Year: 2013

Categories
advice and tips Fun

Travel in Shanghai

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Last Updated on May 27, 2025 by omaha

I visited China with my family a few weeks ago. Shanghai is the flight stop where we arrive and depart.

We stayed at the Courtyard Xujiahui, and Four Points by Sheraton at Pudong during our short stay in Shanghai, a few weeks ago. As I have family and esp. little kid nowadays, I prefer western brand hotel (4 stars) so that it has a bit nice and consistent environment. I no longer go to Home Inn or Jinjiang Star. That was when I was single, and just need a clean place to shower and sleep.

Getting around
In general Shanghai taxi is very nice, with a few exceptions. For instance, we waited one hour in Shanghai Hongqiao railway station on rainy Friday evening (it was also the first day of Gao Kao, China’s college entrance exam). It’s probably better idea if one travel light (without big luggages). Another instance was we were at People’s square, about 10 pm, basically no taxi will take us to Xujiahui. There were a few illegal taxies pass by and asked us if we want to take it. Finally we decided to take Metro (subway) to get back.

Tour bus
We took the double deck tour bus at People’s square, my first time taking it, and was surprised to see a lot of changes in Shanghai, for example, I have not seen Lao Xi Meng for many years (probably not seen it since 1995, 18 years). Big big change. I would like to show my brother the picture some time as I thought he probably have not seen it for 18 years either. Tour bus No. 1 is a good idea for short stay visitors because one can use it for 24 hours, and see many interesting places (bus stops at those places) along the way.

Categories
advice and tips Fun

Went to tower grove farmers market yesterday

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Last Updated on June 23, 2013 by omaha

It was the first time I brought my wife and my daughter there. The weather was a bit hot, as I went there after 9:30 am. We bought the typical things: ribs and eggs from Bobbi (live spring farm), tomato, beans and cucumber from amish farmer. Serenity enjoyed her bagel and apple at the picnic by the market, it’s just some food we brought in case she wanted to eat.

I’m hoping to bring them more often to the market on Saturday mornings this Summer.

Btw, I was thinking about adding a “news feed” to the ToMarket app I recently created. It’s also funny Serenity singing about “ToMarket” couple times yesterday.

Categories
advice and tips Fun

China trip: some random thoughts

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Last Updated on August 10, 2024 by omaha

We took a 2 weeks China trip and came back last Monday evening. A bit exhausted, and at the end of the trip, our daughter got sick, she said she got tummy ache, and needed to go to restroom (lavatory) every 10 min. The fun part of being parents.

Some more serious thoughts

1) My parents are getting older, just as I am getting older. At one morning, my mom asked my dad: did I take the blood pressure medicine. She is not in her 70s yet, but she forgot about it.

2) Money and money: obviously this is a hot topic and it seems my family can not escape it as well. The thing makes me a bit annoyed is when they ask me how much I make in the states, as one of the very first question. It seems money is an important yard stick to measure if a person is successful or not. Btw, it seems everyone back home has more money than me. Interestingly, I read about this article yesterday, it mentioned something similar to that extent.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/mark-kitto-youll-never-be-chinese-leaving-china/#.Ub54LvmThBH

3) Environment. Not so good. The air quality, and the noise is obvious. One thing a bit interesting is Serenity was curious why the car/bus beep (honk) at each other, or at pedestrian. The air at my hometown is not good due to all the container trucks (18 wheelers), and heavy industry.

4) Hard to get coffee, I mean real coffee, not those faked cappuccino ones made by machines gas station here. It’s more easier to find in Shanghai. I got my black/bare ice coffee (Mei Shi Ka Fei 美式咖啡) at Christen bakery 克里斯丁饼屋.

I will talk more later. Btw, I am seriously thinking about wrote something like my memory.

Categories
Fun

Yoyo’s funny words, Spring Musical

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Last Updated on May 20, 2013 by omaha

Yoyo likes to talk a lot, and this morning she said something quite funny: daddy, you should not drink coffee or alcohol anymore, because they won’t help you grow. You should drink some milk. Then she handed her milk bottle to me. Sometimes, she likes to use some big words like “even”, “actually”, we think she learned those from her teachers.

There are also frustrating times, like, she does not like to say “hello” or “good bye” to her teachers, friends and parents. And, sometimes she say words like “go away” to us.

Spring Musical
That’s something we did not expect, and it totally blew up away. I can not upload picture or videos for the obvious reason (it includes other kids). But the teachers did a wonderful job teaching all the kids, and to make it more impressive, the kids bow after they sing the songs.

Overall, we are very impressed with the growth of our daughter. Here is the circle game, the song sing by both the kids and parents at the end.

My thoughts on Power ball
Thought it’s funny. I got a small win on Power Ball last Saturday, I matched the PB only, the prize is $4. Because the cost of ticket is $2, so the return on investment is 100%

I read an Christian Science Monitor article which talked about the government increasing dependence on the lottery revenue, which for the society is not a good thing overall, because there is hidden cost of people got addicted to gambling. The increasing publicity arising from the larger win from Power Ball or Mega Million is one factor to draw more casual players (people who usually don’t play, like me). The CS Monitor article is here.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2013/0517/A-record-Powerball-jackpot-isn-t-a-record-to-celebrate-video

I read (or heard form NPR) that a blue collar worker bought $80 worth of tickets. I would think one of my extended family member had similar thinking, when operating in the domestic A share stock market. Basically they extrapolate from my example: so if $2 can make $2, $200 can make $200, etc.

This is a very naive and dangerous extrapolation (thinking). I hope fewer people go to that route.

Categories
Fun iPhone app

Objective-C code hall of shame

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Last Updated on May 17, 2013 by stlplace

Today I found out I made a dumb mistake while deleting an NSMutableArray.

for(int ii=0; ii<[myNSMutableArray count]; ii++) { myNSMutableArray removeObjectAtIndex:ii]; } The reason being it will get confused about the elements (index) during the loop. The correct way is to use removeAllObjects method.

Categories
advice and tips Fun kids

Preschool days

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Last Updated on March 15, 2013 by omaha

Did not want to go in the morning (most days), did not want to leave in the afternoon (sometimes). Positives: she started to call some teachers by name, and some friends by name. She talked quite a bit in English, continuing make progress on language.

Kindermusik, sit on teachers’ lap. A nice overlap for her as this class is only class she goes this whole semester (with the transition from toddler to preschool).

Change job
The tuition goes up again. I need to make more money to support my family. I plan to start new job on April 1 (yes April fool’s day, but hopefully new job works out for me and my family).

A bit emotional lately as a net friend passed away recently, reminds me of an old friend’s husband passed away years ago at similar age. We all need to balance our life and work at this age.

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Uncategorized

Things moving so fast

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Last Updated on March 9, 2013 by omaha

Serenity started preschool a week ago, on Friday. When she started toddler program, since I need to go to work early in the morning, I have not been able to drop her off or pick her up much for first semester. Since I joined my current employer, I got more flexibility, and I got to see her more inside and outside classroom. I obviously miss the infant toddler community too, as I spent quite some time there (drop off, pick up, other gatherings). On her last day, we got the bags, put her stuff from her cubby, and said good bye to her teachers.

Pre-school
I have been to her preschool a few times (tour, a parent teacher gathering), I just realized it’s much bigger in terms of space, and population. So less intimacy (or cozy) feelings. But we like the teachers and it’s the same system (Hope Montessori). Minor things like fast cars on the parking lot (5 miles speed limit) bothers me a bit, but not terribly. I guess as parents we just need to be watchful of our kids in parking lot. Because each teacher is responsible for more kids (of course kids are older), it will take a while for parents to get familiar with teachers.

This moving from toddler program to pre-school thing reminds me a bit like our daughter was born, the doctor delivered the baby, in no time they cleaned up the baby, and put the baby in a scale (and light) to weigh her. Sometimes I wish things could move a bit slower. But this is the case of our modern society.

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Uncategorized

Some basic techniques for canon rebel T1i

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Last Updated on March 2, 2013 by omaha

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Camera Lens
(link here)

Manual focus point: make sure eye is the focal point (link here

Exposure: add some if background is too bright (snow)

ISO: 100 is the common value, add more if we need more (gan guang du) in the case of low light

Reference:

cheat sheet 

Categories
iPhone app Software development

Code signing error in Xcode

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Last Updated on December 9, 2020 by stlplace

(Update 08-Dec-2020) Things I learned today (or tomorrow am 🙂

  1. One team can have at most two distribution certs
  2. In Xcode sign in as agent without the (mail.com or gmail.com after @) because it appears my apple id is just the id without all the @ + dot com stuff. That alone cost me probably one hour. Plus the one hour I tried to export cert in old MacBook, then move it over to the new MacBook. So totally 2 hours wasted… after those two steps, I was able to go back to automatically signing and validate my archive (ipa) for myNestEgg…

Managing a Distribution Certificate

No signing certificate “iOS Distribution” found

Create, export, and delete signing certificates

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For organizations, if a distribution certificate is missing a private key or not in your keychain, you can email the creator of the signing certificate. Ask the creator to export the signing certificate on their Mac so you can install it on your Mac. (To install a certificate in your keychain, double-click the exported certificate file.)

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What is app signing?

Creating the iOS Distribution Certificate

iOS – Creating a Distribution Certificate and .p12 File

(Original 06-Feb-2013) Had my share of code signing problem (esp. the enterprise distribution certificate) in my Xcode development. Luckily, stackoverflow rescued me as always. It seems a lot problem is due to the Xcode upgrade, project name change, provision profile/distribute certificate expiring etc. And the solution is usually delete or comment out the offending line. Like below. To go to the project file, I usually do in the command line, “cd projectName.xcodeproj”, then “vi project.pbxproj”.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1760518/codesign-error-provisioning-profile-cannot-be-found-after-deleting-expired-prof

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5758154/code-sign-error-provisioning-profile-cant-be-found

I encountered another problem related to the provisioning profile expiration, the distribute certificate appears twice in the Keychain, even after I deleted it explicitly. It turns out the old distribute certificate came back after I opened the project in Xcode (presumedly it came back when the old provision profile associated with the project got loaded). So the workaround is to delete the old distribute certificate again after opening the project in Xcode.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5932522/codesign-error-certificate-identity-appearing-twice

Btw, saw an interesting idea from Mobile Iron regarding the enterprise distribution certificate. Normally the certificate expires in a year. In last 30 days it will prompt the user something like “the provision profile will expire in a few days…”, not good user experience. There is no way to renew it before it expires either. So the workaround suggested by MI is create 2 certificates, and create the second 6 months before the expiration and have user update the app. This way, essentially the app got extended 6 months. And so on. There is one catch in Xcode 4.3.3 I am using. It only recognizes the provision profile that was created earlier (or expires earlier). The workaround there is delete the earlier provision profile 😀

Categories
advice and tips

Thoughts from the NPR “Struggling smarts” story

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Last Updated on February 1, 2013 by omaha

I heard this story from NPR a while back, I meant to share it with my daughter’s teacher, did not do it as the New Town incident happened on that day. This is again discussed this morning at Hope Montessori morning presentation. I gave it some thought on this topic from time to time. I think it’s not east vs. west thing, also we need to consider the “brain freeze” when we put a person who usually is shy about public speaking to the blackboard, explain something to the class.

The most important lesson is, we (both teachers and parents) should encourage “good efforts”. I recall I had a very difficult class in Rolla, and from what I heard, the professor could give some not so good scores in the end. I tried my best, basically take the notes, spend a lot time working on homework problems, sometimes barely get it done before the class starts (I recall we meets 2 or 3 times a week). I did not do well in some of the early tests (3 tests before the final), in one test I did especially poor as I misread the problem as I was trying to finish all the problems in a short time. I explained it to the professor. He obviously understood it. As the semester concludes to my surprise he gave me “A” on the course. I think he gave it mostly because he thought I tried my best.