Random thoughts on life
One (possibly last) update. Jennie and Lucie are now home (since yesterday afternoon). The midwife has visited today and there are no problems. Other than mum and dad having an almost total lack of sleep. But that’s expected.
Thanks to everyone for all their correspondence, cards and best wishes.
I thought I’d provide an update on how mother and baby are.
Jen and Lucie are still in Hospital. Because of Lucie being premature she’s been having some problems with feeding. Another “weigh in” is due on Sunday and, assuming she’s gained weight, we’ll see what’s happening about going home.
The story behind what happened, well, I’ll keep it short – the full version will wait until I’ve finished the screenplay!
First of all, let’s go back to last Thursday (cue swirly cloud effects). My wife, Jennie, and her sister took a train to stay with their Dad overnight. On Friday was the wedding of their Niece, which they would travel to together.
Except Jen woke up on Friday feeling unwell and after a quick trip to a GP, she was sent to Hull Royal Infirmary, who confirmed that she was having contractions and was in labour. At lunchtime I was called and rushed to Hull.
By the evening the contractions pretty much stopped and, eventually, Jen was moved to a ward for monitoring. By Saturday afternoon they’d agreed to transfer her to the City Hospital in Nottingham, where we were “booked”. An ambulance arrived for her, with a midwife going along. A good job really, because half way through the journey, labour started again and the ambulance had to turn on lights and sirens whilst hurtling down the M1. To top things off, the City Hospital called to say they’d filled all the beds, so they diverted to the Queens Medical Centre. When they arrived, the contractions stopped again.
So, after much discussion, the decision was made to induce the contractions via a drip. Unfortunately, the machine kept failing and whilst faffing about this with for hours, they hadn’t noticed that Jen had gone fully into labour and was actually pushing. The problem now, though, was that the contractions weren’t frequent or strong enough to help with the pushing so they ended up using suction to get the baby out.
And that’s about it.
Because Lucie is premature, they’ll remain in hospital for a few days whilst she had antibiotics and various tests. Otherwise, mother and baby are doing well.
I’m working on my Social Bookmarks plugin for WordPress and, for whatever reason, if I use a URL shortening service for the links, they won’t appear under Google Reader. The post appears in the news feed, but refuses to appear in Google Reader.
A Google doesn’t report anyone else having this problem but, literally, as soon as I turn off the shortening service, it works again.
Anyone? Anyone?
Next Day Update
You know, it gets weirder. As soon as I swapped the shortening service from TinyURL to is.gd, it appeared to work. No idea why. I’ll dig more.
I’ve now started in anger on my new social bookmarking plugin for WordPress (and, indeed, you should see the initial results below each post). It’s taking a bit of jiggery-pokery to get them to also work within feeds as well, but I hope I’m getting there. Maybe.
I might now make it so that rather than just have the favourite bookmarking facilities available, I’ll add LOTS and add a simple way of turning off those you don’t want. In the meantime I’ve come across two further, rather popular, bookmarking methods that I missed. I’m sure there’ll be more and I’ll post those later.
There’s an excellent article on how to do this on the LinkedIn website. But, using the format I was using before, it’s…
http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=[url]&title=[title] &source=[source]
The new parameter <code>[source][/source][/source] is where the source article came from – in this case the main URL of the blog. You can also pass a summary, but I found that whenever I did it didn’t appear to work. Not sure why, but as it’s quite limited I’ve decided to omit this.
MySpace
Now, this was a little more tricky as their own developer notes (see the link on the right hand side of the screen) gives entire script examples rather than the simplified URL system I’ve been using. None-the-less, it can be boiled down to…
http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=postto&l=1&u=[url]&t=[title]
Again, you can pass a summary (or in this case it appears to be quite happy to receive the entire content – I’m guessing this is for if you’re passing via form) but I’ve omitted this.
