Ruth Stalker-Firth

I updated both my wordpress versions a while back and ever since I have had an an error occurred while processing this directive message when trying to access this blog. I incorrectly diagnosed the solution to be some conflict due to running two versions of wordpress. I spent ages fiddling with the .htaccess file again and then gave up and thought that I would fix it another day.

Today, I updated both versions of wordpress to 6.2.2 and found that everything works as it should do. A quick google about confirmed that I was getting the error message because my last wordpress upgrade hadn’t worked properly - I should have just reinstalled everything instead of fiddling where I shouldn’t.

I imagined myself as a bit of an earth mother and did the whole yoga and practising for a natural birth thing like the true hippy I am, albeit one with a great interest in technology. However, due to complications which were anticipated by the medical teams who were looking after me, I had our baby on Monday 11th February at 1.23pm by emergency caesarian section. I cannot thank them enough. Because of the skill of everyone involved and a great deal of technology, Jasmine survived birth and her first night. She is currently in Great Ormond St Hospital.

We have set up a blog here to share our news:
http://www.ruthstalkerfirth.com/jasmine/

Thank you to everyone who has contacted us to say they care. It means so much.

Last summer I found myself exploring an early Iron Age home at The Crannog Centre on Loch Tay. The Crannog was cosy, as its focal point was the Iron Age hearth - a large open fire. During the day the inhabitants would peel back wicker shutters to let in fresh air whilst they tended to their animals, making food and clothing and ground spelt for bread.

Today, wearing a woolly jumper and eating spelt pasta, with my back to the radiator, it seems to me that our needs and motivations have changed little since the Iron Age. (more…)

In the above picture a newbie gamer has organised a telephone for his Sim so that it can order pizza. Unfortunately, in the series of pictures which follows, the delivery girl arrives too late and the Grim Reaper delivers the pizza which means that the Sim dies of starvation. Apparently, Sim starvation is common in The Sims 2. (more…)

When Jurassic Park was on at the cinema, I remember laughing out loud with a couple of my computing mates when the young girl, Lex, looks at a computer screen and says: “It’s a UNIX system. I know this.” At the time, UNIX didn’t have much in the way of a graphical-user interface (GUI), unless you wanted to write one yourself. And it definitely looked nothing like the screen she recognised. Nowadays, a quick look around the many Linux and UNIX distributions demonstrates that GUIs are everywhere. There are probably some as fancy as the screen she was looking at before she got the Jurassic system up and running again to save them all from being eaten by dinosaurs.

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