Unthinking Sexism

When I was at university in Auckland, one guy said to me that he hadn’t realized he was sexist until he met me. I’ve always found discrimination based on the biological capability of bearing children to make about as much sense as discrimination based on eye colour. It seems much of the world doesn’t agree, [...]

Sleeping Babies

We’ve had problems with getting the baby (now 10 months) to sleep properly during the day, and when she also started waking more often during the night I decided I had to figure out an answer. Our first child slept readily, took schedule variations in his stride, and so it was a big shock when [...]

Debian 4 and PPP

Yesterday the latest release (4.0) of Debian came out. I decided to be big and brave and upgrade immediately; I’ve never had any problems with upgrading Debian before and didn’t expect to now. It took forever to download, ages to install (with me keeping all the old config files as I always do). And then, [...]

Bad Behavior

I’ve started using the Bad Behavior/Bad Behaviour plugin for WordPress, which is meant to cut down on the number of spambots that attempt to access my site. In theory it shouldn’t block any real visitors, although this has been known to happen, so if you notice any problems (e.g., can’t get to my blog from [...]

Twins and Genetics

Modern genetics sometimes has a bit of a “believe it or not” feeling to it, things are reported that sound like they come out of Greek mythology. One of the recent news items on the BBC had that feeling for me, where they write about semi-identical twins. These babies, who come from one egg fertilized [...]