Babycake has been ill again today. Hopefully he has been able to fall asleep. We plan to watch Valkrie tonight.

oh, by the way...

Mrs McMuffin loves my machine and has tried to claim it for her very own.   She is particularly pleased that she doesn't have to learn another OS.  Babycake even made a bid for it too.  He became very agitated with me when he first saw it, and claimed that it was a "boy 'puter" and he insisted that it was his 'puter.  I have managed to fight them off, but I don't know for how long I can keep it from them.

hacking a dell mini 9 to run OS X

Well, my Dell Mini 9 arrived.  I have spent the last few days trying to put OS X onto it and, despite what you might read, it was not all that easy to do.  I found that I had to use two tutorials: the one from Gizmodo, which was the clearest and probably the most helpful, the other one that was helpful was written by mechdrew on the MyDellMini forum.  I couldn't seem to get a CD drive to work on my Ubuntu loaded machine, so I used a single 8Gb flash drive that I partitioned.  I guess the question you want answered is, "was it worth it?"  All I can say is that it certainly was.  The Mini makes a perfect little Mac netbook.  It is fast, much faster than I expected, and nearly everything works.  In theory, according to the forums etc, everything should work, but in fact, I lose my cursor after every period of sleep (there are lots of problems with sleep, although most of them have been fixed) and have to restart the machine.  I can't seem to find any mention of this anywhere, so I am assuming that it has something to do with my particular setup.  The other problem for me is that the sound is not very good, lots of hisses and pops.  I am sure that I read something about this on my travels around the interwebsuperhighway, so am confident that I can fix it. Everything else just works!  In fact, there is a cool, oh, so very cool, feature that I did not expect and haven't read about anywhere: my machine is recognised as a Macbook Air for some reason, presumedly because there is no CD drive, and I now have access to the Remote Disc feature, which allows me to use any disc drive on the same network wirelessly.  It works brilliantly, and is quite possibly a good reason in itself to do the hack.

If you decide to have a go, I would be happy to offer the benefit of my experience.  Good luck.

UPDATE: after a bit of searching on MyDellMini forum I found solutions to both the audio and cursor problems.  All sorted now.  It really is a fantastic little machine.

trust her...

To spoil the surprise.  I knew that Twittering woman would get me in trouble.  Remind me never to Tweet Mrs McMuffin's friends again.

surprise

I'm sorry to destroy Mr McMuffin's surprise, but I am so excited about him buying the new Dell.  I can't wait to have my own tiny machine to play on while he's watching something very boring on TV, or playing on his laptop.  Happy Mother's Day to me, this is his best present to me ever.

And talking of surprises, the Carrot Cakes have shocked me, but I shan't share yet.  Just like the Dell mini, some things are best kept between ourselves for the moment.

shock...horror

My parents have been reading our blog.  Somehow or other they were able to piece together things that I had said to different people and found the blog.  Not sure how I feel about it really, but it is a bit like they were reading my mail.  There is something intrusive about them reading the blog without having been invited, even though the blog is public and I invite complete strangers (or at least one stranger) to read it every day.  Mrs McMuffin isn't too happy either.  I guess we need to think about this a bit more.

some photos of my beautiful children

Babycake was obsessing about being a Sea Otter so we got some face paints for him.  Mrs McMuffin turned out to be a dab-hand with the old paints.  This is only her second effort.  Ms Ginger Cake has suggested that she is wasted in Social Work and should have a stall in a shopping centre.  I'm not so sure that is such a big compliment myself.

The look of joy.  This is Cupcakes first go on a swing and, as you can see, she loved it.

I took Babycake for a haircut today.  While I was there I thought I would get Cupcake's straggly mess trimmed a little.  She now looks lovely.  Unsurprisingly, Mrs McMuffin is not very happy that I had her hair cut without her.  She claims to have liked all the straggly, looked like a bad comb-over, hair that she had.  By the way, Cupcake is sitting in the fantastic chair thingy that Mrs McMuffin got the other day.  It just slides over the top of an ordinary chair.  It's great and Cupcake loves it.

This is just a lovely photograph.  The light was just right and, believe it or not, I took the photo with my iPhone which takes very nice photos in the right light. 

jean claude van damme in good movie

I just watched JCVD and it is easily the best movie I have seen since I watched Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino yesterday morning (there really is something to be said for a baby who needs a long nap first thing in the morning and who demands that she lies on you while she has it). This is a post-modern deconstruction of the JCVD action movie hero as seen in lots of bad movies over the years. JCVD plays himself and paints a sympathetic portrait of a slightly washed up, disallusioned, 47 years old, action man who has just lost custody if his daughter in part because of the violence that he has promoted in his movies. He now has one of those faces.  The movie is a skillful melding of fantasy and all the things you think you know about JCVD.  

The man himself is great and shows that he can actually act, so long as you allow him to speak in his native French. If you ever had even the slightest soft spot for JCVD, or even if you didn't, this is a movie worth seeing. If there is any justice in the world, JCVD should now have second career as a proper actor who occasionally kicks butt. I would give this movie 8/10.

new life...

Ms Ginger Cake and Mr Rock Cake gave birth to a lovely baby girl this morning at 04:21.  Mother and baby are doing well after a strenuous few hours, actually more like two days.  Welcome to the world.

he's beautiful too!

Mr Rock Cake took this one too.

isn't she beautiful?

Mr Rock Cake took this photo the other day while playing around with his new camera.  

weaning cupcake

Mrs McMuffin returned to work a couple of weeks ago and I have taken over the daytime care of our two lovely children.  Boy, is it hard work.  Fortunately as time passes it seems to be getting a little bit easier.  However, Cupcake is determined to make things as difficult as possible for us.  We are trying to wean her onto solid food and formula during the day.  For her part, she has decided that she wants nothing to do with anything that we might want to put in her mouth.  She absolutely refuses to drink formula milk or to suck from a bottle.  I've tried several different kinds of milk and a couple of different bottles but all to no avail.  It gets better though because she absolutely refuses to eat anything that comes on a spoon.  The upshot is that she will only eat what she can feed herself.  As you can imagine this makes mealtimes a very lengthy and messy affair.  The good news is that she seems willing to eat practically anything.  For the last couple of weeks, Mrs McMuffin has had to return home from work at lunchtime to feed her, and it means that she has been going four or five hours between feeds.  Today, for the first time, she actually drank some water from a bottle which she seemed to enjoy.  It's hard not to become anxious for her, but she is doing really well and when I took her to the baby clinic last week she was on the 91 centile for weight and height.  We have made another giant baby by the looks of things.  The feeding stuff comes as such a surprise for us because we just assumed that she would take to the bottle and solids like Babycake did.  My memory, which may not be quite accurate, was that he took to the bottle immediately and began stuffing himself on lentils after only a couple of days of offering it to him.  He certainly has never looked back.  

She is very lovely though!

happy birthday to babycake

It's hard to believe, but Babycake is three years old today.  It seems like only yesterday that the midwives left us alone with our new baby, and the panic started to descend on us.  It has sometimes seemed as if we would never get to this point.  It certainly never occured to us that when Babycake was three he would also have a little sister.  We have been a little mean to him today because we haven't really made a point of telling him that it's his birthday.  We decided to wait until the weekend to celebrate it with him.  He has a list of people he wants to invite to his "party".  Sadly it doesn't include his favourite aunt, Ms Gypsy Tart.  He has become very unhappy with her over the last couple of weeks as he has come to realise that she is pregnant and will soon give birth to another little girl.

polaroid pogo

I have been trying hard not to buy any technology while Mrs McMuffin has been on maternity leave.  She went back to work last week and I couldn't resist getting myself a Polaroid Pogo portable printer.  Boots are selling them for £77, which seemed like to good a bargain for me to pass up.  You can also get them in John Lewis for £78, by the way.  I love it.  The 3"x2" self adhesive prints are great and I have been printing and sticking like mad since I got it.  It has Bluetooth and connects easily to my Macbook, and will connect to a mobile phone too, just not my wonderful iPhone, of course.  Apparently, a fully charged machine is good for about 15 prints, which may come in handy one day.  I just wanted one.

she is growing up so fast

Cupcake, who is now 8 months has finally, after weeks of struggle, cut her first tooth. Of course, she is a stroppy git and will not allow us to feel it.