mark-elliott.net

I know it’s been a while, but there is more coming…

The onslaught of my twin boys has really put my blogging into a tail spin, but believe it or not, I’m still researching.. sort of. I have come across some really great stigmergy research that I will blog about soon, it’s just taking me a while to get through it as I always seem to have a baby in my arms (like right now).

I’m also embroiled in drafting a fairly massive grant application right now – an Australian Research Council Linkage grant to fund a post doc (amongst other things) to explore digital stigmergy and stigmergic collaboration in publicly situated civic information networks. Specifically on the iHub information network in Melbourne’s CBD – very exciting!

As soon as this grant is done (late November), I’m re-entering my research and dissertation writing with gusto, having also just secured a fantastic new co-supervisor – Sean Cubitt. So expect to see more stigmergy and stigmergic collaboration action soon.

Part 2 in getting everyone caught up in this crazy baby having affair - this will be a longer post, but it should get me uptodate (can that be one word?).

I remember that coming home from the hospital was certainly an exciting event. Having previously installed the ‘capsules’ in the back seat, we loaded up the family (that sounds very strange to say!) and got under way (sorry bout the low res – this was shot on my phone camera):

However we quickly realised that our car was way too small (with the pram, kids, Keri and I loaded up, there was not even room for groceries – let alone other people (like moms, dads, brothers, sisters etc) or extra baggage – in case it all gets to be a bit much and we decide to skip town. So, like many self-respecting families of four and above, we traded in the sedan for a people mover!

I know, I know, ‘geez, that seems like a lotta car’ – true, and it is, but lemmee tell ya, when you’ve got twins, you want everything to be as easy as possible – and i mean eaassyyy.

So we’ve settled into a fuzzy, sleep deprived groove – I ran into a wall (hard) a few weeks ago, and have spent many a perplexing moment walking this way, then the other, only to turn around and go back the original direction (being unsure as to what i was doing), before repeating the whole sequence again.

What has made all this nonsense bearable is Keri’s most supportive family – we came home from the hospital to find three whole rooms spectacularly spotless and dedicated solely to our bean raising endeavours.

Not only has the clean space (and food and shopping) been great, but the people even better! Thanks Dale!

and Renee and Britt!

With a little help from our friends (read family), we even made it to the park in the first week:

Although 4 weeks a have passed since we returned from the hospital, it feels like it could be 40, or .4 – we’re in some form of suspended animation, where time loses all relativity and stretches and contracts with our moods – which do a bit of stretching and contracting them selves ;-). As much as I think I’m getting used to this whole thing, sometimes it still causes a pang in my gut when I think about how crazy it is that this whole twinning thing happened to us – not to mention the miracle of life part!

And this is just plain cute (Cedar yawning & Lucas snoozing):

Did you say something?

By the way, can you tell them appart?:

Cedar?..

Lucas?..

or was that… – more on this in the next instalment…

i’ve just been too busy to blog!

It’s been one month since Lucas and Cedar were born (in the picture to the right, they are 2 days old) and a lot has happened – wow, so much to get caught up on here… Hmm, where to start!

I’ll try to just get caught up – on the whole experience – this might take me a while, but I’ll do my best. At least then it will documented…

Keri’s waters broke at 7am on the morning of September 11th – I heard “shit!” and from a dead sleep sat straight up in bed and said, “What’s wrong?!” “I think my waters have broken,” she replies… Even then we didn’t suspect that within 7 odd hours, they would be born. Ok, so here’s the killer shots, still connected to the umbilical cord, seconds from the womb, born via emergency caesarean:

Cedar, 2.23kg, 2:37pm, September 11, 2006:

Lucas, 2.12kg, 2:38pm, September 11, 2006:

And then there was four…

You’ll have to convert their weight if you’re still in that outmoded imperial measurement system – i’m lazy, and it’s always nice to invert the usual pro U.S. cultural hegemony ;-). When they were weighed yesterday, they came in at Cedar: 2.92 and Lucas: 2.84, so their growing fast!

Look how tiny they were two days after birth (right). Already, in four weeks, they’ve grown so much! (but you’ll have to wait for my next blog for those pix – which i’ll be doing in the next few days…)

There was an initial drop in their weight, but this is normal we are told. However, since they were 4.5 weeks premature, they did not have a strong sucking reflex developed as well as their mouths being too small to properly attach to the nipple. So we spent the first several weeks of their life pushing as much expressed breast milk and formula into them as possible. Otherwise, they would have to go to the special care nursery and have tubes down their throats – yuck! A number of nurses were quite vociferous regarding their opinions that the babes should not be in our care, but rather in the nursery. However the ‘pedes’ (paediatricians) reasoned that if their weight never dropped below 10% of their birth weight, it was better for their parents to care for them – we agreed of course.

And in the end, they never spent a day or night away from us.

We had a lot of ups and downs in the hospital (mainly to do with their lack of organisation!), but in the end, Keri spent 6 nights there, and on the 7th day…

we came home.

In the next post I’ll get you all caught up on the three weeks since being home from the hospital. Hope you’re all well and please feel free to leave comments by clicking the ‘reply’ link at the end of this post.

Lot’s o love, Mark, Keri, Cedar & Lucas!

It’s been a long time coming

For at least a year now I’ve dreamt of having a digital homestead where not only would all my activities be documented for myself and others, but it could also provide a locus for my own private draftings and research (access restricted) and, a locus for public collaborative content creation. This site is built with TWiki and is actually one big wiki, despite looking also like your stock static site and blog. This archetecture gives me the flexability of covering almost every web base – static broadcast, blogging, forum, wiki, etc. I’ve yet to employ all these capacities, but soon come.

Riffing on Cory Doctorow’s Outboard Brain, I’m intending to extend this idea to its natural maximum – my life’s activities documented largely in the public arena in a medium which allows for feedback, collaboration and expansion by the collective intelligence. For at least a year now I’ve dreamt of having a digital homestead where not only would all my activities be documented for myself and others, but the site would also provide a locus for my own private work as well as more public collaborative content creation. I think I’m nearly there!

This site is built with TWiki and is actually one big wiki, despite giving the appearance of a static site and blog. The (T)wiki architecture gives me the flexibility of covering almost every web base – static broadcast, blogging, forum, wiki, etc. though I’ve yet to employ all these capacities, but soon come.

I’ve been using an access restricted wiki for drafting content for over a year now and I’m totally converted into a full blown wiki head – in that most of my work that once would have been Word files centrally stored on my laptop, are now wiki pages, decentralised and accessible to any computer with web access (oh, and Open Source!). Once I’ve got the basics up here, I will begin exploring more collaborative drafting on this site, both for ‘serious’ research, as well as for fun and general explorative creations.

A quick word on this blog’s architecture: I’m trailing this lovely approach which renders various categories to their relevant content portals across the site. So, while this post was created and is listed in the main blog index, it also renders on the home page which renders the most current posts in the News category. This spreads my one blog across this entire site, dividing it up by relevance and effectively carving it up into many smaller blogs, while retaining the capacity to browse all posts from one location.

Oh, and while I might have conjured this site’s architecture up from the wispy ether based on my past experiences with TWiki, it was entirely Marcus Leonard that made it possible – thank you, you are my knight in shining armour!!!

Any thoughts on this site so far?