Posts

General

How Much Is That Dinner Worth?

To fight the recession, looks like some a restaurant in UK is allowing people to name their own price on the food! No, we’re not talking about rock-hard bread with Hungry Man re-plated on designer dish. Appetizers and entrees include crab tartelette, foie gras terrine, goat cheese souffle, duck breast, steamed butterfish and filet steak.  How about opening a name your own price Todai here?

Kids

Ten Months, Sip, Sip!

Lia is now Ten months old! Now let’s see what she’s able to do according to the book What To Expect The First Year.

She should be able to:

  • Stand holding on to someone or something. Check!
  • Pull up to standing position from sitting.  Yup!
  • Object if you try to take a toy away. Uh huh!
  • Say “mama” or “dada” indiscriminately.  Yip!
  • Play peekaboo.  Yesiree!
  • Exchange back-and-forth gestures with you.  Yeah!

Will probably be able to:

  • Get into a sitting position from stomach. 
    Now when she wakes up at night, she goes into the sitting position and cries until she is picked up, hugged, and put back down.
  • Play patty-cake (clap hands) or wave bye-bye. 
    She can do both!
  • Pick up tiny object with any part of thumb and finger. 
    She does this with puffs…
  • Walk holding on to furniture. 
    A little…
  • Understand “no” (but not always obey it). 
    She understands no, but never obeys it.  😉

May possibly be able to:

  • Stand alone momentarily.
    Her max is 3 seconds.
  • Say “dada” or “mama” discriminately. 
    She says dada and mama so often it’s hard to tell…
  • Point to something to get needs met.
    Nope.

May even be able to:

  • Indicate wants in ways other than crying.
    Sort of.  She signed Milk!
  • “play ball” (roll ball back to you). 
    Not yet…
  • drink from a cup independently. 
    You be the judge…
  • Pick up a tiny object neatly with tips of thumb and forefinger.
    Sometimes, with puffs.
  • Stand alone well.
    Her max is 3 seconds.
  • Use immature jargoning.
    A little, but not sure.
  • Say one word other than “mama” or “dada”.
    She can say “up!”.
  • Respond to a one-step command with gestures.
    Nope.
  • Walk well.
    Definitely not.

So regarding the drinking from a cup, we have this clip to show…

Kids

Tent Camping… at home

From time to time, we needed to bring Lia somewhere and have her take a nap, but it can be difficult to sleep in a strange bed. At first we looked into a playpen, but Karen found a better product with high ratings: a tent. It contains an inserted inflatable air mattress at the bottom to keep the tent comfortable, and we’ve been putting Lia in it once a day. Here was a clip of when Lia woke up from a tent session…

Rumor has it that Jujube also has her own tent, so maybe next time she can camp with Lia!

Health

High Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury?

nohighfructosecornsyrup

High Fructose Corn Syrup should be avoided because it fools your body into eating that extra 3 slices of cake when you just had 10 slices of pizza and 3 sticks of hot dogs. Well, turns out that it does more than making you eat the extra serving of pastry, but also make you dumber. A new study shows that U.S. Corn Syrup is tainted with mercury.

So the next time you pop open that honey packet to put on your biscuit at KFC, think about how much your intelligence is worth. Actually, the better question is why you’re in KFC munching on that fatty, fried leg in the first place…

General

Cellphone Keyless Entry

A few days ago, I received what appeared to be spam labeled “5 Things You Never Knew Your Cell Phone Could Do” in my mailbox. One of the paragraphs caught my eye:

Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call
someone at home on their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. It saves someone from having to drive your keys to you.

Now one neat trick I knew is that if the car is just out of range of the remote, putting it under your chin while pressing the button will give the remote an extra boost, as your skull will act as an antenna and give you an extra few yards of slack. 

keyremotechin

Some web sites, such as snopes, insist that the email is a hoax, but after reading various comments from readers on the internet, such as this site, it seems that some people have done it successfully.  It sounded like rubbish, as keyless entry remotes are radio transmitters, but cell phones pick up audio signal and transmits the signal to the cell tower. Even if somehow it carries the transmitter signal, the signal should have dissipated at the radio tower, I would think.  Still, a search for “cell phone car remote unlock” in google will reveal quite a few user comments that say otherwise. Could it be that someone is really trying to expand the hoax by littering comments with success stories, or is there some truth to this matter?

So I did an experiment.  I went to my garage at work, called my wife and asked her to press her remote next to her iPhone while I put my loaner G1 phone next to the door. Nothing. I tried putting the G1 on speakerphone. Nothing. Maybe our phones are too “smart”, but instead, a ghetto phone from last century with a black and white display is needed to execute this experiment? Maybe the optimum angle on the phone was not achieved during my experiment? Or just maybe the whole story is … bowel movement?

If you have attempted it, I’d like to hear your results. It really indeed be convenient to avoid a 1 hour journey just to fetch the spare remote!