Archive for November, 2007
Just before Thanksgiving Kai wrote a short “fill in the blank” style story at school. The topic was the journey of the Mayflower to the New World. When I was a kid we got the sugar-coated fairy tale version of happy pilgrims. I think Kai is getting a somewhat more realistic version of the story, and then is layering on his own matter-of-fact sensibility. Maria and I were cracking up when he showed this to us. There are several pages after these, about the pilgrims building houses, etc., but these first 3 pages are a good sample of his narrative. The guy in the first picture is vomiting.
 August, 1620: I am sailing to the new world. I feel home sick because I miss my home. I will take my one toy. |
 October, 1620: I am on board the Mayflower. I feel even more sick. I feel like getting off the Mayflower. |
 November 9, 1620: We saw land today. I felt happy because we reached land. I wanted to run in the sand. |
Just like the foolishness that’s on the cable news channels’ political talk shows every night (people in suits yelling at each other about the days events), these videos of the boys are cheap to produce and always get good ratings. And hopefully they’re more fulfilling.
This particular performance was actually going on for quite a while before I got the camera. What really got me was the boys disappearing between each vignette - if you listen closely you can hear Kai whispering to Eidan about what to do next. Click the image to start the video.
The Kai and Eidan Show
The Kai and Eidan Show
Why a volcano for Japan?
Why a volcano for Japan?
I’m sure you’ve seen AT&T’s place name mash-up ads. This one greeted me at my neighborhood trolley stop early in the morning today. If you’re wondering what that lump is where Japan should be, I’m fairly certain it’s not a tumor or a wart - I’m pretty sure it’s a volcano. I guess they’re trying for Mt. Fuji, which actually is a dormant volcano, but I don’t think most people in the US know that (it last erupted 300 years ago). So it struck me as a cryptic choice - when I think “Japan,” “volcano” is not an image that comes to mind. It’s a shame because they could have had a lot of fun with other possibilities: Hello Kitty, Shinto shrine gates, sumo wrestlers, sushi, samurai, bullet trains, Astro Boy, cherry blossoms, geishas, and so on. The real problem is that the ad designers boxed themselves in with their choice of bland gray icons, as so much that is iconic about Japan is wonderfully colorful. What makes Mt. Fuji so recognizable is its white capped peak, but that aspect is lost in the ad’s bland grayness.
Doraemon subbing for Stanford’s copy of The Thinker statue when it was temporarily removed in 2001.
If he were more widely known outside Asia, I would have picked Doraemon for the ad. Here’s a picture I took of him on the Stanford campus about 6 years ago. When the University’s copy of The Thinker was temporarily removed for minor repairs, some enterprising students put Doraemon in his place.
The metacarpals below my two middle fingers are rotated
Below the two middle fingers in my left hand, my broken metacarpals are healing, but they are rotated. As you can see in the picture, they’re not pointing in the same direction as my pinky and index finger. The doctor I saw yesterday assured me that I will nonetheless have completely normal function once they’re done healing. They’ll just look a little funny. He said he could fix it with surgery, but it would require attaching a plate and 3 screws for each break…, so I decided to live with the crooked fingers. I keep finding myself trying to push them back where they should be anyway - straighten up you fingers! But it doesn’t seem to make a difference - they just go right back to doing their own thing 
I had a heck of a time even getting the appointment. I was given two bad referrals in a row (one to a doctor who’s no longer in the area, and another who no longer does hand work). I finally just took care of it myself, and then had to make a few calls back to my primary care doctor to get a retroactive referral. Now I have to go to a 3rd place for x-rays, because my insurance won’t cover x-rays done at my hand doctor’s hospital. Of course, the way things are these days, I’m lucky to have insurance at all, even if it’s ridiculously over-bureaucratized.
What do I have in common now with former Presidential candidate Bob Dole and Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen? I’ve only got one good arm. Luckily for me though, it’s a temporary situation. On Saturday morning I fell down the stairs in my house and broke 2 bones in my left hand (the 3rd and 4th metacarpals - the bones that run down from the two middle fingers to the base of the hand). I came down hard on the side of my hand, and at first thought I’d dislocated my fingers, so I popped them back into place. And yes - just like you saw in Lethal Weapon when Riggs dislocated and then re-located his shoulder - it really, really hurt (but I don’t think I carried it off with quite the same tough guy stoicism of Mel Gibson ). The emergency room doctor later explained to me (after seeing the x-rays), that I didn’t dislocate my fingers - when I thought I was popping them back in, I was actually setting the broken bones back in place.
I’m hoping to see a doctor today or tomorrow for a cast - right now I’m still in a “temporary” splint from the emergency room. The problem with getting hurt on a Saturday morning is that it’s hard to reach a regular doctor over the weekend to schedule a follow-up visit. The upside of getting hurt on a Saturday morning is that the emergency room is empty, so there’s no wait - Philadelphia’s Friday night violent crime victims are all patched up, and the Saturday afternoon sporting and home improvement injuries haven’t started flowing in yet.
Unfortunately, this actually affects Maria even more than me. I can’t wash dishes, I can’t get Eidan in his car seat, I can’t open a jar, and so on. She has an incredibly busy schedule right now, so we’ve been scrambling to rearrange our division of labor with the boys and around the house, to try finding a reasonable balance between one handed vs. two handed activities. So far it’s been a challenge, but I think we’ll be able to find a new balance.
The interesting part is sorting out my handedness. I’m not quite ambidextrous - some things I do equally well with either hand (swinging a baseball bat, eating) but for most things I’m only good with one hand. Which one varies depending on the task (writing with my left, throwing a ball with my right). It’s proving to be kind of random which tasks I’m adapting to easily with my right hand and which I’m not: learning to shave with my right hand has been no problem, but brushing my teeth has been awkward. I guess it’s a sign of the times that I’m actually glad I lost the use of my writing hand and not the hand I use with the mouse.
I’ll try to keep blogging, but I may go with an emphasis on photos for a while. One handed typing was a novelty for about 3 minutes - it gets old fast .
I can now explain why I stopped blogging for a month.
I’m going to leave my position at Penn at the end of the year. It’s the best place I’ve ever worked, so it’s not because of job dissatisfaction. Part of me thinks I must be crazy to leave. The reason is that Maria and I have come up with several business ideas we want to pursue. We’ve been making slow progress on them since we got back from Japan, but if any of them are going to have a chance of really getting off the ground, I need to dive in whole-heartedly. (I should point out Maria is not leaving her job no matter what happens - she loves what she’s doing and where she’s doing it.)
We came back from Japan with two ideas, and figured we’d try to pick one to focus on. Instead, we ended up adding two more. Unfortunately I still can’t go into much detail about a lot of it, but here’s what I can say publicly:
- One is a software application that I’ve developed (it’s currently in prototype form), and I think there may be a market for it. I’m working with a friend of mine in California to see if we can generate some interest from the venture capital community there.
- Another is an ecommerce site, selling really cool hand-made candies from a certain foreign country (take your best guess which one) that no one is currently selling online in the US.
- A consulting business, along the lines of the Eurasia Group, but with a somewhat different focus. This has a lot of different aspects to it, and primarily involves Maria and several of her colleagues. But an aspect that interests me is E-government. It’s exciting because it fuses the two fields where I have professional experience and training: political science and internet technology. First, however, I have about 10 years worth of e-government literature to catch up on…
- Web consulting: I’ve heard several horror stories over the years from friends and acquaintances who’ve paid ridiculous amounts of money for really lousy web sites. I figure if there’s room in the market to sustain people who do a bad job, there’s room for people who do a good job too. I’ve found someone to work with here in the Philadelphia area who specializes in the marketing and design side of the web business, which isn’t my strong suit. I’m interested in this partly because I think I have a good shot at being successful with it, and partly because I’m hoping it’ll serve as a sort of glue that can hold things together for me financially as we see how the other ventures go. The idea is that I can ramp up or ramp down on it as the other projects warrant (of course, that’s assuming I can find work when I need it). Penn is planning to hire me back on a part-time basis as soon as I leave my regular position, and I have a couple other small projects lined up, so I’m off to a good start.
I should know by the end of the year whether there’s any investment interest in my software. And the candy project is well underway, but we’re expecting it to take another 3 or 4 months before we’re ready to go live with it. So… stay tuned 
You knew these were coming: Halloween pictures of the boys (along with a cute but random picture of them in a laundry basket). Halloween is my favorite holiday, as it’s the only one that makes us go out and see our neighbors (but I suppose this is only true if you have kids and live in a kid friendly neighborhood). So much of modern life keeps our focus on just work and home, so I think it’s a good thing that we have occasions that focus our attention on our community once and while, even if it’s just the few blocks around our home.
For Kai’s solider costume, we had trouble finding a toy gun - the big retailers don’t seem to carry them anymore. But the huge inflatable gun we found in a costume shop turned out to be much better than a regular toy - it’s ridiculously over the top. Eidan’s spidey costume is a hand-me-down from Kai. Eidan loves it, and has worn it at least once a month since he discovered it in a closet after we returned from Japan, so it was an easy choice for Halloween. Kai painted and carved the Frankenstein pumpkin you can see in the background of the first picture - it won 2nd place in his grade’s pumpkin carving contest. The weird thing was he predicted he’d get 2nd place when we were on the way to school.
Our time spent hitting up people for candy was surprisingly brief. Both boys decided they’d had enough after about half an hour. But they had a lot of fun, and that’s what matters.
About a month ago I set up a Google alert for my last name, Toppa. I was thinking it’d be a fun way to see what other Toppas out there are up to. It’s a rare name (outside of Newport RI anyway), and so far every Toppa I’ve encountered has at least some distant family relationship. It looks like the “other” Mike Toppa is doing well in the world of yachting - here’s a profile of him.
I quickly learned that I needed to modify the alert to exclude anything that also mentioned “tengen.” Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is a Japanese anime series that apparently has a devoted following, as people are out there blogging about it like crazy. It turns out that Toppa means “breakthrough” in Japanese.
Toppa is an Italian name, but until now I didn’t know if it had any particular meaning. In my latest Google alert, I discovered there’s not only a restaurant in Italy bearing the family name - Trattoria La Toppa - but that it also has a, um, rather interesting meaning:
After our day’s sightseeing, we eschewed the hotel’s fine cuisine for a real Italian treat, an al fresco dinner at a trattoria called La Toppa, in the ancient village of San Donato In Poggio. It was a five-course feast, prepared by a family of cooks using recipes handed down the generations.
La Toppa is derived from the Italian expression “prendere una toppa”. It means “to get drunk”.
And lastly, if you visit Guiseppe Silvestrini’s site, you can listen to - and download the sheet music for - a polka called “La Toppa” (it’s the 8th one on the list).
My blog has been sadly quiet for the past month, but I’m now ready to resume my blogging duties. Today I’ve just a got a brief announcement though: Shashin 1.1 is now available for download at wordpress.org. I’ve added the most requested feature - widgets. Shashin now has a widget available for each of its main functions (displaying single photos, album thumbnails, random photos, newest photos, and tables of thumbnails). And for those not using widgets, I simplified the code needed for adding Shashin to your sidebar manually.
I don’t use widgets myself - since my sidebar is just a thin sliver of nav elements across the top - but it was fun learning how they work. The widget admin forms are great because I can include things like a drop down menu listing the possible image sizes, so you don’t have to keep referring back to the FAQ. The one thing that struck me as weird while studying other widgets is that all the other widget authors seem to have something against including a submit button in their widget admin forms. That’s just bizarre and not user friendly at all - they’re just counting on you hitting “enter” after filling out the last field in form. It’s probably because the couple of tutorials that are out there have just a single text input field (where a submit button is arguably less important), so everyone just blindly followed them, even when making a longer form. I’m happy to say that my forms include nice, friendly submit buttons
August, 1620: I am sailing to the new world. I feel home sick because I miss my home. I will take my one toy.
October, 1620: I am on board the Mayflower. I feel even more sick. I feel like getting off the Mayflower.
November 9, 1620: We saw land today. I felt happy because we reached land. I wanted to run in the sand.
