Lucas is doing well, he’s growing like a weed. He’s a great ball of fun. He had his best night ever last night, sleeping about 7 hours straight. That was good for me.

I got spam from the Attention Deficit Times newsletter. I started to skim it, but lost interest and deleted it.

While reading Ties(the regular newsletter from my high school Charles Wright), I saw a notice saying that Anil Ramayya had died. The notice did not mention a cause of death, which struck me as unusual. So a bit of investigating lead me to believe that he killed himself. So long Anil, sorry I didn’t get to know you better. I hadn’t seen him since high school, he was a year older than I, the only Indian guy that I can recall at our school. Anil was smart, well spoken, literary, critical, elitist. We played soccer together(both of us mediocre) and he went on to study English at the University of Chicago. He listened to what I call Asian dance music(Erasure, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, The Smiths), he wore black all the time. In some ways a prototype(with the exception of being Indian) for the educated elite. It’s sad to hear about a suicide, it’s hard to think of anything good coming of it, but I have good memories of him.

I was explaining this to random skeins, but I am not sure I’ve ever blogged about this…

Contrary to popular belief, Google’s greatest contribution to the internet is not PageRank. PageRank is good and all, but it is not that hard to do, and was merely an evolutionary step in internet search engine technology(the underlying principles had been applied in structural engineering for decades). In fact, Google’s gratest impact on the internet is the ability to monetize internet traffic. Before Google, there no one knew how to make from a website that just had a lot of traffic. Today, if your web site has a lot of traffic, then you can make money off of it just by putting up ads. Google enabled this dramatic shift to happen by pioneering the Cost Per Click(CPC) model which they were able to do because they had the best search engine technology at the time. Going to CPC allows both advertisers and content providers to track the ROI of their web sites and ads and thus you can invest with confidence and know your ROI. Before CPC, internet advertising was a black hole for advertisers and for content providers it was tough to prove your value to advertisers. With Google AdSense, anyone can generate revenue from their traffic in just a few minutes. Building a new multibillion dollar market doesn’t happen often, but Google did it by providing the most comprehensive set of services for both advertisers and content providers.

We had a great party this weekend. We’d been planning this for months. A bunch of my relatives came in from out of town to celebrate Lucas. Good times. Pictures up on lucaschen.shutterfly.com. My mom arranged a dinner at ABC Seafood in Foster City. The menu included:

• Roast pork and jellyfish appetizer(both very good)
• Sticky rice. Traditional, not very exciting but good.
• Chinese broccoli. Not a very hard dish, but good.
• Beef Chow Fun. Not a very exciting dish, fine.
• Lobster. Very good.
• Peking Duck. Excellent.
• Braised fish. Worse than it should have been(but it might have been just my serving)
• Mango pudding. Good.

I might have missed a dish but I don’t think so. The food overall was very good, the service however was a bit disappointing. The timing was off and they were slow for a couple things(water and tea) and they forgot a couple things(hoisin for the Peking duck being one).

Lucas was great, a very quiet, happy boy through the whole thing.

mjlewis mentioned that his dad as a small business owner didn’t really put a value on his own time. My mom has the same attitude when doing her real estate work. That’s exactly the opposite of what I do. I’m very conscious about how valuable my time is and I’m usually able to put a dollar amount on how much any given activity is worth me doing personally or paying someone else to do. For instance, whenever I think about cleaning, I think to myself I would much rather pay someone $15/hr to do this for me, I despise the process and I’m terrible at it. Tracy has never entirely bought into my way of thinking. She argues correctly that I can’t actually make that money back by working instead because I’m on a salary. But I don’t think that nullifies the whole time valuation process.

While I was thinking about my personal time valuation, I saw this Wired article on economic environmentalism and he says that the true cost of gas with the environmental impact is about $11/gallon, which is obviously much higher than the ~$2.75 I’m paying at the pump these days. He also says that the cost of a pack of cigarettes to society is $7.18 once you add in the price of health care. It made me wonder about libertarians… There are a lot of things I like about libertarians but I am not sure how they can account for the future societal costs like the health care problems associated with tobacco. It’s not clear to me that they have a way of preventing significantly negative future outcomes when there are immediate tangible positive outcomes. The future negative outcomes are too distant to have enough of an effect on decisions made today. Maybe it comes back to another general issue I have with libertarianism: in order for individuals to making better decisions and each person needs an instant stream of perfect information. And it certainly doesn’t protect individuals from their own bad decisions.

I saw this article a few days ago and found it pretty interesting. I used to be very interested in evolutionary genetics and microbiology. And with Lucas of course recently I’d been wondering what was the evolutionary advantage of making childbirth and breastfeeding so difficult.

I went to a funeral for a great aunt today. Not one I was very close with, but my mom was and she couldn’t make it so I felt like it’d be nice if I represented the family.

It’s funny that even though I have known her for years, I didn’t actually know her American name, but I always addressed her by her Taiwanese title Kim-Po. The Taiwanese language has a huge vocabulary for relatives. I call each of my aunts and uncles by a different name based on their birth order and relation to me. While in English we’d just call everyone aunts and uncles.

Going to a funeral always makes you reflect on your life and what you’ve done and wonder how you will be remembered. I need to come up with a funny epitaph for myself.

Lucas is doing well, and still growing rapidly. He’s definitely starting to control his muscles better. He’s less likely to make random muscle spasms. And he doesn’t do the random faces that make him look bemused, he can actually smile on occasion. He still can’t roll himself over or direct his muscles. We’re very lucky because he doesn’t cry much at all except when he’s hungry. I think he’s as large as the cats now.

We got the hostpital bill and it amused me because they just put thousands of dollars in “incidentals”, without breaking any of it down into more detail. With the cost of health care these days, it must be impossible to have a baby at a hospital without insurance. I can’t imagine being a single parent or trying to survive only on a near minimum wage job.

After listening to that talk on Solaris Zones I went back and played with VMWare again, and I was again impressed with how well it works. I installed VMWare Player and a packaged Kubuntu(Ubuntu with KDE) and it was working with full networking and sound right out of the box(Windows host).

It got me to thinking that maybe software vendors could package their stuff into VMWare execution environments instead of shipping real appliances or regular software packages. For instance Tango works on the Proofpoint appliance and they ship a rackmount server with all their software on it. Rather than having to deal with hardware, they could just ship something that runs under VMWare. There’d be a bit of a performance penalty, but it’s not much.

The big benefit is that the vendor can design a clean environment to work with. Then they can always know the environment the customer is running. No more valuable support time spent tracking down what changes or configuration oddities a customer has. Customers shouldn’t be touching the virtual machine anyways and the vendor can completely lock them out if necesary. It also makes debugging customer problems a lot easier. Got a problem that’s hard to replicate? Just have the customer send you back the whole virtual machine they’re using. It can even solve some porting problems. Want to port from Linux to Windows or vice-versa? Don’t bother, just have the customer run your OS of choice within theirs(this isn’t practical for most applications but it depends). The vendor also doesn’t have to worry about supporting specific OSes(but of course VMWare must support that OS), hardware sizing requirements, hardware support contracts. Obviously this doesn’t work for all kinds of software, but it’d work for most application software. Think of how developers use Java as an abstraction layer, this would be an even higher level of abstraction.

I’m not saying it’s a great idea, it is just a thought.