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Published On: Aug 05, 2007 08:38 AM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Aug 05, 2007 08:38 AM
Catching up
Busy, busy week.
Apropos of nothing, the photo is of the Rock'em Sock'em Robots set I got for William's birthday, in the background, and a Sea Monkey aquarium in the foreground. I think Sea Monkeys are making a bit of a comeback, novelty item here and there. I raised Sea Monkeys for a while as a kid. I got these Sea Monkeys from Toys'R'Us and hatched them over Christmas. The population skyrocketed in late December and early January, and then I had a die-off that left a fairly stable population of around a dozen adults. Occasionally, some baby Sea Monkeys would hatch and appear in groups of two or three, but they'd die off pretty quickly. I recently came to the conclusion that I must not have been feeding them enough and that the adults ate up all the food, starving the babies. In recent weeks, the Sea Monkeys have been mating like crazy, and there's a new batch of at least six more babies. I'm feeding them more often.
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Last week, I started doing taxes in TurboTax. Last year was the first time I used TurboTax since the days it was released as Macintax for the Mac, and last year was also the first time since we got married that we haven't used a tax accountant. Our old tax accountant was based in Chicago, and though we continued to use him long-distance when we moved to California, I felt that it was getting impractical.
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Last weekend, we received three letters concerning William's kindergarten applications -- two acceptances from our second and third choice schools, and one wait-list for a school tied for fourth. The other fourth-place school notified us by phone that they'd accepted William weeks ago and that they'd send the formal letter in April. We didn't hear from our first choice school until Monday -- and it was the only rejection.
It's pretty interesting. The schools that accepted William are all traditional academic schools with good reputations as such. The second and third choice schools are a close second and third, in my opinion, and one of them has a reputation for being rather hard core, academically -- just the kind of school an ambitious and demanding parent would like. In fact, the second and third choice schools were pretty close second and thirds to our first choice school, and if we could have guaranteed that the probable second choice school would be followed by acceptance into one of the two top private high schools for boys in this area, it would probably be our first choice. (I don't look forward to the application process for high school.)
Our first choice school was the first choice mainly because it goes from kindergarten through high school, whereas our second and third choice schools go only through middle school (8th grade). It has a good reputation in Pasadena, but I really wanted it for its guarantee of an education from K to 12, and a bit for its physical location close to Caltech. It's also more expensive than the other schools. Further, it's really seriously academic only in high school, and maybe in middle school. It's developmental, rather than academic, in kindergarten and the earlier grades. I was a bit concerned that the developmental approach may last too long, but I was willing to accept it for the K-12 guarantee.
I don't take rejection very well, and I can harbor grudges. (The only school to reject me for physics grad school merits my scorn to this day.) It turns out that I take rejection of my sons even less well, and I spent Monday evening being pretty steamed about their rejection letter. I take some shared comfort in the fact that we know several families who applied to that same school as their first choice, and to my knowledge, not a single one got accepted. The generally accepted theory is that many of the kindergarten spots were taken by younger siblings of older students. It's possible as well, regarding William specifically, that there was something in our parent statements that made it apparent that William was more an academic student rather than a developmental one, whatever that means.
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I was so steaming irritated Monday night that I went ahead and filed our taxes electronically via TurboTax that night. Usually, when I prepare taxes, I sit on the forms for a week or two before submitting and worry about the numbers, even when we had the forms prepared by our tax accountant. This time, I was so upset about that one rejection letter that I no longer cared about the numbers, so I filed the taxes. (I'm pretty sure the numbers are correct, anyway.)
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Since Tuesday, Hsuan and I are over our upset at the rejection, and we've been thinking hard about the other schools. Honestly, the second and third choice schools are seriously good private schools with a focus on strong, traditional academics. Again, they're just the kind of schools favored by, well, parents like me. The second school reminds me very much of the elementary school that I attended as a child, from the academic focus to the staff to the wonderful, expansive school facilities. The third choice school is very, very similar, albeit newer and a bit smaller, physically. It feels a little more home-like than the second, though, and the staff is uniformly warm and friendly. (The school that sent the rejection letter actually doesn't remind me of my old elementary school or even my old high school. It has a southern California feel to it that I certainly didn't experience until I went to summer science camp at Thacher in Ojai.)
Unfortunately, the third school loses points with me for sticking with French as its foreign language of choice, which I think is outmoded and impractical. The second school is sticking with Spanish (very practical), dropping French, and considering adding an Asian language like Mandarin -- which I think is very impressive and forward-thinking. The second school also has nicer facilities.
On the other hand, the third school has lower tuition, which wins big points with me. The third choice school has lower tuition but offers no financial aid. The second school has higher tuition and offers financial aid, implying that wealthier families are subsidizing poorer families. Something worth considering.
We have a hard choice to make early next week. (I may as well label the second and third choice schools as our new first and second choice schools from now on. The two fourth-place schools will be receiving our thank-you-but-decline notes soon.)
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William drank some spoiled milk for breakfast on Wednesday, and I ended up being called from work to bring him home after he spent the morning at daycare vomiting and having diarrhea. We've had problems with spoiled milk before, and when I got home with William, I tasted a little of it. It hadn't met the expiration date, and from my short taste, I couldn't tell the difference between that quart of milk and another, fresh quart we had in the refrigerator. Hsuan tasted it, found it okay, then drank the rest. When she got to the bottom of the quart, though (there were only one or two cups left in the container), she tasted a spoiled milk taste.
By evening, she was having a lot of diarrhea, too.
Because of the vomiting and diarrhea, William was excluded by school rules from returning to daycare until noon on Thursday, but Hsuan was too sick to bring him. (I had brought James to daycare Thursday morning.)
Both boys returned to daycare this morning.
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Wednesday afternoon, while William napped in bed, we received a visit from our real estate agent. We invited him over to look at our house in order to see the kind of house and neighborhood we want closer to William's new school, and we also wanted to discuss issues in selling our house (i.e. listing price, the market, and what changes, if any, we needed to make). We also spent some time with him looking over listings on the Internet, using the Mac mini attached to our plasma TV.
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Last night, I suddenly started worrying about the STEREO LET matrices that I had submitted for uploading to the spacecraft. The firmware upload was scheduled for this morning, and I was worried that the new gains and offsets would make certain live STIM events miss the STIM boxes in the new matrices. Despite the new gains and offsets, I hadn't changed the locations of the STIM boxes.
By 3:30 AM this morning, I had generated plots using January data showing that, even with the new gains and offsets, the STIM events should still lie within the boxes -- although some events were getting a little close to the edges. Still, I went to sleep feeling comfortable with the new matrices.
Then at 7:20 AM this morning, Hsuan woke me up with a phone call from Branislav, who was at the lab watching the results of the upload to the STEREO Behind spacecraft. He told me that Bob R., one of our engineers, was noticing that we were getting errors from the RNG 4 Fe STIM box. I felt like I was waking up to a nightmare.
As I shook off sleep, I started talking more with Branislav. He wanted to know if we should go ahead with the STEREO Ahead spacecraft firmware upload at 10:40 AM. I told him that I couldn't say with any certainty whether it was a good idea, but I also told him that the STIM events shouldn't affect the science events. At one point, I realized that the new gains and offsets should have affected the RNG 4 Fe STIM events least and should instead have affected the RNG 2 H-He events most, so something odd was going on. Either the matrices were corrupted -- and there was a long stream of steps in which the matrices could have been corrupted -- or there was something odd with the new software.
I told him I'd be at the lab shortly. After driving William and James to daycare, I ran to my office to dump my PowerBook and then ran around the lab looking for Branislav or Bob and not finding either. I found only Ed, who told me Mark was available by phone at his home. I returned to my office, scanned through my e-mail, found today's data, and started going through the data.
As far as I could tell, the RNG 4 Fe STIM events were hitting their STIM box right in the middle, but they were tagged as error events. I generated plots and sent out e-mails. I started going through my matrix generating and conversion code, and as far as I could tell, everything that I created and eventually transmitted to Andrew and Rick C. was correct. Today's firmware upload to the Ahead spacecraft was postponed for further investigation.
Eventually, Andrew found that the problem was downstream of me. It turns out that the new RNG 4 matrix that I generated is more complex than the old one and that the resulting base64 compressed form is larger than the previous version. Thus, the new RNG 4 base64 matrix code overflows the space that was allocated for the old version, so the RNG 4 matrix got truncated. The fix is a simple, one-number adjustment. Firmware upload is rescheduled for next week, probably Monday.
I was so nerve-wracked and shot that, after lunch, I couldn't keep my eyes open and lay down for half an hour in my office. Then I went out for a cup of coffee, to stretch my legs, and to chat to other colleagues in another office before leaving for the day.
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One final note about schools: Last fall, as we were visiting schools and considering our options for applications, we visited a very impressive school south of Glendale. This school goes from K to 12, just like the other, Pasadena school, but unlike the Pasadena school, this Glendale school has a very hard core academic reputation. In fact, they take pride in the fact that their high school students enter various academic competitions and often bring home trophies.
After visiting their kindergarten, I wanted to visit the high school, and I ended up bonding for quite a while with their computer science teacher and the head of their science department. In fact, I was invited by the science department head to return to their school and view some of his students' science competition projects, to critique them prior to the competition and help them be "more sophisticated". I agreed to do so, and I contacted him this Tuesday and arranged to meet with him next Wednesday.
(In the end, we did not apply to this school. As mind-bogglingly impressive as it is, it's too far away from where we live or even want to live. Still, we may apply there for high school.)
Posted: Fri - March 16, 2007 at 11:23 PM