Jefflog

We’re planning to take a trip to China in the next few months to visit Hong’s family, none of whom have yet met Maggie except in pictures. I had made arrangements for my Chinese visa when we wondered which line should Maggie stand in when we get to customs at the Beijing airport? Should she be with me in the slow line, since she’s an American citizen, or can she go through the fast line with Hong since Hong is still a Chinese citizen? Then, we wondered, does Maggie need a passport?

Yes, she does. We had just been assuming that, hey, she’s a baby, what do babies need passports for? I still don’t know the answer to that one, but rather than stage a protest at the Chinese border (never a good idea to stage a protest in Beijing), we’ve been scrambling to get her passport, then apply for a Chinese visa.

We received the passport last week, which you can see linked here. I think it’s kind of funny to see a baby’s picture on a passport, don’t you?

Last week, I finally decided that my main development computer was feeling a bit sluggish, and that I could either try to upgrade the processor or the memory. I had a 2Ghz Celeron chip with 512MB RAM, so you’d think I’d upgrade the processor, but I decided that memory was probably my better option. I purchased an additional 1GB RAM chip.

I am utterly astounded how much faster certain tasks are now. Common operations that used to take 10 seconds are now accomplished in 2. I always thought that 512MB was quite a bit of memory, but apparently when you’re developing .NET applications on Windows XP, it’s not enough.

I finally got around to fixing comments on this site. They had been broken ever since I moved to Wordpress 1.5 and attempted to move my old template to the new format.

It’s still a little broken, and you’ll need to register in order to post comments. I figure, there’s only a handful of you posting comments anyway (spambots excluded), and hopefully it will deter some spambots until they figure out how to autoregister (which won’t work anyway because I need to approve the first comment before future comments are let through anyway, so nyaahhh nyaahhh!!)

If you’re looking for some new Internet radio stations, check out Tuner2 for a growing list of stations broadcasting in aacPlus format, which promises higher quality at a lower bitrate than MP3 streams. You’ll need the VLC Media Player (all platforms), or Winamp (Windows only) to listen to these stations.

From what I can tell, the 48Kbs aacPlus streams are as good if not slightly better than the 128Kbs MP3 streams. Most of the stations are unfortunately broadcasting variations on electronic EuroDance, but there are a variety of genres and the list seems to grow by the week. Two of my favorites include Radio Paradise and The Current (Minnesota Public Radio).

Ever since I read about the Secret of Bananas on The Sneeze, I can’t eat a banana without dividing it into three slices first.

I might as well weigh in on this matter. When I first heard the story, I was on the side of Terri’s husband: it’s time to pull the plug. Ten years is an awful long time, and keeping her in the hospital is probably costing thousands of dollars a week.

Then I heard that by pulling out her feeding tube, it would take a week or longer for her to die. This is exceedingly cruel, and I would not wish it on anyone. There should be a better way to put this woman out of her misery.

Then I hear that Terri’s mother does want her kept alive, so apparently it’s only her husband that wants to pull the tube. While I’m on Mr. Schiavo’s side here, the case doesn’t seem so cut-and-dried. If the entire family was of the same opinion, things would be different.

Now people are getting arrested just trying to “feed Terri”. While I question whether this woman would have accomplished anything by going into her hospital room (what’s she going to do, give her a sandwich?), the simple fact that someone is being arrested for trying to keep her alive is beyond my comprehension.

I can understand the court’s position in saying that the State shall no longer pay to keep Mrs. Schiavo alive, but it seems to me that if people were willing to pay for her hospital upkeep, then why not? Why should the courts deny medical access to someone who is willing to pay for it? Surely with all of her supporters these days, enough money could be raised. Or am I just missing something here?

…you dream that Alan Greenspan attends your church, so while sitting next to him in the pew one Sunday, you decide to ask him how the foreign currency markets work.

I just asked Sherlock to translate the word “babysitting” into French, and what did it return?

Surveillance.

This is similar, but not quite as bad, as the spell-check Easter Egg for very old versions of Microsoft Word for the Mac:

On Word 3.01 or 4.x with the US dictionary (and maybe UK?), spellcheck the word “childcare”. The spell-checker will suggest one word: “kidnaper” [sic].

Yesterday, the local bike club had its first ride of the spring season. I’ve been psyched up about this ride for a few weeks now, now that we’ve had a few nice days. On Friday, the weather was a sunny 57°, so I knew this upcoming ride would be awesome.

Alas, the weather did not hold up, and by Sunday, they were forecasting 47°. That didn’t phase me much, but I told myself I’d do the medium route instead of the long one. Turns out, maybe I should have done the short one. The temperature actually didn’t get above 42°, and it was cloudy and a little windy the whole time.

Lucky for me I thought to bring my gloves, but by the end of the 26 miles, my feet had disappeared and had been replaced with two blocks of ice. Came home, took a hot hot shower, got a back massage from my loving wife, and took the rest of the night easy.

I sure hope it’ll be warmer for next week’s ride!

Usually, Maggie will try to grab everything within her grasp, then quicker than a kung-fu master it’ll be in her mouth, coating the object with a heavy layer of saliva. More often than not, the items she really wants to grab are the ones that she shouldn’t be doing that to: tablecloths, the edge of the chair, my hair, pill bottles, etc.

For some reason, though, she’s really annoyed whenever we try to give her the hairbrush. She gives us this look of disgust as if we just handed her a piece of dog poop. Actually, if she picked up the dog poop she’d probably have no problem with that, but the hairbrush, no way.