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During Sunday evening on the ward the staff concluded that Amelia's condition was not improving & she was still struggling with every breath.

The next step was to put her on a ventillator so thankfully the grandparents dropped everything and came down to take care of Bethany so we could both stay with Amelia at the hospital.

It was decided at around 10pm to go down the ventilator route. This also meant that she would have to be moved to an intensive care ward and to another hospital as Ealing doesnt have the facilities to maintain peadiatric patients on ventillators.

Unfortunately we had to take Amelia into A & E this morning because she had got bad respiratory problems. After a stint in resus she was sent up to the ward.

The twins have got a cold. Unsuprisingly, what one gets the other gets a day later. Poor little things.

Amelia seems to have it worse than Bethany but they both have their moments, so we'll delay cleaning the kitchen carpet till they're over it....!

I've been trying to do some fancy stuff with my "BeBox" broadband router. The GUI makes the thing look quite restrictive in what it can do but really that's deceptive as it seems to be pretty powerfull little device. First up, reconfiguring the DHCP scope... strangely the GUI seems to allow you to add pools of addresses but not delete or edit existing ones. Maybe this is simply to ensure there is always at least 1 pool but there isn't even an obvious way to disable DHCP if you dont want it.

I've just found that Netstumbler wont work on Vista. For years I had it on my XP HP for occasional use. Now I need to use it more regularly (in part because the Vista UI for WLAN selection is so naff) and it wont work at all. Time to try Vistumbler

Now the Vodafone SIM is working I can play with the Nokia N71 that came with it. So far it seems to be an amazingly good phone.

Of course it makes phone calls & sends texts, but it also has good usable PDA functions (email -- POP/IMAP, calendar etc) all of which syncs via usb or bluetooth with outlook. And an easy to use WiFi interface to not only webbrowse (as an alternative to it's GSM/UMTS interfaces) but also to use built in apps like the VoIP/SIP client, Internet radio, email client, etc,...

And unlike the Windows Smartphones the battery seems to last a long time too.

It's 3 years since I had a Vodafone phone ( well except for a £10/m SIM that I only had for 4 months for the quidco credit ). In the past I had reasonably good experience of it Vf for business use ... good coverage, reasonable customer service when needed. So it seemed a good choice for my new business phone.

Here's what their website says about their service : "Our aim is to help you as quickly and efficiently as possible."

Until now, a vista laptop was to me, similar to the attitude I had to kids till last year (when our twins were born):
- Something that seems OK for a few minutes, but thank the lord I can give it back to its owner

But now I've got a new laptop and it's got Vista on it. Aagh.

Vista, by default, asks before running anything that might use the network or reconfigure the system. So for me, that's pretty much every time I touch the damn thing (this 'feature' was turned off pretty quickly).

Sounds pretty unlikely doesn't it?

But according to their new passports, one was born in the town we live, the other was born in the adjacent town. We guess the mix up comes from the way the hospital they were born at is in the adjacent town (just) but the registration district for their birth certificates is our town. And different people at IPS have done the two passports!

I'm not fully convinced about CFLs.
Are they really better for the planet?
Do they really save money?

But despite my sceptism, I'm putting CFLs into our kitchen GU10s

... so soon ....

Get far too much email? So do I... Hundreds on some day. How much do I actually need to read? Probably about 10-20% max. But the trouble is, you dont know if you need to know till you've read it. By when your time is already wasted.

I've been meaning to do this for some while now, but finally I got round to creating an Outlook Rule for this.

So now, any email where I'm on the Cc gets moved to a separate folder ("Cc-Junk") and marked as already read. I almost set it to just delete the email but I thought for the moment I'd just move it and see how it goes.

After running the top floor heating fully controlled by Cortex for about a week , I've now switched over our first floor so that only the ground floor is left under old-fashioned timer control.