Last night I was laid on the living room floor on my back. When I do this Ruby likes to climb on like I am a piece of playground equipment. We started playing a game which involved Ruby standing on my chest then diving superman style over my head at which point I catch her, lower her slowly to the ground over my head the pick her back up and stand her on my chest again. This was repeated over and over and over again, today my triceps are screaming.

This made me think about other games I could create that would be fun
for a toddler and beneficial for me as a workout. The idea then
continued as being a great DVD aimed at parents who have little time
to go to a gym but could do these exercises while playing with their
kids, of course I understand that just taking part in play activities
with your kids is exercise but the idea was to isolate muscle groups
to make it more effective.

Then my Brain went a step further and thought about possible
implications of the whole idea being inappropriate and potentially
having a backlash against it.

I tell you what, that was a busy 5 minutes on the train this morning I
was rich and famous for a brief period but hey ho.

How long have we been waiting for this exactly? It feels like forever. Rumours have been popping up and disappearing only to reemerge months later for years now. Apparently the iPhone was born out of tablet research and technology’s and now the iPhone and the iPod Touch get their big brother the iPad.

I have a very mixed range of emotions to it. It’s gorgeous, it’s sexy, like the iPhone it just works so simplistically while still being complex and most importantly of all i want one. However i also feel a little underwhelmed. Maybe it’s the mass of hype and build up to it that have made me feel this way or maybe it’s the fact that it is pretty much just a large iPod Touch. For me i would use it in place of my iphone while at home. It’d live under the sofa or the TV cabinet or similar and would be used mainly for the web over wifi so surfing, blogging, Twitter and probably games/apps to. I can’t see it going any further than the garden though and as a result I really don’t see the point in 3G versions.

I think the bigger news i think is the book store. It’s another business model for apple to rake it in from and the way it appears to work is very nice but again this is just a variant on the app store so is hardly groundbreaking.

I want to play with one and I’d love to own one but it seems a bit extravagant when the biggest impact it would have on my life is to preserve my iPhone battery a bit.

I will probably give it a miss and just wait for the next iPhone though

Update: Say I buy an iPad, I buy it to use on a commute. I get on the train, I sit at one of the highly coveted tables. 1 person at the other side of the table has a laptop/ netbook and is watching a movie, surfing the web, emailing or whatever. His laptop screen creates a natural barrier giving him a degree of privacy, a degree of privacy only achievable by me if I hold my iPad for the entire time. Not that great

I know, I was as surprised as you but it’s true.

After my stressful day yesterday I just really felt like a beer so I nipped in at tesco’s on my way home from the hospital. I bought 2 bottles of beer and nothing else. While paying I took my keys out of my pocket, they are attached to a belt loop by a mini carabina so just dangled off my jeans. Attached to my keys is one of the tiny club cards, I presume the lady serving me saw it and asked “do you have a club card” i’d not even considered offering my card as I presumed points would not be available on alcohol. So I stated in a questioning way “you give points on alcohol” to which she replied “yes”. My next statement was also phrased in a questioning manner “isn’t that like rewarding alcoholism”? The cashiers response surprised me somewhat.

“yeah” she said “it’s not right is it”! But she didn’t stop there, “but you don’t get points from fags, lottery or baby milk”. Again a little perplexed I enquire further “baby milk”!!! “that’s right” she said “it’s not seen as a neccesity because mothers can breast feed”

So by this logic though Tesco view alcohol as a necessity! Now i dont know about you but out of the four items they don’t offer points on I would say the most likely to be considered a necessity would be baby milk, the others are all something that you can have an unhealthy addiction to, or so I thought anyway. Maybe I’m wrong.

Tesco’s advertising tag line is ‘every little helps’ it would appear that in addition to this, every tipple helps if the thing you want help with is club card points.

Wasn’t sure whether to blog about this or not but it’s my life and that’s what the blog is about so here we go.

Today i got a call from Jen while at work, it was a hideous call. The long and the short of it is that our son hasn’t gained any weight since birth nearly three weeks ago. He and Jen are in the hospital for the night allegedly under observation but looks like they ain’t doing diddly squat till the morning. I feel like the most pointless and useless person alive right now cos there is nothing i can do other than offer moral support to Jen. What she must be feeling right now must be hideous.

I hated leaving them in Hospital and i hate that i have to go to work tomorrow because it isn’t really a job it’s my uni placement and i cant have any time off. Plus even if i could i can’t because it’s the last 2 weeks of placement and i need to get all my work finished. Nothing is more important to me than my family of course but doing anything to Jeopardise my degree so close to the end would be foolish as it’s my family I’m doing this for so i can give us all the lives we deserve.

This is all a bit rambly but i needed to write it as a form of release, therapy if you will so that I’m not bottling it all up.

Anyway I’m going to crawl into bed and put a movie on to fall asleep to. Night folks.

P.S. ask me why Tesco are a bit ridiculous tomorrow or in a few days or something.

So the most important thing that I haven’t blogged about (but have actively spoken about on Twitter and Facebook) is the birth of our son Mason. Excuse me while I potentially gush a little. He is a little bundle of joy and an amazing addition to our family I can’t wait to see him and Ruby grow up together.

Of course as amazing as he is being woken at 4am is rarely fun but it’s all part of the process so you just get on with it. The response from friends has been great, visitors and well wishers a plenty, we are indeed blessed. Ruby is coming round to the idea of him being around too which is great, she’s always wanting to hold him and gives him kisses all the time.

Basis of this post is that Jen and I couldn’t be happier and if you have congratulated us at all through any medium we are so grateful and feel really lucky to have you all as friends.

I did warn it might be a bit gushy.

Yes that’s right I have been neglectful, if my Blog was a Tamagotchi it would not be doing well right now (oooh is there a Tamagotchi app for the iPhone). Aaaaaaanyway I will endeavour to post a bit more regularly and I already have a few things I need to post about. So my humble apologies to anybody who reads (if anybody) but I shall be rectifying this asap.

Wii

Originally uploaded by corneiliuz

Well both Christmas and new year are over now and fairly soon everybody will settle back down into their lives and carry on as normal, apart from me and my family that is.

Christmas was great, we ate good food, we spent time with friends and family and my gorgeous amazing partner bought me a Nintendo Wii under the thinly guised veil that it be a family present (course it is). But the whole period has been overshadowed by the impending birth of our son, he’s still not here and waiting is getting frustrating especially through a period where so much is going on. I can’t wait for him to get here so I can see him, I just wish he’d shift his arse.

So now we know our son will be born in 2010 and it all sounds a bit Sci Fi, surely we should all have hover cars or be slaves to the robots or something by now? But people will settle in and crack on, but this year is HUGE for my little family and here’s a list of reasons why starting with:

our son will be born
I will (hopefully) graduate Uni
i will start my career
we are potentially moving house
Ruby is starting Nursery
I’ve promised Jen I will propose at some point in the next 365 days

so in the words of Montel Vontavious Porter “Big things popping, little things stopping”

have a great 2010 people looks I sure will

Bionic

Originally uploaded by corneiliuz

My copy of Bionic Commando showed up for the 360. When I heard about this game I thought it looked really good and was quite looking forward to it, then the reviews came in, it wasn’t good. The chances of me buying it were getting slimmer and slimmer but wait, a Demo, oh it’s multiplayer only and doesn’t really give you a feel for the game. The decision not to but became pretty much sealed. But then a friend of mine posted a link to play.com and they were selling it for £4.99 delivered. I would say in anyones book that at that price it was worth a purchase just to satisfy my own curiosity.

So it’s arrived but I’m in the middle of Assassins Creed 2 which I’m loving so I’m not even gonna open it yet. I did have a look at the list of achievement though and it looks lazy to me. Every achievement in the game other than 3 are for fininshing specific set challenges within the game. The other 3 are for finishing all the challenges, finishing on hard and finishing on commando. I will post again once I’ve figured out if I think it’s worth the fiver I spent, but seeing as it only came out 7/8 months ago and I got it for a fiver it would suggest that it ain’t a great game.

Well excuse me for a minute while I don my working class hat but as much as I am surprised by the Supreme Court ruling in favour of the banks I’m not surprised that the rich are left rich and the poor remain poor.

Yes i know that if your careful with your money you would never recieve bank charges in the first place but it’s not that black and White. I got caught in a revolving door of bank charges several years ago after losing my job. I was getting charged £175 a month which was tipping me back into an unauthorised overdraught therefore incurring further charges. Its all very well saying well you wouldn’t need to claim charges back if you’d been more careful but in situations like mine and I’m sure thousands of others it’s unavoidable.

The other side of things of course is that the banks are charging these illegally high charges (and regardless of the result they are illegal) because they figured they couldn’t be touched and nobody would call into question the actions of banks because they know best. Oh but wait, we are in a reccession! Who caused this reccession? No it couldn’t have been the banks could it, no they are the keepers of our ever increasingly capitalist society. Everything revolves around money and the banks look after that for us like wardens keeping us safe from the dragon of poverty and uncertainty… Don’t they????

Yesterday was our little girls 3rd birthday. A fabulous occasion which everybody enjoyed thoroughly especially her. Some family members came round for present unwrapping and party food etc. It was all going nicely until i had a brain wave. “hey” i thought to myself “I’m on the XBOX 360 preview program, why don’t i take advantage of that by putting Last.fm on for some background music”.

This idea it appears was only great in theory, it appears my previous experience of Last.fm was no indicator of all of it’s content. I had only previously listened to things like Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden etc but was aware that more family friendly music was available. I switched my XBOX on, moved through the menu’s to Last.fm and selected a station appropriate to our daughters musical taste being Lady GaGa. The musical offering was as you can imagine, Lady GaGa, Katy Perry, Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Pussycat Dolls and weirdly Heidi Montag. Pop music basically. Last.fm on your XBOX displays a slide show of photo’s of the artist while their song is playing, it appears at this point it should perhaps change it’s name to Lust.fm. The ensuing photostream of pictures could have been likened to softcore porn which is something i normally would not have complained about (other than the god awful sight above), but seeing as the music was mainstream pop listened to mainly by young people and the XBOX does try to market itself as a family console i thought it was pretty inappropriate.

Scared I’m sounding like an old fuddy duddy right now but i don’t think anyone would knowingly put the above picture and many like it on the telly knowing that their 3 year old was in the room. I am certain as well that there are far more “family friendly” pics of these artists available for use.

Update: I sent a link to my blog to Last.fm through twitter about this, they responded saying it was an issue they were working with Microsoft on. They also sent me this link to a post made by Major Nelson on his blog. It refers to the new features like Last.fm etc not being available to under 18’s right away as they are working on parental control’s for these features, this is of course is great news especially in light of the things i was saying about family orientation.

It would appear though that my issue would be unresolvable. My 3 year old does not have her own XBOX LIVE account where i can set parental controls to protect her from adult materials for obvious reasons, she’s 3. Therefore as with any other adult themed materials for the XBOX it would be up to me to not access those materials in front of my daughter, and that’s fine. I would never play any games in front of her that involved blood and gore or sexual themes, but the issue is that i was trying to listen to music, music which as far as i am aware does not require pictures of the artist in scantily clad attire or in some cases completely nude with limbs obscuring breasts. So my only answer is to not use a service I’d like to take advantage of, shame really.