ceiling to leak, the drains to block, and cupboard doors to fall off.

By now you’re thinking “but he said there was nothing to complain about?” – that’s because all of this is normal.

It was even pretty normal when I walked in this evening, and within half an hour two of the kids had been sent to their bedrooms. Little Miss 4 had announced earlier, on discovery of what was being cooked for dinner, that she didn’t like it and wasn’t going to eat it. She learned all about having no dinner, and practiced her usual tactic of screaming the house down (from behind the bedroom door that she shut behind her).

All normal stuff really.

Any new parent would be horrified by the warzone that our house sometime resembles – but any experienced parent smiles, or confides “thank god – I thought it was just ours”.

The weird thing is, after the numerous punishments handed out today (threats of no dinner, no TV for a week, no Halloween sweets for a week), the kids will get up again tomorrow with a clean slate. They will munch their breakfast, not get their school things ready, and then ask if they can have television on… and then ask “why?” when we say no.

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

The kids didn’t fall into bed until about 9:30 last night, and somehow recharged their batteries sufficiently after a night of mayhem to wake up at 6:30am. How do they do that ?

Last night was of course Halloween, meaning we dressed the kids up in various costumes representing the dead in order to beg sweets from friends houses. In reality, we spent most of the evening at Wendy’s best friend’s house with various activities being thrown at the assembled children – the most entertaining of which was doughnut eating races (hanging from string, no hands allowed).

This morning the kids are eating their booty. If we were sensible parents we would be rationing it, but I don’t think a blow-out now and again does too much harm, so we let them eat whatever they want – with the warning “when it’s gone, it’s gone…“.

I’m sat writing this in the playroom. Every other room of the house had something going on in it this morning; this was the only sanctuary. I can hear some kind of christmas card making/sticking/gluing happening in the lounge, and a certain 4 year old singing songs in the bathroom.

Today is the first day of NaBloWriMo and NaBloPoMo – wish me luck.

Originally published at Cheese and Beans. You can comment here or there.

While it's been fun hanging out here, I have returned home to the relatively normal surroundings of my personal blog at Cheese and Beans. Feel free to join me there.

Posted via web from Jonathan's Posterous

I got a virtual machete out this lunchtime, and set about hacking lumps from my personal blog. I have been looking a the "Thesis" default template recently, and liking certain aspects of it, so have unashamedly aped elements of it's design. The main idea is to have more white space, and rely on typography a little more. The sidebar is still a little too busy, but it will do for the moment.

Posted via email from Jonathan's Posterous

This afternoon we all trooped off to one of the several events throughout the year at the primary school two of our girls attend. Well... troop is somewhat of an exaggeration, given the tantrum I had to deal with en-route.

Posted via email from Jonathan's Posterous

I have been meddling with the various places that I hold accounts on the internet this evening - trying to bring the same username into effect everywhere (as much as that might be possible, given the lack of planning that went into the mess I have singlehandedly created). While doing so, I thought it might be a sensible idea to keep an online backup of my entire personal blog - so grabbed http://jonbeckett.wordpress.com. A few minutes later it was populated with my old blog posts - if you would like to know how I did it, feel free to email me.

Posted via email from Jonathan's Posterous

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Jonathan's Posterous