Huffman Coding

This past Memorial Day Sunday, the family went to a drive-in to see Madagascar.  With Claire unable to sit still in a theater for two hours (at least the last time we checked), it is our only option for a family movie.  I’m not partial to drive-ins, but the womenfolk like them.  Last weekend it was Kicking and Screaming which was lame, but Madagascar was pretty good.

Because it was a busy holiday weekend, Chris and I decided to get there an hour early and, without an afternoon nap, Claire fell asleep on the way there.  Perfect timing!  For the rest of the evening, Chris implored everyone to be quiet in hopes that she would sleep through the entire movie.

The spot we chose had a clear view of the screen.  As usual, we parked in backward and opened up the rear lift gate so the girls, lying on blankets on the flat minivan floor, could see.  We were on folding chairs in front of the bumper.  The first space between our van and the screen was unoccupied.  As the parking lot filled up, the spot remained unoccupied because it was little skinnier than most and hard to turn into, but as the evening wore on, more and more vehicles were tempted by it.  A car or two pulled in, but only to continue pulling through.

But a few minutes before previews started, a minivan pulled in the spot and parked.  The van obstructed our view of the bottom half of the screen.  With their tailgate up it was sure to block even more of the screen.  Chris, apparently unfazed by not being able to see a movie the family paid to see, deemed it my responsibility to raise a fuss and get the newly arriving van to move.

Now I hate confrontations with strangers.  I try to avoid them like the plague.  (Interestingly, I don’t mind getting snippy with friends.)   I figured that if I made a fuss, then one (or two) families are likely to have a bad evening.  And besides, I really didn’t have any reason to tell them they couldn’t take the spot.  It’s a free country after all (at least until the government deems you a “person of interest”), so I went looking for another spot to move our van to.

As luck would have it, there was a spot the next row back.  When told Chris that I had found a spot, she was less than enthused because we were already settled, but she allowed me to move the minivan with only a modicum of grumbling.  We dropped the lift gate with the girls still on the van floor and I managed to maneuver to the new spot, another skinny one, after a few zig-zags.  The girls giggled as they rolled around in the back as the car moved.  We raised the trunk and after a couple of trips back to the original spot to pick up the folding chairs and junk food we were once again settled.  Claire remained fast asleep in her car seat.  Score!  I was relieved that I was able to solve the issue without having to annoy any of my fellow moviegoers.

But for the evening’s vicissitudes, I earned no Karma…

A woman from a vehicle parked behind my new location, now decided to confront me.  She insisted that I lower my lift gate so she could see.  I declined to share with her the irony of the situation and told her I would try to see what I could do.

I had a short bungee cord in the trunk for tying down Claire’s stroller.  I hooked one end of it over the inside lift gate handle but found nothing to attach the other end to.  It was too short for everything but my folding chair.  If I sat down and didn’t move my chair, we’d be set.

At least until her husband stopped by and said that wasn’t good enough.  He said that security would stop by shortly and tell me to lower it more.  I knew it to be pure BS as over half of the vehicles in my row were minivans and most of them had their lift gate up much higher than mine.  But I had tried my best to be accommodating, so I wasn’t feeling guilty.  My neighbors understood my predicament.  The guy on Chris’s side, with his family in the back of a pickup truck, saw me flummoxed by my too-short bungee cord and offered me a cam buckle tie-down strap.  With one end hooked over the lift gate door handle and the other hooked over the rear window latch, I was able to winch down the trunk until it was a few inches above Chris’s head as she sat in the folding chair.  Low enough for the highest part of the curved trunk to be well below the roofline of the van.  Very cocoon-like.

It was enough to keep the peace; they didn’t bug me again.  Just in case, I will be going to Sears (now that I know what that kind of strap is called) before our next drive-in movie night.

We have bazillions of friends who have adopted from China, but we only know a handful (ok two handfuls) of Columbus families with kids from Vietnam.  A few of the families decided to meet for lunch Saturday at the Asian Festival.   Unfortunately the various family schedules didn’t overlap that well, so we each ate on our own.  The girls and I did a lap around the food court and nothing appealed to them, so Chris and I had Phad Thai while the girls had slushees.  Chris visited some vendor booths with cheap Asian imports (like Walmart wouldn’t do) and, to appease the bored girls, she got a marionette puppy and tiger.

The impetus for meeting at the Asian Festival was that our Vietnam guide, G.T. Le, was going to be there with a booth for his Vietnamese Orphans Relief Fund.  Since we adopted Marissa, Vietnam politicians have closed the door to American adoptions and G.T., without adoptions to facilitate, lost his job at our agency.  In the meantime, he has started VORF to aid some of orphans in Danang.  And if it helps him at his new adoption agency when the adoptions resume, that doesn’t hurt either.

We took Marissa to see G.T. at his booth and explained to her that he was the one who helped us adopt her.  Marissa, who can be obstinate at times, was especially so.  She wouldn’t stand beside him for a picture or even acknowledge him.  In fact she would always stay on the side of me that was opposite of G.T..  Madison, one of Marissa’s orphanage mates, was there at the same time and she was in G.T. arms for a picture.  Still nothing would convince Marissa to be cordial.  G.T. can be a little gruff, so I asked her if she was scared of him, and she said no.  She said she just wanted to go home.

When we got home, Chris mentioned that Madison, too, was initially reluctant to meet G.T.  But she was a little more forthcoming to her parents about her feelings: she didn’t want Mr. Le to take her back to Vietnam.

When I was in diapers (in my pre-blogging days), they were cloth. My girls never had an option, disposables are too convenient. They can absorb a ton nowadays and still feel pretty dry. And that is the problem. There is no motivation for toddlers to toilet train themselves. Slowly over the years, the average age for toilet training has gotten older.

Three-year-old Claire is now in size 5 diapers; that’s for 26 to 40 pounds. (I believe that refers to the baby’s weight, but I have not tested that assumption.) That is typically the size that toddler’s age out of diapers.

Claire LOVES Dora the Explorer. And last time Chris went to the store, she got Dora the Explorer diapers. Big five inch picture of Dora on the front of them. Claire has been eyeing the package each time she gets out of the bathtub, but we’re still working our way through the Sesame Street package. Claire was really looking forward to urinating on her favorite animated friend, so we took the package to Grandma’s when she spent a few days there this past week.

The Dora the Explorer diapers aren’t your run-of-the-mill diapers. They are Pamper’s brand new “Feel ‘n Learn“(tm) line. And what is the amazing new breakthrough? When they are wet, they actually FEEL wet. I kid you not. They have a have “Wet Sensation Liner”(tm) that stays wet against the kid’s crotch. And this is considered an advancement!

But there is one feature they didn’t advertise on the packaging. At grandma’s, those diapers were the only ones around, so that’s what Claire wore at night. In the interest of full disclosure I think the tag should be:

“Feel ‘n Learn: now with a Diaper Rash Inducing Strip(tm)”

I have a subscription to the Java Developers Journal. Years ago (pre-tech bust), when they were trying to build a subscriber base for advertisers, they gave away subscriptions to anyone who was willing to fill out full page profile questionnaire at JavaOne.

In the beginning it wasn’t that good, but it quicky became the Java magazine with the largest subscriber base because it was FREE.

A couple of years ago, the glossy magazine was wrapped in a white construction paper cover. The inside of the cover was an updated full page questionnaire. The outside urged me, in a huge font, to update my profile to continue receiving the magazine free:

Interestingly enough, that did not instill panic in me and I didn’t bother filling out the form. At the bottom was the URL to renew online if you didn’t want to mail in the cover, but both forms wanted my e-mail address and I didn’t want to give it to them.

The following month, I received the same dire warning that that month’s issue was going to be my last. And for the past two years or so I’ve gotten “!THIS IS YOUR LAST ISSUE!” on every issue.

For quite some time now the magazine has been $69.99 (ouch!) a year for subscribers who weren’t grandfathered in. Even so, it seems that insisting to its readers that they had just received the last issue of an expensive magazine wasn’t working for them, so the white paper cover warning, still in a huge font, was reworded last month:

Although they had stopped lying about it being my last issue, I still didn’t bother renewing.

And this month? No paper cover at all. They have given up on getting responses from people like me. The URL to renew online now yields a “404 Not Found.” Apparently you cannot renew your subscription for free anymore.

Will they drop me? Perhaps. Will I fork over $69.99 a year for it? No way. I’m guessing their subscriber base (and advertiser revenue) will plummet if they stop giving away the magazine.

My apathy has got them exactly where I want them.

If only I cared. :-)

Mom, you can skip this post… It is all geek talk.

It is only a matter of time before I hand my four year old computer down to my kids. Their nine year old computer doesn’t run the games they want to play. Chris and I seem to get along just fine with the new laptop, so we may not need to replace the oldest computer when it dies. (Although it is less likely to spontaneously die because they rarely use it anymore.)

Right now we have all our files on the desktop machine and share them over the network, but I am getting the willies trusting my Quicken data to my 7-year-old system administrators when they take over the machine.

The current object of my affection: Netgear’s Storage Center. Plop in some [mirrored!] IDE drives and my data is not subject to the vicissitudes of first graders.

As far as I can tell the network drive does not implement NFS, SMB or any other standard network mount protocol. It appears to use a proprietary UDP-based protocol from Zetera. UDP probably makes the drive pretty fast for streaming data, but it also means it requires special drivers on the client machines. Zetera says drivers are coming for Linux. We’ll see.

Because I know the life of my readership is so incomplete without hearing about my hassles with rebates, I though I’d post my sixth message on the topic.

When I last prodded Sprint PCS about my cell phone rebate, they promised that they would mail me the $150 rebate within 30 days. Since that was more than 30 days ago, I e-mailed them again. It has like pulling teeth with them. They now tell me that I should wait another 20 days. We are approaching 60 days total without reimbursement.

Speaking of that 60 days, one of the conditions of getting the phone rebate was that I had to sign up for their useless and overpriced “Vision” web package. This wasn’t a problem because they only required that I sign up for it (there was no minimum contract length) and it was free to try for the first two months. As I expected, I barely used the service: I think I looked up a movie time once at a restaurant because I was too lazy to go to the car and grab the newspaper. So with my free period coming to an end, I called to cancel it.

Canceling was pretty painless, but right after the customer service guy did what I asked, he offered me the roadside assistance package instead free for two months for being a good customer. When I asked him whether this would be another service I would have to remember to cancel within 60 days, he fessed up and admitted I would have to. I pulled the plug right then and there on the temporarily free add ons. (Besides, I have roadside assistance through my car manufacturer and my wife has AAA. The former is free and the latter is cheaper than Sprint’s package.)

I’m sure Sprint does this so they can make a mint off of customers who are too lazy or unsuspecting to call up and cancel. I think it is sad that a customer has to stay on top the relationship with a utility company to avoid getting taken.

After I switched from SBC to Vonage for my landline phone service, I immediately started getting flyers from SBC for cheaper phone service if I switched back. Perhaps if I had been offered these rates (still more expensive than Vonage) earlier then I might not have left them. But again, why bother charging all your customers the same fair rate when you can make a mint by charging your unsuspecting customers more.

And now the SBC telemarketers are calling in an attempt to get me back. They are using up my monthly Vonage minutes in the process. It is a winning combination: charge more for your service and annoy me when I leave.

Much to my chagrin, Chris cancelled cable service two months ago. Bye, bye Daily Show. (We still have broadband, thank $DEITY.) When she called in March, the Time Warner customer service guy offered to lower our bill by $9 a month if she kept cable. While that would have tempted me, it was no dice with Chris. (We now have only five broadcast network channels, three of them staticky.)

Yet another case of charging the customer extra until he’s onto you.

My standard lunchtime routine is to eat 20 crackers and an apple at my desk while surfing a little. Sad, I know.

But today I had a second lunchtime option: Play soccer with my co-workers. They are all about half my age, and when I play with them, I feel even older. So that wasn’t too appealling.

But today I had a third lunchtime option: Go to my standing Wednesday lunch with my former co-worker cronies. To me, time is never wasted when it is spent in good conversation with friends. Also, they are the only ones to read this blog regularly. Although I don’t know why, we often end up talking about body fluids. So that looked like a good option.

But today I had a fourth lunchtime option: Go biking. It was a really nice day out and I didn’t want to turn down the opportunity to ride even for just an hour. I am also starting to panic because GOBA is about a month away and I’ve only been on my bike three times this year.

So which option did I go with?

Option five: Picking up Katie up at elementary school. She had thrown up and had a temperature so the school nurse called. With Chris at work downtown, I was closer to the school. I took Katie home and waited for Chris to come home.

The sacrifices a father must make. (And Chris doesn’t even read my blog.)