hubert's home

Twittering

2008-07-19T22:16:00.000-07:00

I started to twitter. I'm not sure if I'll keep it up, and I haven't yet decided how I'll put it on this page. But you can look at Facebook or follow my feed here: http://www.twitter.com/hubt/
The service does have a lot more downtime than it ought to, but the UI is nice and simple, and it mostly works.

iPhwnage

2008-07-13T02:15:00.000-07:00

Picked up an 8Gig 3G iPhone this morning. I tried yesterday but the lines were too long and I didn't want to wait. Today I got to an AT&T store about 20 minutes before they opened and there were about a dozen people in line. By the time I had gotten mine and left, they had already sold out of their daily shipment. She said they had about 20 today.

Impressions so far: I like it quite a bit. I had played with other iPhones a bit, but not that much. My opinions are that of a new user and not a comparison to a version 1 iPhone. Good, almost everything works well.

Overall: the interface is good and mostly intuitive, there are a few things that puzzle me, but overall it's good.

Keyboard: I'm still getting used to the keyboard, there's a learning curve for sure. I'm not sure how long it will take to get to my max speed, but i hope it's not more than a couple of weeks.

Camera: Good/Bad. I've never had a cameraphone before. The resolution is better than I expected. The shutter speed is much worse than I expected, all shots pretty much have to be carefully composed.

GPS: Just tried it with GMaps once. Seems good.

Voice: haven't tried calls, but the voicemail seems interesting. I make very very few calls anyways. I see an iPhone as a mobile web browser that happens to do voice

Apps: Haven't tried many of them, but the catalog of apps is pretty good.

Freakanaming

2008-07-13T02:09:00.000-07:00

I finally got a chance to read Freakanomics last week and I was not really surprised that both our kids names were in the top 20 of middle or upper income white Americans. Lauren was #2 in fact. The names will pretty quickly fall out of fashion, but it was amusing still.

Trip to Michigan

2008-07-10T14:03:00.000-07:00

We spent 5 days in Michigan last week. It was a nice break because Tracy's parents live on a lake and have a nice little boat that you can sit in and lounge around on. It was also great weather, so it was perfect for the 4th. Lucas really loved going on the boat and watching the fireworks and seeing his grandpa and grandma. Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle Ed, Aunt Mary all got to see Lauren for the first time, so it was all fun. The trip there was a bit of a nightmare because our flight from Chicago to Kalamazoo got delayed 3 times for 3 hours and then finally cancelled, so we had to rent a car and drive it.

Goings on

2008-06-27T23:35:00.000-07:00

We're going to head to Michigan this week to visit Tracy's family. Traveling with the kids should be interesting.

Lauren is doing well, she's growing and starting to smile sometimes. I think she slept for more than 6 hours straight twice this week, so that's progress.

Lucas is really fun, he's a real joy to have. He and his a friend at day care Margaret-Ann are the cutest little 2 year old couple you've ever seen. His language and learning skills are improving all the time. He can understand most of the simple instructions we give to him. So if you ask him to get his ball or blanket he can do it. This is one step away from him becoming my own personal slave laborer. I am going to pay him $20k/yr good towards his college education. He's good with his sister, he never gets jealous and he tries to help take care of her sometimes. Our only problem is that we let him watch a bit too much TV. Little Einsteins is his favorite.

Work is getting a bit boring. I've been doing a lot of systems and performance metrics and monitoring for the past year or so, but I think it's turned into a bit of a routine. I wouldn't mind doing something a bit different, but I have no idea what yet. It doesn't matter, I am more focused on the kids these days than work.

Family Weekend

2008-06-16T13:05:00.001-07:00

We went to pick berries at a local U-Pick berry farm. It was a bit early in the season and crowded, we did get some decent blackberries, but at prices no better than store bought. $3 each adult to pick and $3/lb which turned out to be only $2. Store bought is like $12/lb. On the other hand, it was pretty fun and Tracy made a really good blackberry sauce that she put on waffles on Sunday.

The rest of Father's day wasn't too eventful. We joined a local pool last week, so we've now gone there a few times and it was pretty much empty on Sunday, so that was nice and relaxing. Lucas likes that pool quite a bit. Finally getting around to reading Freakanomics.

Watching Lucas learn is interesting. He's got a 50 piece alphabet jigsaw puzzle with the alphabet that he's done a dozen times. The way he picks pieces is vastly different than how I would do it. With any puzzle piece he can identify what object was on it(there is one object for each letter of the alphabet), and he immediately knows what area of the puzzle it goes to, faster than I do. But he takes quite a long time to find the exact place and he has a harder time orienting the piece to fit it in the right spot. For me, I wouldn't know the object a any piece is part of, but I'd search for pieces which are next to objects that I already have. It makes me wonder how I unlearned the basic instincts that he is using.

More Fit

2008-06-09T08:51:00.000-07:00

After a week of using the Wii Fit, I can say it's pretty good. I've spent probably 4 hours with it and it's helped me get motivated, which is a primary goal.

Balance sensing is good, it's very sensitive. I like the Yoga stuff in particular, it shows you basics and as you get more time with it, you unlock more advanced stuff. The Yoga and Strength exercises are the best. I'm not too excited about most of the aerobic exercises. They are fun novelties, but I doubt I'll be playing them regularly. Lucas though loves the Table Tilt exercise.

Things I want to see: More personalized training. I go running or biking for aerobic exercise. I am using the Fit to motivate myself to work on strength, balance, and flexibility. I'd like to tell the Fit I already run regularly, and that I want to spend 30-40 minutes/day working on core strength and flexibility and then some specific work on my abs. Then let it select a few exercises for me to do and jump right in. I'd like a little less rest between exercises and faster explanations. I feel like after a week, I've already heard each piece of advice and each inspirational message it can give. The Wii Fit age seems kinda hokey and so does using Body Mass Index as a health indicator. I don't tend to rely on those kinds of metrics. For me, I'm mostly interested my weight and how fat I feel over time.

Back again

2008-06-05T00:47:00.001-07:00

Sorry I haven't been posting. I've been pretty busy the past few weeks both with baby and work. Work has been going OK. We've got a new VP, so we'll be spending time educating him.

I'm kind of in a gadget buying phase right now, which is strange because I am not usually that into them.

I'm planning on buying the highly anticipated 3G iphone next week. Lots of good reasons to have one I think.

I bought a Wii Fit and used it for the first time today. It's not bad. I've been telling myself that I should try yoga to regain some strength, balance, and flexibility, and Wii Fit seems like a pretty good introduction. As with any exercise program, the key is consistent motivation, if I can get 5 hours a week of any kind of exercise then I think I'll be fine. Making it a game helps keep me motivated. It never actually told me how much I weigh, which might discourage me anyways. I'm not too impressed with the balance type games. The dancing game in particular has a very confusing UI which didn't relate at all to the little bit of DDR that I've played. The strength training sessions aren't bad. I think of the Fit as $90 which if it can get me to workout just a few times, it's cheaper than a personal trainer.

I'm also considering buying an Asus eee PC. The things that most appeal to me about it(besides the obvious portability) are the flash drive(which makes it much more durable and increases battery life) and the embedded linux on the motherboard which can boot super-fast(<10 seconds). Plus because it's linux, it's less likely to get slowed down by malware. The hackability of it is nice in theory, but I'm probably too lazy to actually do it. The price is a bit steep, but I think it's worth it. We'll see though, I usually convince myself over a span of several weeks before I go out and buy.

Back to Work

2008-05-22T07:30:00.001-07:00

This is my first week back to work and it's been pretty tiring, but not too bad. I'm sleeping pretty poorly as you'd expect. Work is going fine, but at this point spending time with the family is more important. Since Lauren has been born, I've gotten to spend more time with Lucas, and so far he's a pretty good boy.

I have been doing pretty well playing online poker, this is my best year ever.

I am badly out of shape. It's both bad eating and lack of exercise. It's easy to use the new baby as an excuse to not work out, but mostly it's just laziness. Getting back into shape should be my #2 priority right after baby, but it never is.

I'm planning on getting a 2nd generation iPhone when it comes out. I'm usually pretty immune to buying a hot new consumer electronics device, but I guess the hype has finally gotten to me. There are going to be only a couple platforms for mobile devices, one is the Blackberry, the second is the iPhone and the third may be Google's Android. The Blackberry's email handling is great(I have one for work), but as a web browser it kind of sucks. Google's Android is vaporware so far.

Saturday is my 36th birthday. I feel like I haven't quite given back to the world what I've taken from it yet, but I'll get there some day.

Baby Day 4

2008-05-04T04:58:00.001-07:00

We're home from the hospital. Tracy is doing well. Lauren seems to be a bigger and more consistent eater than Lucas was. This means she also sleeps more too. So far she's an easy baby to take care of, I hope this continues.

Baby pictures up

2008-05-02T17:04:00.000-07:00

We've put up our first set of pictures of Lauren here

Resting with baby

2008-05-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

There's really nothing like holding a newborn in your arms. It's an amazing feeling and I'm not really much of a emotional or sentimental guy.

Not too much going on here at the hospital. Just hanging out with the Tracy and Lauren. Lucas is in day care so at night I go home and pick him up then bring him back to the hospital to see mommy and baby. Then we go home and I put him to bed. Uncle Mike has been house sitting for the past couple of nights, and so I'd leave Lucas at home with Mike and come back to the hospital and spend the night, then in the morning I've been going home and taking Lucas back to day care. It's been a lot of back and forth to the hospital, but it's been great.

Mommy and baby are doing well. Thanks to everyone who sent us congratulations.

Introducing Lauren Tierney Chen

2008-04-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

Lauren Tierney Chen was born April 29, 2008 at 8:22 AM.

She was born at 6 lbs, 13 ounces. 19 inches long.

I'll post pictures in the next few days.

Baby Day.

2008-04-29T05:09:00.000-07:00

We've got a busy day ahead. We should have a brand new baby girl by midday. Managing Lucas at day care is a bit of a logistical challenge, but we'll be fine. I'll post an update or two today I hope. Dunno what net access they have at the hospital, but I'm assuming they have something.

Waiting for baby 2

2008-04-24T09:09:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow's my last day of work before my paternity leave. I'm super excited to have another baby. Lucas has been as much fun as I could imagine. We have a short list of names for the little girl, but we'll make the final decision after we see her. Tracy is having a C-section because of the location of the placenta. She doesn't seem too worried about it, but there will be a bit longer recovery time. I'm planning to be off work for 3 weeks.

Google App Engine

2008-04-13T23:07:00.000-07:00

I downloaded and tried out the Google App Engine the first day it was released. It falls into several different areas that are my favorite kinds of computer science: distributed computing, application frameworks, google, grid computing.

Here's my impressions so far. I like it, but it needs some work.

They currently restrict developers to python. And understandably, there are some significant restrictions like no system calls and no files. This is fine for now, I've been meaning to improve my python skills. But to be have good reach they need to support Java and .Net at least.

DataStore. This is their data storage you have to use instead of a SQL db or the file system. This is probably the coolest part of their architecture. It's interesting because it's an interface into Google's BigTable. Their interface is very very stripped down SQL. Restrictions include: you can only select *. Where clauses can only use <, > and =. You can only select on one =. There must be an index on that equality select. There aren't any joins or subqueries. There are more and I'm sure I misstated some of them. Suffice to say, there are a lot of weirdnesses and it's really not that similar to a relational database other than that they try to use something SQL-like for familiarity. It does however provide advantages that aren't available in traditional RDBMses. You can add arbitrary searchable properties on a per row basis without a schema change

It quite a contrast to Amazon's web services which seem quite separate from each other. One of my biggest beefs with what Amazon does is that by separating the CPU from the Storage, they are making it harder to use both than it should be.

I am also curious about pricing. Google claims you should be able to serve up around 5,000,000 page views/month before you have to start paying. I'll believe it when I see it.

Celebrate Good Times

2008-04-05T01:26:00.000-07:00

Tracy and I celebrated our 10th anniversary tonight. I'm super lucky to be with her and we've been very happy together. We went to Forbes Mill Steakhouse and the food was very good. Mike was kind enough to come over and watch Lucas for a couple of hours while we were out. We had also never realized that our anniversary is also the day that MLK was shot.

Last night my oldest friend Toby was in town so we went out to dinner with he and his family(wife and two kids) and his brother David. I haven't seen them in like 8 years since his wedding. He's now a cardiologist working in Tacoma. David is radiologist doing a fellowship at Stanford, but starting in the summer, he'll be living in SF and working for Kaiser in the East Bay. That's good because it means Toby will come down more often and I'll get to see them all more.

A new way to save gas

2008-04-02T11:17:00.001-07:00

On the way to work this morning, a van was tailgating me pretty closely. I sped up to almost 80 in the carpool lane, but he kept accelerating with me. He had some opportunities to pass me, but didn't take them. Later he got stuck behind another car and was tailgating him pretty closely too. Finally when he was tailgating a third different car a thought occurred to me. Was he trying to draft behind passenger cars in the carpool lane? Maybe gas prices are so high that it might actually make sense. Wind resistance(and therefore energy consumption) does increase exponentially with speed, but could that really save you money?

Market view

2008-03-26T23:50:00.000-07:00

I am relatively bearish on all the US market right now. Market sentiment for both stocks and bonds is pretty bad. Most of the analysis I have read calls for no recovery until next year at the earliest and the housing market may take a full two years or more to show growth again. The steep drop in housing prices and equally steep rise in unsold homes means it will take a while for the housing market to reach a bottom. I've got some cash I would like to put in the market, but I'm going to wait a few more months at least. I think the financial stocks are also going to be hurt more, but I think they have been hurt plenty already so I'm not sure if it will continue. Obviously I'm no economist so don't put too much faith in my view.

Optimistic opportunity

2008-03-21T16:18:00.000-07:00

A few days ago someone left a note on my door saying they were coming to paint the street numbers on my curb and that they would do it voluntarily and they asked for a donation of $10. I was a bit skeptical, but last night they came knocking on my door for the donation and they had indeed painted my curb.

Now if they had tried to sell me a curb painting service for $10, they would have never gotten my money because I hate being sold things. But because they provided the service first and then asked for a donation later, they actually got my money. I wonder what sort of donation rate they get by giving it away for free and then asking for money later. I wonder how that compares to the rates of donating for free online music.

Switched to GMail

2008-03-13T00:13:00.000-07:00

This week I switched from my old text email client mutt over to GMail. I'm pleased with my increased productivity. GMail is faster and just generally makes managing mail easier. Things I like: keyboard shortcuts, labels, filters, better attachment handling. I don't actually use conversation features much.

There are some features I am still not sure about. For instance the spam filter is a too aggressive. I had to look through my spam folder for some legit email which my old filter would deliver correctly, but GMail didn't like them. Also I'm not yet sure how I like the AIM integration. And the Calendar to Exchange sync feature has failed pretty miserably so far.

Baby Fishy

2008-03-11T23:54:00.001-07:00

Lucas has trouble pronouncing Baby Sister, so instead it's Baby Fishy. We're still undecided on names, so I think this is the winner.

New Conforming Loan limits

2008-03-10T18:58:00.001-07:00

Yay. The new conforming loan limits are out. I put together a table with all of them, and it looks like all the SF Bay area markets hit the cap and are now $729.5k. Let the refi craze begin.

Fancy Financing

2008-02-29T05:59:00.001-08:00

As I grow older, I've become more and more interested in finance. I consider myself a somewhat sophisticated individual investor and so I like to hear about interesting new finance products that bankers want to sell. There's two in particular that caught my eye.

The REX agreement is a new, alternative to a home equity line of credit. For most people, I think it's a more attractive way to use home equity than a HELOC. If a HELOC is a loan backed by the equity in your house, the REX agreement is a contract which gives you an immediate cash payment in return for a portion of the proceeds of the sale of your house. It's like selling a fractional call option on your home equity. You can sell up to %50 of the equity of your primary residence(otherwise you might not have enough incentive to maintain your house), and you get to keep all the value and appreciation of any capital improvements you make. There's a lot of caveats here. I've only seen Rex & Co offer this. I have no idea how good the valuation is on the cash payment they give to you. The rest of the caveats are reasonable. They currently only offer it in a limited number of states. They can repossess your house if you fail to maintain it or you use it as collateral for more than the equity you have in it, they require independent appraisals. The advantage over a HELOC is that it's not a loan, there is no interest to pay on it. It's more like a reverse mortgage which liquidates when you sell your house instead of when you die. If there were a competitive market for the valuation on the house instead of being offered by just one company then I'd say this is better than all the other ways to use home equity, because we already have plenty of ways to create new debt from our home equity.

The other new thing to arise in the past few years besides ETFs are Structured Products. They are packaged products created by investment banks for a specific risk profile and outlook. They are usually the kinds of things that can be done by an individual investor with a combination of options, futures, or other derivatives but they are packaged together to sell simply as one security. For instance, a couple of years ago I bought a product which for 18 months tracks the S&P 500 returns, but if the return was > 0% and < x% the return was triple, but if the S&P return was greater than x%, the return was exactly x%. The exact value of X was set by market rates on the derivatives bought at issuance required to make the product(it was about 18% at the time I bought it 2 years ago). So it was a product with leveraged, but capped return which means you need a specific market outlook to want to buy it. It worked out, I made a bit of extra money over market returns. But there are all kinds of these products, tied to a variety of different underlying instruments and a lot of different outlooks. Unfortunately because structured products aren't really marketed to retail investors, information on all of them is hard to find. I only know about them because my broker told me about them. If someone could build a good search engine for all structured products, it'd make me happy.

Kids are fun

2008-02-27T06:15:00.000-08:00

Lucas is really fun these days and I'm really excited about having another baby. Being a parent is busier and better than I expected. Every day Lucas does something unexpected. He learns really quickly and his vocabulary is growing rapidly. His cognitive skills are even more impressive. I think babies just learn a lot faster than I thought. I heard another parent say their child was reading by age 4, and that seemed unreasonable to me 12 months ago, but now I'm pretty sure Lucas will do that.

Tracy's pregnancy is going well. She's a great mom too. I think overall we do everything pretty well, with the exception of giving Lucas a bit too much TV. But I grew up with too much TV and I don't think it hurt me.