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A belated Father’s Day related post, well more a reason for me to post an ancient photo. This is a picture of me and my dad taken a good 23-25 years ago. I look quite scary, possessed even!

The photo was taken in the driveway of our first house in Dublin, we didn’t have a car at that point - we later had a white Ford Cortina which met its match, and subsequently its maker, trying to take on a double decker bus on the old Swords Road. My grandmother’s first inquiry on being told about the accident was what my mother had done to provoke the bus (we were stopped in traffic at the time), presumably she was under the impression that my mother regularly went down to the bus depot and taunted the buses and poked them with sticks…

My dad’s hair is still as mad-mathematician like as in the photo only now mostly iron grey(nor is he the human beanpole anymore). Which isn’t all my fault since I left home 5 years ago! Or perhaps it was because it took so long for me to leave

On seeing the previous post he was some what confused as to whether the first photo was of two cats or just one! Hopefully he will be able to tell that there are two people in this one, and remember who they are! *duck*

Happy Father’s Day Dad! Looking forward to seeing you soon!

About 4 weeks ago we welcomed a new addition to the family; a dark tortoise shell kitten called Sophy. For the first two days or so Lucy, who recently turned two, was very stroppy and sat under our bed being very grumpy. However, after two more days, they got used to each other and now have a litter-mate like relationship: wrestling, playing tail-tag and washing either other’s ears, and generally snoogling up with each other. Lucy is relaxed enough around Sophy to snooze while laying on her back. Always good for some compromising photos!

Jon is particularly pleased as he was worried that we would have a repeat of the 18 month feud/cold war we had between Esme and Lucy. Granted, though, Esme was around 15-16 when we got Lucy so it wasn’t really to be expected that they would get on.

Sophy and Lucy on their chair in the living room.

A pensive Lucy - probably watching Sophy poinging about.

A nice shot of the trees on the path up to the Hell Fire Club in Dublin - taken when we were last in Ireland.

The two boys in my life; Jon with Q, the poofiest cat there is. He has fluff for brains and is without shame - Q that is, Jon is rather clever. Taken at my parents’ house in Dublin, with the lovely new kitchen in the background.

A nice change of topic and scenery. I attended @media(07 as it was this year) with my colleagues from work. I found it quite an interesting experience. I enjoyed the talks I attended but for me the most interesting aspect was that was (not surprisingly I suppose) it was mainly attended by those focusing on the front end. A rough poll of the audience by one speaker put those of us with a CS or CompEng background in the minority. No more was this brought home to me but by the fact that one speaker ( Dan Cederholm - sorry Dan) pretty much intimated that the process from html markup templates to CMS was magic; he didn’t say what the CMS they used for a particular site was and I’m concerned that this was because he didn’t know!

Of course those working at the front-end who are busying coming up with making things look nice, as well as accessible and usable don’t need to worry or know about the intricacies of the back-end but as a web technology architect who isn’t ignorant to the requirements at the front-end it is a bit worrying to think that the ‘deep implementers’ - those who have to take the html templates and shoe horn them into them into the CMS - may be alone in realising that that it isn’t magic getting it all to work. I know myself that InfoGlue can be a bit picky about CSS files, and content types need to be explicitly set, its not like it was back in the day when we just put up files and Apache just got on with it.

For all my concerns though, I have to say that I am very lucky in that the team I work with, who are very talented, vociferous informationarchitects and designers, do understand that just as they get frustrated various browsers and their little ways with css so to those who are getting the back-end and front-end to mesh also have our traumas. Well in so far as they do believe in the magic server pixies who sort it all out, but they know its me

Of course the above is far kindlier representation of the ‘SunBug’ than Ooka’s in OpenKnightly http://visionmeld.com/openstrips/okday149.jpg. But I have mellowed since then, and I don’t keep a spear under my desk.

-Oh, and yes the conference was worth postponing the IUI cycle for .