December 08, 2002
Cameron
Just the facts:
Our baby boy, Cameron Thomas Merrells, was born this morning, Sunday 8th December, at 6:22 am in El Camino Hospital, Mountain View, California. He weighed 7 pounds 7 ounces and is 20 inches in length. He's a very healthy, happy and loud baby!
The gory details:
The birth was long, very long. We had two days of intermittent contractions that just wouldn't become convincingly frequent, long and hard. By Saturday night we were exhausted and thinking about serious medication to get some sleep. Our doula, a lovely lady who does professional labour support , suggested we try a bath. To our delight (and dismay) the contractions then came really fast and strong. Sam laboured hard at home for four hours, mostly standing, leaning against a table, me pushing her back as hard as I could. We then went into the hospital at 2:30 am to see how far we'd got. She was 5 cm dialated, which was great. Our labour nurse was really nice. She'd worked at El Camino for 40 years and our baby was to be her last delivery before retirement. She was very supportive of our desire to have a natural birth. We were both dispondant that we might have another five hours of dialation to go, but our doula persuaded us to keep going a bit longer. The next 45mins was quite surreal. Sam was sat on a plastic chair in the shower and I squatted on the other side of the curtain ready to push her lower back as each contraction came. I nearly lost it here. I couldn't stand to see her in so much pain. At the next check Sam was 9cm dialated and burst into tears with shock that she'd got so far so quickly. We started the pushing phase soon after and Sam learnt fast, but the contractions died down with being in bed. Sam pushed hard for an hour. I almost lost it. Our doula came to the rescue again and we did a couple of pushes squatting on the bed. Our regular doctor was away so the oncall doctor came to perform the delivery. We were so lucky as she totally accepted our desire for as little medical intervension as possible and patiently waited for nature to take its course. He appeared at 6:22 am. I cut the cord. He yelled and yelled and threw his arms and legs around. He was straight onto Sam's chest. It was the most amazing moment. I was so totally shocked. I'm not sure why, as we'd been anticipating this moment for five years. I had such a head rush that blood started pouring out of my right nostril. Sam is just the strongest woman. To breath through all that pain and to be totally exhuasted and still push the baby out is just the most amazing thing. I'm in awe.
Posted by John at 11:06 PM | Comments (6)
November 01, 1998
Beer
Behold the shear character of that pint of Young's Special!
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
John
A self portrait taken at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Most of my secondary education was at the The United World College of South East Asia and the Harrogate Grammar School. After a year off in between to muck about I then went on to a Computer Science degree at The University of Hertfordshire.
Places I've Worked...
I started off working for Rampage games, on the Play By Mail games 'St. Valentine's Day Massacre II' and 'MEP'. But, that didn't work out very well, so I did a degree. Part of this involved working for a year at the British Standards Institution. I tested C compilers, and POSIX Operating Systems... and met Neil Martin and Danny Chacon. After my degree I dossed about some more then became employee number N (where N is between 3 and 5) at Intelligent Games. There I met the cheeky Allan Murphy and had a lot of fun working on a PC game called SimIsle. But, that didn't work out too well either, so I went to Pixel Innovations to work on TERMiTE, a Terminal Emulation application, with Mike Woolley. Then I went to Octel Communications to work on the stupendous Unified Messenger project. Here I worked with Michael Wilson, David Boreham, Marius Milner, Pete Rowley, and Thomas Stubbs. After a respectible interval I followed Mr. Boreham to Netscape Communications to work on the even more stupendous Directory Server. From there I spent a year with a failed startup called 'eTime Capital' which was poised to shake up the world of financial supply chains - whatever that means. And, finally I worked with Sleepcat Software on an embedded database management system called Berkeley DB XML.
Hobbies
My company, Game Pie Ltd, which has developed a Play By Mail game called Godfather. I'm a member of the The Association of C and C++ Users, and am the editor of their ACCU Professional Programming magazine Overload. I'm also a very inactive member of the Computer Conservation Society, the IEEE Computer Society, and the ACM.
Publications
- Since 1997 I have been the editor of the ACCU C++ SIG magazine Overload, and I occasionally contribute to the ACCent newsletter of the USA chapter of the ACCU.
- I was the principal contributor and editor of the LDUP Replication Architecture Internet-Draft.
- I contributed a chapter to this Addison Wesley book: XML Data Management: Native XML and XML-Enabled Database Systems.
- A feature article for BYTE on Berkeley DB XML.
I have six patents pending in the area of directory information systems:
- Replica Update Vectors; John Merrells, Olga Natkovich, Gordon Good, Pinaki Shah, and Mark C. Smith.
- Replication Architecture for a Directory Server; John Merrells, Olga Natkovich, Gordon Good, Ludovic Poitou, and Mark C. Smith.
- Change Sequence Number Generator; Gordon Good, John Merrells, Ludovic Poitou, Olga Natkovich, Mark C. Smith, and Pinaki Shah.
- Update Resolution Procedure for a Directory Server; Gordon Good, John Merrells, Mark C. Smith, Olga Natkovich and Rich Megginson.li>
- Directory Server Software Architecture; Mark F Wahl, John Merrells, and Mark C. Smith.
- Uniqueid-based addressing in a directory server; John Merrells, Olga Natkovich, Gordon Good, Mark Smith
And, I have one patent pending within the area of financial document reconciliation.
- Document Reconciliation System; John Merrells, David Boreham.
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
Sam
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
Cato
Our very talkative one year old cat named Cato, pronounced 'Kay-toh' after the live in assassin of the Pink Panther films. Her full name being 'Cato Brian Penny Bufton Merrells'. Also answers to the nick names 'Little Pixie', 'Fat Magwitch', and 'Elton John'.
At six months... she's a conehead...
At ten weeks...
Posted by John at 12:00 PM