Roblog

Amanda and Elena's 7th birthday is coming up, and we're going to have a smaller event this time. They can invite 5 friends each over to our house for a small party. Donna and I thought it would be neat to make it a science-themed party. I don't think the girls care as long as there's cake and ice cream.

So she and I are brainstorming what to do during the party. A few ideas we've thought of are making "magic muck" (a non-newtonian liquid that stiffens when you squeeze it), "wave in a bottle", a model volcano (with baking soda and vinegar), and "states of matter" which would culminate in making homemade ice cream in insulated bags. I also wanted to do something with dry ice, since it looks so neat.

But dry ice is too dangerous to let a bunch of 7-year-olds play with it, so that won't be as interactive. That is not ideal, but then I started thinking that we could other neat things that were more demonstrations than participatory activities, if we went down that road:
- capturing different gasses and see how they react to a flame: hydrogen & oxygen via electrolysis, carbon dioxide from the dry ice, and regular air
- blowing a up a balloon with carbon dioxide (dry ice in water, and baking soda and vinegar) and oxygen (hydrogen peroxide + a catalyst)
- making a foam fountain via hydrogen peroxide

I'd want to try these out this weekend before I tried them in front of a bunch of 7-year-olds, but I think I could make it pretty fun for the group, even when they couldn't help with much of it.

Even if we decide not to do these at the party, I think I'm going to have to try the foam fountain anyway, just because it looks so neat.

I have always been unusually skinny. In fact, I've sometimes been on the "unhealthy" side of the chart when I compare my weight and height, even though for my body type I've never felt like I've been too underweight. My dad had mentioned a few times that once he hit the age of "x", he started putting on weight. This magical age "x" has changed every few years as I pass it and don't gain any weight.

But now that I've passed 40, it seems like perhaps I am starting to gain a little weight. For the longest time, I was just about at 145 lbs. Now, however, my weight is more consistently 150. And yesterday, wearing just a t-shirt and pajama pants, the scale reported my weight as 155. 155?!?

I have never had to deny myself any food craving I've had, but if my weight continues to climb, I will have to start doing so. I have no idea how easy or hard that will be for me. I almost always have an evening snack before I go to bed. I think I could stop doing that without much difficulty - if I have to. Other behaviour modifications (like consistent exercise) might not be so easy.

So I think to start, I'll try to weigh myself consistently and chart my weight. Donna models the right way to do this (without the data collection and Excel charting). If 155 is just a blip, or even if that's my new stable weight, I doubt I'll act. But if my weight continues to trend upwards, I'll stop indulging every little food craving I get and see if that does the trick.

The final parts of our bathroom remodel have barely been in place, and again we're taking on a remodeling project. This time, we're going to have the closet in our office removed. That will convert the house from a 4-bedroom house to a 3-bedroom one, but since we don't really plan on selling it anytime soon, I'm not worried about its reduced marketability.

Amazingly enough, this will all happen this weekend! We spent last night cleaning out the office to prepare it for the work. We're going to use a subcontractor who we really like that worked on our bathroom. Assuming we can also get the brackets and melamine soon, he'll install our 3 10' bookshelves as well.

The biggest benefit for this will be to force us to clear out just about all the junk that had accumulated in the office over the years. But besides that, the new configuration will allow us to make a much better home office for Donna. Right now, trying to get any real work done in that space, while competing with the other uses of the room and its generally trashed state, is very difficult.

This desktop-picture-sized 3D mock-up of our office has all of the previous furniture in it (in their old locations) but has the closet removed.

I've been eager to upgrade my version of Adobe Photoshop, the original CS version, because the current version (CS4), is the last one that I can upgrade to from CS without paying the full price. And looking for something to spend some of my Christmas money on, I figured this would be a good time to get the upgrade. I knew Adobe had some student pricing for their products, and since Donna is a doctoral student at U of H, I asked her to look into it.

What I found out was astounding. A normal retail price for a Photoshop upgrade is about $200. I learned that I could get the extended version of Photoshop for about that with the student prices. That was a nice bonus, although I didn't think I would be using much of the additional features the extended version offers.

What I didn't realize at first, though, that this $200 price for the extended version of Photoshop referred to the full-install version, and not the upgrade version. The full-install version of Photoshop Extended retails for about $1000! So that's a 80% discount! More poking around the Adobe site revealed that, for $200, I could also get the Adobe Creative Suite 4, Design Standard, which retails for $1400! This is much more exciting, since it comes with Adobe Photoshop (non-extended), but also InDesign, Illustrator, and Acrobat Pro! I doubt I'll use InDesign much, but I'm looking forward to Illustrator, since I've not had a good vector drawing application on my Mac since Canvas 5!

It took some research on my part to convince myself that this discount wasn't going to result in some crippled version - i.e. can only be used while enrolled, or has to be re-licensed every so often - but I've convinced myself it's A-OK. The U of H computer store does mark it up a little (to $250 for a 82% discount), but that's still an amazing bargain.

So now, I'm pretty excited. I think Donna can order it this weekend, then pick it up at U of H before her next class. Ove the next few months, then, I'll have to figure out what all that software can do!

I am fairly meticuluous about naming and labeling all the digital photos I take and store in iPhoto. I continually try to keep up with giving each photo a title and listing who is in it. Currently, all of my 15,000+ photos in my library have been named, although about 3,000 are imported scanned images with little more than the filename associated with the photo.

It's these 3,000 images that have been my pet project recently. I've been trying to associate dates with them, with the ultimate goal of having all my photos identified with dates. Sometimes, this is straightforward to do, as in the case of my Hawaii photos. My detailed web journal and photo naming convention made it almost a mechanical task to assign a date to these photos. I set the time on them arbitrarily just to ensure that they stayed in their correct sequence.

Most of the other older photos, though, are harder to pin down. If the photo is of an event (Christmas, graduation, etc.), I might be able to do it, but that is a small minority. For the majority, I'm hoping I can pin it down to a month and year, but sometimes even a year might be tricky. I'm sure this will keep me occupied for a while.

But even doing this much in iPhoto is tricky, since iPhoto does not support partial dates. You can only specify an exact date and time for every photo - no more, no less. I could simply set the date to be the first of the year for those pictures that I can determine the year only, but then how do I differentiate pictures like that from the ones actually taken on January 1 of that year?

My current workaround is to use iPhoto keywords to identify those types of situations. I have defined two keywords: "year only" and "month-year only" that I associate with photos for which I could only determine a year or a month and year, respectively. This seems to work pretty well: my photos stay in chronological order (mostly) while still allowing me to see which dates are true dates and which ones are approximations.

My iPhoto fastidiousness also means that I'm really eager to get the new version of iLife. iLife '09 comes with enhancements to iPhoto that identifies faces in pictures and tracks locations of where pictures were taken. Since I have a large set of pictures already labeled with people in them, it should be straightforward to flesh-out the built-in Faces grouping in the new iPhoto based on my existing data.

No tracking "places" in iPhoto is something I've not done yet. That will be another fun iPhoto project for me to tackle sometime soon...