Personal

Thu - May 4, 2006

Update

Wow, over a month.

Well, it's not that bad. I have a photoblog that I've been updating almost daily, so I've not been slacking entirely on documenting my life. Plus, we've had James and my birthday on 4/21/06 , a trip to Disneyland , a trip to the LA Zoo , and a trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific , all on the web site. Most of this is with iWeb, and the links are used as such. Hopefully, iWeb won't screw things up too much.

Apart from that, James has been sick since Friday. With Hsuan at jury duty this week, it meant I stayed home to take care of him, while William went to daycare. Today was James' first day back, so I could go to work. Also, Hsuan's jury duty ended today.

Posted at 11:57 AM

Mon - April 3, 2006

Sick boys, or not?

Plus, William completes transitions to the 4-5 year old class.

Last week, Heather was away from Tuesday through Thursday, and James started being sent home with diarrhea, so I spent most of last week caring for the boys at home. The daycare may have suspected James had some sort of stomach flu, but each time I brought him home, his stools firmed up quite nicely, only to return to diarrhea when I brought him back to school. He was out Tuesday, then back at school all day Wednesday, then back briefly Thursday morning, then out Thursday afternoon... I finally decided just to keep him with me at work on Friday, feeding him Pedialyte the whole day.

Over the weekend, not only were James' stools solid and dry, even to the point of being crumbly, but he also seemed to have a bit of constipation.

Further, William had a sharp fever on Wednesday night, so I kept him home with me Thursday, only bringing him back and forth to daycare while we dropped off and then picked up James.

William also completed his transition to the 4-5 year old class (Dragons) last Friday. Also, his teacher Deanna had her last day at the daycare that Friday, having gotten a new job much closer to her home. She drove 80 miles roundtrip daily, so it was a horrible commute for her. She will be missed.

Today was William's first official day as a Dragon. His new teacher, Kenny, is actually a teacher the daycare has had before and who agreed to take the lead Dragon teacher job until he (hopefully) gets a grade-school teaching job in the Fall. We've known Kenny for quite a while, so it's an easy switch for us. He taught in the Cubs (3-year old class) until just before William moved into that class.

Posted at 01:02 PM

Fri - March 24, 2006

William transitions, taxes, tired...

Last Friday, I finally completed our federal and state income taxes and submitted them electronically via TurboTax. I had originally intended only to "practice" doing taxes with Turbotax this year and have our actual taxes filed by our old tax accountant in Chicago, but I had spent so much time collecting numbers and figuring out stock cost bases that I didn't think I'd have time to do taxes by e-mail, mail, and fax with the accountant, so I just submitted what I had. We are supposed to get ~$2600 in refund from the IRS, and we paid ~$1500 to the state.

Last week, I got really exhausted, emotional, and fed up with Heather traveling so much, leaving me alone to take care of both boys so that I'm not only tired every day but sleepy when I drive them to and from daycare and also too tired to do my own paying job effectively. I let loose on Heather for a day, though I bought her roses by that evening. Still, it's motivation enough for her to talk to her boss. Our current hope is that she can reduce her work hours, moving to part time, for the next few months at least until my job review so that, hopefully, I'll have a job next year. (This year is crucial, as my job reappointment is not supposed to be "automatic" this year.) Naturally, I'm worried about the loss in income, since she gets paid more than I do, but we can probably make up some of the shortfall by exercising stock options, a good chunk of which will expire next year anyway.

William began his transition to the 4-5 year old classroom (Dragons) this week. He's so smart and eager to transition. Plus, he's the oldest kid in the 3 year old class (given that he recently turned 4), and the 3 year old class (Cubs) is not only full of girls but also has some <3 year olds who aren't even potty trained yet. At first I was a little reluctant to see my William growing up so fast, but it's clear that he's grown out of the Cubs class.

James continues to grow and to charm me daily. He can "cruise" around, and I can see he's on the verge of walking. He had an ear infection, for which he got a shot of antibiotic last week. His followup appointment this morning showed his ear clear.

Posted at 02:45 PM

Mon - March 13, 2006

Holly, new PowerBook, eBay, Mac mini, William's birthday, taxes, James sick and then better...

Over a month since the last update... how time flies.

Holly, the older of Heather's two older sisters, has been staying with us since January. She came back from Bahrain in order to work on her and Martin's income taxes and also to hang out with us. William especially has enjoyed having her around, and she has been babysitting the boys when Heather has been traveling, which has been pretty often this year. That is, when the boys are home, Holly looks after one while I, say, bathe the other in the evenings or try to put one of them to bed.

Unfortunately, her tax forms were completed this weekend (including a hefty tax because US income taxes aren't withheld while working overseas, apparently), and she left for Bahrain this morning. She treated us out to dinner last night, and I think I'm absorbing all her international phone calls to Bahrain.

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Discovered a stuck pixel on the 23" Cinema Display a few weeks ago. Very hard to see, but I'm still disappointed that it's there.

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Given that IDL so far hasn't been announced as a universal binary, or been announced as Rosetta compatible, and given my resistance to and disappointment in the Intel transition on Macs, I went ahead and put my money where my mouth is -- I bought a new 12" PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz on 2/27/06, and I immediately transferred my work over. I'm typing on it now. It's very nice and noticeably faster than my old PowerBook, so I'm very happy with the purchase. It should last me at least three years, through the Applecare plan I also bought for it. I had some problem registering for Applecare, since it was an old-stock item at the campus bookstore, but I think it went through. That is, as of today, the registration still hadn't gone through, but I called last week and was told that it would be fixed sometime this week.

Eventually, I'll let Heather have my old PowerBook, which is essentially identical to her current one, except that William threw up on her current one long ago and the keys still stick. I'll eventually clean out her keyboard more thoroughly and sell it on eBay.

Speaking of eBay, I went to an iSold-It near our home and got them to sell my old PowerMac G4 (dual 867 MHz, original packaging, etc.), my old 17" Studio Display, and my old Apple DVI-ADC adapter. I've never sold anything on eBay myself, and I didn't want the hassle of setting up the listing and shipping the items. All three sold at the high end of their price range, and after subtracting the iSold-it commission and eBay fees, I got a reasonably good pay-off.

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I also finally set up the Mac mini to work with our home theater system. The Mac mini video and sound now go through the Harman Kardon amplifier, through the video 3 inputs. I also bought Apple's Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, so we can control the mini from the couch. I copied over my iTunes and iPhoto libraries. It's nice to look at pictures on the TV or listen to music on the stereo. In theory, it's nice to surf the web from the couch, too, but the TV has such crappy resolution that text is hard to read. This is pretty good incentive to get a nice LCD HDTV with either HDMI or DVI input.

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Speaking of eBay again, I bought William Mars Pathfinder and Return to Mars Action Pack Hot Wheels sets on eBay, for his birthday. Those are collectibles, and I think he likes them.

William's birthday on 3/3 included cake at his daycare center, shared with his classmates, followed by presents at home. I also bought him a couple of Buzz Lightyear action playsets from Amazon.com, a couple of Lego Star Wars models, three spaceship models (Saturn V, Lunar Lander and Command Module, and Space Shuttle), a cash register (which he actually asked for), and a couple of Incredibles squeeze lights. Dan sent him a bunch of Hot Wheels cars and a Hot Wheels play set (a week late -- he's been studying for the GMAT in prep for possibly getting an MBA). Holly and grandma got him some activity books and some clothes.

The house is crammed with toys, many of which we'd like to donate to an upcoming rummage sale for the boys' daycare.

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Speaking of daycare, I've been sitting on tuition rate calculations for next year, not to mention budget calculations. There's a board meeting this week, at which I intend to get some final tuitions proposed for next year. I had to set aside those calculations because I've been working on family finances and income taxes. I finally got through the income taxes on Turbotax yesterday. I had originally intended to use our old tax accountant in Chicago and just do Turbotax as practice for possibly doing our taxes myself next year. I hadn't used Turbotax (or Macintax) in years, and our forms are complicated, especially with some stock sales and Heather going on maternity leave last year. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I've already done so much leg work on getting stuff into Turbotax, and it's so late in the tax season, that I'm considering just filing the taxes straight from the Turbotax work I've already done. Besides, our old accountant uses Turbotax anyway (the professional version, I assume), and I'd have to send him all the numbers myself regardless. I'll review the forms later this week, I think, but it looks like we owe ~$1500 to CA and will get ~$2600 back from the IRS.

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On the evening of Wednesday 3/1/06, James started throwing up. Unfortunately, Heather had to leave for a business trip (of which there have been rather a lot, recently), and I ended up staying home to take care of James the next day (after dropping off William at daycare). I had assumed that James just had some sort of minor stomach upset, but by evening, he started developing a mild fever. He didn't throw up any more, but just to be safe, I put him on pedialyte instead of formula. He ended up having diarrhea, so the pedialyte was definitely the smart move. Heather came back Thursday night, after I had put the boys to bed, and she stayed home the next day to look after James, apart from bringing cake to William's birthday party that Friday.

It was obvious that James had developed a stomach flu, and Heather, Holly, and grandma all ended up getting it, too. Maybe it was my good sanitation practice, or maybe we got partial protection from our flu shots (influenza, though, doesn't cause stomach flu), but William and I were mostly unaffected. (I had a little diarrhea, but not so bad as to keep me in bed.) We had a doctor's visit for James along with William's 4-year health check-up with the pediatrician on 3/6, and James had to be tested for rotavirus -- a very common cause of stomach flu in children (and a virus which has one or two surface proteins in common with influenza, according to a rotavirus web site presentation I found -- so maybe the flu shot helped after all).

Anyway, James recovered last week, and he's been back in daycare. Given all the time at home, it's been a little hard bringing him back, but I think he'll adjust eventually.

Also, James should be ready to walk, any day now. He stands fine, as long as he has something to hold onto, and he's tentatively starting to stand on his own.

Posted at 01:49 PM

Tue - January 24, 2006

Boys, new monitor, Mac mini

I've been a bit discombobulated by Apple's switch to Intel. When Steve Jobs announced the iMac Core Duo and the MacBook Pro at Macworld this month, I started scouring the web for people's benchmarking of the iMac Core Duo, to compare with Steve's claim of 2x-4x speed improvements over the iMac G5 -- a claim I didn't believe. First, I had long discussions on the Fool over the SPECfp benchmarks that were the basis for Steve's claims and concluded that they were cherrypicked to highlight a dual core chip over a single core chip (and, by the way, IBM has multicore G5 chips already, which weren't compared). Xbench scores showed a 10-20% improvement at most, though there turned out to be some issues of Quartz Beaming being turned on and affecting the Xbench app on the Core Duo. Finally, real-world application speed tests came in, mostly comparing native iLife apps on both iMacs, and the new Core Duo only gets 10-30% speed boost over the G5, even with two cores.

Anyway, I wasted a lot of time posting other people's results to the Fool and discussing speed on the discussion board.

Yesterday, I bought a 23" Apple Cinema Display HD to replace my old 17" Studio Display, which I intend to sell along with the dual G4 on eBay (via isoldit). I also bought a Mac Mini (G4 -- Intel transition not phasing me), and I set it up yesterday. Pretty cool, especially once I use it as a headless server in a closet, maybe.

Got sick with food poisoning yesterday. An unopened jar of salsa, but it expired last month. Painful cramps, until I made myself throw up in the toilet after 2 AM last night. Better today.

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The boys are growing. William is getting harder to keep still at dinners; he's so active and playful. However, he's learning to become remarkably quiet and well-behaved, relatively speaking (still fidgety, but that's okay), at church. On 1/15, the lady sitting next to us complimented him directly about how good he was being.

Father Bernard N., our priest from Kenya, is going back home to Kenya to start his own parish, having been sent by his bishop just a few years ago to get his MBA here. When I first arrived at our parish, I could only understand about 25% of his words, what with his accent. Now that I'm beginning to understand him, he's leaving. :-(

James is crawling and grabbing things and pulling himself up to standing position all the time now. Plus, since the AGU meeting last month, he recognizes me as his fun Daddy and crawls to me whenever he wants to play! He still doesn't talk, though he babbles a bit when he plays, sometimes. Da da da da, mostly.

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Last week, or maybe the week before, I saw the "Raising Cain" documentary on PBS. It's about the crisis with boys in America, academically, socially, psychologically, etc. Well worth watching, although I was already familiar with a lot of the research being discussed.

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I've not been blogging as much as I'd like. Too tired, generally. Plus, Heather is increasingly on travel, too. (Her sister Holly is staying with us a while, while she's in the country to do her taxes.) Plus, iLife '06 (announced at Macworld) has a new iWeb application that includes a blogging template. I might try it out.

Posted at 01:31 PM

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