Huffman Coding

The cheapo databank I handed down to my wife about 8 years ago finally died. She, sensing the inevitable, asked me to get her a PDA. I gave her two options: a basic black and white one or a nicer color one. She wisely chose the better one (nicer than my 2.5 year old one).

It didn’t take more than a few days for me to become envious of it and eventually I requested permission to replace mine as well for my birthday. Mine hadn’t died yet, but I had convinced myself that the few minor nuisances I was having had become major problems. My wife acquiesed.

Of course, for just a little more, I could get an even nicer PDA than the one she chose.

A better man would have shown restraint, but I’m not that good. The nicer one supported WiFi (which I was drooling over). A fellow employee was considering getting a WiFi PDA as well and that didn’t help my self control.

It also meant having to replace the little blue Ethernet router box under my computer desk with another model, but I didn’t care. It is cool stuff!

It came a few days ago. I can now surf the web from my Lay-Z-Boy and post to my blog from the commode. Perhaps I am sharing too much…

Yesterday my Kindergarten girls had a “Tourist” day where they learned about other countries. My wife volunteered to bake five dozen butter cookies, a delicacy Switzerland was supposedly known for. Sure. Whatever. I suppose you aren’t going to convince 5 and 6 year olds to chow down on swiss cheese.

The teacher gave her a recipe a week ahead and Sunday afternoon Chris gave me the corresponding grocery list. After I did the dinner dishes, she started baking. It was an unusual recipe because the sugar and flour were measured in pounds instead of cups. She didn’t have parchment paper, but she was going to forego that. One thing she did forget to put on the list was corn starch. While I would have preferred to just drive back to the grocery store, Chris instructed me to beg one of my accomodating the neighbors for some.

There is a rule of thumb that says house repairs invariably require three trips to the hardware store. Men just accept this. Chris was apparently trying to avoid a return grocery trip for these cookies.

When mixing the cookie ingredients (including the corn starch), it became a gloppy mess instead of a doughy mixture. Way too greasy. Chris had used whole wheat flour, but she and I didn’t think that should matter. The recipe called for tons of butter and very little flour and it showed in the mixture. It didn’t look promising but Chris put the dough on the sheet anyway and hoped for a miracle to occur in the oven.

One did not. The mixture just became pools of brown butter after they were warmed up. Not a surprise, really. Chris then hit the Internet for other butter cookie recipes. Every other one she found had a larger ratio of flour to butter.

I was off to the grocery store for non-wheat flour. Didn’t want to want to take chances with substitute ingredients. While I was there I got parchment paper and corn starch too even though the new recipe didn’t call for either.

The second batch looked more solid. Perhaps too much so. Several of Chris’s disposable decorating bags burst when she squeezed on them to get the cookie dough in little “S” shapes on the sheet. Chris was not having fun.

The second recipe did turn out just fine. Chris put the cookies in a disposable container and sent them off with Katie in the morning.

When the teacher (who had apparently forgotten which parent she doled the task out to) asked who had brought the cookies, Katie didn’t speak up. She was too busy chatting with her best friend. But another boy took credit and so she thanked his mom in front of the class.

Heck, if I had known that some other kid would have claimed responsibility for the cookies I would have suggested to Chris that she just box up the original blobs of grease for Katie to take to school.

It is this year’s zodiac.

We got snapshot in the mail today for our 10th anniversary. It is a headshot of a very young Claire.

Claire's foundling picture

Sometime within the last five years, the United States added another stipulation before it would allow Americans to adopt Chinese girls. To ensure that Americans were adopting true orphans, they required the Chinese government to post a “foundling ad” in the local newspapers for all abandoned children. Only after an ad goes unanswered will it allow the Chinese government to place that child with an American family. This is in case the child was abandoned by one parent without the spouse’s consent.

Last March when we at the orphanage, we asked the director for a copy of Claire’s newspaper clipping. The Director dismissed us saying that they had lost all the early records. The families then asked to be taken the abandonment sites, to which the Director replied that they all were under water. (Fuling is next to the dam-flooded Yangtze river, so it was possible.) At the time, it seemed like her replies were more expedient than accurate.

Recently Chris got in touch with a father who was touring China to research this information for fellow adoptive parents. For a small fee, he would visit the Orphanage and the abandonment site, taking pictures and videos, and search for the foundling ad. To us, even the smallest piece of information may help Claire connect to her beginnings.

To my knowledge, no child has ever been reunited with her birthparent through these ads.

In lieu of a standard birthday party for Katie, we took the family and a few of her friends bowling. We put the bumpers (flexible black plastic drainage pipe) in the gutters to prevent the ball from going there and let the girls have at it. A fellow father and I were in another lane. Since he was being “helped” by his 2 and 3 year old childen, we put bumpers in our gutters as well. My daughters didn’t assist me, but I bowled in the second bumpered lane anyway.

In the little girl’s lane, it was a contest to see who could roll the ball the slowest down the lane. They shared the lightest ball in the place, a bright orange one. Once it didn’t make it all the way to the pins and had to be retrieved. Another time we had to get the staff to retrieve the ball because it wasn’t heavy enough to roll from the back basket to the ball return chute.

Marissa’s shoes were the same size, but one had its sole worn down so much that it was more than a quarter inch lower than her other one.

Meanwhile, I was taking bowling too seriously in my lane. Even though I am a bad bowler, I figured it would be easy to score higher than the other dad who was “toddler-assisted.” I did, but barely. My score, even with bumpers, was anemic 97. No strikes and only one spare. Pathetic. And they isn’t much glory in barely ourscoring a toddler. And taunting a two year old isn’t very rewarding.

When my game was over, I started watching Marissa more closely. Bowling for the first time, with mismatched shoes and the lightest ball in the place that barely made it down the lane, she was in the eighties in the eighth frame. After my hollow victory, I was cheering on my daughter hoping she would outscore me. Then at least someone would have a sense of accomplishment.

It was not to be. Her score was seven shy of mine. Pretty good for a six-year-old, but she lost out on the opportunity to trash talk me.

Today my company HR director just sent out a request for volunteers for the Corporate Challenge bowling tournament. I’ll send my daughter. At least she can have some competition.

I took the girls to see Ella Enchanted this weekend. The Miramax film is based on a Newberry winning novel. Very cool movie, I probably liked it better than my six year olds because it reminded me of The Princess Bride movie. It was kinda Shrek-y too. But I may be the only one who sees the connection because it debuted all the way down in ninth position for the weekend box office. See it with your impressionable youth.

Enough exposition, now for the obligatory cute family anecdote:

As we were coming home from the movie in my car, Marissa noted: “Daddy, you need to undust your car.” Duly noted.

I can tell when Chris was the last person to drive my car. She always puts the armrest up and, because she dislikes my music, she’ll tune the stereo to her radio station. I, when driving her vehicle, will put that car’s armrest down and tune the stereo to NPR. We put up with each other.

The girls hear a wider selection of music when in mommy’s car as I listen to the same CDs over and over. This weekend Katie started singing a catchy song that has heard several times in Chris’s car. Perhaps you’ve heard it, I think it is by Faith Hill. I wasn’t sure of the lyrics, but Katie tells me they are:

It’s the way you love me
It’s a feeling like this
…
This kiss, this kiss. Ron Stoppable.
This kiss, this kiss

I hope Tim McGraw can handle his wife’s lyrical obsession with an underage cartoon character.

My daughter Katie turned 6 yesterday. She loves toy horses. Up until yesterday she only had 22 them. Since Christmas, when she got the pink castle, she has been obsessing over the “My Little Pony” brand. Even though Chris had a handful already wrapped, she went on a late night shopping spree earlier in the week to get some more for her birthday. Chris even signed up for the Pony Points Program to earn more merchandise.

There was definitely an itch that needed to be scratched because Chris was also searching eBay.com for them. She would come up from the computer room with printouts and request that I put bids on them with my account. I’d do her bidding (pun intended) after being told what her desired maximum bid was for each. Of course as soon as even her maximum bid was exceeded, she raise it again.

For the uninformed, the hollow plastic toys sell at Toy-R-Us (NEW!) for $7 to $9 and she was requesting that I put $6 bids on used ones. And tack on excessive shipping charges for eBay. We were competing against collectors for items that Chris was going to give to a 6-year-old. Katie doesn’t care that the purple one was extruded in 1989. Secretly I was hoping to be outbid even as I was placing the bids.

While we were outbid on most (with two going for $13 and $16), we did get two of them from the same seller. Shucks. The next day the seller indicated that she would tack on almost $6 for shipping the 3-ounce toys.

They didn’t arrive in time for Katie’s birthday, so Chris had to settle for giving her a mere nine Little Ponies. The smallest was 3 inches. The largest was 3 feet. Today, the used toys arrived in the mail. They reeked of smoke. It had permeated the plastic so much that even after washing them four times, they still smelled. Even Katie noticed. Chris wanted to notify the seller, but I had visions of a ruined eBay rating because of it and we weren’t going to ask Katie to give up the toy for a refund and sink more money in shipping it back, so I suggested that we just chalk it up as a lesson earned.

So the count stands at 33 toy horses–two of them a little stinky.

After Creative Labs told me I couldn’t play copy protected music files, I wrote back to suggest that they update their website to indicate such.

A different support person responded today and said, contrary to what I was first told, it can play DRM files if I had the latest drivers. Cool. That night, I downloaded two drivers (one for the player, one for the computer) and installed them.

After a painfully slow reboot I plugged in my player and, after a bit of futzing, got it to appear again as a removable hard drive. I dragged the George Shearing track back onto the player. And it, once again, complained that it was copy protected and skipped it. Drats.

I then used the new version of the MediaSource software that came with the player to download the file. That did the trick: deep in the bowels of the player it now knows I have rights to that song and will play it. Just copying the file by hand didn’t enable any rights. Conveniently the player shows up as a portable device within the other music software (MusicMatch Jukebox, Windows Media Player) as well. Yeah, the stars have aligned.

Too bad it is the isn’t the track I originally intended to purchase.

This is a followup to my last posting about buying and being to really use a downloaded music file.

I wrote to MusicMatch telling them that they had mislabeled tracks. They were cool about it. They pulled the album from their inventory and after a few more e-mails refunded my money. Not that $.99 really hurt me, at least others won’t be buying the wrong tracks.

After some after checking, that found that Creative Labs had a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for my audio player. Plainly on that page is the question “Does it support WMA/DRM?” And their answer is a short “Yes, it does.” So I fired off an e-mail saying “so what am I doing wrong?” Their technical support answer was: “As for supporting DRM, it actually meant that it agrees on the Digital Rights Management.” In other words, it agrees NOT TO PLAY IT. Gee, that is mighty misleading FAQ. The support e-mail suggested that I could submit another support question telling them to update their website.

It did seem odd that the support person who sent me the e-mail wouldn’t followup herself to see that website was corrected. Nowhere on their website or on the packaging does it say “will not play copy protected music even if you legally buy it.” I did take her up on her suggestion that I complain and while I was tilting at windmills, I added “is there chance you’ll update the firmware to fix the situation?”

We’ll see what they say, but I suspect I know what the real answer is.