Merry Christmas!
Here's Justin's latest trick — drinking milk while holding the bottle on his own. Doesn't he look sassy with his legs crossed like that?!
Today for lunch we had a small gathering at Pattra's apartment. For that, I baked a pumpkin pie and we also brought over some Jenny-Os turkey bacon and a bottle of wine (I know, that's a strange combination!). We had dinner at Karen & John Lam's apartment. For that, I baked a gammon smoked ham (4 pound, boneless). Yep, lately I've certainly been in the cooking mood.
On Christmas Eve, I had lunch at Kublai's with John & Gloria Young who are visiting from New York. They also came by our apartment to see little Justin. In the evening, we had a nice dinner at Rob & Janey Ho's apartment in Happy Valley.
Oh, I thought I'd also share that I'm really getting into drinking wine. My current favorite is Irvine's Eden Crest Merlot from Eden Valley in Australia.
Right now, the local temperature is just starting to dip down to the forecasted 9- to 12-degrees Celsius (48- to 54-degrees Fahrenheit). Our livingroom window is starting to fog up! We'll no doubt be bringing out our fan heaters tonight!
We enjoy another public holiday tomorrow (26th, boxing day) and the following day (Friday), Gwen and I have taken annual leave so we have a nice, long weekend ahead of us — woohoo!
Last night was the first night ever that Justin slept the whole night through — from 7pm to 6:30am! We started "sleep training" Justin last Friday. Sleep training basically involves letting him cry until he falls back to sleep on his own.
That first night he cried for around an hour at about 11:30pm and then for about 15 minutes a couple of times after that, probably at around 1am and then 3am. We went "cold turkey", making sure he didn't see us while he was crying. Of course, we naturally wanted to go in and comfort him as we had done night after night ever since he was born but we knew that if we did that, he'd cry and yell even more hysterically and chances are we'd then end up picking him up (he was conditioned to that). I think it helped that during that first hour of crying, I was in our dining room and so his cries were muted. Now, whenever Gwen and I are sleeping in bed (right next to his crib), when he cries we hide under our blanket so he doesn't see us. For us, ensuring that he doesn't see us in the middle of the night has been key. Thankfully, the nights following that first night, he has cried with less frequency and duration (not more than 15 minutes). We'll have to see if he can keep this up... We've got our fingers crossed!
We also note that since we started the sleep training, his appetite in the mornings has been excellent — probably because he's not getting breast fed anymore during the night.
Justin will be exactly 9 months old tomorrow!
Apple, PLEASE get rid of Column View in OS X's Open/Save dialog boxes SOON! Users would be able to work much more efficiently — type to jump to specific file and no horizontal scrolling — if the old List View were brought back in the Open/Save dialog boxes. I'm afraid that even with Default Folder X installed, using OS X's Open/Save dialog boxes are just incredibly painful.
A colleague on a Windows 98 machine had trouble logging into Admango.com (a subscription-based monitoring service for Hong Kong advertising media). She'd enter her username and password but after clicking the (Javascript) Submit button nothing would happen. A few times Internet Explorer's status (bottom left corner of window) would show the form data being submitted to "do_login.asp" but it would get stuck at that. She had no trouble accessing other sites or any local network resources such as servers or printers. She could also use her username and password on other PCs without a problem.
Initially, I figured Javascript might have been disabled (or somehow messed up) so I reset Internet Explorer's Security settings to their default values (Medium level) and examined the values. I also deleted all browser cookies and temporary Internet files. This did not resolve the issue so I upgraded Internet Explorer from 5.5 SP1 to 6.0 SP1. Problem was still there. Another strange circumstance was that she was able to log in instantly using Admango's version 1.0 Login screen. With Admango's version 2.5 beta Login she'd get an "Invalid Login Name, Password, And/Or Insufficient Priveleges" error. This was consistent: 1.0 Login = success, 2.0 Login = no response, 2.5 beta Login = error.
At that point I began to suspect that her network interface card (NIC) might be the culprit. I found out that her NIC was an old Compaq 10Mbps ISA-type NIC. I swapped in a 3Com 10/100Mbps PCI NIC and that did the trick!
So the next time you experience any strange network problems, don't rule out a bad NIC as being the culprit. Other hardware such as memory and even the power supply can cause what would seem to be software issues as well. Accordingly, if you're building your own PC, don't skimp on the motherboard (MSI is good), power supply (SPI is good even though their site sucks), memory, and NIC (3Com is good). But then again, these days, why build your own when you can just buy a DELL with a nice 3-year warranty?
Justin's a wonderful baby BUT...! Well, the only thing we're still struggling at with him is his nighttime sleeping habits. He's now 1 week shy of 9 months but he still wakes up 2 to 3 times every night crying and yelling his heart out until mommy puts him on her breast. He's addicted to her breast and he can't sleep unless he's pacified by her breast (he does drink breast milk while he's there)! This means mommy gets only a little over 3 hours of sleep every night and of course that's very exhausting for a mommy who's working fulltime! Yes, our little Justin is conditioned to be this way and we've got to break that.
We've heard and read that the right thing to do is to let him cry. So we've tried and one night we even managed to "ignore" his crying for 25 minutes (seemed like an hour!) but of course it was so agonizing for us we gave in and picked him up. We know, this is making it worse because it's teaching him that if he cries and yells loud and long enough, he'll get what he wants. He also doesn't like any pacifiers — won't even let you stick it in his mouth! We do have him on a strict daytime napping schedule and bedtime routine but this has not proven any help at night.
We plan to try the Ferber method very soon.
A very relevant CNN.com article, When sleeping like a baby is just a dream, just popped into my Inbox as part of today's "CNN AM QuickNews" daily email newsletter — very timely!
Here's a shot of Justin just after his bath this past Wednesday.
For a work project, we wanted to have our staff in Asia fill out a Web-based survey and then have a "survey engine" automatically record and tally up all the answers and display the results using bar charts on-the-fly.
So I did many hours of research, sifting through the more than 150 Perl- and PHP-based scripts in the Polls and Voting category at HotScripts.com. Many sounded good but had dead links. Many were missing key features we needed, like the ability to accept text (e.g. name, email, and comments) and an "Other" answer text field (in addition to radio, checkbox, multiple choice, and true/false type answers). I also wanted one that prevented multiple submissions by using browser cookies (not by just IP which I think would be problematic for those behind firewalls). It also had to be free or cheap and not require a backend database (e.g. MySQL) which would make things complicated and be overkill.
EventHandler by the funny-sounding UbiDog Productions turned out to be the star. Instructions and documentation are excellent but I still managed to run into problems getting everything to work. Before I went to bed last night, I posted my problem on UbiDog's online support forum and this morning I got a helpful reply. Incredible — excellent free support for free software! The details of my fix are in the forum, but basically, I got the scripts working this morning.
By this evening, I had fully configured the system, created and fine-tuned our survey, did multiple tests, and customized the template file which defines the design and layout of the pages. So now I have a functionally-rich Web survey system that looks very professional and is free. UbiDog has a US$100 "Pro" version which adds a TON of additional features. I'm hoping to convince our management to purchase the Pro license — the UbiDog folks certainly deserve it! Heck, the time that EventHandler saves us from having to manually tally up and tabulate the answers is worth several times the price.
In short, I highly recommend EventHandler for conducting online surveys. I'm quite sure it's best in its class.
I hadn't seen my dad in 4 and a half years (!) but Dad finally made a trip over to Hong Kong to visit. Gwen and I took a week off from work and so from November 22 to 29 we all had a wonderful time — eating, drinking, shopping, listening to jazz music, reminiscing about old times, and just hanging out, watching DVDs at home. This was the first time my dad got to meet his first grandchild in person so our time together was especially meaningful. I now refer to my dad as "Gung-Gung Tom", meaning "Grandfather Tom" in Cantonese. "Gung-Gung" actually refers to the grandfather on the mom's side and "Yeh-Yeh", grandfather on the dad's side so I should actually be using "Yeh-Yeh Tom" (or I think actually "Tom Yeh-Yeh"). When I was a kid though, I called both my grandfathers "Gung-Gung" and so that's why Gung-Gung Tom it is!
Check out the 61 new photos that recorded our fun times together!
Just got a DELL Latitude X200 ultra-portable notebook computer for a new colleague. I especially like that the X200 weighs only 1.38kg (2.9 pounds), is only 0.8-inches thick, and comes with the "Media Base" docking station — all for only HK$13,800 (~US$1,770). The dock concept is fantastic because it eliminates having to constanly plug in and disconnect cables. Right now with my Apple PowerBook G4, twice a day — at home and office — I have to plug in at least 2 cables (power and USB mouse) and up to 5 (Ethernet cable, USB cable for my Canon PowerShot G1 camera, and FireWire cable for external hard disks). (As an aside: More digital camera manufacturers should use a dock, like Kodak's EasyShare digital cameras. Canon, please!...) Docking and undocking the X200 to the Media Base was a snap too (much simpler and more reliable than the mechanism used on the old DIGITAL HiNote Ultra notebooks I had used in the past).
Other specs:
I REALLY wish Apple had ultraportable notebooks like this on offer; if they did they'd no doubt sell like hotcakes!