In my old job at the credit card 💳 co. I did support for a while and once I spent about 2 hours giving cardholder about 1.3 cents worth of US dollar. Today the roles reversed. Btw, Serenity said she was proud of me (assuming she was complementing I was the cool 😎 guy).
What happened
I don’t check my email that’s associated with appleid frequently because I transitioned most emails out of that one. But on Monday August 15, I noticed something is wrong with my Apple Card as I saw the suspicious purchase: $7.97 for robux, in case you don’t play Roblox, robux is the virtual currency for Robox game. On Tuesday 8/16 I saw one more purchase: $12.98 total, $9.99 for weather – (this is quite scammy as I don’t recall I never bought its subscription), and $2.99 worth of robux.
How I handled it
I contacted Goldman Sachs customer service through the dispute button in the Apple card, and they gave me credit eventually. I also changed the password for the apple id and the email (enabled 2FA). I noticed some tips from Apple regarding kids apple store payment, requirement for password, etc. This is the Apple web page that explains a few ways we can tighten the in app purchase on the devices.
My thoughts
Overall I still prefer Apple music / fitness+ over Youtube Music. Compared to Youtube (owned by google), sound quality on Apple music is usually guaranteed, while some YT music has bad sound quality. Also Fitness+ with integrated music is better than Peloton outdoor.
I wrote a twitter thread on this, btw.
I did not change the #email address. But I changed the password for the mentioned email (added two factor authentication), and password for the #appleid as well. I did explore changing email, but it seems both my personal #gmail and #outlook email are already on Apple system. /4
A checklist for Ladue school parents and guardians
Buy school supplies;
Meet the teacher / community night (bring school supplies if applicable): mainly say hi to teachers and staff, and for the kids to learn where are the classrooms etc. on 1st day;
Adjust kids sleep routine: from summer (no school or no camp) schedule to school schedule, may take a few days or a week;
Adjust grownup routine: from watching kids + work (or the other way), to do more work and maybe some self care (workout, social etc);
Some apps or emails that are likely relevant:
Parent Square (district and schools to parents communication), iOS, Android. Note PS has website too. But app is a bit more handier and performant. Last but not least please take a look at the notifications customization as well (especially the text messages).
MySchoolBucks (lunch money). From this school year (2022 to 2023) on the free lunch money from the government ran out. There is still the reduced fare lunch and so on, please contact the school as applicable. Note to add money to the meal account, we can do it via credit card (CC) on its website (it seems to me we cannot add money via the mobile app), or via check to school district (which I have not done it, please ask each school administrator as needed). Note MySchoolBucks (heartland payment co.) charges a credit card transaction fee.
Email Ladue Schools e-Connect Newsletter (usually weekly) and the paper Newsletter (usually monthly): district wide information such as lunch or construction, or strategic plan. The content is created by the district Communications Office.
SafeStop (instructions here, note this PDF has the code for the district, the one at the school bus website doesn’t): bus tracking, not the best or most reliable app in the world, but considering constructions in some schools the bus may still be the better choice for many families (maybe on one of those days, I can brush up my mobile app dev skills and create a better app 🙂 Btw, the bus information is here. Last but not least, it seems we only need to put in the code once for one device. || A side note, it seems there is delay of tracking the kids moved up in schools (for example, from elementary to FGC), it’s possible we need an manual update in the backend in terms of kid’s school information. || Another way to track kids, especially younger kids, is to use airtag. It seems it’s working because the main thing it needs is other nearby device’s bluetooth capability. Without today’s popularity of smartphone in the school and in the bus, I think it works most of the time.
Last but not least, for Spoede families, the portal of SSA (Spoede School Association) moved to here. The underlying software is used for the LMSPA website we well.
Some disclaimer: not district official doc. I believe each kid is unique, special and gifted in her / his own way. And for many parents / guardians they do sincerely believe their kids are the smartest. Years ago I think when my older daughter was probably 3 or 4 years old, at the preschool a few parents talked about the competitiveness of getting into gifted programs at public school (I was not the parent to initiated this topic :-). And one parent said that’s one reason they are sending their kids to private school. Although now I think about it, their kids were very smart and they can get into the gifted programs in many public schools.
The gifted program runs from grade 1 to grade 8. It’s called Idea Lab between grade 1 and 5; Apogee between grade 6 and 8. The main identification period is at the end of kindergarten, and at the end of grade 2. There are also exceptions, for example, there are opportunities, both for transfer (in) students, and occasionally at recommendation of classroom teacher (as he / she sees fit for the kid). Some may ask why they stopped at middle school: one explanation I heard is in high school they have the AP (which personally I think it’s different, but AP itself is a topic I don’t want to get into today). Note the program is not accelerated math or turbo charged STEM. The teacher has a lot of topics, but usually it covers topics such as science, creativity (think Lego etc) and some presentation. They usually meets twice a week in regular school time: which may or may not impact other regular subjects. Please check with the classroom teacher for the missing content and make sure the kid make up the work as need.
The work: I recall when Serenity our older daughter was at 2nd grade, she made a very nice hard cover book on a topic she was interested. I was impressed with the quality of the work: it seems Serenity carries this “attention to details / carry it through” to other subjects such as music. Serenity also benefited quite a bit from the presentation training, as she is an introvert and she usually gets nervous in front of people. I saw her progressing over the years. || This probably is applicable to everyone, and every job. Over the years I have seen myself improve on this front, and in one instance, we (a fellow mom to be precise) helped a shy student to speak up at the Creative Convention. Back to topic below.
Tests
There are two stages of test. One has to pass the first stage before entering the 2nd stage: which is an IQ test, it requires parents / guardians’ approval, as well as the kid has to be at least 6 year old. The first stage tests are described as below. I quote some content from the letter I received via email from the gifted program coordinator, for my younger daughter. I believe there is no proprietary information here: may be helpful to share it on district proper web page? I did take out the actual percentile or score threshold etc. See below in Italics:
“…During the initial steps of the process, we first evaluate two categories of learning and review students academic performance. Students need to pass at least two of the three screeners to move onto the phase (2) of testing.
Please note those scores or numbers are not absolute. The teachers and staff do have some flexibility interpreting the scores. We did not do anything special prep other than the daily math and reading work which the kid does at school or home (depends on the grade). My old daughter passed the tests at the kindergarten year, and my younger daughter at 2nd grade. Note the tests are usually done at the second semester. I recall there is usually an authorization form for parents to fill out at the beginning of school year as well.
For the second stage there is this IQ test, again note another form the parents need to fill. They emphasize there is nothing to prep for this IQ test. And we did not do anything 🙂 And it seems they rely on a specialist outside from district to perform the evaluation. I honestly don’t recall how my old daughter did (it was 6 years ago), but my younger daughter did the eval recently, and I felt the lady who does the eval has great patience with her. Both my girls scored similarly. Their scores are above 130. I think they maybe smarter than me 🙂
Personally I never took an IQ test, and I haven’t asked my kids about it either. It seems 130 is pretty high from the video above.
Experience
Note each school has one gifted teacher. My older daughter has gone through 4 teachers now (she had two teachers at elementary due to teacher change). Parent has option to do a parent / teacher conference, which is helped by Zoom for middle school nowadays. One thing I do remember is the Creative Convention, which is organized by the Gifted Resource Council. They do Equation competition too, also organized by GRC. I vaguely recall 2nd grader and up participate the Creative Convention; 3rd grader and up participate the Equation Competition. For the latter I am pretty certain it’s not limited to the gifted program kids. The team is usually organized by each school though.
Other Resources
The gifted program at Ladue Schools are usually not that easy to get into, because the program is limited (again only one teacher at each school; I think there are more in middle school) in terms of size. But for the parents, it’s not the end of the world if the kids did not get in, or did not get in at the kindergarten year testing. Remember it’s not Harvard admission either: both in terms of difficulty and its impact. Every kid is unique and as parents / guardians our main responsibility to provide an environment (along with the teachers) to help them learn / grow in their own ways, and hopefully to their full potential. In our case as you can see our younger daughter did not get in during her kindergarten year (her spring break was the time we got covid shutdown). We were obviously disappointed, but not disheartened. My wife was a bit anxious on her math and she made sure Sophia our daughter do some extra work when possible.
Last but not the least, I want to thank you all the Spoede/Ladue teachers who have taught our kids.
Gifted Resourced Council (GRC)
Also, there are many other resources such as GRC’s learning labs and summer academies (summer camps), and they are open to all the kids and parents. (Update 09-29-2022) Please note the fall 2022 learning labs, and parenting classes here. It looks all are in person now (no more Zooms).
There are other interesting STEM programs such as Maryville Science and Robotics program and Project MEGSSS for math enthusiasts as well. Again both are open to all the interested kids / families. They have some scholarship opportunities too. Last but not least there are tons of good materials on the Internet including YouTube nowadays. The internet definitely democratized the STEM learning.
SLPS Magnet Schools: this is a voluntary reciprocal program between STL City and County (not all county school district participate though). I have seen couple kids (Clayton, Ladue) went to the city magnet school, stayed for couple years, before coming back to their regular public school.
St Louis Regions Program for Exceptionally Gifted Students (South – Lindbergh; North – Pattonville). I have seen something similar for a Ladue kid (went to the Lindbergh for a year, then come back to Ladue). Note my kids never went to the city magnet school or the PEGS program.
FB Private Group (Parents of Gifted & High Ability Children): they will ask a few questions before you can join. It has a range of questions and discussions. || Btw, I came across this advice from the FB group: “As the mom of an older gifted child (10 years old in the 99.99 percentile), I want to HIGHLY recommend getting your kids into sports while they are little. A majority of gifted kids have asynchronous development that you begin to really notice throughout elementary school. This means they are VERY advanced learners, observers, emotional beings.. but usually a year or two behind socially and physically which can seriously affect self esteem and physical health. Starting and keeping them on sports teams early can really really help this. Best of luck “
I understand those at first look, doesn’t seem intuitive, but we as parents (especially for parents of gifted kids) probably will benefit a lot learning about all this.
(Update 09-17-2024)GRC is offering free webinars for parents (google form registration here)
Do you want to be an “involved parent”? I guess at least, we don’t want our kids watching ASMR on youtube all day… or for that matter, watching YouTube shorts, TikTok, Instagram and doing Snapchat? And may I add roblox, adopt me, Minecraft, and Fornite 🙁
Sorry this is the only games I know my girls do these days (except Fornite?) I am not against the social media and mobile games, for that matter, I think some exposure to those are okay. I just think both myself and my kids are wasting way too much time on iPhone (me) / iPads (them), this is not too surprising considering the pandemic and personally I spent way too much time on Twitter and WeChat (think WeChat is a combination of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and PayPal / Venmo, mainly in Chinese).
Anyway, enough Ted Talk from me. Integirls Math (math competition) is something I was working with my daughter Serenity (6th grader), math or other stem problems that’s a bit interesting. For example, since I mentioned Ted Talk here, I recall recently Serenity asked me this locker problem when I was driving. This is a bit intimidating problem at first look. But it was similar to some of the problems that I worked when I was learning computer programming, when I was in middle school (or high school? Sorry I forgot the exact timing), and it’s similar to some of the coding problem that I asked candidates during technical interview in recent years. Full disclosure: I am a software engineer with about 20 years of software development experience.
I understand Math sounds hard or may not be interesting to some
As parents I encourage my daughter to learn more math, more STEM, and more coding if possible. But at the same time, I do understand in our Ladue school, there are many talented kids and sometimes it could be a bit intimidating to participating the math club, the science club etc. This is probably applicable to my daughter (her introvert personality), as well as being a girl. I recall at the beginning of this school year, she was invited to join a team for math competition, and she does not want to do it. The reason: “I don’t like math“. Personally I think she probably does not like competition. I am okay with that. But I don’t want to leave her an impression that “my math is not that good”, or something along those lines. I think looking purely from the grade level, her math is very good.
What I like to see
No, I don’t expect her to solve the locker riddle in the TedEdu. Or some of the “math / algorithm” problems I collected in this file (some day I will organize it better 🙂 But I want to work with her, and show her some of problems in the InteGirls is doable at her level. “Empowering girls in STEM” is my goal, to be more specific, my selfish goal is empower my daughter in STEM.
How I plan to do it
Again I will work with Serenity, and potentially some of her friends. Here is the pdf file location for one set of sample problems (how I get here: I click on “Winter 2021 Math Contest” from the home page, from there, I scroll down, click on the Solutions – MS folder, it leads me to the google drive folder that has the PDF problem (and solution). I will try to work on a few problems (say 5) in 30 mins to 45 mins session. And ideally I want to make sure the kids know how to approach a problem. Teaching is not my strength, but I feel comfortable with English and middle school math (numbers, algebra, geometry etc.).
Are you going to form a team and compete?
I don’t know. But again my goal is first to practice then we can mutually decide if it’s something we can do. Again from the web page, score card, I saw some familiar names. I am not keen on winning a certain place, but if the girls are getting more confident, even if they only solve one problem (on their own), I will be happy 🙂
PS: yesterday I came across a video which is about basic finance and investing, and (at about 45 minutes mark) it has two interesting math (and psychological) problems too. Now I think about it, when I was in China, attending Zhenhai Middle School (its equivalent to both middle school and high school here in the US), and from time to time, I met some really good teachers and had some inspiring or interesting discussions or problems. Just think math teacher like Po Shen Loh here in the USA (CMU). If you know Chinese, I think 李永乐老师 is the best on math, science, life and literature (yes I said it he is good on everything 🙂 And Po Shen Loh (CMU math professor) is pretty close on that too.
(Update 03-24-2022) I just noticed the Spring 2022 contest is on: April 16 Saturday. Here is the link. Noticed this too: We will also be hosting a game and math review session on Wednesday, April 13th at 8 PM CT. You will have the opportunity to play fun games with your team, review math concepts for the contest, and meet others all over the country! Sign up for the session by registering for the contest.
Appendix: I collected some interesting math problems at this GitHub repo. I started collecting during the pandemic shutdown and that’s the reason it’s in that repo.
(Update 12-04-022) Today a friend told me about another book, prealgebra, which is roughly about a 7th or 8th-grade math textbook in the USA. My daughter (7th grade) is doing the exercises on Afficient (this is a bit like the online version of the good old Kumon).
(Original) In my daughters school, we started this math curriculum about 5, or 6 years ago. One thing I noticed in the US, the kids usually don’t have paper textbooks that they can bring home. My impression is the school usually provide the books when kids are in school, during the class. I also think each teacher can do it in a different way.
For the Math in Focus (a variant of Singapore Math) though, the textbook is available online. Here is the link to get it (this is the Clever portal, note one needs to be in Ladue School and has the right login information in order to access). Once one logs into the Clever portal, go to “think central”, and it has the links to the math textbooks (or student book, exercise book). There is .epub format textbook to download too. Note we have not really taken advantage of the ebook yet. But it’s probably a good idea to know where the textbook is, especially when we try to explain the bar model to the kiddos 🙂
Btw, please note Clever is a single sign on platform in which we can see other apps in addition to thinkcentral. For example, I saw the “Big Ideas Math” there too, which is used by my 6th grader. I am guessing other school districts (or other schools) may use the Clever platform too.
Last but not least, we also bought the “big ideas math” (common core) textbook for my older daughter the 6th grader as well. We asked around and bought it online: it’s a bit unusual for book sellers as they usually work with schools (wholesale as opposed to retail). I believe Amazon has math in focus textbook too.
High profile or high impact outage or incidents are just a way of the life in modern internet, or public cloud. The key is to recover quickly from the incident, and learn from those incidents: post mortem analysis, or in some places they do root cause analysis or RCA, and in my personal opinion, RCA is usually useless exercise, both due to the political nature of scapegoating in large orgs, as well as there are usually some unique breakpoints in an incident.
I listened to or watched a few interesting youtube video and or twitter space recently. The most significant one is the “storytelling”, I believe this is probably as important as “compounding effect” in investing and life time learning.
Below is the youtube video, how to speak, by Prof Patrick Winston of MIT
This is also in line with Warren Buffett’s emphasis on “public speaking” and I believe he was quite shy when he was young, and he signed up the Dale Carnegie course to improve his public speaking skills: the rest is the history.
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Second topic I am interested, somewhat related to the story telling, is transitioning and level up in the IT / Software space. This is the twitter space: benefits of dating jobs in Tech. I understand the title maybe a bit hard to understand, but I think the content is good. I did some of that in the past, notably in year 2013, 2014, and 2015. Also did some of that (looking internally) when I was with the credit card co. between 2016 and 2018.
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Last but not least, I have two good newsletter to share. This English one by Juston Garrison (same Justin as above). There is a subscribe (weekly email option which I recommend.)
科技爱好者周刊 by ruanyf : github; available at WeChat too. Note for WeChat this is just one weekly magazine, I think you may consider subscribe it via WeChat.
I am thinking about this, also there was an ask from two parents. Some of the things I think I can start at first class, also some of the things I am thinking about teaching (more systematic).
For 12 factor application the No. 1 principle is one source code base. Today I was thinking about this topic: one sets of source code for one app, and use configuration for language, region or other different settings for different customers. And this reminded me of some of the articles I read (such as this one: Building a versioned UI deploy system for fast, stable deploys and rollbacks, actually this one “Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches“, both from Blend Labs, that’s why I was a bit confused 😐 ) and a few apps I worked on in last 3 or 4 years: note those apps include both monolithic, cloud native apps and somewhere in between.
At current place, I noticed one thing odd. We have different code bases for different locale (country) for one of our key apps: basically two sets of code (mostly identical) for apps for 2 countries. This seems to me not good architecture and a bit unusual. Without going into all the details and history (I was new to the team, and it’s also not good to point fingers anyway). So the direct cost I see now is to maintain two sets of code bases (very similar) and two apps: in other words thinking along the lines of the cost of developer, admin and infrastructure and so on.
On the contrast, at a former place I worked at, we have many white label customers, and we serve them on one set of code base and one set of apps (for the most part). All the differences between customers are addressed via System Maintenance (a web based configuration app). Web services for all the customers is running on one app on multiple servers (load balanced). The customer facing website is similar with one caveat: at one time we realized for one country the customer has traffic spikes from time to time, so that app for that country is put on dedicated “overflow” server: still the same code base with the difference in the configuration.
And at today’s world, we also increasingly hear more about multi tenant(s). The scenario I described above, as well as the medium article mentioned at the first paragraph, is along the same lines. And during Covid, at the former place I worked (a healthcare provider, to be more precise, the No. 2 US based hospital chain in terms of size), we developed a Covid screen app, for internal, as well as external customers (for example, Indiana Pacers). At the very beginning, we speed up the development by deploying the same code base to different org / spaces (essentially each customer has its own database). Later on we consolidated quite a bit, by changing the code to handle multiple customers (multi-tenant, if I may). In both cases, the source code is the same. The difference being in the early days, we used more resources because each customer has its own database, and its own app. And there is maintenance headache as well, for example, deployment and validation will take hours.
PS: one more thing. Once I did copy and paste of javascript code because I was not very good at javascript and I did not know how to do either inheritance or composition in js. The downside of doing this is also obvious: if there is bug in the code, we need to change it in 2 places. This is just a small example of why we don’t want to duplicate code.
PS 2: now I recall another company. This company is the No 1. medicaid provider in the nation, and has operations in probably 20 to 30 states in the US. Note medicaid is administrated by the stat, unlike medicare which is administrated by the federal government (CMS). I saw two issues one is re: code and another one is re: infrastructure. So because each state will have its own customization, what they did is they branch out code for each state (so basically a master branch and let’s say 20 branches for each of the state). On the infrastructure side, they scale up horizontally, so basically each state has its own database server (Oracle), and its own application server and so on (this is also dedicated by the source code). So this is their implementation of “multi-tenant”. Not very flexible to say the least. They also have a horrendous interview process and work culture too, which I won’t delve into.
Downloaded Noobs image installer (imager_1.6.2) to Mac, unpack (or install) so that I have “Raspberry Pi Imager” on Mac, and then used it to create the bootable OS on the sd card using that software.
Burn the image for Raspberry Pi on Mac
After that insert the sd card to the appropriate slot on p3, also plugged in hdmi for monitor, and usb keyboard and mouse. Turn on the power (plug in the power adapter for iPhone with proper cable).
The Pi 3 in action, ports counter clockwise: power, hdmi (monitor), USB (2, mouse and keyboard)
Raspberry Pi Desktop first impression: I mainly used the web browser Chromium “Version 92.0.4515.98 (Official Build) Built on Raspbian , running on Raspbian 10 (32-bit)”, there is some lagging (keyboard, gmail and wordpress self host / post) compared to the MacBook, but still manageable. Keep in mind this pi 3 is probably selling for $30 or less nowadays. Btw, I tried a YouTube video (it’s the CNN Virginis moms switching from Biden to Youngkin story) in the browser too and it was a bit laggy in the beginning (video streaming?), but it worked well after couple minutes. This is pretty impressive.
Raspberry Pi Desktop
Obviously in order to use it as a desktop replacement, I would need to do some more tests. But I came across one post using pi 4 just now. Seems very promising there as well. Every Sunday morning my 2 daughters will take Chinese classes virtually via Zoom, and they uses my two personal macbooks. So in that duration I could use the pi 3. I noticed the temperature of the motherboard is not too hot either (no fans, no enclosure, just look like the picture 2 above).
Some other thoughts: there are tons of ideas regarding pi on internet. One idea is use it as home security. I will just need to dig more into it, and once I have more knowledge, I may purchase more Pi’s like my old friend Jeff Geerling (projects, blog) does. I don’t think I would be as prolific as he does. But I am just going to try.
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