zerolight

Rafi and Zee are home! Yay. Ali’s exhausted from the excitment of the past few days and has fallen asleep on the couch. Rafi and Zee are in the bedroom feeding and preparing for a well deserved nap.

Monday night ended like any other night. Almost. Zee mentioned that she was feeling different and that the baby was really pushing around more than usual trying to get comfy. We were asleep by 11pm. Zee awoke at 2am feeling a bit uncomfortable with mild contractions. She woke me 2 hours later, quietly whispering that she’d had a show, was having contractions, and suspected she was in labour.

We took our time getting ready, and eventually got into the Queen Mum’s at about 6am. As Zee’s water hadn’t broken, their assumption was that this was Braxton Hicks, though they were somewhat baffled by the bleeding. At this point I left Zee at the hospital and took Ali to stay with our friends. On my return I was surprised to be told I couldn’t get back into the ward till after 9am – hospital rules – unless Zee went into full blown labour.

Fast forward to 9am. Braxton Hicks is still assumed. We’re waiting for a scan to tell us more about the bleeding. Fast forward 6 hours. Zee is in increasing pain, and the scan showed everything was well with the baby. No idea about the bleeding. Early show and Braxton Hicks remains the theory. I’m packed off home for dinner and am to bring Ali in at 7pm for a visit. Zee isn’t going into labour that day or night apparently.

So I turn up at 7pm with Ali to find an empty bed. “We tried to call you.” Clearly they copied down the wrong mobile number. Apparently she has been in the labour suite for an hour! And I can’t take Ali in. Zee later told me that she’d made a real fuss at around 17:30 when another mum was taken to the labour suite. Eventually a doctor agreed to check her out and realised she was 6cm dilated, though her waters still hadn’t broken. She was still on a drug dose of paracetamol and codine! Wouldn’t it have made sense to carry out that check before the Braxton Hicks diagnosis? So I’m left standing outside the hospital with Ali for another 20 mins waiting on our friends to come back and collect Ali again, then I frantically make my way up to the labour suite. I thought it was only in the movies that fathers sprint into the labour suite just in the nick of time.

There I found Zee high as a kite on gas and air… yet again she’s managed to avoid the real drugs. She’s been here for about an hour thus far. 20 mins later Rafi was born, much to the relief of a thoroughly exhausted Zee. It’s been a very long and painful day for her, but worth it. The midwives in the labour suite were amazing.

Rafi looks a lot like Ali. A lot. He has all his facial expressions, and a touch more Zee mixed in for good measure. He was born at 19:45 on the 15th. He’s a tiny 5 lbs and 7 oz. He was born at 36 weeks – 4 weeks early. He cuddled into Zee for a while, before eventually taking a big feed. He’s got a strong pair of lungs, but soon quietens down when held by Zee or I. He’s adorable. Ali can’t wait to meet him.

As he’s only 36 weeks and so small, they’ll have been waking Zee every 3 hours to feed him and check his temperature. It’ll have been a long night for both Rafi and Zee. Ali and I are going to haul ourselves out of bed shortly (we were up from 4am to midnight yesterday) to go visit Zee and Rafi. We expect them to come home with us tomorrow.

edit: lots of pictures on flickr.

Introducing Rafi. Rafi was born at 19:45 today. He’s a tiny little thing at 5lbs 7oz, and was born 4 weeks early. He and mum are well. Proper post tomorrow. I’ve been up since 4am.

Prologue gets a lot of things wrong. Flaky AI that needs a script to keep it on its toes. Screen tearing. Poor online. The fictional tracks have walls which you can bounce around without losing momentum if you are that way inclined. But the handling is near flawless. Driving on the raggedy edge hasn’t been this convincing since GPL. It’s the first racer since that old PC racer where I’ve struggled to maintain pace consistently over a three lap race, instead spinning out after one or two perfect on the limit laps. That’s a good thing. That’s realism. GT5 has that in spades. Punishingly so. Take the new GTR and push it to the limits on Suzuka to see what I mean.

Even that old school – start at the back and make your way to the front in three laps – gameplay is a good thing. Yes it masks the lacking AI, but it adds a challenge that requires you to, in most cases, push your car to the limit whilst avoiding slower traffic in the hope of making the top three at the end of the last lap. Forza races tend to be over after the first few corners so this alleged backwards step in GT5 suits me just fine. Do I want more? Of course, and I hope that over the next year the team find the time to deliver it. They need to take a long hard look at what Forza does right if they want to offer a compelling and complete package. For now though, GT5P is about as good as driving gets – virtually. Before the end of the year, DP has promised GT5P updates which will provide a realistic damage model to curb the wall riders, and a more complete online experience.

Having already Jailbroken my iPodTouch I decided to actually research the jailbreaking of an iPodTouch/iPhone. I did this, in a rather backwards sort of way, because having used the ziphone method I had found my iPod wasn’t behaving entirely as expected – there were permission problems on certain folders, and despite ssh’ing into the iPod as root, I was unable to correct them.

My research suggested that whilst ziphone does exactly what it says on the tin, and works well, it’s been cobbled together from a number of sources, perhaps not always correctly. If you plan to tinker, or do anything more advanced with the iPod, you may run into problems with the ziphone solution. Certainly, you need a patch to even be able to connect to the iPod with iBricker or iPhoneBrowser.

iLiberty+ is currently garnering a lot of praise, and has been developed by some respected coders. One of the niggles iPhone users have with ziphone is that it permanently downgrades your bootloader which can have warranty implications, whereas iLiberty apparently does not. Of course this is not a worry for iPod users like myself.

iLiberty+ comes in two flavours, Mac and Windows, with the Windows version seemingly futher down the development ladder (I was able to download payloads for the windows version rather than the Mac version, disappointingly). edit: looks like the Mac version has been updated. As such, I opted for the Windows install, along with Cydia, and Installer for the iPod. Cydia is a better Unix based subsystem than the more commonly used BSD Subsystem found in ziphone, particularly as it comes with it’s own package installer which may eventually replace Nullrivers Installer 3. More importantly, Cydia shuffles the iPod’s OS files around a little bit, freeing up, by my calculations, about 60mb of OS partition space. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s provided me with something like 300% extra space for 3rd party apps.

As it happens, despite some internet rumblings about iLiberty being more complex than ziphone, the process is quick, and painless. I spent about 45 mins trying to see if I could get payloads (extra packages like Cydia and Installer) to work on the Mac before giving up and spending 10 mins doing it on the PC. You simply tick the payloads required, then click a button and sit back and wait. It took 10 minutes only because my laptop is old skool USB 1.0, hence my original desire to do it on the Mac. Since jailbreaking my iPod I notice that the developers have released a new Mac version with features on a par with the PC version.

The upgrade was flawless, permissions are correct – I can even use DropCopy to auto-install apps that I can’t find on a repo – like “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. I’ve installed around 12 third party apps, and have around 77mb of free OS space. I was even able to run iLiberty a second time on my now jailbroken iPod to add Installer, as I’d initially gone with just Cydia – to my surprise it kept Cydia and my already installed apps, whilst adding Installer. The permissions issue, the extra space, and the fact that iLiberty just seems to get everything right, means that my vote goes to iLiberty over ziphone.