WiredAtom

After having putting off reorganizing my CD binders for months, I finally decided to go ahead and consolidate all my data CDs, separating all the PC discs from my Mac disks. But while I was going through THAT, I realized I actually had more than half a dozen backup CDs of my art and design works from back in college. So then I decided I might as well consolidate all of THAT as well… Ah~ how I miss creating art.

So I threw away a bunch of discs, made DVDs where I could to save space. But I was saddened that one of my Houdini project backup CDs was corrupted (damn cheap CDRs). So on my DVDR, I decided to make 2 copies of the consolidated backup files. Murdza once told me he actually made backups, and then backups of backups, and then backups of backups of backups…. He kept one copy in his fire-proof safe and another at the bank (or so I remember)…. I should probably revisit those files every couple of years and reburn them just in case…

One of Grace’s mommy friends told her about an interesting online (but yet local!) community called FreeCycle. The free service is basically a collection of local residents in your area who are part of a larger collective “recycling” community. The idea is to recycle what you don’t want and give them to someone else who may find good use for them. Almost every major city in the world has a FreeCycle group (yes, even Freehold, NJ, Murdza!).

I thought this is better than Craigslist in that when you join this group (more than 5000 members for San Jose), you know what you give/get would be free in the spirit of recycling and sharing. Grace got a saucer and a doorway jumper for Bryan when someone was giving them away. I also posted a “wanted” entry for a keyboard tray for my desk, and immediately someone offered me one for free! But it turned out that the tray is kind of heavy (all metal!) for my cheap IKEA desk….

All in all, it’s a pretty cool community of folks… And I am glad, for once, this is not a corporate commercial venture (something I can see eBay doing). The website relies on ads and donations to keep going.

So… We “got rid” of our Infiniti on Monday. I guess the guy is a mechanic who’s going to be fixing it up and resale the car.

Now comes the impossible task of finding a reliable car that will fit a budget on a string, literally… not to mention the hassles of having to deal with low-life car salesmen… I wonder why car salesmen have to be suck pricks and jackasses, like most of the police officers I have dealt with — that’s not to say all of them are jerks… but clearly pricks outnumber the non-pricks for most people I know to dislike them…

Anyway… Grace found some interesting possibilities… Maybe we’ll deal with Internet car sales people this time… geek-to-geek talks… Plus we are not going to spend hours haggling with the sales people anymore… We’ll go right before the dealership closes (we’ll see how late they can play the good-cop/bad-cop game). Also, we have Bryan on our side this time…. Anytime we smell something fishy, we’ll use him as an excuse to get out of the dealership, pronto…

Being in the web development business, it’s plain impossible to develop sites without having to check your work in Internet Explorer for bugs (not that my code is buggy, but that Internet Explorer rendering engines are simply not compliant to standards). So I finally broke down, booted up my Fedora Core 4 Linux on my 6-year-old Dell (running dual Pentium 3 @ 450Mhz!), fussed with VMWare and finally managed to install Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Oh, how I dreaded having to touch Windows again having stayed away from it for almost a year and a half. Just the installation of Windows 2000 felt like playing with Mac OS 9 again… So primitive and ancient. I especially “loved” the restarts after each service pack, patches to service packs and then hotfixes to the patches that were originally released to fix the service packs… etc. I wasted an entire evening just installing and patching Windows in VMWare. Nothing says “I love my life” like wasting time installing Windows OS!

The upside, though, is that I can perhaps install Internet Explorer 7 beta to see what the fuss is all about (yoohoo! Tabbed browsing… only 2 years late!)…. And then maybe if I feel adventurous enough, I’ll even download Windows Vista Public Beta and try to install it in VMWare (which I doubt will even install given that both the host and guest hardware are pretty damn old… even if by some miracle Vista installs, it’d probably take a few hours just to boot up… ha!).

I hope this is the last time I’ll have to deal with installing Windows ever again…

Bryan caught a cold two weeks ago. He was really congested for the first few days and got really mad for not being able to breathe through his nose. I read somewhere that younger infants don’t know how to breathe through their mouths if something blocks their nasal passages — this makes me feel better that Bryan got his first cold now.

We had to learn to use one of those suction bulbs to clear Bryan’s nasal passages so that he could breathe better. At first he hated it — he would cry, scream, use his hands to block the bulb, turned his heads so that I couldn’t get to his nose… etc. It was heartbreaking. But after first couple of suctions, he realized that thing did him good and remained calm for the next few suctions. Luckily he got much better after a few days. But man, getting that mucus out of his nose was quite an interesting experience…

The first three nights of his cold was almost unbearably heartbreaking. He couldn’t sleep, eat or even enjoy his toys. He coughed so hard that he’d wake himself several times in the middle of the night — it was almost like we had a newborn again — taking turns to wake up every couple of hours to comfort and soothe him as he cried himself to sleep.

We also learned something new through this new experience — Bryan has associated the verbal sound of “mamma” with Grace as being the mother. And often he preferred Grace to comfort him over me (to which, strangely enough, I don’t feel jealouse). And we know this because he’d call out “mamma, mamma” while unstoppably sobbing, looking at Grace’s direction even when he was in my arms.

He recovered from the cold in about a week. Sooner than Grace recovering from her cold — the same one the Bryan had*.

Then a couple of days ago, Bryan experienced a mild fever. We were pretty scared being that this was his first fever, and we saw that he became very inactive and reluctant to play. The doctor said to observe him for a couple more days and see if the fever goes away or that he develops any rash.

Sure enough, we saw rash all over his body on Sunday**. Now with more evidence, the doctor determined that Bryan had developed Roseola, a very common viral illness for young children.

I guess Bryan’s immune system will be bombarded with more and more illnesses from now on. It’s also time for Grace and I to buckle up and brace ourselves with more sleepless nights and occasional sore throats.

Ah~… Parenthood…

*I am usually considered the weak one in the family. But I was okay throughout the entire cold episode.

**We had to cancel our plans with Jason and Alicia because Bryan didn’t feel very well.

I went down to Car Clinic today to take some pictures of our J30t and collected our personal belongings from the car. It seems that the only sensible thing to do is to stop investing anymore money into the car and look forward to something more “long lasting.”

I thought Tibor was going to charge me labor and time for checking out what went wrong this time. But he told me I didn’t owe him anything — he didn’t want to charge me for the same problem twice even though he’d already taken the time and effort to examine the transmission and explained to me exactly what went wrong. Nice! Any other mechanic would have told me it’d cost me time and labor.

And then I asked if I could leave the car there for potential Craigslist buyers to come by and check out the car at his shop so that I don’t have to haul it. And he’s more than OK with that idea, too! Now I understand why a couple of online forums so highly recommend his shop… honest, friendly and pleasant to work with. I might have to give him a nice bottle of wine someday!

JASE, maybe you oughta bring the van to my mechanic for a 2nd opinon!

Professor Farnsworth: “Good news, everyone. Tibor called and said the car’s transmission is officially out of its misery. The bad news is the car isn’t worth much without a working transmission.”

Great. Three quarters’ tank of good gas is going to waste. Maybe there’s a way to “reclaim” some of that fresh gasoline for the loaner car from Michelle…

A person probably goes through hundreds, or maybe thousands, of “awakenings” in his lifetime. Some ideas I simply couldn’t grasp a few years ago seem so clear and obvious to me today. But observing and experiencing such awakenings isn’t always so easy. However, it’s very breath-takingly memorable and refreshing when Grace and I see it in Bryan as he becomes ever more aware of everything around him.

Ever since our last observation with Bryan’s awakening to his hands, it seems like he’s suddenly seeing the world through a completely different perspective. To illustrate this, take Grace’s observation of Bryan at our neighbor’s: Bryan was excited to see some kittens as our neighbor fed them. So he started clapping his hands to show “approval” (as in, “yes, this is worthy of my clapping hands) and his excitement. The he proceeded to take the neighbor’s hands and waved them in the motion of clapping hands. Bryan was trying to teach our neighbor how to clap hands to share his joy!

Life is good.

As Professor Farnsworth would put it, “Good news, everyone. We are going to get a new car!”

After Tibor did the initial quick fix with the transmission, everything went well for a few days. Then yesterday the transmission decided it was going to work only in the 3rd gear and nothing else (not even 1st or 2nd gear). Literally. Even “neutral” and “reverse” gears simultaneously decided they were “park”. I almost got stuck in a parking lot and couldn’t get out because I had no “reverse”… As a result, I came to the conclusion that a car without “reverse” is pretty useless (unless it’s a tank or, similarly, a Humvee). It’s kind of like driving a car that can only turn left….

To make the long story short, I made it all the way from Hayward to Tibor’s shop in Mt. View…. in third gear. Imagine the massive amount of gas I wasted.

Maybe poor people aren’t meant to have cars. Maybe this is a sign that we should start getting used to the San Jose public transit system.

Lazy Friday afternoon…. the whole family was in the livingroom… just hanging out. Suddenly Bryan curiously looked at his hands, then his fingers and then he finally realized that he has the will to control every aspect of them — he turned his wrists, bent his fingers one by one, made fists then extended the fingers. He thought, “WOW!”

As Grace and I watched in amazement, I showed Bryan what he could do with his palms — clapping! He was so excited with his new skills that he laughed, giggled and clapped for the next five minutes with Grace and I encouraging him and cheering him on the whole time.

Magic moments like what we experienced this afternoon made the hardship of parenthood worthwhile (a little more).

Tibor had my car ready the same afternoon I sent the car in on Tuesday. He said he cleaned the gears and fixed a wire which apparently was the culprit of the transmission incident. But Tibor said the gears are all pretty worn out that the tranny might go within a year (maybe sooner).

So the car runs like a champ again. And Tibor didn’t charge an arm and a leg for it. He even said if we decide to get the tranny replaced (an eventuality), he’ll give me a break on this job because he said this job was almost like a pre-requisite to diagnose any kind of transmission problem. And it doesn’t make sense for him to charge me twice for it. You can’t find an honest mechanic like Tibor anymore!

But we think we’ll have to replace the car with something a little more reliable soon. After our investment in fixing the engine, any additional pay outs for major fixes would make the car cost more than its worth. Plus now we have a baby, it makes sense that we get a car that we don’t have to worry about. So maybe we’ll do what Murdza did and get a certified pre-owned.

How much can you bear to spend on an used car before you ditch it for a newer one?

Our Inifiniti J30t broke down on my way home after my doctor’s appointment on Saturday, 2 hours before I was supposed to pick up my cousin from the airport. To make the story short, we ended up towing the car nearby the Car Clinic where we normally have Tibor to look into car problems.

So what happened to the car? Basically the transimission died in the middle the highway. Luckily I was the only passenger in the car. The situation would have gotten way more complicated if Bryan was also in the car. So for the sake of safety and peace of mind, perhaps we should be looking at something newer… That’s $$$ down the drain!

Argh!

Thanks to the long weekend, we won’t be able to do anything about it until Tuesday the earliest.