Jefflog

I’ve put up a new movie I’m pretty proud of. It’s a 17-minute collection of photos and video clips from Maggie’s first two years, sync’ed to the song “When the Water Breaks” by Liquid Tension Experiment. I had to reduce the quality somewhat to get it down to 21MB, and I used Quicktime and the H.264 codec. This means that if you’ve not on a relatively speedy computer, your playback might be stuttery. The Quicktime Player will play it, but so will VLC if you have that installed. If you have 17 minutes to spare, check it out on the movie page or download it directly.

Note to family members: a better quality version of this will be on the next family DVD.

I know it’s not healthy to do, but I watch my stock portfolio go up and down all day long. I’ve got a sidebar with my stocks displayed in my browser, and I can see how much I’ve made or lost today updated every five minutes.

I had gotten to thinking, though, that there’s no reason those quotes couldn’t be auto-updating using the latest AJAX technology. I toyed with the idea of writing my own portfolio tracker using Ruby on Rails, but to be honest I never really had the time to delve into the framework. The idea has been languishing on my hard drive for six months.

Today I noticed that Yahoo has implemented this feature just about everywhere a stock quote is displayed. The Yahoo Finance home page is a good place to start. It’s cool to watch the numbers change on the fly.

Of course, there have been Java applets that could do this for years, but I hate waiting for the Java applet to load not to mention the extra memory it eats up.

My sidebar is still only updating every five minutes, but I may have to see if I can put Yahoo Finance in my sidebar instead.

Considering how much Hong and I like books, it’s not surprising that we’ve imbued a similar love of books into Maggie. She’s got a collection of books downstairs that are mostly picture books and of the “look and find” variety. She likes to peruse through these books and talk out loud when she sees things she identifies, or wants us to sit with her and explain what the pictures are.

She’s also got a stack of books she keeps on her bed. One time we tried to take the books away, but she got so upset we decided to leave them there. In the evening, we already read between one and three books in bed before she goes to sleep. For her afternoon naptime, she likes to be left alone so she can read the books on her own. While she doesn’t know how to read yet, she’s memorized the words to most of her shorter books, and we can hear her behind the door flipping pages and reciting the words.

Posted six new movies on the movie page today. It’s been almost four months since I last had the chance to update it.

It’s been a rough three months with the new kid. His incessant crying has caused us both at times to be frustrated, tired, and given us reason to cry ourselves. The only time he was content was when he was sleeping, which thankfully he did a lot of, up to 16 hours a day. There was no sense of fun to offset the general burden of caring for a baby.

That’s fully changed now that he’s nearly three months old. He likes to sit down and be entertained by us. Sometimes we sing to him, and his favorite songs will elicit a fat smile from his fat face. Sometimes we’ll dangle a ball or other toy near his face, and he’ll stare at it intensely through crossed eyes and make feeble attempts to grab it. Mostly, though, we like to show him picture books. The fat smile is accompanied by gurgles of delight.

We’ve heard that it’s unusual for a baby of his age to respond to books. We’d like to think that it’s a sign of intelligene, although all it really means is that he likes pictures. We’ll see if Oliver ends up sharing the same love of books that Maggie has.

Here’s some links to software I’ve found useful over the last couple weeks:

• Workrave is a handy timer that tracks how long you’ve been working and reminds you to take a break every x minutes. It’s unique in that it notices when you take “natural” breaks — basically, when you stop using the mouse or keyboard for a while — and resets the clock so it doesn’t “over” remind you. The reminder is also difficult to ignore, but not obnoxiously intrusive. It runs on Linux and Windows. My main gripe with it is that it uses over 10MB of memory for a relatively simple task. This is no doubt largely due to the GTK widget set they use. Why does GTK have to be so bloated???
• Google Calendar is the best on-line calendar I’ve used and outshines even some desktop calendars I’ve used. It’s very responsive for a browser-based application, and integrates with Google Desktop so I can see upcoming events without the need to visit the webpage. It has become my primary calendar application.
• Speaking of Google software, I’m also finding Google Notebook handy for making bookmarks of sites that aren’t important enough to clutter up my browser bookmarks with. Google Spreadsheets also looks pretty good for a browser-based spreadsheet, although I don’t use spreadsheets all that often so I can’t comment on it much.

Ever since Costco opened up a warehouse in Indianapolis about three years ago, we’ve become die-hard fans of the place. No longer content with tiny packages of comestibles and toiletry products, we buy five pound packages of frozen vegetables and twelve rolls of paper towels at a time.

This is guy shopping at it’s finest. You’re buying what you need to buy, at a good price, and once bought you don’t need to go shopping for it again for a while. I’ve never come close to filling up my shopping cart at the grocery store, but I frequently do at Costco, meaning that each trip there is worth 2-3 trips to the grocery store.

Those large packages also make for guy shopping. Some women can’t even pick up some of the items in the store. Hong has never shopped at Costco by herself, and indeed, it’s probably the only grocery store where you’ll find more individual men than individual women. Now that we’ve got two kids, Hong doesn’t come with me any more, making me one of those lone male shoppers.

I go about every three weeks, and continually make a shopping list inbetween those trips. Low on shampoo, raisins, and toothbrushes? Put them on the list. This kind of shopping requires a careful understanding of what Costco carries, and also knowing when the Costco size is too big for your household.

For example, when we used Netflix, we would frequently make a bag of microwave popcorn to eat while we watched the movie. When we saw a box of 24 bags of popcorn for the same price that 6 of those bags would cost us at the regular grocery store, we picked it up. Sadly, the kind we got wasn’t as good as the grocery store variety we were used to, so we didn’t eat it as much. A year-and-a-half later, we’ve still got 10 bags in our pantry. We still came out ahead money-wise but it seems wasteful to me.

As a general rule of thumb, we’ll only buy the Costco size if we think we’ll use it up within a year. This rules out buying the large bottle of dishwashing liquid, the 4 rolls of aluminum foil, the 5 pound bag of pecans. By sticking to the rule, you will rarely fall into the trap of losing money because you bought more than you could ever use.

Speaking of money, how much money do you save by shopping at a warehouse store like Costco? It’s hard to know for certain, although since it’s a public company, we can look at it’s published gross margins (”Revenue – Cost of Goods Sold”) and get a pretty good idea. According to Reuters, Costco has gross margins of 12.35%. By way of comparison, Kroger has gross margins of 24.57% and Target has gross margins of 32.23%. Even Family Dollar Stores has a gross margin of 33%. So it’s safe bet that goods at Costco are at least 12-20% cheaper than at the regular stores, and that’s not including any discounts from the sellers because of the exclusive nature of the warehouse.

Don’t forget that that 12.35% margin also includes the revenue they get from membership fees, which effectively have a 100% margin. So, the actual markup on merchandise is going to be a little less than 12.35%.

Up until Sunday night, Oliver had maintained a schedule of waking up every three to four hours during the night. When you consider that it takes up to an hour to nurse him, change his diaper, then rock him back to sleep, that often didn’t leave much room for our sleep (mostly Hong, but also myself as the official night-time diaper-changer and rocker.)

On Sunday night, we made a few changes to his sleep arrangements, such as putting him in another room, removing the “white noise” that we had been trying with initial success, and making more effort to let him sleep during the morning and keep him up longer during the afternoon and evening. Voila, he went for six hours between feedings. Hallelujah! Trying the same schedule last night gave us a five-hour stretch. Four hours of sleep never felt so good.

To add to the pleasantry, Maggie has been sleeping a bit longer after being on a low-sleep schedule for the past few weeks. We had been putting her to bed at 10pm and she’d still wake up at 6:30am or 7:00am at the latest, but last night she slept from 9:30pm-7:30pm. That made our night of sleep even better.

Well, well, if it isn’t my old friend the weblog. I typically don’t have much time to write these days, but Maggie is taking a nap, Oliver is busy chomping on the teat, and I’m too tired to get any work done, which makes this a rare opportunity to post an update.

Oliver is doing much better lately. Some of it has been due to a thoughtful friend buying us the book The Happiest Baby on the Block, which is full of good advice to soothe a fussy baby. The other part has been due to Hong cutting out dairy from her diet, which we strongly suspect causes a lot of intestinal grief for him. (Did you know that some 90% of Chinese people are lactose intolerant? Neither did we until recently.)

Maggie’s also been behaving more like a two-year old lately. Four or five weeks ago, we started letting her sleep on the big bed. She hadn’t yet started to climb out of her crib, but we had let her take her naps on the big bed for a while and she always slept just fine. And even though she could have gotten out at any time, usually she’d just wait for us to get her after she wakes up. She was so easy to deal with.

Then about two weeks ago, I guess we waited too long to fetch her because she figured out that she could get out of bed by herself, anytime she wanted to. This includes immediately after we tuck her in and leave the room. Now bedtime and naptime have become a power struggle, with her wanting to get out of bed unless she’s drop-dead tired. It was really bad for the first week, often requiring a couple of trips taking her back to bed, but last night she didn’t leave the bed when we left, being content to pout while staying on the bed. Before long, I imagine, the crying will dry up, too.

Actually, Maggie’s grandmother just sent over some little stuffed animals and a Noah’s ark pillow that we can bribe Maggie with. Every day she goes to bed without crying, she gets an animal to put in the ark. We’ll see how well that works.

Meanwhile, she still gets out of bed when she wakes up in the morning, which is fine by me. She quietly opens her door, softly knocks on our bedroom door, and waits for us to open it. I don’t know where she learned that she should knock on our door before coming in. We didn’t teach her, or at least we can’t remember teaching her. I guess some parts of raising children turn out to be easier than they could be.

I’ve always known that I was sensitive to high-pitched sounds. In particular, I can always tell when the TV is on even when it’s muted, because it makes this high-pitched whine. Hong can’t hear this whine, and I’m guessing a lot of other people don’t hear it as well.

Maybe you’ve read about The Mosquito, a device which is supposed to emit a high-pitched noise that teenagers can hear but adults cannot. The only problem is that I’m 32 and I can hear the noise loud and clear. (Too loud, really.)

To further aid in sound tests, Ochen K. put up a number of MP3’s at different oscillations so you can test your own hearing. I can hear up the 18,000 Khz level, but 19,000 is silent to me. Hong only hears up to 14,000 Khz.

I’m looking forward to the day that I get old and can’t hear the whine of the TV set anymore.