Nathan is one today! He was spoilt with presents - a musical caterpillar, super clothes, a “little people” bus and Noah’s ark, and lots of kisses .

He shares his birthday with his cousin Mina, and he had a party in Paris at his Aunt & Uncles’ place. He didn’t blow out his candle, maybe next birthday he’ll have grown up enough to understand the candle blowing ritual…

YouTube is a community based site where anyone can upload video and share them with friends and other members of the site. Since I don’t have a whole lot of bandwidth available for this site, it’s a great way to allow you all to see video of Nathan.

October 14th will be his first birthday, so it’s a good time to see just how he’s progressed since he was born.

The video was taken with my digital camera, and then converted to a format convenient for YouTube using VirtualDub, a free tool to edit and convert video. The problem with digital cameras is that they’re generally not as good at making the most of light conditions - not having the complex electronics for shooting video like camcorders have. With VirtualDub, I can post-process the images and improve levels (lighting) and sound. Digital camera films often suffer from noise too (graininess) so I cleaned this up using a filter in the software. Since the original was at 640×480 and the YouTube version is at 320×240 I have effectively discarded 3/4 of the original information, but the quality improvement given the filters makes it easier on the eye. Let me know what you think.

You were a great friend to my mother. A friend who understood. Who had a true heart and a kind spirit.

I haven’t seen Mark, Paul or Philip for a long time. I remember being at school with Mark and playing Megadrive games at your house and having cups of tea in the kitchen, chatting.

You must have suffered great pain, and now ours is the time to share that pain, the nostalgia of better days and fond memories.

For the first time since we left in early 2003, we went back to Morocco this summer on holiday. We took Nathan with us which made travel logistics all the more difficult. Flying with a 10 month old baby is tiring, since he has to be occupied all the time. On the way out he was sleepy but couldn’t get comfortable for a long time, and whined much to the delight of the other passengers.

On arrival, our rental car was a new Renault Dacia Logan - the car that’s been in the news, being a budget vehicle which costs around 5000€ / 6000$ new. It was a disappointment though, since we expected a Laguna (a much nicer car…). Still, there was plenty room in the boot of the car for luggage including the pram and air conditioning, which made it a reasonable car for the trip.

A lot of things have changed in Rabat, where we used to live. The development of a big new marina on the Bou Regreg estuary in Rabat is under way, and plans for a lot of new holiday apartments on the coast road south of Rabat are well advanced.

We stayed just south of Rabat; for the first week we were on the beach with friends, and for the second just back from the beach in a house with a swimming pool in the garden where Nathan is pictured with me and his red clockwork paddle boat, which ran around on the water much to his amusement.

It was also the first time Nathan had seen sand and the sea. He met his great grandmother, his maternal grandmother, his uncle and a few great-aunts, uncles and cousins. He’d just started crawling before we left, so he was around everywhere grabbing hold of things he shouldn’t have, and pulling himself up to stand and walk himself around whilst holding onto things like a table or chairs. His favourite pastimes were trying to move plastic outdoor chairs as far as he could before getting stopped, and crawling along long corridors in the houses we stayed at.

With the two hour difference between Rabat and Paris, it was hard to get back into the regular sleep routine with him. He’s back to normal now though, and it all seems like too distant a memory already.

I’ve been away on holiday. On my return I had over 1,000 messages waiting, most of which were blog spam. I spent a considerable amount of time cleaning all that up. So I’ve now taken steps to reduce spam on this blog by closing comments on posts older than 21 days.

Back soon with photos of the holiday.

Greg Kolodziejzyk, a keen physical endurance competitor, has just broken the record for the furthest a human can travel under his own power in 24 hours. The photo is of the machine he did it in: a recumbent bicycle with a carbon fiber fairing into which Greg is taped shut for best aerodynamics.

I discovered Greg’s site whilst reading the RSS feed from Gizmag. It’s an absorbing read, covering the design of the machine Critical Power, the training, and the failed first attempt at the record.

The second time Greg got it right, traveling 1046.94 km (650.538 miles) in 24 hours, 25.58 km further than the previous record set in 1995. I signed up to follow his email alerts, and he summed up at the end by saying:

It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done and took some major, major deep digging to find the strength to continue and to ramp up the effort level as my averages started to dwindle.

You can see photos of the event on Flickr, and there are some videos on You Tube.

I’d have enough trouble staying up for 24 hours on the trot, let alone cycling (bar pitstops every 2 hours for a few minutes) at an average speed of 43km/h for the whole time. In fact, given the pit stops, I expect the kind of speed whilst in motion and cruising was consistently above 50km/h (30mph).

Congratulations Greg.

Last year, I ran a daily email following the stages in the Tour de France. A number of friends participated in a fantasy game where you allocate a team and win points if the riders are placed in each stage.

Whilst trying to rally support for a game in this year’s edition, the news broke that Jan Ullrich, the likely contender to win the tour this year, and Ivan Basso who was also on the podium last year, have been suspended due to alleged doping.

The accusations centre around blood transfusions: the riders have blood extracted at a previous time. This is then stored and re-transfused just before major races, giving them a 10-15% performance advantage as their blood is extra-oxygenated.

I’m not so motivated to watch and report on the tour this year. Lance Armstrong’s two possible successors are out, and many other teams are reduced to less riders as there are many suspended athletes.

Doping has been a scourge to cycling, but I think it’s unfairly singled out since endurance for an event like the Tour puts the athletes very much under the spotlight. 200km+ per day for 2-3 weeks makes phenomenal demands on the body.

Look me in the (virtual) eye and tell me that there aren’t performance enhancing methods going undetected in major sports.

Nathan has often had a little cough and been “bunged up” in the nose. He’s already on special anti-regurgitation milk and takes Motilium before, and Gaviscon after meals.

Our paediatrician suspected a gastroesophageal reflux and so I took Nathan to a clinic in Boulogne (15 miles away, but an hour’s drive due to heavy traffic ). He had a tube put through his nose with a sensor to measure the acidity level just above his stomach, and had to keep it overnight (he wasn’t particularly happy about it, see photo). A little box recorded the PH at regular intervals, and this was put into a little baby backpack so that we could carry it with him.

To stop him from pulling the tube out, he had his elbows bound - at the clinic - with the latest high tech solution: cardboard tube from a loo roll, kitchen paper and medical tape. You can just about see the one on his left arm in the picture.

The clinic phoned back yesterday with the results. He’s within the normal range for the tests, so there’s some other reason that he’s regurgitating. It could be that it will gradually fade away. In any case, the results are great news! Levels of acidity that are too high would mean special treatment and a lot of worry. I’m still wondering what it is that’s causing him to cough and regurgitate from time to time, but at least I know it’s linked to a medical issue with acidity.