Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

To take my mind off the pregnancy chaos that's been going on in our lives over the last few weeks, I bought a Sony PSP video game a few days ago. This joins the Nintendo DS I picked up just before Christmas.

I still love my Nintendo DS and regularly play it, but I wanted to see what all the fuss around the PSP has been about.

Firstly, the PSP is clearly aimed at a more mature market with its asking price of $250, as opposed to the DS's more manageable $150. The unit is very attractive, looking more like an expensive portable DVD player than a video game. The sleek black finish is very appealing and the screen is of a very high standard, blowing away the DS's smaller and lower resolution screens.

The PSP's games confirm the assumption that Sony is aiming at an older market with the PSP. They're generally much less cute than their DS counterparts and quite a bit more expensive on average. Unfortunately, they actually show a lot less imagination in general than DS games. Most of the PSP games are shoot-'em-ups and racing games. Yawn. The DS has those, too, but thankfully it has more original games, such as Mario 64 and Warioware Touched!.

The fact the PSP has so few appealing games served to initially put me off it, which is why it's taken me a month since its release to purchase one. The only two really cool-looking games on the market are Lumines and Mercury, so those are the ones I bought to begin with. Both are puzzle genre games, with Lumines building on the theme of Tetris and Mercury harking back to Atari's 80s arcade classic Marble Madness.

Mercury's graphics are brilliant. Clearly, a lot of work went into designing the mazes in this game and getting the physics of the flowing blob of mercury just right. Unfortunately, it must have quickly exhausted the developers, since they created only six levels, each of which has about ten or so mazes, each with their own mission. Some involve getting a certain percentage of mercury from one end of the maze to the other, avoiding various hazards on the way. Others involve a specific task. Yet others involve multiple blobs of coloured mercury, usually requiring one to mix the blobs and form new colours. It's an incredibly appealing game, but after just a couple of days, I'm close to 50% of the way through the game. Compare that to Mario 64 on the DS, which took me three months of fairly heavy play to get through.

The PSP can play a UMD disc, which is a new proprietary format medium from Sony. The idea is that people will use their PSP to watch movies, but since the PSPs are crippled with region-encoding, I certainly won't be playing into their hands by purchasing any films. They only one I'll be watching is the copy of Spiderman 2 that came with my unit, a free gift with the first million units sold.

Since UMDs are read-only, one needs a way of storing game state, such as scores and position reached within a game. To that end, Sony includes a memory stick Pro Duo slot on the PSP and a 32  card in the box. That's fine for saving your game state, but Sony has also made it possible to listen to MP3s, as well as view JPEG photos and watch MPEG-4 films. For this to be a viable option, you need a 1 Gb memory stick, a decidedly scarce item at the moment.

I'm still struggling to get mencoder and ffmpeg to rip and encode DVDs in the most space-efficient way, whilst still preserving reasonable quality. All I've watched on the PSP so far is a short clip of birds flying around Mykines, made by Sarah during our holiday on the Faroe Islands last year.

The PSP's battery life is quite dismal, way behind that of the DS. The PSP's deliciously huge screen has to draw its juice from somewhere and you, the user, will definitely notice this.

I've yet to play Lumines; I'll probably wait until I've finished with Mercury before I touch that. So, my opinions are based on having played just one game. Nevertheless, I have to say that I think the DS has the overall edge. Sony has the better hardware with the PSP, no question about it, but Nintendo has made that irrelevant by introducing the idea of a touch-screen into video-game playing. That one innovation, if properly taken advantage of by the game designers, makes for incredibly original and refreshing games, the like of which we haven't really seen before. It adds a whole new dimension to game-playing. The PSP on the other hand, takes traditional game-playing, and updates that for 2005. The PSP is a wonderful gaming unit, but it's just the next logical step in the sequence of hand-held units. The DS, on the other hand, makes an evolutionary leap and introduces a radical new idea.

That's not intended to be a put down of the PSP, though; the PSP and DS are very different units for very different markets. Yes, both are for gaming, but, once you get more specific than that, they don't have much in common. Most consumer review sites are full of DS owners reviewing the PSP and saying that it sucks, along with PSP owners saying the same of the DS. I think they're all missing the point. Being fortunate enough to own one of each, I can honestly say that I enjoy and appreciate both of them for what they are. I think the DS ultimately advances the art of game-playing more than the PSP, but the PSP looks a lot nicer and plays movies and MP3s, which is a very nice bonus (even though my entire music collection is encoded in OGG format, so I won't be using it).

One nice thing about the PSP is that it can associate with a wireless network, which enables it to download new levels and even new firmware from an Internet connection. There's even talk of a Web browser and e-mail client, although I think that will be stretching the limitations of this unit a little. The various hack sites have already managed to get their PSP units to do limited Web-browsing.

More Dead Can Dance tickets went on sale earlier this week, so I now have tickets for the Hollywood and New York concerts. Those join the two nights in Oakland and one in San Diego that I had already purchased.

The Hollywood Bowl concert will feature backing from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, which should make for a phenomenally unique gig. I can't wait for that one. According to Brendan Perry, who I spoke to backstage at the London Forum concert in early April, the New York concert will also feature a full orchestra, but I haven't seen that mentioned anywhere else yet.

I'm still not sure how the logistics of all of this are going to work. We'll have a new baby in tow and will likely be coming from Europe at the time. Who will babysit? How will we get around? Will I even feel like doing all of this travel once I'm a new dad? Will Sarah?

Well, we have the tickets now. If we ultimately decide that the prospect of two itinerant weeks in the US is just too overwhelming, we can always resort to selling them on eBay.

Otherwise, we're already set to see Dead Can Dance a whopping five times during their North American tour: a very exciting prospect. Once tickets for Boston go on sale, I plan to add those to the pile, too, bringing our total attendance to six concerts.

If you're interested in picking up a CD of one of the recent European concerts, your time is running out. The limited edition CDs of those concerts are almost sold out, with Madrid the only concert still available. These CDs should start shipping soon. I can't wait.

If you've had any connectivity problems with this site over the last couple of days, that's because I've been busy moving the site to a new home, over at managed.com.

Every time we move house, I have the headache of trying to keep caliban.org on the net. That's because it's been hosted on domestic DSL since I moved to the US, so every time we move house, I have to get DSL up and running in the new house before it's shut off in the old one. This is a real pain.

Not only that, but domestic DSL doesn't offer you much upstream bandwidth to serve files, which can be a real bottleneck with RPM packages and our photo gallery. Whenever the site was hit hard by crawlers, browsing the Internet from home or working over ssh from the office was agony. With our move to managed.com, that should be a thing of the past.

The Web site has already been moved, along with DNS service. The last thing to go will be e-mail, which should be completed by the end of the weekend, if not before.

Getting the site ready to roll at the new location has involved me syncing large parts of the site to my laptop, which I then bring to work, where I rsync the data over to the new server. Like I said, the upstream bandwidth of domestic DSL is pathetic, so this was the only way to transfer the data in a reasonable amount of time. To copy it from home would probably have taken a couple of weeks.

Anyway, this will free us up to move house at will. Whatever we do, the site will stay up and the e-mail will keep flowing. We're paying $95 per month for the privilege, but I think it's money well spent for the peace of mind it gives us.

A few days ago, I finally got around to assembling the AquaDoula birthing pool that we have rented from local midwife, Ronnie Falcao.

I had a little trouble at first with getting the filling hose connected to our tap, as the aerator was fused to it with limescale and other crap. I had to settle for sterilising the other parts of the kit that evening, as there was nothing more I could do. Thankfully, Franbert decided not to put in an appearance that evening.

The next day, Jason lent me a wrench to remove the aerator, which did the trick nicely. Thanks, Jason. Once that was off, I could connect the hose's tap attachment and do a quick check of the hose.

Anyway, now it's all set up and ready to go. All that's missing is the one-time liner sheet, the water and the labouring woman. Still, it shouldn't be too long now.

Last night, I moved e-mail service to the new hosted server. That was more or less painless. The only grief I caused myself was in upgrading Postfix as part of the process, which rendered my version of one of the configuration files incompatibly old. Once I figured that out, all was well.

Since I run the Cyrus IMAP server on the back-end, I'd been forwarding my own personal e-mail off to a separate server that does traditional spool delivery, since that's how I like to read and manage my own mail. The goal now, however, was complete independence from my DSL line, so I had to move away from this model and consolidate spool delivery with the database-driven Cyrus model. I completed this work this afternoon.

With that, caliban.org is now completely independent of my Speakeasy DSL line. It has good bandwidth and is hopefully more or less immune to power blackouts. Reverse DNS has been set up and I have new secondary DNS servers for the domain, as the previous ones had been somewhat unreliable.

Only a few stragglers are still hitting the Web site at the old address. They're given an HTTP 301 to send them to the new server. Within a few days, those should completely dry up.

I'm glad to have all of this out of the way before the baby arrives, as there will be precious little time available once he's here.

Hopefully, those of you who've struggled with viewing our photos in the past will enjoy the increase in speed. Multi-megapixel photos should now load a lot more quickly.

I had hoped to have purchased my first video camera in time for Franbert's birth, but when I'd finally decided on the make and model I wanted, it was a camera that wouldn't go on sale until after the birth: 15th June, to be precise.

I've chosen the JVC GZ-MC500. This is the world's first 3 CCD camcorder that records to compact flash card or microdrive. There are great advantages to this over a MiniDV camera: immediate random access to data, no accidental recording over a tape, and MPEG-2 footage that needs no conversion on the computer to make DVDs. On the other hand, it'll be important to copy off footage as soon as it's taken, as it's not very economical to keep a stack of CF cards or microdrives on hand.

I imagine we'll keep this camera for many years, which is why I'm willing to spend a fair chunk of money on it. I really like the idea of not having to naff around with tapes, too. If only JVC would release it a month earlier.

Oh well; I guess we'll just have to live with still photography for the first month. In the meantime, we can make a few AVI movies with our digital cameras and upload those to our gallery.

After two months underway from The Netherlands to California, our Bugaboo Cameleon finally turned up this afternoon. In spite of the weight of the package and the length of time spent in transit, it arrived in great condition.

After inspecting the contents of the box, Sarah and I spent the evening reading the instructions and assembling Franbert's new buggy. I'd heard that the forerunner to the Cameleon, the Frog, is quite involved to set up, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that there wasn't all that much to assembling the Cameleon.

The improvements with respect to the Frog are definitely appreciated. The extensible push-bar is nice for parents of varying heights and the adjustable suspension on the castor wheels should make for a comfy riding experience for both baby and parent on all sorts of terrain.

Our chosen colour combination of a blue base unit with supplemental orange turns out to have been a pretty good one. Franbert's going to look very snazzy in his new vechicle. We can't wait to take him out for a spin in it.

We made one minor mistake in purchasing a Maxi-Cosi car seat adaptor for the Cameleon. We thought this was identical to the American Graco car seat adaptor, but it turns out to be a very different part, so we're going to purchase a Graco car seat adaptor tomorrow at a local shop. Apparently, the adaptors for the Frog fit the Cameleon, too, so we can just buy a Graco adaptor locally and use that to affix our SnugRide to the Cameleon.

The Maxi-Cosi adaptor won't actually be wasted, either, as it happens. When we eventually move back to Europe, our intention is to purchase a Maxi-Cosi car seat, anyway, as they are widely regarded as being the best on the market. Like the Cameleon, however, they're not available on the American market. Whilst it seemed worth the time and trouble to import a Cameleon, we're not fussy enough to go to the extra expense of importing a car seat, since the Graco is very good, too, so we'll stick with that while we're in the US.

It's a relief that the Cameleon has finally turned up. I must confess I was starting to get a little worried about it. The nappy bag and transport bag are still in transit, however. They were sent about a month after the Cameleon itself, so I don't think we'll be seeing those until some time in early June, at which point Franbert will be amongst us.

Sarah hits 39 weeks tomorrow. F-Day is just one week away. The excitement continues to mount.

Just two days after the arrival of our Bugaboo Cameleon, its occupant decided that the time was right to put in an appearance.

Franbert entered into the world at precisely 19:00 PDT on Thursday, 12th May, some 39 weeks and 1 day into her gestation. If you're east of the mid-Atlantic, you can consider her born on Friday, 13th May. She weighed in at 3400g and measured 51cm in length. All of her bits and pieces are in place and add up to the right number. In short, she's a perfectly healthy baby girl.

The fact that Franbert turned out to be a girl utterly astonished both Sarah and me. We had both been certain it would turn out to be a boy; I don't know why, but we were sure. Well, we clearly don't have a sixth sense for gender.

We'd like to thank Rosanna (our midwife), Kristin (our doula) and Pearl (our labour assistant) for their fantastic assistance during this intense experience. We were wonderfully privileged to have them as our birth management team and will always be deeply indebted to each of them.

If you're looking for photos, you've come to the right place. More to come as and when we find time.

Sarah made me censor the more interesting labour photos. We might be able to save a few from being consigned to the private family annals by some judicious cropping. if so, we'll add those later.

I can't tell you how proud I am right now. I am the father of a beautiful baby girl, but I'm also indescribably proud of Sarah, who experienced a completely natural homebirth (i.e. with no medication), just the way nature intended it to be. The experience was intensely emotional for both of us and has unquestionably brought us closer together as a couple.

If yesterday was as busy as hell, today didn't provide much respite.

The day started early with some mild crying. We slowly rose to greet the day and set about calling Sabina, our paediatrician, to make an appointment. She was able to come later the same day, so we made an appointment for 14:00.

Rosanna came over soon afterwards to draw some blood from Sarah. This is needed as part of the cord blood banking in which we have enrolled. Once Sarah's blood was drawn (the baby's cord blood was extracted last night), I called CBR to schedule the pick-up of the blood samples. Those should now be safely ensconced in the lab, somewhere in Arizona.

We took our new baby to the supermarket this afternoon, marking her first time out of the house since being born. We needed to go out to stock up on supplies, as I'm not supposed to leave Sarah alone for the first 48 hours after birth. There's too much risk of haemorrhage, for example.

Soon after we got back, Sabina arrived and found absolutely nothing wrong with the baby. She's a glowing, healthy girl, just as she appears. We have another visit with her at her office on Monday.

Rosanna came back at 18:00 to examine Sarah. All appears well, but Sarah is under orders to eat well and not make too many trips up and down the stairs.

In the evening, Geoff (henceforth Uncle Geoff) came over and the bunch of us all ordered takeaway pizza from Pizza Chicago, which is normally where we hang out on a Friday night. Since we don't really want to expose the baby to so much stimulation and potential for germs until her immune system is more developed, we had pizza at home instead.

In the midst of this, we somehow managed to put up some more photos, as we've been getting complaints from people that the baby isn't clear enough in the first lot. I think you'll enjoy the new photos.

Sarah and I would both like to thank everyone for their congratulations and warm wishes over the last 24 hours. They've been really heartening. It's good to know that so many people out there care about us.

Anyway, there's time for a quick shower before bedtime. Cramming it all in is already starting to prove difficult.

Pearl's coming back tomorrow to provide lactation advice to Sarah. Feeding the little one is proving a little tricky, but she fed well this evening, so we're now confident she's getting enough colustrum to see her through to the real milk.

Tomorrow is also the day when the serious business of naming of the baby must begin in earnest. Soon, there will be no more Franbert, only...

Parenting has begun in earnest today. Where have all the hours gone?

Between breastfeeding, nappy changing, doing the laundry, preparing food for Sarah, tidying up, cuddling the baby and fielding phone calls, the whole day has somehow almost unnoticeably been devoured.

Time has ceased to have meaning. In my mind, the baby was born yesterday, but it was, of course, actually the evening before. The hours are all starting to meld together, because the days are no longer clearly separated by distinct periods of sleep and waking.

Pearl came over this morning to give Sarah lactation advice and check her fundus. The baby has a partially receded chin, compounded by the bad habit of pulling in her lips when she suckles (a habit probably picked up from sucking her own fingers whilst in the womb), so she's predisposed to be a little difficult to breastfeed. With perseverance, I'm sure we'll get there, but it's been tricky work thus far. You'd think there was nothing to it, right? Here's a big tit and a hungry mouth: make these things work together. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a little more complicated than that.

The little one appears to have a blocked tear duct in her left eye, so it's oozing some yellow gunk. Our paediatrician advised us to drop some chamomile tea in there, which we're now doing. Sarah is now also hand-expressing a few drops of milk into her eye, as the anti-bacterial properties of the milk are also good for her.

The phone has rung many times today. Many people are calling to congratulate us and express their desire to come and visit. Both Sarah and I are pretty exhausted, however, so I think we're going to avoid making any visiting appointments until further notice.

Soon after publication, Sarah had second thoughts and pulled the labour gallery from the Web site. She somehow found a few moments to audit the photos and hide those that she considers too private, so an expurgated labour gallery is now once again available.

Sarah's breasts are now rapidly becoming engorged, as the thick colostrum makes way for the normal supply of milk. The physiological changes in her are visible with the naked eye. They're swelling up and getting firmer by the hour. It's quite remarkable.

After several nappy changes today, the final remnants of vernix are starting to disappear from the cracks of the baby's legs, as wiping away the poop inevitably removes the last vestiges of the cheesy substance that protected her whilst she was in the womb.

The reason some vernix can still be found in the cracks of her limbs is that she has not been bathed since birth. She therefore still has her newborn smell, which is a curious, inoffensive and endearing scent, quite unlike anything else I've ever smelt.

Speaking of birth-related material, her back is covered in a fine layer of lanugo that is incredibly soft to the touch. It's as if she's half gerbil! I'll try to capture it in a photo if the opportunity presents itself.

Rosanna's coming back for another visit in the morning, just to check up on things. That's pretty much our only scheduled obligation for the day, but we only had one today, too, and yet that managed to sail by with no problem at all.

Anyway, we made some progress on finding a name today. I think we'll be ready to make an important announcement tomorrow. Watch this space.

We only managed to squeeze in a few new photos today. Basically, we'll put up a new album each day for the first week, then just selected new photos. We don't want to bore you all to death.

A little known fact is that Sarah and I started arguing over names pretty much right after we started going out together. It's a good thing the discussions started early, as there was a lot of ground to cover. Since she got pregnant, it's been a battle against time to narrow down the potential names to a manageable short-list.

Things were compounded by the fact that Sarah and I have different nationalities and come from superficially similar, yet very distinct cultures. Roll in the extra complication that we chose not to be told whether we were having a boy or a girl until the moment of truth, and you might be able to understand the scope of the issue and sympathise a little better with our plight.

In the end, events overtook us and we really did run out of time, although we had at least come up with a few serious contenders for either a boy or a girl. Using that list, we've been involved in an iterative process over the last couple of days and have finally arrived at a name with which we are both very happy.

Our little progeny will cease to carry the pre-launch project monicker of Franbert and will henceforth be known as Eloïse Amalia Liesbeth Hermione. I don't really have an opinion on the surname, but Sarah prefers Macdonald over the double-barrelled McKenna-Macdonald, so that's what we're giving her.

For those of you curious how to pronounce her name, we've recorded the correct pronunciation for you.

Incidentally, at the moment Sarah and I said, "OK, this is your new name", Eloïse farted and let out a gigantic dump into her nappy. Hopefully, that wasn't an expression of distaste for her new name.

Sarah has finally found a breastfeeding technique that works well for her. My step-sister, Fenella, pointed us in the direction of Baby-Led Feeding, which offers an alternative way of producing a good latch from the baby onto the boob. Since this discovery, breastfeeding is progressing a lot more easily for Sarah. I no longer have to help her latch the baby on, suckling causes less pain and the baby gets her food more quickly.

Of course, what goes in must come out and Eloïse 's poop is now in the transitional stage. The thick tar-like meconium has almost completely passed through her and is now making way for lighter, curry-coloured poop. It doesn't even smell bad, I must admit. I'm doing most of the nappy-changing around here, which is fine. It's the least I can do after what Sarah has done for me, which is to provide me with the most precious thing I've ever possessed. It also allows me to feel paternally involved, which helps me bond with her.

Eloïse is now a full three days old. The time is passing so quickly. Before I know it, she'll be bringing boys home and I'll be wanting to break their unworthy little legs.

Tomorrow is Monday, but I don't have to go to work. I know it's a bit drastic to have a baby to get a few weeks off work, but I've always been a bit on the radical side. Google gives me a full seven weeks off for my paternity leave, which is incredibly good; much better than I'd get back in The Netherlands and one of the few benefits that is given more generously in the US (although it has more to do with the generosity of the state of California and my particular employer than it does with the federal government).

We also get to declare $500 in food expenses over the next four weeks, as it's recognised that it's hard to cook when you're rushing around after a newborn baby.

Tomorrow, we'll be making the trip to the paediatrician. That will be Eloïse 's first time out in the car. I'm going to be driving a little more slowly tomorrow than I usually do. There, she'll be checked out to make sure that she's not losing weight and everything else is progressing as nature intended.

Sabina is a holistic paediatrician, one of the very few. She, like us, believes that most of the immunisations that are commonly given to babies are either useless or downright dangerous. We've therefore elected to skip all of them for the first couple of years of Eloïse 's life. After that, her immune system will be better developed and we will give her the injections as needed. We believe this approach will lead to fewer allergies later in life, as well as less exposure to potentially harmful side-effects. Most of the common immunisations (such as hepatitis), we'll be skipping entirely, however, as we believe they serve no useful purpose.

Sleeping with Eloïse in between us is a lot of fun. It's so nice to wake up and see her lying there peacefully next to me. She's so well-behaved and cries very infrequently, even when she's mostly naked and having her nappy changed. I don't know who she inherited her stoic personality from, but both Sarah and I are really enjoying it.

Don't forget to check out the latest batch of photos.

Sarah opened the freezer yesterday evening and was surprised by the sight of her frozen placenta. We had no idea it had been kept in cold storage by one of our labour team.

We're not quite sure what to do with it at the moment, so we're content to let it hang out in there. That way, if I get desperate for a snack, I'll have something to cook up and eat.

Whilst randomly browsing tonight, I came across this wonderfully balanced article on natural childbirth vs. interventions.

It's exceptionally well-written and nicely sums up how I feel about the subject. It recognises that the complaints women on both sides of the debate have with each other are misdirected. The real enemy is misinformation and those who propagate it.

The truth of the matter is that many women believe they are in possession of all of the facts when they choose to have a desensitised labour, but more often than not, they have not been properly informed of the many natural means a woman has at her disposal for coping with the pain of labour. They are led to believe that the only thing medicated labour removes from the experience is the pain, but there is so much more to it than that.

Anyway, said article explains the issue far better than I ever could, so do read it.

We were up early this morning for our visit to the paediatrician. That meant strapping Eloïse into her car-seat, which was a little tricky at first. I'd forgotten how to adjust the straps and had to resort to the manual.

Eloïse is doing fine. She's lost a little weight, but that's normal for newborn babies. She's also a little jaundiced, due to the high quantity of bilirubin in her blood. We're keeping an eye on that and exposing her to some sunlight to help break down the bilirubin. Some degree of jaundice is actually very common in newborns.

As I was changing Eloïse 's nappy last night before going to bed, her umbilical cord snapped off.

Even though it's rotten and smelly, I couldn't quite bring myself to throw it away. It's so curious to have a bit of someone's body drop off like that. I doubt we'll hang onto it for very long, though.

There's not much else to report today, really. Eloïse continues to cry very little and is a good eater, but Sarah's boobs are still pretty sore from the engorgement with milk and poor latch of the first few days. Eloïse shows them very little mercy: she feeds frequently and vigourously.

I disassembled the birthing pool this afternoon and will be returning that tomorrow. Breaking it down was even more work than setting it up, I think. It was really hard work to coil the outer rim tightly enough to snap it into its binding.

As always, there are a couple of new photos to check out.

We are starting to get the hang of this baby lark now, or so it would appear. For one thing, I'm pretty good at changing nappies now. Sarah pours in the milk at one end, Eloïse converts it to mustard-coloured shit, and I collect it at the other end. What a team!

We took Eloïse to an osteopath in Portola Valley today, the same one that Sarah visits. He relieved some pressure in her skull and took the tension out of her limbs. She seems even more chilled out since that visit. Supposedly, this will help her relax and should make for better breastfeeding. We'll see.

This evening, we found a vase full of pink lilies and tulips on our doorstep. This was accompanied by a note congratulating us on the birth of our new daughter. The package was a gift from my colleagues in Google's Operations department. How sweet!

Tomorrow, Rosanna is coming over to do Eloïse 's PKU screening. After that, we'll be paying a visit to Lullaby Lane to pick up a few missing items, such as a breastfeeding pillow and a few more disposable nappies, as she's still a little too small to wear the cloth ones we have.

Oh, and we have more photos.

No blog entry yesterday. We were just too tired.

Today, I drove down to the Office of Vital Records in San Jose to hand in a completed form, containing Eloïse 's full name and birth details. In a couple of days, we should get a call to go back with Rosanna, our midwife, and officially register the birth. At that point, we'll be able to obtain birth certificates.

As usual, there's a fly in the ointment. Since this is America, the one and only country in the world and it's a given that every person on Earth has American English has his/her mother tongue, it's impossible to get a letter with a diaeresis into the computer system. Never mind that it's a part of her name.

"What about the hispanics? They use accents and other diacritical symbols."

"Oh yes", came the reply. "They have something funny with their Ns. We can't do those either."

Sheesh! Something fuññy with their Ñs?

Of course, this wouldn't be American bureaucracy if there weren't more than a single fly in the ointment. In the land of the free where individuality is championed and diversity is celebrated, something as fundamentally individual as naming one's child is expected to conform to the rigours of a staid and unimaginative template: first, middle and last name.

Even the mere mention of the term middle name implicitly suggests the notion that a person has exactly three, one on either side of the middle. How ridiculous. Why not just have the concept of forenames and a surname? Doesn't that allow the individual a little more creative freedom?

To cut a long story short, we have the option of placing two of Eloïse 's names in the box for first name, plus another two in the box for middle name. Of course, then she's legally got two names for her first name, which is liable to matter if she ever chooses to spend time in the US when she's older. She'll end up an accidental redneck, with a name reminiscent of Mary Beth, Jim Bob or some other Waltons-like sobriquet.

The only other alternative is to file an application to amend the middle name field on the birth certificate to include her second, third and fourth names. She would then have a two page birth certificate, the second page being an affidavit with the amendment.

The absurdity of this beggars belief. The middle name field can only accommodate 18 characters, so we can't just put her middle three names in there, but we can file an amendment to do so, even though the birth certificate has not yet been typed up. So, her names are too long for the field, but a note can be added to the certificate to say what it should have said all along.

Nice: a two page birth certificate. Whoever heard of such bollocks? One can only hope this won't come back to haunt her later.

Once we have birth certificates, we can begin the next round of hassles of getting her a social security number and passports, both American and Dutch.

Sarah's folks arrived in town this evening and seem very taken with their new granddaughter. And who wouldn't be? She is a great looking baby, after all. It'll be good having them around, as they'll be able to take some of the strain off Sarah and me, particularly off Sarah.

Another lactation consultant will be coming in the morning. One of Sarah's mammaries is still giving her gip.

It's all go around here. I can't imagine how anyone with a baby manages to fit in working as well. I'm very glad that I've been absolved of this responsibility for the next few weeks.

Our final batch of photos from Eloïse 's first week is available.

It really is nice having Sarah's folks here. They're looking after us while we look after Eloïse . I change her nappies, Sarah feeds her, and Sarah's folks feed us. Then, we all watch Cold Feet in the evening. It's working out really well.

Yesterday was the inaugural ride of the Cameleon. As the midday sun was so hot, we stayed within the streets of the surrounding area before returning home. We'll venture further afield when our days become less busy.

This week will be the week of bureaucracy, I think. We went down to the Office of Vital Records in San Jose this morning to register Eloïse 's birth and pick up copies of the birth certificate. That required one previous trip last week, plus the attendance of our midwife. They don't make it easy.

As I've previously written, they can accommodate neither the diaeresis over her first name, nor the number of characters in her forenames. For that reason, she now has a two page birth certificate, the second page being an official amendment to the first one. The only alternative was to fill in multiple names in the box for her first name, which could have awkward implications for her if she chooses to spend any time in the US once she's older.

Armed with the birth certificate, I had hoped to immediately get her a social security number, but it turns out that two forms of identification are required to obtain this detail. We have only one, of course: her birth certificate.

I had hoped to get by with an affidavit from our midwife, testifying that Eloïse is who we claim her to be and that she was born when her birth certificate claims she was, but after standing in the queue for an hour at the social security office, I discovered they were having none of it and they sent me away empty-handed. We're going to try to get a note from our paediatrician tomorrow and hope that that will suffice.

Other forms of identification they would have accepted from us are a baptismal certificate, her hospital records and proof of immunisation. Great, except that our daughter hasn't been baptised, wasn't born in a hospital and won't be receiving immunisations any time soon. This is just another way in which those who don't follow the mainstream are discriminated against. As if a baptismal record is a better form of identification than an affidavit from the woman who delivered her! And whatever happened to the separation of church and state?

A parallel piece of bureaucracy I need to take care of is obtaining an apostille for Eloïse 's birth certificate. This is required by the Dutch authorities before they will grant her a Dutch passport.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the California Secretary of State in San Francisco will not accept a certified birth certificate from the Vital Records office of the county of Santa Clara, because those are signed by the area health officer (in fact, they're not even signed: the signature is preprinted). They want me to go to the Office of the Clerk Recorder to have the health officer's signature certified.

Can you believe it? This is already a legally certified birth certificate, but it needs to be a certified certified birth certificate before the California Secretary of State will accept it. It looks like another drive down to San Jose is in my near future. Assuming I can obtain that without too much grief, I'll then need to drive to San Francisco to obtain the apostille.

One way or another, this is going to be a busy week. We're taking photos as we go.

Well, today was a more productive day than yesterday.

First off, we went to see Sabine, our paediatrician, in the morning. There, we discovered that Eloïse has regained her birth weight, which is great news. It means she's feeding well and getting the nutrients she needs. Her head even shows marginal growth.

After our paediatric visit, it was time to take on the hordes of civil servants again.

When we got home, there was a message from Rosanna, our midwife, on the answerphone. I played it back and listened to her recount the tale of a phone conversation she had had that very morning with the Mountain View social security office.

Apparently, after 45 minutes on the phone with them, she had finally got them to agree that a birth certificate and a midwife's signed affidavit are sufficient forms of identification to obtain a social security number for a newborn.

Yesterday, I had been sent away empty-handed, because they didn't consider Rosanna's affidavit an official document. Today, thanks to Rosanna, I came away with a receipt for Eloïse 's social security number application, which should arrive in the next couple of weeks. With that, we can apply for an American passport for her. Of course, I did have to spend another two hours queuing in a singularly boring waiting room, but at least it was for the last time. Incidentally, this time, I was told that a birth certificate and an affidavit are sufficient, as long as the application is being filed within 30 days of the child's date of birth.

From there, I headed down to the Office of the Clerk Recorder in San Jose to obtain certification of the preprinted signature of the health officer whose name is at the bottom of Eloïse 's birth certificate.

I still find this step rather puzzling. Firstly, a birth certificate is already a certification in itself. The signature at the bottom makes it a certified copy, so we're already talking about a certified certificate. Then, the Clerk Recorder has to add her own certification to the certificate, because the signing health officer is not recognised by the California Secretary of State.

Anyway, $13 lighter, I emerged from the building, now carrying a certified certified certificate. I just love the text on this thing. Here's an extract:

I further cerrtify that I am well acquainted with the handwriting of said official and believe that the signature to said annexed instrument is genuine.

It's bad enough that the person whose name is on the original certificate is not recognised by government officials in the same state as that person, but when you read the above passage and then realise that the original signature is not even a real signature, but a preprinted one, you have to wonder if this whole process isn't some bureaucrat's idea of a practical joke.

Anyway, I now finally had a birth certificate that the Secretary of State would be happy with, so I sped up Highway 101 from San Jose to Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco, where I laid down $26 to have an apostille attached to the birth certificate. That step was easy, at least.

This particular copy of Eloïse 's birth certificate now boasts four pages. This should enable us to obtain a Dutch passport for her. I'll call the Dutch Consulate in the morning to make an appointment to file the application. We'll also need to go and have some passport photographs taken of her.

This is by far the trickiest document to obtain. Not only do we need a copy of her birth certificate complete with an apostille, but we also need a copy of our marriage certificate, also adorned with an apostille. In that case, we had to obtain the document from the Secretary of State in Maine.

Finally, we need my Dutch passport, plus a copy of Sarah's birth certificate. That, too, must carry an apostille, which, in this case, had to be obtained from the Secretary of State in Rhode Island.

And, just to make everything as hard as it can be, all original documents (including the apostilles attached to them) must be no older than one year. So, if you don't quickly use your documents to obtain the papers you need them for, they start to expire and you quickly find yourself back at square one, having to request all of this crap all over again.

Anyway, like I said, we'll be taking Eloïse out to get passport photographs tomorrow. Then, I'll be making an appointment with the Dutch Consulate to apply for a passport in her name. The application for an American passport has to wait until we receive her social security number in the post.

Today has been strangely satisfying, as we've made significant inroads in the bureaucracy through which we have to wade.

Here's an interesting article on Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas. There's a bloke matching that description where I work, so I read this essay with interest.

As most of us know, someone who is proficient at arguing and persuasive of character can win the day with an argument that is fundamentally flawed, especially if the people around him are apathetic or less well versed in the art of debate. This article sheds some light on why people will sometimes refute the obvious and defend the ridiculous.

The following State of the Union speech by George Bush was just brought to my attention. The audio editing is really very good.

Sarah and I handed in Eloïse 's Dutch passport application at the Dutch Consulate in San Mateo this morning. A huge pile of original papers, apostilles, passports, photographs and photocopies were handed over the counter, verified and finally accepted.

Because Sarah is not a Dutch citizen, she had to fill in a parental consent form, basically giving her permission for the passport application to go ahead.

After that, we paid our $66.50 ($41.50 of which is for the passport itself; $25 of which is for FedEx to send us the passport when it's ready) and left the building, feeling immensely satisfied. This was a lot of hassle to prepare for and it's nice to have it finally submitted and in processing.

Eloïse had to appear in person, but with Sarah's folks now back on the east coast, the issue was moot, anyway.

Then, in the afternoon, the post came and I was delighted to discover that Eloïse 's social security card had already arrived. She's not really old enough to sign it yet, but this is great news, as it means that Sarah and I can go and file Eloïse 's American passport application tomorrow.

At that point, I think we'll have everything we need for her: birth certificate and social security number, plus both the Dutch and American passport applications in processing. Not bad, considering that she's not yet three weeks old.