Year: 2006

Northern Voice Questions

North­ern Voice is a small Van­couver con­fer­ence on blog­ging, and I’m on the organ­iz­ing com­mit­tee. We’re gear­ing up for the 2007 con­fer­ence, which we were plan­ning on hold­ing in Feb­ru­ary, but we’ve run into some issues with the ven­ue. So we’ve come up with a sur­vey to ask people who were think­ing of attend­ing NV 2007 for opin­ions on the vari­ous options we have — it’s at NV 2007 Dates and Ven­ue Sur­vey. Clos­ing date is a week from today, that’s Septem­ber 13th. The sur­vey is short and should­n’t take more than a couple of minutes to fill in. Thanks!

Coping with Pregnancy

I found a couple of things very use­ful for my second preg­nancy that I did­n’t dis­cov­er for my first — and thought I should blog them in case they’re use­ful to any­body else. I’m sure any read­ers with oth­er ideas will add them — I’ll do anoth­er post in a bit about some early baby­hood stuff that I found useful.

The biggest prob­lems I had with the second preg­nancy were simply due to the size of the belly. I can highly recom­mend doing Pil­ates, or yoga, or find­ing some oth­er way of get­ting some­body to help you fig­ure out how to sit, stand, and walk as the belly grows. I stuck out in front which made the poten­tial for lower back pain (which I had for my first, when I did­n’t do Pil­ates) worse than for those women for whom the weight is more evenly dis­trib­uted. I was in a cof­fee shop in the last couple of weeks and chat­ted to the barista about this; she thought stick­ing out in front and not being notice­ably preg­nant from behind was good until I poin­ted out it makes doing up your shoes dif­fi­cult. You do get some­what adept at twist­ing your legs around so you can get at your feet side­ways — I found a long shoe­horn was very use­ful at this stage. 

A body pil­low was use­ful for sleep­ing as you are meant to sleep only on your side, and the lig­a­ments in your hips start to stretch and hurt, so you need all the sup­port you can get. You can get by with lots of pil­lows, but a body pil­low is easi­er to deal with. I did­n’t both­er with one of those fancy shaped body pil­lows, the basic straight ver­sion did just fine and was a lot less expens­ive. I also found reg­u­lar mas­sages from a registered mas­sage ther­ap­ist (make sure they have preg­nancy pil­lows for sup­port and have exper­i­ence in pren­at­al mas­sage) to be well worth the money — all those muscles that are being stretched and over­loaded in unfa­mil­i­ar ways really enjoyed being put back into place.

And of course you want to get as much done as pos­sible before the baby arrives, while get­ting as much sleep as pos­sible. No mat­ter how tired you are before the baby arrives, and how little energy you have, you will be more tired and have less energy after­wards! Mind you, if you live any­where like Van­couver and need any renov­a­tions done, you won’t have much choice in when things get done. They will get done when the con­tract­or can fit them in, if you can find a con­tract­or to do any­thing. And the rest will get done when you have some energy. Hav­ing a baby is a good les­son in what does­n’t need to be done.

Bootees

I was a few months preg­nant when Tim asked when I was going to knit some bootees (aka booties) for the baby. I wondered why he had­n’t asked for the first child, he answered that he had­n’t known I could knit back then. Fair enough.

So I got some yarn in time for the trip to Hawaii, think­ing it would be a good chance to get some knit­ting in. I tried two pat­terns, one from a book of my great-aunt’s, and one on the web; I pre­ferred the web pat­tern (they’re the bootees on the right). Once the baby arrived of course, we redis­covered why we had­n’t used the bootees we had with our first child; they don’t stay on the feet! Socks or out­fits with feet built-in are much more prac­tic­al. Although I did dis­cov­er that if you put socks on first, the bootees do stay on longer.

The res­ults of the Hawaii knit­ting are here, show­cased on a table­cloth I got in Hawaii… Baby's jacket and bootees

The jack­et is a seam­less cabled jack­et, knit­ted in Baby Soft by Lana Gatto from a pat­tern that’s no longer avail­able. The only slightly tricky bit was mak­ing the increases work into the cable pat­tern prop­erly, that required a piece of paper and a cer­tain amount of cal­cu­lat­ing. Oth­er than that, a reas­on­ably easy knit and the yarn is lovely and soft. I just hope she spends as much (or more) time wear­ing it as I did knit­ting it!

Hawaii 2006

We had a fam­ily trip to Hawaii (the Big Island) in the last week where I could reas­on­ably fly before I got too big. Mind you, I was still big and bulky and quite glad of being able to float along in the water. I took quite a few pho­tos, but these two are the only ones I deemed worthy of pub­lish­ing. They’re from the “saddle road” between the vol­ca­noes on the Big Island. 

I found the con­trast between the new lava, the old lava, and the no-longer-vis­ible lava on this photo to be the inter­est­ing part: View from Saddle Road on Hawaii

and the con­trast of the new lava with the tree, the grass, and the moun­tains was what made this photo interesting: tree on Saddle Road on Hawaii

Liberty Deployments

It’s good to see ana­lysts writ­ing sen­tences like “the Liberty spe­cific­a­tions are res­on­at­ing with major IT user organ­iz­a­tions” (quoted in an InfoWorld art­icle entitled E‑government Group forms with­in Liberty Alli­ance). It shows that the Liberty spe­cific­a­tions (and not just fed­er­a­tion) are being imple­men­ted and deployed.

Which brings me to the main point of this post­ing — if you know of Liberty deploy­ments that are worthy of pub­lic atten­tion, pro­pose them for the Iden­tity Deploy­ment of the Year awards. Nom­in­a­tions close on Monday, August 21st, and the judges are wait­ing to see what you can nom­in­ate! The win­ners will be announced on stage at Digit­al IDWorld. I’m hop­ing we get to see some deploy­ments that are illus­trat­ive of the wide range of prob­lems that Liberty Alli­ance spe­cific­a­tions solve. Paul of course wants a People Ser­vice imple­ment­a­tion to win; are there any cool ones out there that will sway the oth­er judges as well?

The Wall

The Wall was put up 45 years ago today, an event that seemed to define the Cold War. I lived in Ber­lin for a few years, start­ing in 1988; to me the concept of a city belong­ing to West Ger­many being in the middle of East Ger­many sur­roun­ded by a sys­tem of walls pur­pose­fully designed to make it easy to shoot people try­ing to cross was pro­foundly unnat­ur­al. For those Ger­mans who’d been born (as I had) since the build­ing of the Wall, it was nat­ur­al, it was what they’d always known. I remem­ber long dis­cus­sions with friends early in 1989, as the Com­mun­ist sys­tems star­ted to wobble and crumble, wheth­er and when East and West Ger­many could become one again. As late as June 1989 it was­n’t at all some­thing that people allowed them­selves to believe in. Most people I talked to seemed to think the Allies (the US, the Soviet Uni­on, Great Bri­tain, and France, the four “win­ning powers”) would­n’t allow Ger­many to ever again be a large, power­ful coun­try. And indeed it took a lot of dis­cus­sion before the four powers would allow the reuni­fic­a­tion of Ger­many, under the Two plus Four Con­tract.

The Wall evokes mixed emo­tions. In the West it was, of course, seen as unam­bigu­ously bad, stop­ping people leav­ing East Ger­many and sep­ar­at­ing fam­il­ies. When I talked to some people from East Ger­many around the time it fell (Novem­ber 9, 1989) they said at the time it was built the Wall was a neces­sity to give their fledging state a chance of sur­viv­al. Too many hard-work­ing people with skills and ambi­tion had left the coun­try and they needed to keep those who were left. Their view was that even­tu­ally East Ger­many would be a socially fair, pros­per­ous coun­try, if only it could have a fair chance. And, from what I’ve heard, in the dec­ade after the Wall was built, life did get bet­ter. Wal­ter Ulbricht, the lead­er of the coun­try at the time, was said to remain in touch with the people, to go to the pub with his mates, and to genu­inely want what was best for his coun­try under the cir­cum­stances. Later on the polit­ic­al lead­ers were more adept at liv­ing the good lives them­selves than they were at pro­cur­ing them for the rest of the pop­u­la­tion, with their vil­las and parties with food and drink unob­tain­able by nor­mal people. I’m not going to go into the eco­nom­ic prob­lems of East Ger­many here, there were lots, but suf­fice to say that by the end of the 1980s East Ger­many was not pros­per­ous. West Ger­mans and for­eign­ers could vis­it East Ber­lin on exchange of 25 Deutschmark for 25 East Ger­man Marks; this was deemed to be an entrance fee by many West­ern­ers and there was quite a debate about wheth­er people should vis­it or wheth­er that money was just prop­ping up the East Ger­man regime. But I digress.

Many people ask why the West Ger­mans did­n’t just tear down the Wall? One reas­on was that the Wall was built com­pletely on East Ger­man ter­rit­ory, suf­fi­ciently back from the leg­al bor­der that nobody could claim it encroached on any part of West Ger­many or West Ber­lin (which leg­ally had a dif­fer­ent status to the rest of West Ger­many). Anoth­er was that even at the time I was in Ber­lin, there was a def­in­ite feel­ing of being occu­pied. I worked at the Hahn-Meit­ner Insti­tut in Wannsee, near the south-west bor­der of West Ber­lin, in the Amer­ic­an zone. It was not uncom­mon to see Amer­ic­an sol­diers in full battle gear with machine guns run­ning around the streets on some exer­cise; they sel­dom bothered to learn any Ger­man and I remem­ber being at a kebab stand watch­ing the Amer­ic­an sol­diers bark orders at the Turk­ish server/cook in Amer­ic­an Eng­lish in such thick accents and so fast that I had dif­fi­culty under­stand­ing them. Then there was the less defin­able feel­ing of guilt, the feel­ing that this sep­ar­a­tion was some part of the pun­ish­ment that Ger­mans had to suf­fer in order to atone (if only in part) for what had happened dur­ing the second World War.

Most people in West Ber­lin learned to live in the pres­ence of the Wall, although many could­n’t and fled to West Ger­many. Many people died (Peter Fechter was the most fam­ous), many fam­il­ies were ripped apart, for a Wall that was gone, along with the sys­tem that cre­ated it, 30 years later.