Busy weekend – some of the highlights:
- rented a Victorian-era apartment near Alamo Square with a garden
- surprise party for R – 19 adults and six toddlers
- baked goat cheese and roasted red pepper lasagna and home-made pizza for everyone
- had lots of help from many people – decorations, extra food, balloons, drinks – R has many close friends.
- rest of the weekend was shopping at Union Sq, and visiting the California Academy of Sciences
OK, so I’ve been busy over the last few months. Technology never stops evolving, and we must do what we can to keep up.
A month ago, I took a dive – bought a second-hand Mac Mini as our home entertainment center. It came with the prerequisites:
- Silent and unobtrusive
- Runs Boxee and other media centers seamlessly
- Provides a remote control that simply works
- Powerful enough to handle Internet video from various sources like Hulu and Netflix
- Digital video and audio outputs!
Simple as it seems, the other contenders were pretty far off. Some of these included:
- Windows laptops – not many come with a remote control. Boxee was nice-to-have – there are decent alternatives in Windows-land. Also, the cheaper laptops lack digital video outputs.
- Apple TV was almost there, but lacked the computing power to playback Netflix streams.
So I have it set up as my Music server (40GB of MP3s) and Videos live in a portable HDD or streamed live from the Internet.
But what really struck me was it’s speed. I wanted to try out encoding DVDs with the Mac – it blew away my Dell D620 running Windows XP by almost 2x. I was stunned – I thought my Dell was relatively fast.
I don’t have the full hands-on experience yet with Mac OS X, but I can now understand the premium that Apple commands over Windows. In fact, I am even evaluating if a Mac platform might suit my needs (having a Unix-based kernel brings back fond memories)… Ah, but am I cool enough to be a Mac user?
I received a memory upgrade for my notebook today – the corporate IT bumped up its memory from 1GB to 4GB. Yay! Rebooted and checked my system information to see how much faster I can surf work.
Wow, 3.25 GB of RAM! Wait… 3.25? What happened to the other 0.75GB? Did the operating system hijack it?
Oh no, that wasn’t the reason. A quick check on the web revealed the answer: we’ve hit the limits of addressable memory space of a 32-bit microprocessor. Already? Wasn’t it a mere 16 years ago that the Intel 80386 (my first 32-bit computer) came with 1MB of RAM and a 4GB hard disk. Although the system had 4GB of RAM, memory addresses were reserved for devices with direct memory access, such as the video card and some peripherals.
There were workarounds such as PAE and such, but the cold truth was that we had to go to a 64-bit architecture to get access to more memory. Ah, the pace of technological innovation and how far we’ve come since the early days of the PC.
Just returned from a trip to Washington D.C., and finished one of the more interesting books on economics. The authors of Freakonomics disclaim any unifying theme to their book, and the title isn’t much help either, but here’s how I’d summarize it.
The book looks at various social trends such as the large drop in crime rate in the US from the 1980’s to 2000, causes for child success and reexamines some of the causes for these events. It shows that how some commonly-held views are not backed by analytical or statistical data and that better insight may be gleaned from understanding the incentives behind the behaviour or trend.
The man behind these ideas is Steven Levitt, who digs up all kinds of surprising and fascinating truths that makes this such an interesting book. His insight is backed with well-documented end notes and well so because some of his conclusions are quite unconventional (especially around the link between legalized abortion and crime rates).
The book weighs in at only 200 pages and is well worth the time.
Another year has passed, and oh-so-quickly. What happened this year? Let’s see:
- Welcoming Isabelle!
- Having my parents over for four months was great – chance to reconnect and to have Gabriel get to know them better.
- Peak Oil – the high oil and gasoline prices made this hit home. I moved some of my portfolio to energy, but alas…
- Economic crisis – it’s hard to step back from an event when you are observing it first hand. This will be a landmark year in the future, as much as 9/11 was. It will lead to fundamental changes in the way the global economy operates.
- Baking bread – I started with simple loaves in July, but I’ve come a long way since then. Focaccia, baguettes and rustic loaves…. yummy!
What should happen next year?
- I’m looking for more exercise. Cycling to work is great, but not intense enough. One major hike in the weekends will be nice as well as a couple of long lunch-time routines on the bicycle.
- Flossing daily. My wisdom tooth is starting to act up and we shall see how long I can keep it quiet.
- Pursue my professional development – need to keep up with the times. Attend at least three non-Savi events.
- Write more. Write often. My posts have become irregular – once a month doesn’t capture sufficient progress.
I’ll review this next year to see where we are.
It’s interesting to watch a documentary that advocates the free market at the same time when the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression is unfolding.
The documentary is based on a book by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. It tells the story of how competing economic views jostled for the mind-share of governments and the public since World War I. The narrative covers the historical background of our modern economic system. It describes how Keynesian economics reigned during the post-WW II era where state control and regulation of major sectors of the economy were the dominant economic ideas and how the shift to free markets started during the Reagan / Thatcher administrations in the 80s.
The authors have a strong disposition towards the free-market and ideas from Jeffrey Sachs and Milton Friedman are illustrated with case studies. One shortfall of this documentary was that it avoids cases where government intervention especially in numerous East Asian economies played a key role in developing local industry.
What I found tremendously useful was the context in which Commanding Heights lent the current financial crisis. There is nothing inevitable about globalization or free markets – the “borderless world” that I’ve grown with is probably the most important casualty one the dust settles. The biggest risk I believe is that protectionist tendencies may overcompensate as countries try to protect and insulate themselves from these financial risks.
And so my daughter grows…. She’s now almost doubled her birth weight at 11 1/2 pounds, she is at the 60% percentile of her cohort. Her neck is still a little weak, but she’s starting to assert more control over her head.
This might be the last time I’m raising a newborn, so here are a few things I’ve picked up along the way.
- Everyone Passes This Way Once. After ten weeks, she’s no longer a skinny fragile newborn. She’s layered with baby fat and occassionally graces us with a smile (finally!). I look at my 2-year old son, and realize that the memories we made while he was an infant was unique and once the moment passes, it fades into the depths of our memories and lingers perhaps in photos or recollections like this blog.
- Crying Doesn’t Do Permanent Damage. Yes I believe this. Perhaps it lets me keep sane when she’s wailing inconsolably but when I reviewed the video of her birth, nothing was more abnormal than a newborn baby that didn’t cry (she was delivered under a C-section under general anesthetic and was drugged out). As long as she was fed, cleaned and burped, each crying session would end eventually (even at 2 a.m. in the morning)
- Everyone Has Their Own Way of Pacifying. Both my wife and my mum put Isabelle to sleep differently. So do I. And my father. There’s no magic bullet.
- A Parent’s Unconditional Love. The sacrifice of a parent for an infant is probably the closest experience I have of unconditional love. Here is someone who totally depends on two parents who have to provide for her every need, without any reward or acknowledgement (even though she smiles a little more now). Scientists will make the case that genetic conditioning predisposes us to care for our young, but it does not detract from this intensely human experience – to love and to give. There’s no way a child can repay their parent’s sacrifice – it is a gift given, never to be reclaimed. The best I hope for is that my children will give to others as I have given to them.
IK is now two weeks old. She’s been very well behaved so R and I are very thankful but wondering when it will end. She sleeps most of the time, and whimpers when she’s hungry. She sometimes need to be held before sleeping, but will also sleep by herself.
Unlike G, there’s no schedule to strive for – we’re letting IK set her own pace and eating when she’s hungry and sleeping when she’s not. Mummy and Papa are helping where they can – taking G to his play dates and to activities, cooking for dinner and cleaning up. This is not as tumultuous as we had feared.
When G was about this age, he had bouts of colic. We think it was related to our inexperience or inability to burp him and he was often uncomfortable. IK has proved to be totally opposite – she burps without too much coaxing and sometime even by sitting up she will produce a loud belch. Her crying bouts are never inconsolable.
So far, so good – we’re counting our blessings.
Rosanna and I are proud to announce the birth of our baby girl, Isabelle.
She was born on Friday, 20th June, 2008 6.54 am in the morning at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Santa Clara, California. She entered the world weighing 2.87 kg and 48 cm long with a head full of hair and a hungry cry.
A recent article from the Independent was forwarded to me with the headline “Oil shortage a myth, says industry insider“. I was wondering why someone in a prominent position (Richard Pike was the CEO of the Royal Society of Chemists) with little to gain from either supporting or criticizing the oil industry would make such a statement.
Well, a little more investigative work led me to the original article published in the Petroleum Review in June 2006 with a title “Have we underestimated the environmental challenge?” The title seemed like a far cry from the dramatic newspaper headline – I had to find out why.
My interpretation of Dr Pike’s original article was that it made a case for how to account for CO2 sequestration (presumably as a counter to global warming and to meet Kyoto Protocol obligations) – how environmentalists and policy makers must use the larger value (proven + probably) estimates of oil reserves, instead of just the “proven” estimates. The quote “the world is understating the environmental challenge facing generations to come” actually refers to the challenge of actually removing or mitigating the effects of greenhouse gas emissions – and not of producing sufficient oil to meet current demands.
That’s why I found it strange that the Steve Connor (the Science editor of the Independent) picked up on this article and made the connection with Peak Oil, which was not the original intent of the article. Since the article was published in June 2006, oil prices has risen from $63.44 to $135 – it’s more than 100% over two years – so my guess is that there’ll be no shortage of articles trying to explain either (1) why prices are so high and should go higher OR (2) why prices are so high and should collapse.
I don’t think there’s any contradiction with the article’s findings and Peak Oil theory – the problems anticipated by the Peak Oil theory is not one of whether there is sufficient proven or probable reserves but that the production of oil will peak and decline and this prediction is not based on assessments of reserves, but on the amount of oil discovered each year (which peaked in the 1960’s at about 55Gb/year).
The only question is: when is Peak Oil? Latest EIA statistics (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/ipsr/t21.xls ) indicate that world oil production has not increased since 2005 – where the average production plateaued at a little less than 85 mil barrels/day. There is increased public awareness that oil is a finite resource – witness the number of headline stories in the New York Times and bold pronouncements of $200 / barrel and $150 / barrel prices by Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank analysts.
But the unfortunate fact of peak oil is that it can only be recognised after it happens.
