Month: January 2006

Our Last Day Working in Denver, CO

Today is our last day working in Denver, CO. Too bad, there is no relatively permanent job here. This is a lovely city with beautiful snow capped mountains on the westside. People are friendly too.

Well, we are heading to Chicago tomorrow and will stay there for the weekend to celebrate the Chinese New Year (Year of Dog) with Uncle Louis and a good friend of Mom. May be Aunt Helen.

After that, we are heading to Washington DC for a party with friends with cancer. Try to cheer them up. Life is always not perfect, for some reasons.

February 6th, we will start working at Aiken, SC. On the road, probably we will check our laptop occasionally. Cell phones are always with us.

Great, we are going to visit last State that we have never visited before – IOWA.

Product designer request!

Hello! Anyone there? I’m looking for a product designer! (Psst – that’d be you – Donald).

Hey bro, I could use some help here. I’ve been trying to teach Edda to drink from a straw with very little forward progress. This is really the first step towards weaning her, she’s not taking any liquids except from me and I’m tired of it. So what I’ve been doing is putting a plastic straw into orange juice, holding my thumb over the end and capturing some liquid in the straw and then placing it into Edda’s mouth and releasing the suction and she usually sucks the liquid into her mouth OK. There are a few problems with this..

  1. When Edda sucks from the straw, the liquid is on the “bottom” of the straw, my hand is usually above her head at the “top” of the straw trying to maintain the vacuum and she remembers this position and can’t translate this to sucking a straw from a cup in the normal cup/straw position.
  2. When I place the straw in the “normal” cup/straw position, she tends to bite the plastic disposable straw and mangle it so it doesn’t really work.

So I was wondering if you could make a contraption for me…

It would involve a cup with 2 straws protruding from it. I would blow in one straw and Edda would be at the other straw and so the cup/straw would be in the normal position and I could force liquid into her mouth and maybe she’ll learn to drink from a straw. I have seen her at least twice pull liquid from a cup through a straw, but she can’t remember to do it again.

A few requirements:

  1. Non-breakable parts
  2. Washable parts
  3. Rigid straws.

Jeremy says that you can go to Target and buy a sippy cup that has a straw in it and drill a hole in it and blow into the hole, but I want it a little more easier to use. Can you help me with this? I’d need it as soon as you could make something. Thank you! Thank you!

Little Miss Edda

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We’re trying to improve Edda’s eye contact as a first step for speech therapy. At meal times, we hold a spoonful of food right up to our eyes and wait until Edda looks at us to give her the food. We’ve been doing this for a few days now, it was the first suggestion given to us by the speech therapist, it’s going OK, but mealtimes are slower.

Grocery shopping.

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I’m hating grocery shopping these days. Edda hates being trapped in her stroller. Vince runs off in some direction and starts pulling chocolate milk off the shelf. And the grocery store is so full of boxes of bad chinese desserts for Chinese New Year, that going down the lanes is incredibly frustrating. Here’s Vince sitting down in his school uniform enjoying KFC french fries while I wait to pay for my toilet paper.

And, my knitting…

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DSC01930, originally uploaded by dturnip1.

I gave up on the socks, it turned out I did the first one completely wrong, so I pulled both of them apart and so now I have no socks and just sock yarn. I’m knitting this basketweave scarf. Easy, no brainwork, just keeping myself occupied while Edda learns to walk and Vince plays computer games.

Dinner at the Delifrance.

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DSC01936, originally uploaded by dturnip1.

Today we went to the Singapore American School to meet with the head of the Early Childhood Center. She was very encouraging and helpful with the recommendations of therapy centers. We have an appointment for Saturday to start therapy! Hooray! Finally…

Camera Choices…

Well the body maybe the easy choice…

a D200 or a D70s

The D200 is new, sealed like the F bodies. Allows use of the apeture ring. of course it’s almost 2x more.

The more problematic choice is the lenses. The new DSLRs don’t have a 35mm size sensor. They have an APS size sensor, dubbed the DX format. This of course changes all the focal length factors by 1.5x. a normal lense for a DX format is about 33mm..

So the lens choices..

17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S
12-24mm f/4G ED-IF AF-S DX
17-55mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S DX
70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR

G – no apeture ring
DX – only for DX size sensor. Won’t cover the whole 35mm frame
VR – vibration reduction
AF-S – Motor is in the lens
ED-IF – lens is coated and only the glass on the inside of the lense moves when it focuses

I like the apeture ring on older Nikons lenses. only the D200 will let you use the apeture ring. I hate G lenses, tho I might have to buy the 70-200.

I’d like to get non DX lenses. I’d still like to shoot film. or at least the option to. The downside is that i’ll never get truely wide angle photos with out a DX lens.

the 17-55 might be the most useful lens for everyday shooting.

I lust after the 17-35. It’s the one lense that I would buy for a 35mm camera.