Categories
advice and tips kids

Diapers, diapers, diapers

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Baby Sophia is almost 5 months old, and she is on size 3 diaper (16 to 28 lbs). I recall she was born at 7 lbs and 3 oz, quickly reach 10 lbs which also outgrew new born size diaper. Similar thing happened to size 1 diaper, she reached 14 lbs at 2 month mark, and now we have both new born and size 1 surplus diapers 🙂

Things slowed a bit since 2 month, she was about 15.5 lbs at 4 month checkup. Nonetheless we used all size 2 diapers (12 to 18 lbs), and started size 3 (16 to 28 lbs).

As to diaper brands and type, we used huggies natural new born, pampers swaddler new born, huggies snug and dry size 1, a store brand size 1, huggies little smuggler size 2, and pampers swaddler size 3.

Thinking switch to huggies snug and dry size 3 in the future, that’s what our elder daughter had most of time, and it sells for $39 per 210 at Costco. A bit cheaper than pampers swaddler.

Categories
advice and tips Fun

How to set bluetooth on Toyota Sienna minivan

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2012 LE, basic radio.

Set the language from Spanish to English
(it says Corolla, but it works for Sienna as well, as they have very similar audio equipments).

Setup bluetooth

My tip: so I followed the instruction 1 and set up bluetooth audio for my iPhone 5s with the minivan, and later on I tried to add the bluetooth phone, and I was not successful during the step where the phone tries to connect to the bluetooth audio (car multi-media). The fix is to forget the car multi-media in the iPhone, and set up again for both phone and audio (“device type” in the car audio prompt).

(update 03-12-15) I had to pair my iPhone 5s bluetooth again with sienna, after iOS 8.1.3 update. Forgot this “forgot the car multi-media” tip initially 🙂 Note again select “phone setup” and “interior bluetooth audio”, this way it will work both for phone and audio.

Categories
Fun

Montessori at home

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IMG_4289.JPG

The new math puzzle bought from Amazon. Since serenity no longer goes to Montessori school, we got this for her. The item costs $44.99 at Amazon, and costs about $10 at Taobao in China 🙂

Categories
advice and tips finance

Trying to be frugal, ready for Kindergarden

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I have been in “austerity mode” since late Sept., and so far my main approach is “shop at Aldi, and global food market”. I found Aldi has most of the grocery and basic daily stuff, while global food market has the fresh veggies and sea food. Occasionally I shopped at Sam’s club, Target, Trader Joe’s and Chinese grocery store for specific stuff: bottle water, paper towels and fruits at Sam’s, Hawaii King rolls and baby diapers at Target, pot sticker and beans at Trader Joe’s.

Aldi has changed quite a bit in recent years, when I first came to the US as a “poor” graduate student, sometimes we joked Aldi is for the “poor people” (it seemed we excluded ourselves”). Not anymore. I found a lot of people shop at Aldi nowadays, in the Aldi near our home (Olive and 270), which is previously a Borders’ book store. It was mostly busier when I go there. Sometimes I go there too much (like 3 times in one afternoon). It was almost like some people indulge on the trip at Costco. I do have the Costco membership, but found myself have not been there for months 🙂

On a separate note, my elder daughter is 4 years and 9 months old, and we are getting ready for her to go to kindergarden in public school next fall. The school will be very close to our home (school boundary map). Our younger one, is already 4 and half months, and can stand her head up. In this holiday season, there are always friends gatherings, and we always talked about kids, education etc.

Categories
Site Info Software development Web

Moving wordpress from shared host to aws ec2

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I did an experiment recently trying to move my wordpress website from a shared hosting site to Amazon aws ec2 micro instance (t1). The migration was mostly successful, I did not make the move eventually due to some technical and non-technical reasons. Nonetheless, I would like to share some of the lesson I learned from this process. I followed this blog post form smashmagazine as a blueprint for “moving wordpress”. Note I already have ubuntu installed on ec2, and has setup keys for my laptop.

1) Setup wordpress on new host. This is the link I followed to setup wordpress on ubuntu on my aws ec2. Another useful article is here.

2) Upload files: I used FileZilla (SFTP) for uploading the files. Here is the link regarding setup keys. Note the file permission is also very important to make wordpress work, which is especially important when moving the sites. More on this later.

3) File permission, one thing I noticed quickly is I don’t have any writing privilege after moving, e.g., update plug-ins etc. Did google quite a bit, and tries to change the file permissions using FileZilla. No luck. Eventually I read this from wordpress official doc. Quote:…(a) file ownership: all of your WordPress files must be owned by the user under which your web server executes. In other words, the owner of your WordPress files must match the user under which your web server executes. The web server user (e.g., “apache”, “web”, “www”, “nobody”, etc.) is not necessarily the owner of your WordPress files…

I did “ps -ef|grep httpd” at my ubuntu server, and find the user for apache web server (not “root”). And changed the file owner to this user (via “chown” command).

4) MySQL server crash: I found this happens quite often (as often as once every 3 days). Turns out to be a memory problem for the t1 micro instance and apache web server and mysql fights for the memory, eventually mysql lost. The solution I found is add virtual memory to the system, and reduce the memory requirement for mysql in config file. Eventually I was able to have mysql run as long as 13 days without shutting down. Not ideal, but still meaningful improvement (13 days uptime vs 3). Another idea, people talked about is use a lightweight http server such as this one.

5) MySQL database migration. Found out for large database, php export will not complete, and will end up with some junk html in the database file (.sql), it will fail during import. The workaround is do the export and import in the mysql command line. But I still have one problem with database, it appears the Chinese character got lost during this process. This problem along with the mysql server problem mentioned above, and the relative higher cost of AWS compared to shared host, made me decide to not switch at this time.

Other links:
Setup php/mysql, and phpMyAdmin.

Craig Emerson has an up-to-date article on this topic WordPress CloudFront CDN Setup Using W3 Total Cache.

Categories
finance

Not an easy week

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It’s Friday again. I had to admit this is not an easy week for me. After a lot of back and forth, I finally decided to withdraw my elder daughter from Montessori school, mostly due to financial reasons. As a father, I felt I am giving up something for my daughter due to my limited earning power. Both of us liked the school, and we have been there for a little over 3 years since she was 1.5 years old. From toddler house to pre-school. She had some good friends there. My original plan was to bite the bullet and stay there until next May, but due to some costs associated with new baby, I decided to look elsewhere. I don’t feel comfortable to put all this in a credit card, and begin to pay back until next summer. This also bring up another point, about emergency savings, and life style choice. I felt I did not do my best job in this aspect during last 3 to 4 years. Now I learned the lesson the hard way. I guess there are two sides of an equation, save more (which is usually more meaningful), and increase earning power (not as efficient as government took a cut from any increase in paycheck).

I will share more when I give it more thought on this topic.

(11-5-14) Yesterday was serenity’s day 2 at new school. My wife already had second thoughts on this 🙁 But we think at this moment let’s stay put, rather than rush to conclusion. There is an old Chinese saying that is applicable here: it’s easier to get from poor to luxury, rather than the other way around. (need better translation here 🙂

Categories
Fun

Big baby, little baby

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My elder daughter Serenity finally used to sleep in her room recently. The trick is I decided not to co-sleep with her. Also, she still needs her mommy watch her falling asleep, which usually takes an hour or so, since she gets up sometimes: ask me questions, etc. (delay tactic).

Little baby Sophia is getting big, she weighs about 14 lbs in 2 month check up, which doubled from her birth weight. She likes to sleep on my shoulder. Today my coworker told me one reason is she like to feel heart beat. Also sometimes she sucks my neck or upper arm. It’s normal in baby growth, I just found out from web, although I am second time dad. Never stop learning.

Categories
iPhone app

Some tips for submit updated app to iTunes store post iOS8

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With (before) the release of iOS8, I noticed the iTunes Connect web interface has also been changed. But today is the first time I submit my app (update) to the store for last few months. There are some changes.

1) First, there is no “ready to submit app” button in the iTunes Connect, instead we just create a new version at ITC;

2) After that, we load the app to the app store, I used good old Xcode 5.1.1, which is the minimum version Apple requires now. Now here is a tip when submit from Xcode organizer, when I run “validate” before submit, it says I could not change “bundle” number, which I have not. Looking more carefully, it appears the good old Xcode 5.1.1 got confused with which app profile to use, and it picked the wrong one all the time. So I manually corrected it. After that I was able to upload the binary.

3) There is one more step, the actual “submit for review”, in the past the step 2) is sufficient. Now there is this extra step. In this step, it will ask questions similar to the questions being asked when we do “ready to submit” in the ITC in the past (before this change). In my case, since the app has “iAd”, it insists me check the Ad identifier selection, and after I check that, it let me submit (note I will try couple times, eventually I started over). But it appears not let me check “no” in the Ad section. This appears to be a glitch, I was able to submit my other 2 apps without any problem when checking no for the Ad identifier. There is another glitch though, that is I have to quit the app, before pick the newly added build, and submit for review. In summary, it appears ITC web page needs some work.

I will report more when/if I find anything new next time I submit app update. I noticed there is new marketing collaterals such as the preview video, and screenshots for 4.7/5.5 inch screen. My gut feeling is those will be required after this transition period. So hurry up if you have some app or update to release 🙂

(PS, 09-28-2014) One more thing, I noticed if I wanted to reject a binary (a build in new term), I need to create a new version. In the past, I could upload a newer binary with same version number. I think it’s probably a good idea to limit this back and forth. Note Apple added testFlight capability too. It should help app testing.

Categories
advice and tips Fun

Found out why I missed 25000 miles Alaska Airlines from credit card

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I signed up the BoA credit card 50,000 miles promotion last Dec. But I forgot to spend $1000 in the first 3 months, I spent $995 in the first two months and then stopped. The reason was I thought I had reached this limit. But I forgot one thing: to check my spending at both BoA and at Alaska Airlines websites. I did not go to the latter because I thought I did not have the mileage plan number.

Today I found out on my credit card I do have the number. But the 3 months has long passed. They now offer 25,000 miles for bonus opening their credit card.

Categories
advice and tips kids

Chinese kids

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Saw this discussion at mittbbs.com (发信人: waluzz78 (哇鲁庄镇), 信区: Parenting). I think I agree.

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最近跟国内来的访问学者或旅游的家庭往，感觉国内的孩子很活泼自信，跟大人打交道
也很自然。跟他们相比，我们周围在美国长大的10岁左右的小孩，包括我们自己的孩子
，显得更木讷，尤其不擅长跟大人打交道。我琢磨了一下，觉得原因是孩子在美国长大
，只想用英文说话，而在家里父母用中文跟他们交流，他们虽然能听懂，但不愿用中文
回答，久而久之，跟大人的交流也变少了，而中国父母跟美国家庭的来往有限，孩子们
也缺乏跟美国大人的来往，结果既没学会中国人待人接物的方法，也没学会美国人的方
式，基本上只会跟同龄人打交道，在成人面前就显得很木讷。想起夏天一个孩子班上搞
得跟老师告别的party上，美国孩子即兴侃侃而谈表达对老师的感激之情，几个中国孩
子唯唯诺诺的回避发言，当时以为是性格所至，现在看应该是生长环境造成的。国内长
大的孩子普遍就大方多了。现在很想亡羊补牢，改善一下孩子的社交能力，我能想到的
就是多带孩子参加活动，尤其是美国人为主的活动，因为让孩子学中国人待人处事已经
不切合实际了，只好人他们学习美国人的方式，自己也只好step out of the comfort
zone了.也许加入country club是个办法。以前觉得那里中国人太少了，加入是受罪.不
知大家有什么好建议。
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