The Alex and Amelia mysteries

The case of the mystery flap

Alex is nearly four years old. He’s no fool. He’s seen it all. But this? This is different.

In the door to the basement, there is a small plastic flap. Whenever Alex is trying to make friends with one of the cats, they would disappear downstairs. Finally, he figured they were disappearing through the flap in the door.

He’d heard his parents mention a ‘cat door’ before, but this did not look like any door. There was no handle, there was no light switch next to it, and it hinged on the top instead of the side.

Alex went to consult with his associate and little sister Amelia, but Amelia was busy with a mystery of her own. Namely, why she could not fit the entire plastic toy phone inside her mouth. Alex tried a few helpful suggestions, like taking the toy away entirely, but none seemed to help. On his own, Alex decided that the only way to understand the nature of the flap was to figure out what would fit through it.

Two hours later, having exhausted his supply of toys, towels, tissue boxes, remote controls, pieces of computer hardware, clothes and drinking cups, Alex found himself only certain that large blankets would definitely not fit through the flap. He retreated to the living room to think.

A short while later, daddy reported to mommy that the door to the basement could not be opened. Apparently, it had been barricaded.

Alex suspected the flap had something to do with this, but wasn’t sure. As soon as daddy retrieved all of his toys though, he’d try again!

Case: UNSOLVED.

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

The case of the strange cup

Alex and Amelia were playing in the backyard, enjoying the first warm day of spring after a long, cold winter. Amelia, only 8 months old, was too young to even remember when days were warm. She was also too young to walk, so had to be carried everywhere by her daddy. She was fine with this.

Alex, on the other hand, relished the opportunity to run around and play on his swing set. It was a simple affair with three swings, rings, and a slide. He was too short for the rings, but would play with each swing in turn before finishing his playtime with a few zips down the slide.

Today, however, was different. Alex noticed after getting off the first swing that there was a cup sitting on the second swing. It looked just like the cup he had been eating goldfish out of earlier, but he did not remember placing the cup there. Immediately, Alex moved in to investigate. Amelia, who had all this time been watching her brother, spurred on her daddy to come over and join in the investigation.

Together, the two of them peered at the cup. It did look like the cup Alex used to eat his goldfish crackers. In fact, it had goldfish crackers in it, but neither one could figure out how it ended up on the swing.

Suddenly, daddy wrinkled his nose and announced that Alex needed a diaper change. He gather the two of them up and began to herd them back to the house. Alex looked back to the swing, but saw that the cup had disappeared.

Later, after the diaper change, Alex’s daddy gave him his cup of goldfish. Alex wondered if the two cups had anything to do with each other, but could not be certain.

Case: UNSOLVED!

Perception of value

I have direct deposit. It’s great. Twice a month my salary gets deposited into my account automatically. I don’t have to to go the bank, I don’t have to wait for the funds to clear. It just works.

A lot of my bills are taken care of in the same way. The mortgage gets paid automatically. The credit cards are nearly automatic. I keep that manual in case there are ever charges that I need to dispute, same with the phone bill. But, in the end, finances are controlled by logging in to an online service and shifting funds from one entity to another.

I sometimes wonder if this is a bad thing.

Money has become an abstraction in my life. I do not carry cash anymore. Too often, when I did carry it, I’d end up giving it away to people begging for change in the subways or on the streets in Boston. I’m not opposed to helping people in need, but think that supporting institutions designed to get people off the street is a much better use of my funds rather than giving someone $5 because they tell me they need money for a bus ticket to get home. What little reading I’ve done into the subject gives me little encouragement that the $5 is actually going to a bus ticket .

So, life is easier with a credit or debit card, handling the finances in computerized transactions that are automatically recorded, removing humans and human errors largely from the equation, streamlining the system of payment to give me what I want exactly when I want it, without having to worry about the availability of funds.

It’s easy to see why this appeals to so many people. The simplicity and speed of gratification is a sign of modernity. Companies like it too. One would think it heretical that both sides like the exact same thing. After all, aren’t they both competing to hang on to the money? Except we don’t. Or, at least I don’t.

What is a dollar worth? For value propositions, we are often presented the worth of something in dollars, but without a baseline perception of the metric, how can we have any meaningful comparisons?

Example 1: An unlocked (purchased off contract, without a subsidy) smart phone for $200 is perceived to be a good deal, but why? The reason is that, compared to other unlocked cell phones, $200 falls on the low end of the spectrum. Higher end Android and iPhones unlocked easily broach $600. But what is the value of $200? For that, you could buy 200 loaves of bread, or 100 half-gallons of milk. Or split the difference and eat like a medieval peasant for a third of a year (and probably die by the end, that’s not the healthiest diet).

The point is, why has $200 for a smartphone been deemed an acceptable value? One could argue that the  market demand determines the price. Higher prices reduce adoption, lower prices eliminate profitability margin, and you’re sort of right. We don’t usually know how much things cost to make, in every sense.

Example 2: Health insurance. The Affordable Care Act, if nothing else, is forcing people to face the quagmire of health insurance. Lots of articles and news reports have shed light on the completely bizarre value propostion presented by health insurance. Money loses are sense of value when it comes to health insurance. Doctors and hospitals bill amounts mandated by the hospitals, get reimbursed a certain amount, patients get charged another amount, and then there’s other amounts that just sort of vanish. It’s called “funny money” It’s charged, but never collected, and never expected.

Say you go to the doctor because you don’t feel good. She takes your temperature, concludes you have a cold that needs to run its course, and send you home with some aspirin. It was worth going because now you know what you have and you aren’t worried you’re about to die of some horrible, obscure disease. (Hypochondriacs unite! But don’t hold hands.) Let’s say the doctor’s time is worth $100, plus the cost of the aspirin at $3. Rather than pay the doctor directly, you pay a co-pay of 7.5 half-gallons of milk. The doctor then bills the insurance company for 300 loaves of bread. The insurance company pays out a quarter of an unlocked iphone ($150 for those keeping score) to the doctor and take the copay, along with the monthly premiums that the person and their employer pays them. But the doctor billed for half an unlocked iphone. What happened to the other 150 loaves of bread? The doctor bills that much because she is contractually obligated to charge a certain amount to the insurance company for certain kinds of service, but the value in it is never clear.

Example 3: Dinner out at a nice restaurant plus a show plus a babysitter easily runs north of $200. Plane tickets for the family to travel to Texas for a week: $800. A brand new videogame $60. According to steam, the most time I’ve ever spent on a single videogame is about 200 hours (that was before I had kids), but people online have bragged about spending over 2000 hours on some Call of Duty games. Not a a statistic I would brag about, but to each his own. For one of those people, a video game breaks down to $.03/hr. A dinner breaks down to $67/hr. A week in Texas breaks down to $4.76/hr (not including food, lodging, etc.) Am I spending too much on dinner, or not enough on the videogame?

Market forces are supposed to determine the value people have for a good or service, but has the abstraction of money clouded our perception of value, rendering a market that is free to chose a price that it wants, and then simply has to convince us that we want it at the price it has set? Are we numb to the market?

Either way, I think I need to find a babysitter I can pay in loaves of bread.

Download an entire blog from blogger.com

*Updated table with some improvements*

I have been reading a site called Queryshark as part of the process to refine a query letter for courting literary agents. Most of the time that I have to read is on the bus, and while I do now have internet access, the connection is spotty along the route, and I am somewhat bandwidth constrained. As such, I opted to download the site to read it offline.

This is not as easy as I thought it would be.

Originally I tried a program called backstreet browser, but try as I might, I never got the settings to work so that it would download the entire archive. Out of 200+ entries, it only ever grabbed about 15 or so.

And I thought to myself, “there’s a better way, I just know it.”

So, here is a handy dandy guide if you ever wish to transform a blogger site into something that easy to read for offline viewing. I wasn’t going to post this, as it required some commercial software, but Microsoft just made Expression Web 4 free for all. If you want a free web page editor, you aren’t going to do better.

Disclaimer: These instructions assume that there is an RSS feed setup for the site, and you’re using windows.

1. Download and use blogger backup. The settings are fairly simple. One thing I had trouble with is downloading with comments to a single file. If you want the comments, I recommend you have one file per post. This creates a file for every single comment, but we can combine them later. Choose a date where you want to start, or get everything, and click the go button.

2. Go do something else for a while.

3. Once done, you’ll have a folder filled with xml files. The backup utility is designed for pulling all of one’s data from blogger for migrating it to a different blogging platform. As such, the files are not especially readable. There’s also a lot of them, but consolidating them is surprisingly easy.

4. Launch the command prompt and navigate to the folder where the files are kept. Now type in the following command:

copy *.xml consolidated.txt

This will convert all of the files in chronological order of oldest to newest into a single file. Although, the comments will be reversed for a given post, so that the most recent comment for a given post will be at the top.

5. Download and install Notepad++.

6. Open the text file. At the top of the file, add

<html>

<body>

At the bottom of the file, add

</body>

</html>

File –> Save As, under options choose “hypertext markup language”

Save as consolidated.html

7. Here’s where things get a bit hairy. Under Search –> Replace (CTRL+H)

Find	Replace
<id>	<!--<id>
</id>	</id>-->
<email>	<!--<email>
</email>	</email>-->
<updated>	<!--<updated>
</updated>	</updated>-->
<uri>	<!--<uri>
</uri>	</uri>-->
<published>	<!--<published>
</published>	</published>-->
<title type="text">	&lt;h2&gt;
</title>	&lt;/h2&gt;

This is commenting out a bunch of xml metadata that isn’t relevant to reading the posts and comments. These were determined by trial and error, so there may be more or less depending on the nature of the blog and when this is performed.

Save and close the file.

8. Open a web browser, preferably IE or firefox (I had trouble getting this all to work in Chrome), and open the file consolidated.html. If you aren’t sure how to open a local file, hit CTRL+O (the letter, not the number).

9. Go do something else. This can actually take a bit depending on the size of the file. The browser can interpret the XML and translates it into HTML code. It’s not going to look right, but that’s okay for now.

10. Once it’s done loading the site, Choose File –> Save As. Under options, choose a text file .txt. Called it consolidated2.txt

11. Open consolidated2.txt in notepad++.

Redo the html code listed above:

At the top of the file, add

<html>

<body>

At the bottom of the file, add

</body>

</html>

File –> Save As, under options choose “hypertext markup language”

Save as consolidated2.html and close.

12. Now go to the browser and open consolidated2.html.

You should now have something that is mostly readable, or at least you can tease the content out of the remaining cruft.

13. Here is where Expression Web comes in. Open the file consolidated2.html.

14. Split consolidated2.html into smaller pages with fewer entries. It was worth consolidating to do the bulk of the work all at once, but just 200 entries with comments is enough code to bring just about any browser to its knees. After a while, it gives up trying to parse the error prone html and the stuff at the bottom just looks weird. 25 entries seems to strike a good balance of readability and browser speed.

15. The nice thing about using a web editor like Expression is that you can have the page and the underlying code open side by side. It will also call out html code that was opened but never closed. In my experience, a lot of things that get italicized with the <i> command never get a closing </i> command. You can find those quickly and easily using this tool.

16. The one thing I never figured out is how to detect comments vs. actual posts, so they are treated equally. When cleaning up the document for easier reading, I opted to give actual posts Header 2 <h2> and posts Header 3 <h3>

17. That’s about it, but some handy dandy tricks for using the tool:

CTRL + (down arrow) jumps to the next header. If you have a lot of text and don’t want to scroll while editing, that gets you there a lot quicker.

If you highlight something and hit CTRL+SHIFT+S, you can change the header immediately.

You’ll get random characters at the end of some comment titles that happen to truncate at an apostrophe. I have no idea why.

Starting at the bottom of a page, near the top of the window you can see all of the open html codes that need to be closed. You can click on them to jump straight to that code wherever it is in the page. You can right click and choose remove directly. NEVER click on it and hit the delete key! The act of clicking on the code highlights everything on page between where you are and where that piece of code is, and hitting delete gets rid of all of that content.

CTRL+Z is your friend

Frustration with the publishing process

It’s not easy to get a book published if you want to go the traditional route.

1. First you have to write a book.
2. Then you have to throw it away and write a different, better book.
3. Then you have to get that book ripped apart, critiqued, and properly edited.
4. Then you have to find a literary agent.
5. Then you have to get it published.

I’m currently on step 4, and have been working on a good query letter for some time, ready heavily through a site called QueryShark. It’s run by a literary agent who has gotten fed up with how bad query letters can be, especially compared to how good the books can be.

Writing, I think for a lot of people, starts out as something for the ego. It feels good to write. I suspect this because the process of publishing is designed largely to separate the good books from those that are written purely for the sake of the author. Each of the above steps, aside from the first one, cause a lot of anguish and frustration. Who wants to throw away their first book, after all the time they put into it? Who wants to listen to a bunch of people who just don’t get your story? Why can’t the agent and publishing company just read the book, and know that it is as good as you believe it to be?

But, you suck it up, you throw away that book, you remove some of your proudest writing because it takes away from the story for the reader, you do your homework, you deal with rejection, and acknowledge that there is a very real probability that no publisher will greenlight your book.

And then, one day, while walking through the DVD section at Target, you’ll spot this.

Assuming that getting a movie made and into distribution is at least as hard as getting a book published, you’ll think to yourself, “I’ve gotta be doing something wrong.”

For those who can’t be bothered to click the link. The movie is about a bunch of people trapped in a flooded grocery store with a great white shark. No, I’m not making that up.

Parenting: the lessons you don’t expect

One of the things that I was not prepared for with Alex, that has since been reinforced with Amelia, is that a small child produces as much, if not more laundry than a full grown adult. Typically Julie handles one or two loads during the week when she has a free moment, and we tackle it together on the weekends. I originally expected our son’s laundry to be once every few weeks, because his clothes are so much smaller.

I did not account for the messes and redresses .

Sure, it’s smaller, but there are a lot more of them. Like army ants.

Kids go through a lot of clothes. They make messes when they eat, they make messes when they go outside, they make messes when they stay inside. They have to wear extra layers to say warm because they have much less thermal mess, and all of that has to get washed. More than once has the kids laundry exceeded the adult laundry, and folding all of those tiny socks takes quite a bit of time.

And it’s all worth it.

Check the temperatures! Something is starting to freeze!

My opinion of Apple is softening.

I still don’t like them, and believe they are a bad company, but I have to admit that reality is starting to return to the view of most people.

Some of the recent good moves that Apple has made:

1. Dividends. Apple has done a tremendous job of separating people from their money, jacking up a stock price to astronomical levels, arguable becoming the most valuable company in the world. To what end? Well, at last, there is an end.

2. Charitable donations: This also falls under the category of giving back, but bears notable mention here. A few years ago Apple famously refused to donate to any causes, but is now offering to match donations its employees make to some causes.

3. Apologies: Remember the terrible antenna in the iPhone 4? Remember how it came out that it always had terrible antennas, and that the software was reporting stronger signal than it actually had? Remember the independent studies showing that it was not the network, but in fact the design architecture of the iPhones that resulted in so many dropped calls on the AT&T network? Remember the press conference with the non-apology, accusing the press of picking on Apple? But recently they did apologize for forcing maps, which so many have complained about.

It used to be that when Apple did something bad, it was okay because they were Apple, and I always hated that. Now, they don’t have a free pass anymore. Now they are under the same scrutiny as all of the other techs, more so than many now, and are no longer the perfect company that they never were.

They still do things I don’t like, such as denying customers features that they can roll out, but choose not to in order to improve the attractiveness of the next version. The original iPhone shipped with a 2G antenna, even thought many phones were already 3G. Their slow speeds were blamed on the network, but Apple really needed a good selling point for the next year.

One thing that I must credit them is creating a platform with a very accessible interface that has generated a vast swath of apps to help those with autism.

Which is why, on Black, er, Thursday, I will be standing in line at Target to get my son an iPad. Don’t tell him, it’s his Christmas present.