18 Aug 2006
will be a productive day. I will wake up before 8, be dressed + have eaten breakfast + functional by 9, start ingesting video from TACKLES sleepover last Saturday (NOT on a Linux computer, because even Ubuntu doesn’t play nice with Firewire cards, it seems), call a friend I’ve been meaning to call for too long and generally stop procrastinating on that front whilst the video thingy is at work (I bought a Firewire cable so will hopefully never again have to capture from analogue sources where I don’t absolutely need to), and call another friend accordingly, based upon the outcome of the first, prod the Matthias site a little bit (blog goodness for those who are keen on it!), hopefully return a video camera if Adam is home (otherwise leave voicemail and deal with it all later, I suppose), return home, email check (compulsively, as if there were any other way), eat lunch, go to work, work, get home, contemplate dealing with captured video and decide it’s too hard without iMovie/Premiere/something less painful/more powerful than Windows Movie Maker/less gargantuan/buggy/UI-designed-by-primates than Cinelerra, email compulsively some more, chase some lights, put off til weekend (when everywhere will be closed anyway), stay at home for once, sleep (before midnight).
Noticing a downwards Getting-Stuff-Done trend. Meh. Lecture is cancelled tomorrow so I’ve got more time to try and be productive in. Now I’ve just got to not wake up too late… not even the 372 will save me if it’s not a going-to-uni day (haven’t had one of those in a while now, nice!)
15 Aug 2006
Seven weeks: able to feel and respond to stimulus.
Sixteen weeks: able to hear even whilst the pinna is still forming.
Seventeen weeks: skin sensitivity in most of body.
Twenty-four weeks: legal abortion in NSW, Australia, without any need for proof of danger to mother or child.
We know the seventeen weeks figure for skin sensitivity from testing on ‘aborted’ (but still alive — and interestingly acknowledged as “living”) foetuses. Seriously. I don’t know how the experiments go exactly, but I reckon it’s something along the lines of “hey, let’s prod the unborn child and see what happens!” (semi-sarcastic tone). Sigh.
Half of this education course seems to be about the best way(s) to scar and kill children. It’s interesting in a really scary kind of way.
15 Aug 2006
We finally got around to getting dupes made of car key after the ignition lock thingy broke and we had to get it replaced. So now there is more than one shared car key between three occasional drivers, which is excellent. Not so excellent is that I nearly broke my keyring putting it on, because Honda make seriously obese keys, but no matter. I have a key now. *is happy*
14 Aug 2006
Much fun and little sleep was had. No fatal injuries, the worst was a few pillow-induced tears. Everyone — including leaders — but Adam (I think) was asleep by 1am, so we pretty much all managed nearly six hours. We restructured the normal morning programme so that the kids could actually concentrate for the study, and it all went really well. Thanks be to God for an awesome night! I think we had three kids along who don’t usually attend TACKLES so hopefully they’ll be back in the future. We got plenty of video shot (haven’t had a chance to ingest it yet, hopefully that’ll get done in the next two days as soon as I buy a Firewire cable! Really gotta get a camera to make video stuff easier… really gotta get a decent computer with Windows and Premiere) which will hopefully be turned into a 5-minute clip about TACKLES for the end of the year when the kids invade morning church. Plenty of still photos, too, which are always helpful for newsletters to parents and whatever else, in which we explain that yes, we did feed their children more sugar than they have consumed at any other point in their lives, and yes, they were allowed to stay up until the small hours of the morning. All good fun :-)
