A blog by James: Gamer, Father, Geek.

Downside to the day was I’d lost my voice so had to take the day off. Upside was that my iPad was dispatched a day early!

It is the most lovely piece of technology I have ever had the pleasure of holding. It’s sleek, sexy and fast. I opted for the 32gb 3G version. I have a nice case for it on order, but the Amazon delivery slot for it is 1-3 months which I think is just code for they aren’t released in the UK yet and they’re just guessing a time frame.

Oh and of course this post was written on the iPad with the WordPress app. I can actually type just as fast on here as a regular keyboard. The downside is I am making more mistakes than usual and the keyboard doesn’t have an apostrophe key. The iPad does compensate somewhat for this with it’s auto correction but it’s a little hard to get used to. I suspect practice will make perfect.

My advice is if you have the money to burn, buy one. It’s the ultimate tech luxury item. If you consume a lot of information and media that is internet or electronic in nature, get one. If you’re not sure then see if you can try one out at an Apple store, but beware they are hard to resist!

Although overall fallout of the election is not yet over, these quotes have made me laugh:

“Our growth and resilience is truly inspiring. The BNP has arrived and will be knocking on the doors of power sooner than some ever imagined!”

Let’s see, they had a 1.8% increase. Assuming their money hasn’t run out and they don’t destroy themselves through in-fighting, and an election every 4 years, why yes you’ll be in power in a few hundred years!

I have recently discovered that my daughter’s mind is like a sponge. Of course logically I know this is true of children, but it’s still taken me by surprise. We started putting on In the Night Garden on a regular basis for her a month ago. She loves it. So I got her an In the Night Garden book after about a week of her watching it. I read through it with her, and just decided to ask her where a certain character was. To my surprise she pointed to them. To see if it was a fluke, I asked her where another one was and again she pointed to the right one. I went through all the characters (5 in all) and she got them all right, time after time. My mind was literally blown. This little 16 month old girl who can’t speak a word had learned the names of all these characters without any intervention from us.

It didn’t take long to realise that she obviously understands much more that we think. So I got her a ‘My first words’ book. It must have over 100 things in it, pictures of animals, people and objects with the words underneath. She’s had it about a week and she can identify probably 20 of those consistently. That’s with probably less than 10 mins per day reading through it. Although she has started forming some words, on the whole she’s not speaking but I do love that for most of the animals she recognises she can do the noises for them if I ask her (again, bright enough to know when I’m asking her to point and when I’m asking her to make the noise).

I’ve no idea where this puts her on average compared to other kids her age, but even if it’s not true I think she’s a little genius. Added to that she’s gorgeous, funny, active and affectionate, I really do count myself the luckiest Dad in the world.