RSS feedAround midnight the doctors marched back in, because Louise was at 135/100 again. Now they’re mixing two different drugs in different quantities and at different times, trying to get the right balance for going forward. Not sure whether this means they’ll let her come if they figure it out, or not.
Got a little more news. As at around 8:30pm tonight, Louise’s blood pressure has stablised a little. The little man with the little hammer came in and hammered her legs again, which she finds particularly amusing since she’s never had her legs hammered before in her life. They’ll watch her overnight, and hopefully she’ll come back to normal by the morning.
I fought the parking man, and the parking man won. On Thursday night, I left the hospital late, around 11pm or so, and the boom gate of the car park was up, so I just drove out. $30 saved. When I say car park, it’s more just a few empty blocks of gravel and dirt, but it’s the only car park near the hospital, so it will do.
Louise’s car had also parked there since Thursday, and was amassing quite a large fee. But I didn’t care, because I figured I’d just drive them both out late on successive nights, and voila, free parking.
So last night, Friday, I’d been parked there all day. I left the hospital at around 10pm, and walked to the car park. It was a cold night. The guy was still there, boom gate up, but waiting to take my money, so I walked around for a while, freezing, figuring 10:30pm would do it. Nope, still there. So I called my sister, spoke to her for a while, and walked back around 11pm.
By this time I was cold and frustrated, wondering why I didn’t just pay the parking fee. But the guy was packing up his stuff and about to leave, so it seemed like it was worth the wait. I walked close by to check it out, careful not to give away my intention. He watched me walk by, it was like a mexican stand off, him wanting to leave, but not wanting to miss out on the $30. So I went around a corner and waited 10 minutes before returning.
Finally, he’d gone. I checked the gate… it was locked. Check the other gate, also locked. I walked right around the entire station, there was no way out. I’d had a chance a leave, but I wrecked it, so here I was, with both of our cars locked inside a parking station that I couldn’t get them out of. I ended up having to walk home, and walk back to the hospital in the morning. This morning.
Late this afternoon I finally left the car park, asking the guy if I could go out and come back later in the day and continue the ongoing fee, but no, he said I’d have to pay the full day rate every time I left and returned in the same day. What an arse.
As it is, I now park out in the street, and I’ll get Louise’s car out (with a $100+ fee) sometime tomorrow.
What an arse.
Another day of not much happening. The renal specialist came past this morning and just reiterated pretty much what we already knew, they’re still monitoring the fluids and blood pressure. This evening Louise got down to 110/80, but as normal for her, she’s gone up at night to around 140/90 as at 8pm, which is much better than last night.
At this stage, no news is good news. We’re waiting to see how things pan out, and we’ll hopefully have some idea of where we are by Monday. Yes, she’ll be in until then. Baby is doing excellently and cooking well at 34 weeks and 2 days and counting. At this point every single day inside counts.
Louise’s blood pressure dropped over night, and is now the best it’s been since going in. She has a heart monitor on the baby, and is otherwise doing very well. They’re going to give us a tour of the neonatal unit later today, just in case we need it at some point.
Louise and I have been counting the days to the birth of our baby. Due on 8th August, or 8/8/8, the same day as the 2008 Olympics, the number 8 is of course good luck in Chinese, and media are nicely telling us over and over how many days to go, which is nice of them to care about us and little bubby.
In What a crazy year, part 1, I was in Canberra, and had just managed to get my passport and Visa application in on time. Jump to lunchtime Thursday at the end of that week, I’m still in Canberra, and I get a call from Louise “Look, there’s nothing to worry about, but I’ve just xxxxxx, and I called the hospital just to check, and they suggested I come in so they can just do a routine check, so I’m going to head over there after lunch”
So I was just a little on edge that afternoon, with a few critical meetings that I had to do before taking the four hour drive back to Sydney. Then around 5pm, as I’m packing my car to leave, I get another call “I’m just sitting here, they ran some tests, but no real news, I’m hoping they’ll let me go soon, but I’m not sure. I have some urgent work to do at home so…”
10 minutes later I get the call that they want her in over night just to monitor her. Fine, let’s do that, better safe than sorry. I started driving. I’m half way back and the phone calls from Louise are getting more panicy. Louise has never been in hospital before as a patient, and has rarely visited one to see someone else, so the whole experience was fairly confronting.
I arrived around 8:30pm, and then we heard the word we didn’t want to hear, Pre-eclampsia.
It’s now Saturday, and for friends and family reading this, this is what’s happening. Both baby and Louise are great, no problems. Louise has fairly high blood pressure at the moment, so they’re monitoring that to see how it goes. Over the next day or so they will then make a call on whether the baby should be delivered (we’re five weeks from the due date) or not, just to be safe. Apart from that, we know little else.
We’ve both had to shed as many appointments and deadlines as possible, amongst mine being two big shows that I was supposed to Stage Manage and tech, and of course the inevitably jinxed Vietnam trip, so much for that.
But yeah, we’re all doing fine, we just really don’t know what’s going to happen from hour to hour.
Special thanks to Cale, Lyn, John, Peter and Cindy for allowing me to cancel a bunch of stuff at the last minute. I’ll make it up to you. Right, back to the hospital…
There must be something about impending fatherhood that mellows you out. It’s not something I’m particularly used to, except when dealing with people in my work life, but for some reason I’ve started taking everything in my stride, whereas previously I’d probably either hide from the world.
At Ludic Creative we recently landed some conference work in Vietnam, which is timed about a month before my first baby is due. Working back from the conference date, our facilitators (including myself) needed to get our passports to the Vietnamese Embassy at least 10 working days before the trip, for Visa processing.
Unfortunately my passport had expired 14 months ago, which meant I needed to apply for a new one. You can simply renew it if it’s up to 12 months, so I just missed the cut off. Fine, I was happy to re-apply.
Filling in the application involves having someone you’re not related to, and not partnered to, signing the application and the back of a photograph of the applicant. So I arranged to have that done, and then took it to the GPO, figuring short of the actual Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the GPO would be the next best thing.
So the GPO lady looked through the form and got the photo, and said that the back of the photo needed to be signed in black ink. I pointed out that nowhere did it say this, and she pointed to the text on the form that said “the form” must be completed in black ink. She failed to see the difference between the form and the photo, and said that the photo was part of the form, which it clearly wasn’t as part of my filling it in, and anyway how was I to know. Anyway, I agreed to get another photo signed, but asked her to check the application to make sure nothing else was wrong. It wasn’t.
So I spent the next 3 days hooking up with my photo signing person, and returned to the GPO, all the while wary of the clock rapidly approaching the Visa deadline.
Surprise, the address on my application form didn’t match the address on the back of my license. I’ve just moved, and hadn’t had the chance to do that. I had the lady check the rest of the form and she said it was fine. So I spent the next week applying for the address on my license to be changed and have it mailed to me. Eventually it arrived, so I headed back to the GPO.
Now on the back of the photo, the photo signing person is supposed to write “This is a true photo of Name Of Person” and then their signature. I now had it in black ink, but because my name is quite long, the letter were fairly close together, and the GPO lady said “It looks too much like RichardBF, not Richard BF. You’re going to have to get it resigned.” I would have punched her in the face then and there if it wasn’t for the fact that she was pregnant.
A week later, I manage to get yet another photo signed, and as I was leaving he said “You better check with them soon though, because I’m flying to Europe tomorrow night.” So I got to the GPO, everything was thankfully correct and I said back to wait for the application to be processed.
At this point there was about 3 weeks to go before I needed to get the Visa application in, and passports these days tend to take about 10 working days, so I was cutting it fine, but certainly doable.
Ten days passed, and I heard nothing. Eleven days, nothing. I called, “any ideas on how long it will take, because I need it for my Visa application”, “let us take a look and get back to you, someone will call you.”. OK.
Twelve days. “Any ideas where my passport is?” “We’re not sure, someone will call you back.”
Thirteen days. “Any ideas where my passport is, because I need it in the next 5 days or I’m not going to Vietnam?” “We’re not sure, someone will call you back.” “Can you mention that while I’m going away on 8th July, I actually need it earlier for the Visa?”, “You have enough time sir, someone will call you.”
Thus I came to Friday afternoon. The following week I would be out of town in Canberra on work, and I needed my passport by that Friday in order to get the Visa. I was starting to panic. I was driving to my weekly radio show, where we had planned to do a world wide live link up of my photo signing person for the show, not related to the photo signing of course, and I had stopped to pick up my P.O. box mail when I got a call from the passport office. “We’re sorry, but your passport application never actually arrived. We have no record of it. It’s most likely still at the GPO. I see you’re going in 3 weeks, just put in a new application and you’ll be fine.”
Once I’d explained the real deadline, we came up with a plan, I would resubmit my application to DFAT in Canberra, Monday lunchtime, which was the soonest possible because I was supposed to be running a training course. They would electronically transfer it to Sydney, process it, and have it ready for my girlfriend to pick up on Tuesday afternoon, so we could then rush it to the Visa people. I was already going insane.
I hung up the phone, realising that the next few weeks were going to be a rollercoaster, but at least I had a fun live radio show to do, which I suddenly realised was in 5 minutes. I jumped out of the car to go grab the mail, and… I’d locked my keys in the car…
Suffice to say, this was a week ago, we did cancel the radio show, but I also did get my passport, and the Visa application did go in on time. I’ve been pretty relaxed, when in the past I’d normally be close to a break down. I’ve been flat out working non-stop for the last month, and Vietnam is going to be the last big thing to do before the baby drops, if only I can get to mid-July.
I was doing some performance tuning the other day, for some fairly complex PHP code, and so finally had a chance to try out xdebug‘s profiling support. It’s pretty cool, but unfortunately tool support for it is fairly limited.
xdebug spits out profiling data in a subset of the Callgrind Format, which is part of the Valgrind project. While the data is textual and human readable, the structure itself is a flat unrolled execution stack that’s not entirely sequential for parsing, and so you need some kind of tool to interpret the data.
A number of shell tools will do the job, but won’t be overly useful for really drilling into the data. The KDE based KCachegrind will read and display the data and everything else besides, but I haven’t run KDE for about 8 years now, so it’s not much use to me. Likewise the small but powerful WinCacheGrind does the job, but it’s Windows, which for me means using my Windows box which is away from my main development set up. It also has a number of annoying little bugs, and while the source is available on sourceforge, it’s not really being updated.
So, I spent a few days writing a Mac OS X profiling tool, MacCallGrind.
It’s a bit rough and ready at the moment, and there’s a number of problems with it, but it reads the xdebug output and displays it with at least a few useful metrics. There’s more to come, because I need it for some other upcoming work, but I won’t be getting back to that for a few weeks, so I figured it’s best to just get it out there for other people use, even though it doesn’t do very much.
Let me know what you think and what you’d like me to add.
Remember, I know it’s only minimal, but what do you expect for two days’ work?!
We might be about to see a big and very welcome change in the way we innovate and invent. About 20 years ago we were bemoaning the move from individual inventor to corporate R&D, when most well known developments seemed to come out of company labs, and companies such as Philips and IBM invested more and more in pure research and it’s commercialisation. While inventions were still coming from an idea by an individual, the individual and the teams that went on to develop them were more often than not working for a large corporation.
Who remembers Charles P. Ginsburg of Ampex Corporation, who led the team which invented the first video recorder; or Dr. Percy Spencer from weapons developers Raytheon Corporation, who first discovered that microwaves could be used in a new type of oven; or the team behind the Joint Strike Fighter?
The day of the individual inventor seemed to be over, with the likes of Edison, Bell and Gutenberg perhaps ending with someone like Robert Moog or Raymond Kurzeil. This also seemed the case in my industry, with the days when an individual software developer could design and build a product on their own, also almost over. Goodbye to the heady days of software invention by engineers such as Dan Bricklin, Bill Budge and Alan Bird, to name a random few.
However, about five years ago the ABC TV show “The Inventors” popped back on air, and there seem to be a lot more news stories these days about individual inventors again. How come?
This story about a bed which makes itself is amusing, and was invented by an individual, Enrico Berruti. Now you may be thinking well, that’s what you get from an individual inventor, but Jean-Luc Vincent, who chairs the International Exhibition of Inventions where the bed is being shown, makes reference to Proctor & Gamble’s Connect & Develop strategy, where up to 50% of the P&G’s innovations are sourced from outside the company. Of course this doesn’t mean that these are all by individuals, but there’s at least recognition that invention happens outside a formal lab environment, and more often than not when an individual randomly gets a really clever idea all of a sudden.
In software at least, are we finally seeing a shift back to individuals or small teams? Things went out of control when users started expecting more functionality in their products, particularly with companies such as Microsoft setting a new benchmark in software complexity. Small developers found it difficult to satisfy ever growing user expectations of what good software should include.
About 15 years ago I used to write software packages on my own, and have them marketed by software publishing companies. I haven’t done that in a long while, due to the work that would be involved in developing so much new code from scratch. But with open source and COTS now being increasingly low risk and easy to integrate options for developers, maybe we are seeing a revitalised community of individual developers.
So go and invent something!
I wrote a bit of a rant about 3 and half years ago, about the Canberra taxi sharing rate. It’s
old, so I’m sure the system has changed since then, but for some reason I still get
blog comments, usually from people who don’t understand the system, or a driver with
no idea what it’s like to be a passenger.
Anyway, it’s time to turn on the Sydney taxi system, which is completely
stuffed, and was recently voted the worst in
all of Australia by the Tourist and Transport
Forum.
We live in Newtown, a fairly arty yet very busy middle income area of Sydney,
which if you’re not taking the tollway between the CBD and the airport, is pretty
much mid-way between them, but again, lots of people live and work in the area. But
therein lies the problem, cabbies would rather go to the CBD or airport than pick
up a Newtown fare that could be going anywhere. I catch cabs several times a week,
so how do I fare? A few examples are in order.
My girlfriend booked a cab over the phone around 6:30am on a weekday morning,
and was told “first available”, which seems to be the layman’s translation of “good
fucking luck if anyone happens to be in your area”. After several calls, and 30
minutes, there was no cab, so she called a third time to complain, at which point
they cancelled the cab that said he was on his way, and organised for another cab
company to take the booking. Meanwhile, the cab that was cancelled, came past our
house, but decided not to stop and take the booking. After an hour, she finally got
her cab, at the expense of an important meeting.
3pm is shift changeover. If you want a cab within 30 minutes of 3pm, you’re
stuffed. Cabs will even drive past you with their light on (“available”) but won’t
stop.
One day at a big taxi rank in town, I was waiting for a cab at around 2:30pm. I
was at the head of the rank, so I should have gotten the next one. Two cabs turn up
at the rank, but park at the rear of the rank. There used to be a law that if a
taxi joins the rank, then they must take you wherever you want to go, and I have a
feeling the law is now extended to anywhere, not just at a rank. However cabs these
days seem to think they can sit at the back of the rank, get out of their vehicle,
walk down to the line of people and ask if anyone’s going to a high fare area, or
somewhere on the way to their shift changeover location. If they don’t want to take
the chance of getting a good fare at 3pm, then just don’t take any fares! It breaks
the system, and makes people unhappy and pissed off with taxi drivers.
This is what happened on this particular day, and it took 45 minutes to get a
cab at this major CBD rank. Meanwhile other cabs are driving into the rank,
dropping people off, and then driving away empty. After 20 minutes had passed, a
cab turns up at the head of the rank and drops people off, I try to get into the
cab, but he says he’s not taking bookings and drives off. I joke with the guy
behind me about arsehole cab drivers. Then two turn up to drop off passengers,
again at the head of the rank. The guy behind me goes to the second cab, who let’s
him in, but the first cab doesn’t let me in, he’s not taking bookings. So the guy
behind me decides he’s waited long enough and just drives off. Passengers can be
arseholes too.
The other week I booked a cab for 9am at the corner of my street and King
Street, the major through road in the area. Two cabs came past with their light on,
and both said that they weren’t the ones who had accepted the booking, even though
they were from the same company as the booking. WTF? I ended up getting into the
second one, and called the company to cancel the booking, but twice when I was half
way through their automated booking system, they hung up on me, so I gave up
bothering to let them know. I don’t know whether my number is now logged, but I
definitely get a lot of late cabs these days.
“first available” cab bookings used to work by calling out the job over the taxi
radio, and whichever driver hit “accept” or whatever the button is called on their
radio, they would get the job. The driver was supposed to only take the job if they
were in the area and within a few minutes of being free. However I’ve had lots of
cabs where while we’re way outside the area of my destination, they will switch
their radio to where we’re going to be in 20 minutes, and accept any job they hear.
No wonder it always takes so long to get a cab.
Sure, cabbies have it tough, but they have a choice of whether to be one or not,
and they have a choice of whether to be nice to people or to mess with the system.
Today my girlfriend and I got into a cab in town, and were on our way home. We hit
traffic from a big accident about half way, and decided to get out and walk, but we
didn’t because the cabbie would be out of a fare AND stuck in traffic. However he
overheard us talking and said it would be fine if we wanted to get out. So I gave
him a big tip and we got out. Meanwhile, around the next corner, the accident had
cleared, so he pulled over and waited for the 2 minutes it took us to catch up by
walking, and asked if we’d like to have the rest of our journey for free. The tip
wouldn’t have covered the distance, but he still offered. It’s nice to be nice,
nice makes nice.
A few years back, cabbies started messing with the first available system, by
giving their business cards to passengers who have big regular fares. Many of the
cabs that take jobs from the airport, are because a regular customer called them
direct on their mobile, and asked them to be picked up. The state government
decides on how many taxi licenses to hand out, based on how many they think the
city can handle. When many of these are used for private paid transport, it’s no
wonder that people not bucking the system, have to wait so long for a cab.
This is against the law by the way, and to combat this, a lot of taxi drivers
have changed themselves into private hire transport, outside the taxi system,
because they can make more money that way. This in effect brings in more
inexperienced cabbies into the taxi system.
I met one cabbie who had two other mates who also drove taxis, and they’d spent
most of their time on the phone co-ordinating their private bookings and looking
after each other. His excuse was that they were now competing with the hire
transport guys for fares, and so had to optimise their fares in order to survive.
And this is one of the main problems with Sydney’s taxi system, the drivers mess
with the system, the broken system then annoys the customers, and the drivers
respond by saying “fuck you” to the customers and even more trying to optimise
their bucking of the system.
So for you you taxi customers out there, the best way to work with the system,
and get a cab when you want it, is to book with Silver Service, over the Internet,
for a specific date and time, ahead of that time.
It is ironic that the moment when you need a cab most urgently, that being right
now without any warning, cab companies treat this as “first available”, which
effectively gives it the lowest priority of all taxi bookings.
In closing, I should mention the infamous taxi round about problem. You’re
waiting on a city block for a cab. You haven’t booked one, and the closest rank is
too far away or is empty, so you’re just going to call one over when you see it.
Problem is, there’s another person nearby who also wants a cab, so they stand 10-20
metres in front of you, and end up getting the first cab. If you see someone
standing in front of you, do you then move another 10-20 metres around the block?
Eventually you’ll end up where you started from.
Or what about the rank stalker? These are people who stand 5-10 metres in front
of the cab rank, so they can grab the next taxi just before it gets to the rank. I
was in town one Thursday night with three of us at a main rank, and had four
different people steal incoming cabs just before they hit the rank. Surely cab
drivers would try to respect the system when they’ll still get a fare if they go
the extra 10 metres to the rank? Or maybe outside the rank they can at least check
to see where the person is going before taking the job.
All I ask of the taxi system is that a taxi turns up when I need it, and it takes me to where I want to go. Is this too much to ask?
The Sydney taxi system is screwed, and something needs to be done about it. It’s
not like you can catch public transport instead, because it’s also stuffed.