Jefflog

Up until a few weeks ago, the words that Maggie could speak were limited to “da da”, “ow ta” (out), “na na” (for banana) and “nai nai” (Chinese word for milk).

Then, all of a sudden, she starts exploding with new words. Two weeks ago, it was “ball”. Then, “boo boo” and “bub bo” (bubble). Last week, “mao” (meow) and “ma ma” (finally!) And right now, it seems like there’s a new word every day. This morning, “Elmo” was the word of the day.

Here’s another Sesame Street word that’s even cuter: when we point to The Count in her Sesame Street book, she says “ah ah ah”. For, you see, that’s how The Count laughs: “Two! Two shoes! Ah ah ah ah!”

I recently got very frustrated with my inkjet printer. The ink cartridge was producing poor output after at most a couple hundred pages, and those inkjet cartridges are expensive! Inkjets also aren’t terribly fast, and the quality always looks a bit fuzzy to me. I knew I wanted a laser printer.

Looking on Ebay, I realized that there are a TON of used, older laser printers available. In fact, it’s really a buyer’s market with the sheer number of them available. And here’s the real dirt: laser printer technology hasn’t changed much over the past ten years. Sure, getting a new laser printer might give you 2400×2400 pixels per inch instead of 600×600 pixels, but who can really tell the difference? Laser printers are also built to last, so most models up for sale are still in good working condition.

I ended up winning one for $19. I’m not kidding: I got an HP LaserJet 6P for $19. Shipping added another $20. It turned out to be quite bare-bones though; no toner, no cords, no manuals, not even a paper tray (although it does have a paper feeder which holds about 100 pages). Cords ran me $15, a generic toner cartridge was $32 shipped. I also found some memory chips on Ebay for $5 which will bump my printer’s memory from 2MB to 50MB, which should handle anything I can throw at it.

All of this, for less than what a new inkjet printer will cost, and the toner cartridge will print a couple of thousand pages before I need to buy a new one.

Over the last few years, there have been very few TV shows that we both enjoyed watching. We never watched any of the “reality” TV shows, and our Tivo mostly recorded sitcom reruns for us.

Last year changed all that. We became fans of a number of shows, and the continuation of those shows haven’t disappointed us. Lost, Arrested Development, and The Office are our top three picks. I’ve also enjoyed CSI: New York, but Hong doesn’t like the gruesome detail shown in the morgue, so even though it gets Tivo’ed it doesn’t often get watched.

I haven’t yet watched or heard of any good new shows from the current season. It’s just as well; we find it hard enough to keep up with the three or four weekly shows that we do watch (plus the weekly Netflix movie rental).

Today is Dine For America, a benefit for the Red Cross. Go out to eat at participating local restaurants, where they’ll be donating some or all of the profits for today to the American Red Cross. I’m sure it only works out to a dollar or so per couple, but it’s a nice gesture. Hong and I typically go out for lunch on Wednesdays anyway, since we have the babysitter handy.

Or, maybe you’ll read this rant against the Red Cross and think twice before donating. It doesn’t disparage what the Red Cross does, but enlightens us that the Red Cross probably isn’t what you think it is. Their executives seem to be paid an awful lot for a non-profit agency, too.

A couple of weeks ago, I was complaining that George Bush seemed to be completely unaware of the scope of the Katrina tragedy. Then, a couple of days later, he not only grasped the magnitude of the situation, but apologized for not handling things better. As far as I’m aware of, up until that point he hadn’t apologized for anything (following in the bold, arrogant footsteps of his favorite philosopher Jesus Christ, no doubt).

So far, great. I’m relieved that Bush understands the situation at hand. So how does he remedy the situation? By spending more money, authorizing $60 billion dollars for rebuilding efforts. $60 billion! This sounds much more like an attempt to buy political support than a true interest in rebuilding the region, and isn’t the talk of a conservative.

Oops, I forgot, our president isn’t really a conservative. His rate of spending is more closely aligned with the liberal most reviled by conservatives, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ask any conservative about the beginnings of the ills of big government, and their finger always points to FDR. Don’t be surprised to see a lot of finger pointing about tomorrow’s governmental ills towards Franklin Delano Bush.

Luckilly, many true conservatives are getting the guts to stand up to FDB and say we need to cut spending before authorizing any additional funds. Some have launched an initiative called Operation Offset to cut $500 billion from the budget. There are a few things in there that I guess I would be sad to see let go (lots of funding to NASA, science research, NPR and PBS, for instance), but they’re things we can easily live without. There are other areas I’d like to see cut as well (foremost, the military and Katrina boondoggling), and I’d like to see more tax cuts to the lower and middle classes, but thinking about trimming the budget is a good start no matter where you start.

Finally got around to posting four new home movie clips this weekend. Watch and smile.

For those users using Quicktime to view the movies, the quality is now much improved. Previously, I had been using the Quicktime Export within the iMovie application, but produces terribly inefficient videos. After spending a few hours looking for open-source tools to perform the conversion, I found ffmpeg, which does a fantastic job of creating high-quality Quicktime videos. It also supports a slew of other formats, and a ton of encoding options. Now the Quicktime videos are comparable to the Theora ones, both in size and quality.