Saturday 21st of June was another milestone - actually, an event moreso than a milestone - in Finn’s life. We had him Christened.

It was a wonderful day and Finn, as always, was a dote.

Everyone had a great day and for that all of the credit has to go to Áine, who did trojan work organising the day and feeding everyone at the reception. Thanks a million also to everyone who came to help celebrate this, the most important day in Finn’s christian life.

More photos are available on Flickr.

This is funny in a nerdy way: type about:robots into your address bar.

You might remember that in a previous post I complained about the way Firefox (and Internet Explorer) handle embedded colour profiles in images. Well, with the release of version 3 of the browser, the problem may very well have been fixed in Firefox.

There’s a hidden setting in Firefox 3 that lets you configure it to use colour managment. To access the feature, you need to type about:config into your address bar, agree to be careful and then type “gfx.color_management” into the filter textbox at the top of the page. Double-click the gfx.color_management.enabled setting to change it to true and then restart Firefox. Voilá - colour management has been enabled in Firefox 3 and your wonderful, vibrant photographs won’t look dull and listless any more.

But now the bad news: some people are reporting that when you enable colour management in Firefox 3, it internally converts all colour profiles to sRGB. This means that if you visit a site that has, say, borders comprised of PNG images and those PNG images have an embedded colour profile, Firefox will attempt to convert the profile to sRGB and the site may wind up looking a little off-colour, as it were. It may also interfer with CSS colour codes and so on as well. I personally haven’t come across anything like this but your milage may vary, as they say. This is also why the setting is disabled by default.

The latest version of Firefox can be downloaded here and is well worth it. I’ve been using it since the first beta and have found it to be very stable, faster than Firefox 2 and less troublesome in respect of memory utilisation. And, of course, it’s extremely customisable.

It’s hard to believe, but Finn is 17 weeks old now - just a little over four months. As you can see in this pic, which was actually taken a couple of weeks ago, he’s a proper little boy now - all of the newborn features are gone and he’s this lovely little alert fella that goos and gaas at his mammy and daddy all of the time.

Sunday gone was an important milestone for us for two reasons. To start with, he had his first ever taste of ‘real’ food - puréed carrot. Yum. It took about twenty minutes for him to eat two spoonfuls - the concept of food is alien to him so he kept spitting it out and making disgusted faces. He was a bit more keen on the baby rice that I gave him yesterday but I think that that’s because it has a slightly sweeter taste. It only took me fiften minutes to get that into him.

The second part of Sunday’s milestone was bedtime: for the first time in 4 months Finn, Áine and I didn’t go to bed at the same time and Finn didn’t sleep in our room. Instead we put him up at about 10 p.m. and he went into his own room, in the cot. He’s been napping in there for a few weeks now but at night we’ve been putting him into the Moses basket in our room. Not any more though!

Ironically Finn slept like - yep - a baby while Áine and I were tossing and turning all night, listening out for him! Neither of us slept a wink! Last night - his second night in his own room - was a little easier since we’d gotten the first night out of the way but it was still a little weird waking up in the morning and not seeing his little face looking up at you from the basket.

We’re just back from our first family holiday - a week in Quinta Da Lago, near Almancil in Portugal’s Algarve region. As always, Finn was an angel and we didn’t have any problems with him at any stage; even on the plane he was as good as gold and didn’t mind the experience one bit. Of course, in a few more years it’ll be impossible to get him to sit still, even for the two-and-a-bit hours that it takes to get to Faro.

The week itself was pretty cool - we didn’t really do much, because there’s not a hell of a lot that you can do with a three month old in tow. Not that we minded - a week of relaxation was pretty much all we needed. We spent most of the week lounging around on the terrace by day, dining out in the evening.

Of course, the holiday didn’t start out relaxing. I managed to not just burst but destroy one of our hire car’s tyres on the first day, an event that wound up costing me €240 (!) to resolve. Grrrr…

Also, I forgot to bring a media card with me for my camera. Grrrr… We did take a handful of photos with Áine’s compact, which I’ll post later. I suppose not being able to use my camera meant that I had a good oppurtunity to use my camcorder for change, which can’t be a bad thing. In that light, I present Finn’s first swim:

Click here for the video…