Huffman Coding

My web host keeps usage statistics for my little website. It has oodles of information broken down by month, day, hour, etc.

It tallies which of my web pages are hit the most: Usually it is my game or this blog. No surprise there.

It tallies the domain where they are coming from. I get alot of users from Canada (family) and Finland (I assume the game). A few months ago there were alot of game players from Pakistan, but they seem to have petered off. Or moved to Finland. There are stats on which browser and operating system they are running too.

But the most interesting statistic is the website that they came from. Most people have either bookmarked this blog (or are playing the game), but there are links from other web pages. A chunk of the links are from search engine results. People are reaching me by searching for “Huffman algorithm,” “China adoption,” and “French military game.”

There are links from other bloggers too. Some high schooler apparently searched for “cute baby girls” then embedded a link to a picture of Katie in one of her blog entries. My usage temporarily spiked because, unlike my blog, she has a following.

I am in at least one other‘s blogroll. I feel compelled to subscribe to the blog of anyone who admits publicly that they read mine. I also perused the other bloggers that hold his interest. And so I am now reading a blog dedicated solely to an Intro to Java course some college student is taking. I am kibitzing too. Forgive me: it reminds me of my days at Ohio State.

This friends-of-friends investigation also lead me to Dooce. She is a former web designer who is now a stay at home mom. She is a riot and as such, she has much more of a following than the rest of us posers. Today she (and others) were on an NPR segment talking about how they were fired for blogging to the world about their jobs.

Perhaps I should have known this yesterday.

Three and half years ago, I took a business trip to Greece. Normally I don’t mind travelling, but this was a trip right out of a travel book by Kafka. I was subject to the whims of a clueless, boorish, duplicitous salesman for four weeks.

Three weeks into my absence, my (then) 3-year-old remarked to my overworked wife: “Daddy’s not coming home is he?”

The only thing that preserved my sanity was a daily missive to my co-workers back home to blow off steam. With each one I vented on the sub-optimal state of things and as the month progressed it got circulated to a wider audience. I suppose it was a precursor to this blog. Angst and all.

When I started veering into non-work related topics (like Athenian taxis), my project manager requested that I only sent the e-mail updates to him. At least until the CEO complained that he no longer got the unvarnished scoop.

That particular development opportunity turned out to be a boondoggle and while I’ve gone onto to more productive pursuits, I still wince when I am reminded of it.

I was gone so long that I was issued a corporate American Express to cover my expenses. Eventually my company realized my time was better spent in the office programming, so I now travel much less and the card was cancelled within the year.

This weekend I got a letter from the LiPuma Settlement Administrator. Evidently Edward LiPuma, an American Express cardholder, sued the company because they did not accurately disclose their fees for converting foreign purchases into U.S. currency. Apparently Turkish purchases were remarkably overcharged due its devaluation years ago.

Now I don’t know how much of a world traveller Eddie was, but for just that month I racked up $3600 in foreign expenses. I’m guessing that due to the “Alleged Rounding Damages” I was overcharged about $30 in fees. The total settlement for cardholders is for about $75M.

If my refund ever comes, I think I’ll take take my wife out to dinner.

Probably not Greek though.

Marissa’s birthday was Friday. Grandma made chocolate cupcakes and Chris took them into school for her fellow first-graders. Unfortunately her classmates had to celebrate without her because she had pnemonia and had to stay home herself.

Apparently she opened her presents shortly after I left for work. At 9 o’clock, Marissa calls me at work to request that I help her install her Zoo Tycoon 2 program on my PC right then. Marissa is adept at installing programs on her own older PC, but this program requires her parent’s beefier machine and I have no plans to make her an administrator on the newer box. Heck, I reluctantly made my wife an administrator so she could use the scanner. I told Marissa I would install it when I got home. She had to cool her jets.

It was bath night for the girls. And because all three of them don’t fit in the bathtub at the same time anymore, it was too late to install the software after the multiple bathtub cycles. Last thing I wanted to do was to install a program for her then tell her to go to bed. She had to cool her jets again.

So at 6:50am Saturday, Marissa appears at my bedside to request computer support. Not wanting to put her off again, I installed the program and she went to town. Daddy went back to bed.

She and her sister played the game pretty much non-stop all Saturday while I enjoyed running to the hardware store and cleaning out clogged sinks. By Sunday noon, I was requesting time on the main computer from Marissa. I needed to pay the bills. Reluctantly she acquiesced after lunch.

Expecting it to be a five minute process, Marissa kept on asking when I would be done. As I was doing alot of year-end stuff in Quicken, Marissa was disappointed to hear it was going to be all afternoon. I mean really disappointed. She was in tears. She had to cool her jets again. So unfair! I reminded her of all the other games that she just got for Christmas that do play just fine on her old computer, but to her they paled in comparison to Zoo Tycoon 2. She did feel better after I mentioned that I was going to work Monday and she was staying home for MLK day and could use the computer all day.

Around dinnertime, I completed my bill paying and relinquished the main computer. Marissa’s grin went from ear to ear. I could put off my recreational blogging/surfing until after the girls went to bed while I watched some mindless soap. But just as the program starts, my wife comes out of the bedroom with the laptop. She had work to do. It took her all evening.

I had to cool my jets. So unfair!

Grandma made a little felt, tooth-shaped pillow for the girls. It had a 3-centimeter square pocket for baby teeth. Marissa put her newly lost baby tooth in the pocket and placed the hand-sized pillow on the top of her headboard. About an hour after the girls went to bed, I snuck a Sacagawea dollar in its pocket. The perfect size for the gold coin I had gotten from the bank. I felt pretty smug for having thought of it too. Surely Marissa would be impressed with the special coin even if my wife wasn’t.

Marissa was sound asleep.  Chris had gone to bed too.  Chris eventually wanted to put the tooth in a scrapbook, so she wanted me to leave the tooth in the pillow so she could request it from Marissa in the morning. This seemed against STFP (Standard Tooth Fairy Protocol), but I agreed.  Marissa would catch on if it appeared in a photo album after the Tooth Fairy had supposedly taken it.

About a half hour after placement, Marissa woke up and appeared at the top of the stairs.  I was expecting her to announce that the Tooth Fairy had already visited, but rather she asked whether the middle of the night had passed.  I said no and instructed her to go back to bed.  I didn’t put much thought into her query at the time.

At 6:50 the next morning, Marissa appeared at our bedside and announced that the Tooth Fairy had not made a visit.  Without moving, Chris drolly remarked, “What do you think about that, Daddy?”  I took the hint and investigated.  I dragged myself to Marissa’s room and turned on the light.  Marissa duly noted that the tooth was still present and there was no coin.  I briefly thought that perhaps my 6-year-old was trying to scam the system and get money from the Fairy until the tooth had exhausted its fiduciary potential.

I scanned the headboard several times and tossed the pillows overboard.  I felt the bed sheets and carpet underneath.  With a puzzled grimace, I told Marissa that perhaps the Tooth Fairy hadn’t visited.  I was denying my own efforts.

Finally the coin was revealed during the third pass of my hand over the pink floor.  With mock amazement I showed Marissa the special coin that the Tooth Fairy had left her–hoping for sense of wonder from her in return.  Nonplussed as she dropped it into her piggy bank, Marissa remarked, “Why didn’t she just give me a regular dollar?”

Don’t read this if you are under 10 years old.

Christmas was 18 days ago. My wife got me a few board games for Christmas. They were greatly appreciated because I play games with my guy friends every month. We don’t play poker in our undershirts while scratching ourselves; we don’t play charades and act out clues; we play analytical games that come with twenty page instruction manuals and game cards that are written in German. We carefully put game pieces in little ziplock bags to keep them pristine after we play. No one, except the four of us who play, understands why we do any of this.

So when my wife gave me two games that we actually might play on one of those weeknights, I was impressed. You can’t exactly get them at Walmart or Toy-R-Us.

And I did something no husband should ever do. I asked her who helped her pick the gifts out. She was incredulous. How dare I assume that she couldn’t pick them out by herself.

Uh, oh.

Attempting to claw out of hot water, I indicated that I merely wanted the opportunity to thank one of my fellow gamers for assisting her with her greatly appreciated gesture. A few awkward moments later she admitted that she had sought assistance.

Chris did pretty well at picking out her own gifts for me to pretend to give to her. The girls got stuff from Santa that they had been looking forward to. Marissa’s birthday is in mid-January and she started counting down the days soon after Christmas. Three weeks is an excruciatingly long interval between gifts for a 6-year-old.

Thank goodness she lost her first baby tooth today. Another opportunity for STUFF!

Her big tooth had already come in on the bottom and was pushing the little one out further and further. She had two rows of teeth. For the past few days, Chris had been suggesting that it needed to be pulled out. This was a terrifying prospect to Marissa so I suggested we let nature run its course.

It had been loose for weeks and last Monday, when the girls had gone back to school and I still had one more day of time off, I went to the bank and requested dollar bill coins. Something I’m pretty sure Marissa hasn’t seen. The male teller asked if I wanted silver Susan B. Anthony coins or gold Sacagawea ones. When I said “I think the Tooth Fairy prefers gold,” the female teller in the adjacent window perked up and the first teller referred me to her.

Since I had a $5 bill, I requested five coins and the teller looked over her stash of coins and thoughtfully picked out the shiniest ones. My 2-year-old in tow was obvious to the transaction.

That evening I told Chris that I was prepared for Marissa’s rite of passage… And Chris asked who had helped me with the idea to get the coins.

I was incredulous.

Some endeavors are worth pursuing even if they are time consuming and difficult.

Others are an colossal waste of time.

There is a pastime called Google Whacking where you try to search google.com with exactly two words and try to get exactly one result. With Google’s indexing of 8 billion web pages, it is pretty difficult. You have to use real words and you cannot use quotes because that would be cheating. Even searching for oddball words like turgid schnitzel results in way too many hits.

Over the holidays Scarlett Johansson Googlewhacked on the Today show (see December 27th), so it must be socially acceptable to do in public. It must have been a slow newsday.

Because my main “time waster” website was undergoing weekend maintenance, I killed a few minutes whacking. I thought I found a winning combination but it turned out to be a false alarm because I had misspelled the second word. The website found was not in English.

But I did get lucky after 10 minutes and here is the proof:

Google-Whacked

I can now retire.

My Christmas HP computer is one hot laptop. Physical temperature hot. The CPU must be on the bottom left side because that is where the fan and vents are and where the heat comes from. After about an hour it gets almost to hot to use on top of a lap. I’ve got a TV tray with legs, but at a foot tall it is not at the appropriate height to use while seated.

I thought about getting a nice laptop cart but those are too bulky to store when not in use.

While I was flipping channels over the holidays, I saw an ad for a Table-Mate II on some channel I never watch. This thing folds flat for under a bed or sofa. It is half the price of the other cart, but its cheapness shows. It is three bent metal tubes and a plastic tray. It looks likes you could buy the thing for about $10 at Big Lots. Except you can’t. It appears you can only get it from the factory for three times as much plus shipping. I wasn’t convinced.

But over at OfficeMax, you can get a LapDesk. I like it better, because it appears to be a little more thought out, but we’re still talking about a slab of plastic. And at the same price, this doesn’t even include the legs. I wasn’t sold on this either.

Until I find something better, I’ll just accept a warm lap and adopt my kids.