My wife has accused me of two things:

• Applying unnecessary intricacy to simple processes. Which is silly.
• Having the worst hand-writing this side of the TUKS medical campus.

The first point is moot as far as I’m concerned. As for the second… well I have trouble reading my own notes. But I’ll let you be the judge:

This morning at 04:45 I became a father again, for the second time. My son Cian Robert Dingle weighed 3.2 kilograms at birth and is perfectly healthy. My wife, Roxanne was amazing as usual and is the picture of glowing motherhood.

Thank you to all who have sent through their congratulations – we are blessed to have the most amazing friends and family who have all been awesomely supportive and spoiled us with gifts, calls, smses et al.

[I've removed the pictures from this post - if you would like to see pics of Cian and you are on my friend-list on Facebook you can view pictures there.]

I have finally signed up for an account on Facebook after considering it for some time. So far I am tres impressed with the service.

I always thought that Facebook was like Myspace and that assumption kept me away from it, as I can not stand Myspace. Myspace is the ugliest thing on the Internet and I can’t be arsed to spend my time on dodgy pages with flashing text where some kid has listed their favourite bands.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a more rational service that just works. It has some really cool and useful functionality and you can get up and running with it rapidly.

I recommend it. As social networking services go, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything better online.

If you have a Facebook account, click here and add me as a friend.

My iPod is broken. This is especially sad since it is the first iPod I have ever owned and was a gift from my wife. It was also purchased by my friend Christo at the Apple store in San Francisco which, as any Apple aficionado will tell you, is the shit – as Apple stores go.

At first my 60 gigabyte iPod photo gave the ‘sad iPod’ icon when I tried to start it up:

According to the Apple support site for iPods, you should try to force the iPod into disk mode if that happens. From the Apple site:

Once you have done that you can use iTunes to reset the iPod. It took me many attempts before I finally forced my iPod into disk mode. I then connected it to my Powerbook and reset the pod. Halfway through syncing it with my library again, however, I got an error indicating that copying to the iPod had failed.

I guess the disk is moer-toe (fried). *sigh*

I shall have to take it to Apple and hope that it can be repaired without much cost. Given the prices of iPods I probably won’t be replacing it. The huge tag just doesn’t seem to justify the purchase of something which breaks so easily. Besides, I have nappies to buy and houses to pay off.

I am going to have to find an alternative method for listening to podcasts in my car for the time being, which sucks. It’s amazing how something so small and simple becomes an integral part of your life. I can’t really survive without a media player of some sort – and I sure as hell am not going to be listening to music radio in South Africa.