Richard's space

For Christmas we gave Charlie (amongst other things) a Leapfrog Tag Reader which, although aimed at 4-8 year olds, Charlie definitely gets fun from interacting with the pages in the book. He’s not up to the point of actually listening to the story very much (although he did listen to all of the “Cat in the Hat” with mummies help). It’s quite difficult to get it off him as he’ll put it away and then immediately start saying “again! again!” and getting it back out of it’s carrying case.

It seems like it works really well and has been durable so far. He loves the book that comes with it titled “Ozzie and Mack” which is specifically written for the Tag system and now knows the characters names.

Hopefully it will last until he is into the suggested age range for the books (4-8) but in my opinion it really is useful from about 2-3 onwards, and Charlie is doing so well with his vocabulary and comprehension at the moment he may be a bit ahead of the curve.

The new Photo Gallery beta supports face detection to make it easier to tag photo’s with peoples names. It unfortunately doesn’t do facial recognition which would make the job a LOT faster.

Here’s an example of an already tagged photo listing the two people in the shot (with Charlie highlighted):

And in a bit of a recursive loop here’s a shot of the interface that pops up when you click on a persons face, and the photo is the screenshot I took above, so it’s detected my face again.

Very handy feature!

Microsoft have just released the beta of the Wave 3 of their Live suite of tools. This includes email, photo gallery, messenger, writer (for blogs) and finally includes calendar! This is incorporated into Windows Live Mail and synchronises with the online calendar within Hotmail. I can finally have a synchronised calendar available from home and work!

After taking Charlie to a model train exhibition a couple of weeks ago he's really shown interest in trains and Thomas the Tank Engine. We've bought him a Tomy plastic and battery powered Thomas set that he loves to watch go round and round.

I also dug out my old trains that fortunately my parents convinced me to keep. I'll have to work out what still works from the 4 engines that are there and probably get some new track as the old stuff is a bit rusty.

Well after only a week at the new job they're sending me off (at my request) to Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 which is being hosted once again at the Darling Harbour Exhibition Centre in Sydney. I'll be there for the entire first week of September attending a 2 day training course and the 3 day Tech Ed conference itself.

I went to Tech Ed in 2006 as well at the same venue and like last time Sarah will also be coming along for a "holiday" in Sydney. Of course Charlie will be coming as well and it'll be his first experience of flying. I'll be busy during the day for all 5 days that we'll be there so won't get to spend too much time with the family, but at least we have a self contained apartment while there with bedroom, lounge and kitchen.

Here's a few photo's of Charlie from our few nights away at Cradle Mountain:

Well after a bit over a year at my previous job I've moved on and today started a new job within a state government department. It'll take me a while to come up to speed with everything but it seems like it's got a lot of promise.

On the plus side I'll be heading off to Sydney for TechEd in 3 weeks time. Just trying to work out if it's feasible for Sarah and Charlie to tag along for the 5 or 6 nights.

I took a week off between jobs so we went away for 4 nights up north. Two nights at Country Club Casino and two nights at Cradle Mountain Chateau. It was good to get away and Charlie seemed to enjoy it although he took a while to get used to the long trips in the car. Basically the only one he really enjoyed was the trip home which was the longest, but he seemed to be used to it by then.

We spent the day at Mt Field yesterday and took Charlie on 3 short walks within the park. It's pretty clear from the following photo that he had a great time