Pages tagged “family”
15 Dec 2024
Start your holidays with a meta-alarm
Back in 2022 I wrote about how annoying it is, with all the built-in smarts in a smartphone, they still wake me up even when there are like a hundred ways they could detect that I don’t want to be woken. I now have a solution! If you work, or have children to get to school on time, or otherwise just need to be up and about before you naturally wake up in the morning, you have doubtless got a scheduled, repeating alarm.
02 Dec 2024
PGN files from handwritten chess notation
Our family has been playing quite a bit of chess recently. The younger members - initially insistent that all games must be “full chess” - have been persuaded to complete a few exercises with just pawns, practise some end games and get the ideas about planning more than one move ahead. We got a chess puzzle/exercise book and it’s proved a hit. I’m now routinely losing to a 9.5 year old - he has had more practice than his big sister.
17 Dec 2023
Times Table Hack Stars
Time will tell if this was good parenting or not. Finn has been saying he’s interested in coding. We’ve enjoyed building games together (he loves setting up cheat codes in the little scripts). It seems to work best if I code and commentate: although he likes getting the machine to do his bidding, the details don’t seem so interesting to him. Anyway, Finn has also been obsessed of late with an online times table challenge shared at school.
28 Feb 2021
Sula Sauce
Heinz have hit a sweet spot with this product in our house. That’s right: another high entropy cupboard product. Or should that be fridge product? No longer does Iris have to mash two sauces together to create her world famous “Sula Sauce”. I already have a world view that divides food into “better with mayonnaise” and “other” so I am pretty much right in the traction beam here. Iris shares my love for the white stuff and first tried mixing it with ketchup years ago, so the big corporations are playing catch up here.
13 Jan 2021
Scribble school
As part of a covid lockdown, we have already had a remote Christmas and for lots of people schools are closed at the moment. We have two full-time worker parents in our family and that means “screen schooling” is all too prevalent. Recently we have launched an experiment with my parents: I thought it worth a write up. A lot of what I could find online was either aimed at teachers running classes, or very basic tech grandparenting (“try a video call instead of using your telephone”!
20 Feb 2019
Sports mode
Had a great time playing with my friend Aadi’s relatively-new drone in Girton this weekend. Another gadget goes on my wishlist. I was amazed by the amount of tech crammed into such a small package, and in particular at how much angry-sounding power comes out. On a gently breezy day, it hovered with no perceptible movement and was easy to control. We tried out “follow target”, “dronies” (a new one on me) and checked out its maximum speed.
20 Feb 2019
Roger that, basecamp
If you have children that are old enough to scoot or cycle off on their own, my tip: get some walkie-talkies. Our house has a fairly quiet road out the back, but pavement-next-to-busy-road is the only way to get to either the Rec or the local car park (best place to learn to ride in Girton is the one at the top of Wellbrook Way). I’ve got a couple of Motorola T82s and two Cobra AM245s.
18 Feb 2019
FaceTime → EarTime
In our house we’ve spent countless hours on video calls to distant family members. Being able to see the other side of a call is amazing: we actually live in the future, right? You can wave at someone hundreds of miles away, show them your new favourite toy, ask them how their garden grows, or - if you’re under six - show them the inside of your mouth. It’s very engaging, but Iris and Finn are completely accustomed to it - so much so, they have come to see a roughly-weekly FaceTime session more like a routine form of telepresence than a call.
09 Apr 2017
Safety is a shared responsibility
From the instructions for a new toddler pillow - which, by the way is scientifically proven to reduce cranial pressure by up to 50% and reduce flat head syndrome. dangerous to use this product on elevated surfaces e.g… bed… Definitely one to keep for further reference.
13 Feb 2017
How old is that gannet?
Yesterday I caught the last official day of “Tracking Animals” - an exhibition at The Hunterian in Glasgow curated by my good friend Nicky. Iris pressed her four-year-old nose to the glass of the display cabinet and peered at the taxidermied seabird inside. “How old is that gannet?” she asked, prompted by discussion between myself and her grandpa about its plumage. This preserved individual was, specifically, a teenager, in gannet terms; it’d been chosen to illustrate and augment the other articles on display about GPS tracking of this species’s wanderings between colonies.
05 Nov 2015
One unexpected pleasure of fatherhood...
…is that this morning I got to test physics by driving about with a helium balloon in the car. I think I am happy explaining the phenomenon without reference to general relativity but it’s an interesting perspective Why does a helium filled balloon move forward when a car accelerates Happy Birthday Iris!
17 Oct 2015
On infinite villages
Just behind the New Old Inn (a name I particularly like) in Bourton-on-the-Water is a model village, modelled on the village of Bourton-on-the-Water. The model makers must’ve been my kind of people, and shared my love of “meta” because they made it a member of the set of things that describe themselves, a bit like this sentence would be, if it talked about itself. Which it does. Anyway, what I mean is: they included a model of the model inside the model, and a model model model inside it.
08 Oct 2015
Remember, remember the xth of November
I have an old-fashioned, non-smart, not-even-digital watch. I have to fiddle with the little rotary adjuster thingamabob to set the date to “1” at the end of every month with fewer than 31 days. How do I remember the length of all the months? That rhyme, right? The one that everybody knows: “30 days hath September…” Mnemonics are great, but if this is supposed to be one (wikipedia says it is), it’s a terrible example.
02 Jun 2015
A metric milestone for Finn
Like big sister, Finn slept through his megasecond. It happened at 2:03am though, so I wasn’t going to stay up for it. An artist’s impression of the event is available below.
23 May 2015
Morrisons += 10lbs
I am so proud of my wife. We have another baby and his name is Finn Owen Morrison. He seems a placid sort of fellow and likes sleeping during the day and whimpering during the night. I think he looks a bit like big sister did at the same age. Born precisely 1,432,210,581 seconds after midnight on the 1st of January 1970 a.k.a. early on Thursday afternoon. (He has a terrible almost-repetetive birthdate of 21-05-2015.25 Apr 2015
Trapeziuming
I suspect every parent feels the feeling I have at the moment. Right now, Iris is fast asleep next door dreaming, probably, of the bears that she says often visit her at night and take her to the park. She’s totally fine, except for a bump on the face - exacerbated by her new sunglasses whacking into her right next to the eye. She had a bit of a trapeziuming incident today, after I let her go on “the big girls' swings”.
27 Apr 2014
Iris Sula Morrison meets, er, Morus Bassanus
Iris encountered the bird with which she shares a name this Easter and was generally unimpressed. A great, sunny-if-cold few days camping near the Morrison Yorkshire “hood”!
14 Dec 2013
Sula skull sponsorship
Iris Sula Morrison has adopted an exhibit at the Grant museum of Zoology: the skull of a northern gannet, whose Latin name at the time the specimen was catalogued was Sula bassana. Gannets are awesome and so is Iris!
13 Dec 2013
Inverse crowing
While working alone in an otherwise quiet house yesterday afternoon, just as the sun was setting, I was surprised by the sound of a cockerel crowing from the living room. Baby Iris has a toy puzzle with different farm animal shapes, and it uses tiny light sensors to detect the presence or absence of the pieces. It plays the animal sound as each piece is put in the correct hole. As is usual in our house, the pieces were scattered around the room, none of them in their little holes.
04 Dec 2013
“Tændʒoʊ”!
On the face of it, putting a tangerine in a stocking is a strange thing to do. Why put something in there that’s neither novel, nor a surprise, nor particularly exciting? Dear Father Christmas - if you’re reading this, I’m grateful for my stockings. They had some great things in, but I must admit I always hoped that the toe bit would have something other than citrus fruit in it.
17 Jun 2013
Two more metaphotos for my collection
I’ve mentioned my liking for metaphotos before. Now, with the hugest of thanks to photographer extraordianaire, Quentin, Sarah and I have a great set of photos of wee baby Iris. Equalling Iris’s toy collection in size and quantity but probably surpassing it in terms of expense, the contents of Quentin’s photographic kit bag were put to deft and skilful use, and the results are brilliant. Grannies/grandmas/granddads reading this: we are deliberately witholding the full set, but don’t worry, just be patient!
17 Jun 2013
j = 100i
Yesterday Iris passed an interesting milestone with one of her parents' parents. Grandma was (near enough) exactly 100 times Iris’s age at the time of this specially arranged video call. By the magic of maths, although her grandparents' ages span a few years, she will pass the equivalent milestone with all of them in the space of a week. I hope to compile a full gallery - technology permitting. Since it fits so nicely, and because her “turn” came first, I’ve decided to remember this moment in Iris’s life as… a Janniversary.
25 May 2013
Starting early
Iris’s first typing. She hammered away on the keyboard until I saw windows starting to open - at which point I grabbed the keyboard back! Here are her first “words”: . gnmnm g n b v hnmjk Not that different from her current speech.
05 May 2013
Iris celebrates half a lap of the Sun
6 months ago, Iris Sula Morrison entered the world. She marked today (her sexemensary?) by: rolling over for the first time. We missed it! Just turned around for a second, turned back, and there she was. directing a poo so precisely out of the leg of her nappy that all three members of her family had to change their clothing. learning to jump up and down properly in a Jumperoo.
29 Apr 2013
Broken thermometers no longer exist
From a caption at the exhibition at the Bowes museum, Barnard Castle (Jeremiah Dixon - Scientist, Surveyor and Stargazer): This thermometer is probably identical to those taken to Cape Town by Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason in 1761. The actual thermometers they used got broken on the way home, so no longer exist. If things that got broken ceased to exist, a lot of museum exhibits would take on a whole new dimension.
01 Mar 2013
Another milestone for Iris
Iris passed another milestone this afternoon: 10 megaseconds. It’s a sobering thought that she probably has only two of these decimal events left in her lifetime. I hope I’m around for her gigasecond on 14th July 2044.
17 Dec 2012
Iris unimpressed by the concept of a metaphoto
I have a liking for photos of photos. It is clearly not (yet) shared by Iris. Sarah’s “photo of a photo being taken of a photo being taken of a kangaroo” is one of my all time favourites (click for full size version)…
17 Nov 2012
There was a 1 in 3 chance...
…that Iris would be asleep for her megasecond. She seems to partake in sleeping, crying and feeding in approximately equal measures, and pays no attention to other timescales.
08 Nov 2012