I’m back in the office this morning and having real problems concentrating.

Yesterday we went back to the Lister Hospital in London for the egg transfer - effectively the last part of the IVF treatment (where they put the fertilized eggs back into the womb). It’s difficult to type this without smiling, but “technically”, it means W could quite possibly be pregnant now.

Because they waited for the eggs to become “blastocysts” before putting them back, it raises the odds of conception to above 70%. Here’s the scary part - they put two blastocysts back - which means we have over a 50% chance of twins.

Unfortunately W still has to keep taking a cocktail of drugs for the new few weeks - a mixture of steroids, anti-coagulants, and hormone supplements. The worst part is an injection each night of a drug called “Fragmin” that causes bruising. The injection itself doesn’t hurt too much, but the contents of it do - it has sodium in it.

For at least the next few weeks - and possibly months - we have to try and keep our feet on the ground now. We know from past experience that “getting pregnant” is only the start of the story, and that all kinds of things can and do go wrong.

Okay. I now promise to return to geeky posts about all kinds of things that are interesting (to me) for the next few weeks. I was talking about this while on the train with W yesterday though - I find pretty much everything interesting.

Thanks for all the comments from people reading this blog by the way - they’re really appreciated.

Do you ever feel guilty about being lazy? It’s now just gone 12:00 on Sunday, and all I have managed to do so far is get out of bed at about 10, make a cup of tea, play with the Playstation for a couple of hours (in my housecoat), have a shower, and get dressed.

My day is “officially” starting right now - except of course the morning has already gone.

The admittedly weak reason I was playing on the Playstation was to have a go on it before W got up. I bought her “The Sims 2″ yesterday, and she’s been glued to it ever since. I also got “Formula One 2005″ for myself, and due to much simmage, I haven’t been able to play it at all - well, until this morning anyway.

We had our usual call from the hospital in London yesterday morning - all the eggs have carried on dividing, and are all looking good, so we go in tomorrow morning for them to be transferred to W.

We’re trying not to get too excited, but it’s difficult.

More IVF news! I’ll try to keep it brief, as I realise this is probably very boring indeed for most people. It’s exciting for us though, so please bear with me when I write about this stuff now and again :)

The Lister Hospital called W again this morning to report on progress with the fertilized eggs. All 8 are continuing to develop, with some going faster than others - although they are still reporting all of them as being in “Grade 1″ condition.

The plan from here on is to wait another couple of days for the best candidate eggs to reach a stage called the “Blastocyst”. I never knew about any of this until yesterday, so the mechanics of what is going on seem incredible.

Here’s a potted explanation… as soon as the egg gets fertilized, it starts splitting - so it becomes two cells, then four, then eight and so on. You would think it would just grow into a huge lump, wouldn’t you - but it doesn’t. As soon as there are somewhere near 64 cells, they form into a ball shape, with the edge thicker on one side than the other… that thicker part (after several hundred billion divisions) becomes the baby, and the rest becomes the placenta. The ball is termed a “Blastocyst”. How the cells have all the programming to do this off their own back is amazing to me.

Our eggs are at about the 4 to 8 cell stage at the moment - over the weekend they will divide a few more times and reach the Blastocyst stage, at which point the most advanced will be picked for transfer back into W - the rest will be frozen for future attempts should anything go wrong.

The next few weeks are going to be absolute torture.

Late last year I planned to take part in “Nanowrimo” - the annual internet novel writing event. Unfortunately circumstances got in the way and my attempt was over before it started. I did spend one evening (while sat in a hotel the other side of the country) starting my story, so thought it might be nice to share the little bit I did write…

Brownian motion. That’s what they call it. When dust floats around in the air, and catches the light. It’s all about the “jiggling” apparently – something to do with energy.

As the alarm clock crept towards 7am, shafts of light were finally making their way through the gaps in the curtains - cutting the room into variously sized chunks with their blades of floating, jiggling, dust.

One chunk contained a slice of desk, some computer and a bit of monitor. Another chunk contained the bindings of a number of books. The final chunk had some kind of pop art print material, with fingers and a tuft of hair poking out. If you listened very carefully, you could hear the fingers and hair make gentle breathing noises now and again. Sometimes they spoke. On rare occaisions they shouted, and woke up the creature they belonged to.

“No, you can’t do that! That’s not in the rules!”

Joe woke with a start. He wasn’t sure if he had just shouted that in his dream or not. He hadn’t actually moved – he was studying the edge of his pillow and the corner of the alarm clock through a small gap in the bedclothes that afforded just enough air to breath. It was far too cold to risk a bigger gap. Probably.

“Joe, are you okay?”

Joe’s mum’s voice drifted up from the kitchen and he realized that he must have shouted out loud. How embarrassing. The enquiry was followed by a rhythmic creaking of stairs, growing louder and louder, followed by the sound a door makes when it rubs over a carpet.

“What was that about Rules? Were you talking in your sleep again?”

There was a tearing sound, and the room was suddenly washed with Saturday morning sunlight. Jimmy, Joe’s hamster, made a snap decision that sunlight really was far too bright to be doing anything with, and quickly shot behind the remains of his plastic house (the part he hadn’t eaten) to carry on his attempts at burrowing through the bottom of the cage. In the last 12 months, through continual effort during the hours of darkness, Jimmy had managed to make definite scratch marks. At this rate he would be out inside 5 years. Of course hamsters have very little understanding of long timescales… living for about 18 months as they do.

The light of course didn’t stop at Jimmy’s cage. It exploded around the room in the instantaneous way that light tends to, and suddenly Buzz Lightyear found himself greeting a new day at the far end of the book shelves. He was stood in front of a book called “The Big Boy’s Book of Tall Tales”, with a painting of a diver fighting a shark on the fly-sheet. The diver had a very impressive knife attached to his calf.

An assortment of spaceships, second world war aircraft and a huge pile of books on the floor also took in the warmth from the window.

“We’re going to take some things to the car boot sale – are you going to help me fill this box with things you don’t want any more?”

Joe didn’t say anything. He was still studying the bit of alarm clock he could see – watching the second hand tick it’s way past, and trying to count the seconds until it re-appeared. He was nomally within a second or two. Not bad.

“Are you going to help or not?”

Joe felt something big and Mum’s hand-ish poke his leg.

“If you don’t help, I’ll do it myself – then you’ll be sorry, won’t you.”

Ooh… about half a second out that time. Somewhere in the deep recesses of Joe’s mind, a cog turned and a penny started to fall quite some distance. When it hit the ground (or wherever it is that pennies fall to), it caused Joe to sit bolt upright in bed and try to focus his eyes on what his Mum was doing. Why is bright light blurry anyway?

“No, don’t take those Mum!”

“Why not? You don’t read this rubbish any more!”

“But they’re my favourite!”

Joe’s mum was grabbing handfuls of comic books from the floor and putting them in a box.

Just a quick update (don’t have much time at the moment)… we got the lab results back from the Lister Hospital in London this morning - fantastic news - they collected 8 suitable eggs from W, and all of them have fertilized.

It’s a huge weight off our mind. Usually with IVF, you hope for 3 or 4 of the eggs to have fertilized. 8 really is unprecedented. It means we will almost certainly have enough to freeze.

We’ll have more news in a day or two once the eggs have developed further (sometimes they don’t for all sorts of reasons - in the same way that only something like 25% of normal pregnancies succeed - most of the time women don’t have a clue they might have been “pregnant” for a few days).

There is a weird thought that struck me this morning though - for the next few days, in a lab in London there are 8 prototypes of myself and W busily growing… that’s just weird.

We were up at 5am this morning, made our way to Maidenhead, and caught the 6:05 train to London for the first part of the IVF cycle. It seems strange referring to it as “the first part” because W has been on a cocktail of hormone drugs for the last month already, and will be on far more drugs over the coming weeks.

We arrived at Paddington station in London at about 7am - probably the earliest I have ever arrived there. It was -2° when we left the car at Maidenhead station, and London seemed a little colder - uncomfortably cold.

We jumped straight in a taxi and headed off to the Lister Hospital, and quietly watched the city pass by. I’m always fascinated watching the various happenings in the early hours - the traders opening shops, papers being delivered, barrels being lowered into the basement of public houses…

The thing that sticks out in my mind from this morning were the numbers of horses out being exercised by the army and police in the early hours - there are a lot of horses in London - the police use them to patrol, and the army have hundreds - those of you outside of England will no doubt have heard of “Horse Guards” - the Queen’s Cavalry regiment that is based in central London. It just seemed really strange to see groups of 20 or so horses - some riderless (tethered to others) - standing at various road junctions, waiting for the light to change. I guess the golden dawn light made it look all the more strange.

The IVF part of the journey went well - although I’m guessing we’ll only really know “how well” tomorrow when the first results come back from the lab. I’m guessing that neither of us will be able to concentrate on much tomorrow.

Coming home from the hospital I drove back from Maidenhead. A novel experience, seeing that I haven’t driven anything for about 4 months. It took me a few minutes to become comfortable with driving again (remember - I ride a bike to work and back every day). By the time we got home I was just about starting to become smooth again. I wonder how long it will be until I drive again?

So here I sit - it’s nearly 5pm, and I’m pretty tired. W is fast asleep in the living room, and the cat is sitting on top of her. Off to surf the internet I suppose…

I have just decided that a comic strip will happen.

I have been reading an article (a question and answer session at MIT between the guys at Penny Arcade and the students), and it’s made me realise that I have absolutly nothing stopping me from starting an online comic.

The obvious person to base it on is myself - because I know myself rather well. I’m guessing I’ll need to involve the cat too, because everybody loves jokes where people are nasty to the cat. And before anybody that loves cats gets angry, the cat will almost always win the day. If I’m ever nasty to our cat at home, he either takes out some evil retribution himself, or I’m caughty by my other half in the act of being nasty and reprimanded appropriately.

What sort of subjects will the comic cover?

Computer games is a given. The internet. Porn on the web. Chat communities. Anything and everything that ever winds me up may well make it’s way into the comic.

I’m actually looking forward to starting on it already.

It’s nearly 9:20 as I write this, and I’m just starting to warm up a bit. When I got my bike out of the shed this morning I thought it was cold outside, but couldn’t believe the weather report from Konfabulator when I switched my computer on : -4° !

It’s now warmed up outside to a relatively balmy -2°

I guess I should explain what Konfabulator is, for those who have not seen it - it’s the answer to all your geek utility prayers. It’s hard to describe easily too. Imagine a little program that sits in the corner of your computer, and lets you install lots of fun “plugins” for it that do all the things you never knew you needed. Things like a local weather report (with nice graphics, as you can see to the right…), nice analogue clock, a to-do list, a picture frame showing pictures from your Flickr account, a broadband graph, a wifi graph… the list goes on.

Konfabulator has been around for a long time - on Windows and Mac, and Yahoo just bought them out, so they are busy making plugins for all their services too. If Google and Yahoo are going to go toe to toe in the online utility market it can only be good news for people who like installing crap now and again (and yes, I will admit to that).

And - as is typical around here - I just got called away for the last hour to talk through some code somebody else has written. I’m not commenting on that though because I’ve got in trouble too many times for talking about work in my blog.

I’ll try and think of something important to write about later. I’m guessing it will be our impending visit to the IVF clinic tomorrow, but you never know - something might wind me up later and warrant a blast of cynicism into this blog…

I’m sat here this evening thinking about drawing an online comic. For the last hour or so I’ve been looking around on the web at various online comic strips. My favourites are probably Atland by Nate Piekos (pictured to the right), and Copper by Kazu Kibuishi.

You see, the thing is, I studied art at college. I can draw. And I don’t just mean draw a bit - I have been trained to draw people properly. I always feel a bit guilty - working as a software developer - that I have this so called “talent” that is going completely to waste. I can’t really remember the last time I picked up a pencil and sketched anything or anybody.

Actually - I can remember the last time I drew anything “properly”. In the late 90s I signed up for an art class at college near where I worked - with the idea that it would force me into doing something. I remember turning up on the first night - all I had was a pencil and an eraser. The rest of the group arrived with all this professional kit, and I felt a bit like a fraud - like I wasn’t trying hard enough.

After we had all made polite conversation for a few minutes the tutor walked in and I did a double take… it was the same woman who had originally taught me years before. She initially ignored me, but once everybody settled down to draw their first studies (I’m guessing so she could figure out where everybody was in ability), she sidled over and sat down next to me.

“I thought I recognised the name on the enrolement sheet”

When I left college she was a bit annoyed with me - she wanted me to go straight on to University and do a masters in fine art. I was already bored with painting and drawing, and walked away from it all - towards computers. I’m guessing if I had done what they wanted they might have had an example to point at for the next generation at the college (my stuff was always pinned up in the art department corridors).

The art class was quite entertaining for that first session - the tutor made her way around the class giving tips, and teaching people, but when she got to me she would just sit down and chat about what we’d both been doing over the last few years. Looking around the room I started to feel a bit like a fraud for a different reason - it was obvious there was a gulf in ability between myself and all the people who turned up with the professional kit.

I kept my head down for much of the first session - the “professionals” seemed to know each other and I was an interloper. Then the crunch came. As we were finishing up, one of the old guys was walking across the room and looked over my shoulder. I heard him stop walking.

“I’m going to go home and shoot myself.”

I of course started to feel embarassed. What could I do but shrug my shoulders?

Over the course of the next few weeks, most of the regular year-in, year-out members of the class decided that I was pretty much “the enemy” no matter how nice I tried to be. I have heard of this kind of behaviour with people who grow vegetables for village shows, but never in an art room!

The animosity got so bad that in the end I just didn’t bother turning up any more. I think I lasted about 6 weeks. After doing a bit of arithmetic, that was in 1997. It doesn’t seem like 7 years ago.

Here’s a couple of the drawings that survive from that time (well - the scans now survive - the drawing of Jodie was given to her, so god knows where that is now).

“Man in Glasses” - pencil study from a photograph. I seem to remember that I had never drawn anybody with glasses before…

“Jodie” - a girl I used to know, and will admit to liking rather more than was healthy. I gave her the drawing, and it probably contributed to the breakup of the relationship she was in (I didn’t cheer, honest).

So the question remains. Do I commit to starting to draw again?

Okay… I’ve been playing with the new camera (at last)

The weather outside has been pretty grotty for the last few weeks - and when it has been good I’ve not had the time to go out. This evening I thought “what the hell”, and climbed up into the loft to fetch my old photography lamp. 500 watts of artificial sunlight. Just the job.

The photos (below) were the first I have taken on fully manual with the new camera. I had to get the book out to figure out the aperture and shutter controls, but from then on I was fine - many moons ago I studied photography at college.

The thing you can do with a fully manual camera, that you just cannot do with an automatic is narrow the depth of field on purpose. It’s great fun :)

I’m not too happy with this one - there’s just something not quite right about it. Maybe the hand should have been the thing in focus? Oh well… at least it didn’t cost anything to create it - unlike the (soon to be numbered) days of traditional film photography, where you were loath to experiment because each shot cost X amount to get developed and printed.

I guess I should really go and look at photofriday and see what their project is for the week.