dale lane

Grace doesn’t watch a lot of TV, but when she does it tends to be CBeebies – BBC’s digital channel for kids. (I’m not entirely sure if there was a lot of thought behind why CBeebies – but ITV’s kids channel has only been around for a year, so I guess it was mainly that we got into a habit when it was one of the only options.)

I’m bringing this up because Grace watched Winnie the Pooh on telly in bed with me this morning. The TV in our bedroom doesn’t have Freeview, so I was limited to terrestrial channels. I happened to come across ‘The Book of Pooh’ on five just by chance – she loves Winnie the Pooh, and it bought me an extra half-hour in bed, so everyone was happy.

Anyway, this is just an observation, and I’m not trying to make a deep and meaningful point here… but the difference between watching kids TV on the BBC and five was striking. Adverts.

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I had to drive to the New Forest Children’s Services Centre in Bartley yesterday for a strategy meeting. I’d never been there before, so had to use the sat nav on my new PDA to get me there. But as I’ve only had the PDA for a week, I haven’t got round to getting a car mount that will fit it yet, and had to rely on the voice directions.

Is it very wrong that driving along with a computer telling me what to do reminded me of Knight Rider? 🙂

I got an email from a guy at Google a couple of weeks ago. He said that he had come across my CV online and asked if I’d consider opportunities at Google. I’m not really looking to leave IBM, but I was curious to hear more about Google and figured that I had nothing to lose by finding out more. It led to me having a quick chat on the phone with him and a ‘mini-interview’. So I thought people might be interested to know what this included.

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Dear Sir,
i have some valuable information about top al-qaeda leadership in Pakistan. Can u help me to give some e mail of top official to contact him and give him the information.
zaheer

This was an email sent to me at work from a Yahoo webmail address.

Huh?

Less something that I have learnt today, and more something that I need to learn. For Valentines, my wife has got me an entry into a fun poker tournament. Sounds like fun – but I need to practice!

Scary moment this evening – Grace choked on a banana.

She’s fine now, although I guess that’s kinda obvious. If she wasn’t, writing a blog post about it wouldn’t have been high on my list of priorities!

I’d given her a banana, a big chunk of which she shoved in her gob and swallowed without chewing. It got stuck, and she couldn’t breathe. She panicked: tried to spit it out but couldn’t; tried to cry but couldn’t.

We managed to get it free by holding her pointing downwards. After what felt like a lifetime (but was probably only a few seconds) out came a solid lump of unchewed banana.

The little monster aged me 20 years tonight! A basic First Aid and Resuscitation course was included in the antenatal classes we went on before she was born, but to be honest, I didn’t feel all that confident or in control when it came to it this evening – that 40 minute introduction a couple of years ago felt very distant.

So I’m thinking that I need to learn what to do if this happens again. St John Ambulance run a course which looks like the sort of thing that I want, but not near me. I’ll keep looking…

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