Huffman Coding

Vonage rocks. I now have access to detailed activity of my phone calls:

To: info@hallmarkmortgageservices.com
Subject: Unsolicited telephone call

Ken Huffman

Chris, to challenge an otherwise bored first grader, bought Marissa a math book for home. To encourage her to do the work, Chris promised Marissa a computer game if she finished forty pages in the extracurricular text book.

It came time to pay up this weekend. I took the girls Best Buy and Marissa picked out SeaWorld Adventure Park Tycoon 2.

The girls have been inching towards taking over my desktop machine as their own. And this was another game that required my beefier machine. They now run it, Disney Princess Magical Dress-Up, Brother Bear and Zoo Tycoon 2 on there.

Both SeaWorld and Dress-Up require Administrator rights to run, so I have given two 7-years-olds reign over my machine. This irks me to no end. I felt uneasy enough to backup the system tonight. I hope they don’t figure out how to change my password.

Katie plays the Dress-Up game. You build a doll, picking a body shape, hair, eye and skin color and then you layer on clothes. Just like the old paper dolls without having to resort to messy analog scissors.

Even before she could speak, we have made Katie aware that she was adopted from China. She hasn’t always known what that meant though. When she was four she asked when her hair would turn yellow like mommy’s. We told her it never would and that almost everyone from China had black hair. A few months later she asked at what age her nose would “pop out.” We let her know that, just like most Chinese people, her nose will always be small.

The Dress-Up software allows you to import a digital picture so your daughter can dress up a doll with her own face on it. With the girls gone to bed tonight, I imported Katie’s beautiful China doll face from a recent birthday picture.

This takes a bit of effort as you have to indicate with an oval where the face is on the image. This allows the image to be cropped properly. Then you have to mark where on the face the eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth are. This is allows the software to shade the face to make it look 3D.

The software makes some unfortunate assumptions on the range of real skin colors and facial shading. You can make some crude adjustments to the skin color, but you cannot adjust how much it shades the indicated features.

This is the picture I started with:

Katie Before

After a several attempts, this is what I ended up with (warning: not for the squeamish).

At least she’ll never wish for a Western nose again.

A few minutes before her class is to end, I pull into a parking spot at Katie’s gymnastics building. My phone rings over the car’s audio system and I press the little offhook button at the 8 o’clock position on the steering wheel.

“beeeeep”

Oh no, not again.

It is a fax machine calling my cell phone. Annoyed, I hang up. I recognized the sound immediately as this has happened before. I knew, even before I checked, that the display on my cellphone would show it as UNKNOWN. There is no way to determine the source of the call. I cannot call (or fax) anyone back to tell whoever that my number is not a fax machine. Perhaps in a prior life my cell phone number belonged to a fax machine, but for over two years the number has been mine and the faxes have never gone through. And still they can’t take the hint.

Occasionally, I’ll be so pissed that I’ll beeeeeep back at it with my vocal chords to confuse the machine, but of course it never falls for it. It doesn’t make me feel better either.

But that doesn’t stop the machine from re-trying. Five minutes later the phantom faxer calls again. At least I’m out of the car. I answer and hang up again. I don’t bother letting it go to my voice mail. That would mean letting ring and ring for a half minute, followed by another ring when my voice mail tells me that I missed the call. Then I would have to erase the voice mail message. Been there. Done that.

Back in the car driving Katie home, it calls a third time. Nothing I can do to stop it. Annoying me and using my cell phone minutes to boot.

The faxes come in spurts. I’ll go a few months without a fax call, then I can get a handful in a week. All with caller id: UNKNOWN.

At least I’m awake. In the past, they’ve called at 3 in the morning. Every five minutes.

Grrr.

Today I am 42. Which means I am The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

A friend of Chris’s was kind enough to give me a Media Play gift certificate for fixing her computer. Last night I took Marissa and Katie there to cash it in. After what seemed to be an eternity, they agreed on a Polly Pockets toy. This was after Marissa vetoed Katie’s My Little Pony selection and I vetoed the Baskin Robbin’s Ice Cream Maker.

Then we went to dinner and a movie. Being 7-year-olds, they chose McDonald’s and Ice Princess. (Chris informed later that she never goes to that particular McDonald’s because its PlayPlace is a veritable peri dish for childhood communicable diseases. Good to note for the future.)

On the way home after the movie, the girls and I discussed the merits of traffic lights. Marissa wondered why the chose red, yellow, and green for their colors. She said she would have chosen purple for “Go”. I pointed out that the purple is close in hue to red and that might be confusing, and they probably picked green because is further away on the color wheel from red.

The girls shot a hole in my theory by mentioning that yellow was kinda close to both green and red.

Katie said she was most confused about yellow. It sometimes meant “caution” and sometimes meant “slow”. I tried to expain its true meaning, but Katie interrupted and said, to Marissa,

“when daddy drives, yellow means go very fast.”

According to the Unitarian Jihad Name Generator, my Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Rail Gun of Desirable Mindfulness.

(I had to refresh a few times to get one I liked though.)

Chris and I went out for our anniversary Saturday. After dinner at BD’s Mongolian Grill, we spent our first date in a long time at… Lowe’s and Toys-R-Us. Hey, Chris chose the places and she is such the romantic.

We did end up seeing Fever Pitch which was a much better movie than I expected it to be.

Since the kids were left with the babysitter, we left the minivan in the garage and took my car. Yes, on day 51 of ownership, my wife actually sat in the car.

Her assessment of the car the next day at an extended family get-together: “It’s… ok.”

Success!

So about that “Congratulations on Your Anniversary” card we received…

Shouldn’t it be a plain “Happy Anniversary” card?

Is staying married between your 10th and 11th anniversaries so remarkable nowadays that warrants congratulations? “Whew, you guys made it another year.”

Perhaps there was a reason the card was addressed only to Chris.

[Readers: feel free to leave snide comments regarding my starter marriage twenty years ago.]

We received a “Congratulations on Your Anniversary” card from a friend who moved to Oregon several years ago.

It was addressed only to Chris.

At least wasn’t a condolence card.

Alot of the advice I’ve read on how to blog say that you should pick a topic and stick with it. You are more apt to build a repeat audience when you appear to be an expert and source of valuable information on something, rather than a collection of random thoughts.

Based on historical data, it appears my candidate topics are:

• My wife still hasn’t sat in the family’s sedan
• Intolerance of people who Aren’t Like You sucks
• Rebates suck

Since my wife will sit in my car eventually, I’m figuring that is not a long term blog prospect. Update: The wife of a neighbor was in the car a few days ago, but not Chris yet.

There are alot of blogs on the second topic. Update: Bigotry still sucks.

So I am left I with whining about my latest rebate experiences…

When I filled my rebate form for my notebook mouse, I noticed that hidden in step 2 it said (in 6 point font!): “Acquire any new Laptop Computer from a Microsoft authorized reseller or a participating retailer on or between 2/13/05 and 4/16/05.“.

Grr. So much for that rebate. (In the meantime the web retailer had lowered its price too.)

The one big rebate that I hadn’t received yet was for the cell phone. I wasn’t worried about it because I received an e-mail from the cell phone company on March 30th with the subject “Your Sprint Rebate is Being Processed”. Cool.

Two weeks later, with no rebate check in sight, I followed the web link in the e-mail: “The Terms and Conditions for this offer require a 2-year Advantage Agreement with the activation of your new PCS Phone Number. Out records indicate you have not met that requirement.” Great, the salesman didn’t renew the contract when I bought the phone.

But when I go to another part of Sprint’s website and they tell me that my “PCS Advantage Agreement” expires on 9/19/06. Ahem. It seems the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

So I go to yet another part of their website to click on the “Frequently Asked Questions” link. It gives me a 404.

Then I try their customer support web form. I dutifully enter all my contact information and explain, in the form’s text box, what had happened and that perhaps their records are messed up. When I pressed [Submit], I got a “Your question is more than 500 characters.” Huh? 500 bytes flying across the Internet is nothing. That’s maybe a tenth the size of banner ad on the page. That’s about 75 words. Can every customer service problem be asked in 75 words? Geez.

So I remove some introductory sentences and try again. Still too wordy. I remove the “please”s and “thank you”s and try again. It accepts my shortened 411-character reply. At 2am the following morning (I wonder in what country that employee is working), the problem is fixed. I’ll get my check sometime in May. Yet another rebate successfully hassled. I think.

Meanwhile the price of the phone went down $40.