Jefflog

Life has been so busy with work and family that I hardly ever have time for recreational computer time. My RSS reader shows 264 unread messages, and it’s only that low because I occasionally go in and invoke “mark all as read” for the less-interesting feeds.

Right now is an exception to that rule. The planets are aligned and Hong, Maggie, and Oliver are all asleep. It has been a long while since I’ve been able to sit in front of my Powerbook without the pressure that I could be called away at any minute to tend to a crying baby or pay attention to a hyperactive toddler. Eric Dolphy is playing on my headphones, and I got a full nine hours of sleep last night. A steaming cup of coffee is the only things that’s stopping this moment from being a perfect dream.

I realize that I miss using my Mac. I use Windows at work, and without trying to get into any holy wars here, my Windows machine just doesn’t have the elegance, the consistency, or the fun that my three-year old Powerbook has. I don’t suppose there are any programming jobs out there that would let me work on my Mac? (short answer: yes there are, they just don’t exist in Indiana.)

Now, it’s time to see if I can make that cup of coffee a reality without waking up the baby…

In years past, Christmas hasn’t been a large holiday for us. It’s partially because of me, who has grown tired of the crass commercialism of the holiday and the perfunctory gift giving associated with it. Don’t get me wrong; I love giving gifts, but only when I see something that I think the givee would really enjoy, not because I’m obligated to buy something for that person. (If you really want to be a Scrooge, read Is Santa a deadweight loss?, which explains that gift-giving is bad for the economy at large.)

This year, that’s all changed now that Maggie is two years old. Hong and I are very excited for Christmas morning, not for what we’re going to get but to see Maggie’s reaction. Meanwhile, Maggie is aware of the upcoming holiday, but I don’t think she fully knows what’s going to happen yet. We’re trying to hype it up, but our efforts are only paying off moderately so far. I fully expect she’ll be a lot more excited next year.

We’ve managed to play the “be nice or Santa won’t come” card with her a few times. Well, only once, really. She’s such a sweet little girl that threats aren’t necessary most of the time. We’ll also try to play the “go to bed early on Christmas Eve or Santa won’t come” card. We’ll be tracking Santa’s progress through Google Earth that evening.

Shortly after Maggie was born, my friend Alexis wrote to me to “be prepared for Fun!”. I think my fun is about to become a lot more fun.

We recently received in the mail a notice showing us the most recent assessment value of our house, which was made on March 1, 2006. The previous assessment was made when we bought the house in October, 2001, roughly four-and-a-half years prior. Want to guess how much our home’s value has appreciated in that timeframe?

Almost 14%. Over four-and-a-half years, that works out to slightly less than 3% compounded year-over-year. Historically, that’s an average return, but nowhere near the 20% annual increases that have been recently reported in other parts of the country. There’s no real-estate bubble to be found here.

Practically, what this means for us is:

1. If we wanted to sell our house and buy another house in the area, we can feel confident that we won’t be overpaying for the new house.
2. It would be extremely foolish to sell our house here and buy a house in another part of the country, or at least not in any places where real estate has skyrocketed (like Seattle).

Looks like we’re stuck in Indiana whether we like it or not.

Several months ago, I read an article on Wal*Mart’s initiative to push fluorescent lights to its customers. Their goal is to sell 100 million compact fluorescent (CF) bulbs within 1 year.

I don’t shop at Wal*Mart very often, but the article got me thinking about CFs again. I had used them about 10 years ago, when they cost up to $20 a pop, although they promised to last as long as 10 regular bulbs and save you $40 in energy costs over its lifetime. They also had the annoying habit of flickering for a few seconds before they would turn on. My bedroom had two light sockets connected to the wall switch, and I had a CF in one of them and a regular incandescent in the other just so I could see my room as soon as I flipped the switch.

My experiment with CFs ended when I tried to change out a regular lightbulb for a fluorescent one and dropped my $20 bulb on the sidewalk in the process. At least when you break a standard bulb, the accident only costs you 50 cents.

I finally bought an 8-pack of CFs at Costco today, for about $12 or about $1.50 each, and installed them throughout the house. Boy have times changed. These bulbs don’t flicker and come on instantly. I can’t gauge any difference between these bulbs and their incandescent brethren, except for the swirly look to them. And at 1/4th the energy use, they’ll probably pay for themselves within the first year. Amazing.

On Friday, the cable company upgraded the speed of my Internet connection to 6/Mbps download and 1/Mbps upload. Yay!

Unfortunately, today the cable company effectively “downgraded” my service because it keeps going out every 5-10 minutes. They won’t have a guy out to look at it until tomorrow. Bummer…

Today, Microsoft releases their much-touted Zune portable music player as a competitor to the reigning champ, the iPod. There’s been a lot of talk about this device in the last few months, not because it will necessarily be the “iPod killer” everyone always talks about, but because Microsoft has the clout to get people talking about it.

I haven’t actually used the Zune, or even seen one in person, so what I’m about to say is purely speculation on my part, but here’s what I think: despite it’s splashy intro and large marketing budget, the Zune will initially be a flop, gradually erode market share from the iPod, and will only eclipse the iPod if Apple falls asleep at the wheel (which it won’t), making the Zune the second-most popular portable music player on the market.

Consider the Zune’s most-touted feature: the ability to send a restricted copy of a song to another nearby Zune wirelessly. Let me explain why this is doomed to fail, at least in the short run.

Throughout most of college and all through graduate school, I used an HP-48 calculator. This was, and still is, the finest calculator you could buy. It was fully programmable, and I would spend hours tap-tapping on it’s tiny keyboard writing little programs for it.

The calculator had this neat feature: you could transfer programs between calculators through an infrared beam. Just place the two calculators facing each other, set up one to send and the other to receive, and it would transmit the program using the Kermit protocol. It was very cool.

Only thing is, I only got a chance to use this feature once, because hardly anyone else had an HP-48. Even when I did come across someone with the same calculator, I didn’t necessarily have any programs I wanted to share with them.

That’s my point. Nobody has a Zune yet, so who exactly are you going to be sharing with, at least in the short term? And when you do find someone with a Zune, do they really want to listen to your crummy music?

This may rectify itself over time as Microsoft begins heavily marketing the device and it falls into the hands of more kids. But, since those kids already have iPods, they’re not likely to get a new player anytime soon, unless their dimwit parents get it for them for Christmas, making Johnny a bit unhappy since all the cool kids have iPods and he’s stuck with lugging this bulky Zune instead.

Even if someone wants a new player, why would they buy a Zune? It’s not cheaper, and for every new feature it has (larger screen, FM tuner), it has a corresponding negative (bulkier size, lack of accessories, not as “cool”). Besides, is anyone going to bother re-encoding all of their music and stop using iTunes just to use a different music player?

That’s about as likely as someone ditching Microsoft Windows and switching to a Macintosh, and we all know how likely that is.

Right now, I’m listening to one of my favorite albums from one of my favorite bands, Rush’s Presto, and memories of my teen years come flooding back.

I remember my dad taking me to a used CD store one evening, and I picked it up after previously buying Moving Pictures and loving that album. We listened to some of the album on the way home, and I think he liked it as well.

At home, I had a pillow chair propped up against the wall and another pillow on the floor in the shape of one of those “Baby On Board” car window signs that said “Genius On Board”. Next to my pillow configuration was a cheap printer stand on which sat a desk lamp and my CD player. During my summers away from college, I could often be found here in the evenings, reading a book while listening to music on my headphones.

My on-campus apartment during my first year at Tulane had a very small bedroom, and with my bed and two desks in there (one for each computer), you practically had to walk in sideways to get through it. My CD player sat on a bookshelf above my bed attached to a pair of Radio Shack speakers plugged in through the headphone jack. A door opened out to a little balcony area, and during thunderstorms I would open my door and turn up the volume. Fresno only got about 10 inches of rain a year, with thunderstorms being exceedingly rare, so storms were always a pleasant treat.

I was a happy teenager.

It’s hard for me to find time to keep this log up to date, and it’s been a while since I wrote about my family, so I’m going to try to combine several posts into one.

Oliver turns five months old tomorrow. He’s starting to sit up, and likes to play with his feet. He slept through the night a couple of days ago, which gives us some hope that “this too will pass”. I still wouldn’t characterize him as an “easy” baby, but every week brings some progress and he becomes more fun.

Maggie dressed up as a witch for Halloween. We hyped up the evening, explaining that she could get candy (CANDY!!) by going to neighbors houses and saying “trick or treat!” After three houses, though, she had had enough and wanted to go home. We spent the rest of the evening answering the doorbell and giving out candy to other kids instead. None of the pictures I took on Halloween night came out very good, so I’ve uploaded a picture at the zoo where they encouraged the kids to come dressed in their costumes instead.

When Daylight Saving Time expired, our Tivo was off by an hour and we recorded Barney & Friends instead of Sesame Street. Maggie got a taste of Barney, and now her calls for Elmo have been supplanted by Barney. Ugh. It didn’t take long for her to start listening to music that drives me crazy.

I just upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 on my work machine, and took a look at Jefflog through it. Sure enough, all of the rendering errors that showed up in Internet Explorer 6 have been fixed in the new version. Yay! It’s time to remove the warning message I used to display to Internet Explorer users on this page, or at least remove it for people using IE7.

Do I like IE7? Not especially. It’s a welcome improvement over IE6 (which hasn’t seen an upgrade in over FIVE YEARS), but Firefox is still the better browser. I just keep Internet Explorer around for those sites that require it, like my company’s intranet that likes to publish URLs with spaces in them. Firefox doggedly adheres to HTTP standards and ignores everything past the space, while IE happily accepts the space. If I was in charge of the company’s intranet, I’d replace those spaces with “%20″ and make it standards compliant, but since I’m not in charge I’m stuck with IE from time to time.

Besides, Firefox is Free software, and I will almost always choose the Free version over the non-Free, even if the non-Free has more features. It’s a stubborn philosophy, but I’ve been burned by non-Free software too many times, either because it’s been discontinued, requires a paid upgrade, doesn’t work on my new computer, etc. While Free software isn’t immune to being discontinued, having the source code available means that at least I have the option to fix it or, more likely, someone else may fix it.

I don’t think I’ve written about this before, but my son Oliver is shaping up to be a large child. At 4 months of age, he already weighed more than 18 pounds, which puts him above the 95th percentile for his age. Height is a similar story. Considering I’m only 5′6″ and Hong is only a little taller than me, I don’t know where he gets it from.

Maybe because of this, he’s still waking up in the middle of the night, usually once but sometimes twice. Then, we have to rock that 18-pound baby to sleep!