We spent two nights at my sister in-law’s on a short trip to LA after Christmas. On the last night, Suzanne was out late seeing an old friend. I was putting the girls to bed when they asked for a story as they often do. At home, sometime instead of reading books I would tell them stories– some true accounts and some I make up. So, I was looking around at the new surrounding for things to work into my story (I usually make things up as I go) when I saw a ceiling fan. That gave me an idea.

So I made up this story of a boy who woke up and discovered himself all sweaty on a sweltering summer day. He got ready for school, but grew increasingly uncomfortable in the hot morning. He kept complaining about the heat to his mother and didn’t want to go to school. His endless whining throughout breakfast gave her an idea. She gave him a shoe box and told him that it was magic! This magical thing in the box will instantly make him cool and comfortable. But there’s one condition: he cannot open it until he gets to class. Otherwise, the magic will not work. The boy got excited, grabbed the box and sprinted out the house. Along the way, he bragged about the magic box that will make him cool to every friend he encountered.

By the time he got to school the entire class knew about the magic box. As the boy sat down in class, anticipation built and all eyes were on him. The boy excitedly put the magic box on his desk, took a deep breath, surveyed the entire class and then calmly removed the cover. His eye bugged out, mouth gasped as he reached in the magic box with his hand and grabed its magical content: a paper fan which his mother made and inscribed with crayons “I love you, mom!” The boy raised the fan to show all his friends in pure delight. The collective excitement of the students exploded in a thunderous applause.

The end…

Katelyn and Allison were cracking up as I finished the story– just the feedback I was looking for. Allison then excitedly jumped out of her bed, made a fist with her hand, put it on the middle of her forehead and excitedly said to me: “Daddy, when you were telling the story I see everything in my head!”

Well… with a response like that, I guess that story was magical to me too.

Around last Thanksgiving, the internal flash on my Canon 40D camera started to act up. I couldn’t get it to pop up. At first I figured that I messed some configuration or something. I kinda ignored it for a few weeks; I tend to avoid using the flash as much as I can anyway.

So finally with some free time last week, I finally looked into the fixing the problem. When I digged into the configuration of the camera, it became clear that it incorrectly detected the attachment of an external flash! This explains why I couldn’t get the internal flash to pop up. Figured it had to be some mechanical issue like a pin getting stuck or something. I used one of those air canisters to blow some air on the horseshoe to clear out any dirt and sand. When that didn’t work, I used a tweezer poking around the horseshoe. Lifting the metal plate on right side revealed this tiny pin. Giving the pin a little wiggle via the tweezer did the trick. The pin popped up and the camera no longer detected an attachment of the external flash– the internal flash popped up just fine, finally…

Don’t know if this is common, but other 40D owners have definitely seen it. Found a useful thread on flickr with very insightful discussions.

Technorati Tags: 40d, flash

One of the things I love about Emacs is its extensibility. It has all sorts of different edit modes for different file types. For example, SGML mode comes standard for editing XML & HTML. It’s a step up from normal text edit mode, it renders tags in color fonts. But it’s pretty plain vanilla editing– no syntax validation nor smart tag completion.

I started to use nxml-mode earlier this week and am liking it. Here’re some of the nice features:

• Smarter rendering of tags
• Real-time syntax checking
• Tag completion
• Support of folding
• Link handling

You can download nxml-mode here. The latest file as of this writing is “nxml-mode-20041004.tar.gz”. Unzip the package into the standard emacs “site-lisp” directory (it’s /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp on my macbook).

Configure it to auto-load and bind to various file extension via the following configuration in your .emacs file:

(load “rng-auto.el”)
(add-to-list ‘auto-mode-alist
              (cons (concat “\\.” (regexp-opt ‘(”xml” “xsd” “sch” “rng” “xslt” “svg” “rss”) t) “\\’”)
                    ‘nxml-mode))
(setq magic-mode-alist
      (cons ‘(”<???xml ” . nxml-mode)
            magic-mode-alist))
(fset ‘xml-mode ‘nxml-mode)
(fset ‘html-mode ‘nxml-mode)

We took the girls to see Santa at the History Park this past weekend. They got to meet with Santa, did some art projects, rode a trolley as well as a handcar and posed for snapshots by their old dad. The highlight for the kids was when Santa arrived in this old fire truck. Santa was basically mobbed by the kids as soon as he stepped out of the truck!

It was the first time I’ve been to the place. The park houses and preserves quite a few Victorian buildings. It has a running cable car and a barn that contains countless historical artifacts from the gold rush era. There was this old cable car operator that was nice enough to indulge me and posed for a few pictures. Overall, it was a much more enjoyable alternative than going to the malls, at least for me anyway. Plus, the place was a goldmine of photo opps…

While watching Wall-E with the girls this weekend, I finally catch on to one of the inside jokes from the movie Wall-E now that I started to use a Mac.

Toward the end, after The Axiom lands on Earth, Eve takes Wall-E back to his hut and feverishly puts him back together. She then shot a hole in the ceiling to let in the sun light to recharge Wall-E. After a few seconds, Wall-E boots up with an audio chime. Turns out that chime is the same sound my Macbook Pro makes when it boots up!

The joke is that Wall-E is a Mac, I get it now…

I saw a good deal for a 4GB USB/thumb drive on one of the deal sites I frequent this week. It’s pretty bare bone but it meets my 2 requirements: a retractable USB head and a small form factor to be attached to a key chain.

I then secured it by encrypting its content using TrueCrypt, an open-source encryption software. Encrypting/decrypting files has always been a pain, but TrueCrypt makes it easy. You basically read and write the files seamlessly as a password-protected mounted drive. Encrypting and decrypting are done on the fly automatically. Piece of cake…

The best part is that since TrueCrypt is available in Windows, Mac and Linux, my personal data on the new USB drive is now both secure and truly portable across platforms.

Sweet!

The girls had a few days off for Veteran’s day so I took a day off work and we headed down to visit my mom & my sister. We also paid Mickey Mouse a visit. We spent the morning in Tomorrowland which makes Andre happy. He was a great sport as we spent the afternoon in Fantasyland doing girly rides.

Unlike our visit a few years ago when the girls were younger, the kids and even grandma managed to stay the entire day– catching the parade before we called it a day. The new Finding Nemo and updated Pirates of The Caribbean were everybody’s favorites. Katelyn loved Peter Pan’s Flight; Allison’s favorite was Adventures of Winnie The Pooh while Andre’s favorite was Autopia. The new Pixie Hollow was a disappointment for Andre: an hour-long wait for snapshots with Tinker Bell.

Einstein is an African Grey parrot with a 200+ vocabulary; here giving a very entertaining routine in TED 2006. Highlighting it with singing happy birthday to Al Gore. Seeing Einstein makes me miss Bongo, my African grey…

A little company developed an iPhone application that fakes calls to yourself. Ha! A great meeting escape-hatch.

A Sweet and simple app…

Some years ago, I read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond took a whirlwind look at the human societies trying to answer the question posed to him by a politician from New Guinea:

“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

Diamond took a broader approach: why European societies managed to dominate the world in wealth and power?

He rejected the notion of racial or intellectual superiority as answers and argued that successful societies are not created out by sheer intelligence, but by a chain events. His investigation focuses on environmental issues and formed a theory that whites dominate the natives because of environmental influences.

He argued that development of farming in specific regions and favorable climates in certain areas that give rise to the growth of important crops. Some regions were less prime for farming like New Guinea. The farming advantage gave way to a larger population which in turn gave way to trade & economic growth in a society. Two critical advantages come with larger more efficient societies: strong immunity and faster technology progress.

In short, Diamond basically argued that the dominance of Europeans is attributed to happenstance (luck of climate and location) rather than actual differences (intelligence, strength, etc) between the people. His theory gained both acceptance (the book won 1998 Pulitzer prize) and criticism.

It was an interesting read; while I accept a lot of his arguments but I do think he sidestepped some of the more controversial issues.

Anyhow I was browsing TED the other night and came across an interesting presentation called “Why Societies Collapse” by Diamond in 2003. In it, he argued for 5 factors that lead to a collapse of a society:

1. Human impact on environment
2. Climate change
3. Relation with neighbor societies
4. Relation with hostile society
5. Political, economic and cultural factors that lead a society to perceive & solve environmental problems.

As an example, he explained how all these 5 things that can lead to the collapse of Montana (who knew Montana is in danger? :).

1. toxic from mines, weed control, salination, forest fires etc…
2. warmer & drier weather
3. half of Montana income derived from out of state
4. economic hostile from over seas and terrorism
5. long-standing traditional values getting the way

He argued that two things that blind a society from seeing the coming collapse:

• The conflict of short term of decision maker elite and long term of society as whole. He argued that this conflict is particular acute in US in 2003 as the elite insulate themselves from society; he used ENRON as an example.
• It is hard to make good decision when conflict involving long-standing values. He used Australia as an example, but he can simple look at the religious conservative in the American heart-land.

Diamond argued that these ticking time-bombs have short fuses, most of them a few decades-long. We are on a non-sustainable course and we will face outcomes in the coming decades. Ever the optimist, Diamond claimed that that we have choices and we can choose to do things to avoid a collapse of our society.

The take away lesson?

We have to look at what we can do and do more!

This is cool if you have children like me. The full Wikipedia for Schools selection has been made available on a DVD. It’s a free and community-based alternative to Microsoft Encarta and the likes. Very cool…

K&A may be a bit too young for this, but I’ll make them a copy and check it out.

You can download it via BitTorrent here.

There are some folks that claim iPhone makes up as much as 40% of Apple’s revenue. How many companies can claim that type of success with their 1st or 2nd generation product in a brand new industry? The company is on a tear. In fact, it’s already supplanting older and more established products like Macs & iPods as the bread-winner.

The company’s recent string of hit products is just amazing if you remember the old days of Gil Amelio. Whatever happened to him?

This incredible piano performance is from a 14 year old Jennifer Lin who demonstrated her composition talents by improvising a song on the spot after asking a guest to randomly chose 5 notes for her. Wow…

Ran across some funny campaign posters inspired by the original posters by Shepard Fairey…

At 9:47AM this morning, Allison turns exactly 5 years old. She’s such a happy and lovely child. She makes up for her petite in size with her stubbornness. She loves to color, draw and dress up as princesses. She knows how to melt your heart and has her daddy wrapped around her tiny fingers.

Happy birthday kiddo, I love you…

This past Saturday, I had a rare afternoon which I didn’t have to tend to the girls. I took advantage of it, grabbed my camera bag and headed out for a hike at Rancho San Antonio. The rain the night before cooled the afternoon but not enough, fortunately, to leave mud on the trails. The highlight was the view at vista point at “High Meadow” and my encounter with a pack of deers on my way back.

It was a nice way for some quality time alone and decompress…

We were looking at the photo books we made recently in bed last night, when I casually (honest!) mentioned to Suzanne about Canon releasing a new full-frame camera. I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a full-frame awhile, but these babies cost an arm & a leg. So, I was describing the camera to her (with no ulterior motives, of course! ;), when Suzanne said

I don’t care how much it costs, just buy whatever it takes to get good pictures. These photo books are worth it!

Alright, I’m blogging this as proof. Got a license to kill… our budget, baby!

As employees here at Shutterfly, we get to make some of the company photo-related products as freebies. These past two weeks, Suzanne & I have been busy making photo books.

We got the first two this week. Oh my… they are simply amazing products. Suzanne & I are thrilled with them. The printing is National Geographic quality. The background is simply gorgeous (the icons on our web site don’t do them justice at all). The book binding is great. Quality is top-notch (I’m not claiming this just because I’m an employee). These are coffee-table quality books!

It’s a great way to breath new life to photos that normally sit on your hard drive as idle bits. It’s such a more fun and liberating way to organize and make prints. A photo book like these instantly elevate the sentimental values in your photographs. I believe we found the best method for presentation. No more stuffing 4×6’s into a shoe box or a clunky photo album. I highly recommend you checking out Shutterfly’s photo books.

Most of all, the photo books really give me great satisfaction because it really showcases the photos that I took myself!

One thing I like about Chrome is that it’s fast and light. It starts up fast and performs zippier than Firefox. The memory footprint is about 1/3 to half of that uses by Firefox as the screen shot below shows. Both where running with a single tab opened. Not surprising since I have a few of Firefox plugins installed. Firefox started out as a light version of Mozilla, but has gotten fattened up a bit over the years. I’d like to think the bloat is for richer features and extensible plugins. It’s still my browser of choice, but I am finding that I’m firing up Chrome more & more when I want some quick surfing.