This is just a test post to try out Open Live Writer on my blog. I used to use the old Live Writer a bit, and was glad to hear that it had recently been open sourced.
So why am I all of a sudden interested in blogging again? Well, I have a few articles that I’d like to write, relating to a little side project that I’ve been working on, and I really like the WYSIWYG and native-client feel of Live Writer versus the WordPress admin UI.
Stay tuned! 
Sandy and I recently decided to get our DNA analyzed through 23andme. The service genotypes DNA from your saliva, which you send to the lab after collecting it in their “spit kit.” After a few weeks, you get access to a set of results containing health and ancestry information for yourself. The presentation is through a fairly slick web app, with what seems to be pretty good documentation and bibliography for the claims that are made, and an easy-to-navigate interface.
The information available is kind of a mix between useful statistical data (risk factors for certain diseases, whether or not you are a carrier for certain diseases, etc.), and what I think of as “science-flavored astrology” (seeing which celebrities share your maternal or paternal haplogroups, or seeing the percentage of neanderthal DNA you possess).
There are a range of health risks for which their data suggests I am statistically at an elevated risk — similarly, there is another set of risks for which I am at decreased risk. These range from type 2 diabetes, to certain types of cancers, to Alzheimer’s. Some of the probabilities allow you to select a particular ethnicity (presumably selecting for a specific experiment or set of experiments whose results back the calculation), which is somewhat problematic or tough to interpret for someone like me from a mixed background. (23andme itself lets you report multiple ethnicities, but source data for certain health risks may only have involved cohorts of a single ethnicity.) Interestingly, the elevated risks for Sandy and I are mostly disjoint, which gives me hope that our daughter will inherit our advantageous traits while skipping our vulnerabilities. 🙂
You can also browse a set of “traits”, which are a set of tests on non-disease characteristics. For example, I am apparently 0.13-0.29 times less likely than the average European to develop male pattern baldness — fingers crossed! I also apparently have a genotype that frequently results in not being able to taste certain bitter flavors, which perhaps explains some of my tastes in food and drink.
There’s also an ancestry aspect to the service, which does a bit of analysis to show where your distant ancestors (500+ years ago) came from, and also provides a “relative finder” and family tree builder. You need to specifically allow the “relative finder” to find close relatives (or to be found as a close relative), apparently to reduce the likelihood of unpleasant surprises. This is interesting but I have no particularly close matches currently registered on the service — the closest are estimated as 3rd through 5th cousins.
The cost of the service is fairly modest — it’s now $99. On the one hand, it’s not at the level where I could call it “cheap” — however, given the breadth of information that is obtained from the test, I think nearly everyone would find something interesting or perhaps helpful from getting tested. To look at it in a very simplistic way, if you undertake any sort of successful lifestyle change (prompted by your genotype analysis results), and you wind up living just a few hours longer than you would have otherwise, it’s “worth it.” I also find the idea that this sort of information is now more readily available to the average person really fascinating — I guess I’m more focused on the potentially positive aspects of it, rather than potential privacy and/or insurability problems.
Since we are moving soon, I figured it would be nice to get rid of stuff we don’t need, or that we haven’t touched in years. I had heard about somewhere, so I decided now would be a good time to try it out. I pretty much cleaned out most of my book collection to have it scanned by this service. Fortunately, since we live nearby, I was able to just drive over there and drop the books off, instead of having to send the package to them. I did have to count pages in order to calculate the price — they charge $1 for every 100 pages or fraction thereof, and there are various add-on services like OCR which add to the cost. I did opt for OCR, so the output should be searchable, too.
In a couple of weeks, my stuff should be scanned and available for me to download and read. Hopefully this turns out well!
I have been going through the process of obtaining an apostille certifying the recent birth of my daughter. It is an international means of certifying the origin of a document from another country – in this case, her birth certificate. We need to have this in order for her to obtain her dual citizenship, from Finland. There is a good primer on apostilles, “The ABCs of Apostilles,” available from the Hague Conference on Private International Law. (Note that not every country is a participant in the “Apostille convention,” so check to make sure that the country in question accepts this means of document authentication.)
The process is a bit involved, so I figured that it would be useful to put together a short article describing the steps involved. Note that the steps may vary depending on where you are – in my case, the instructions are tailored for people living in California (and more specifically, Santa Clara County).
For Santa Clara County, certified copies of the birth certificate (from birth through 1 year of age) are available from the Public Health Department, through the Department of Vital Records. Information can be found here. At the time of writing, the cost was $21.00 per copy.
Birth certificates older than 1 year must be obtained from the Santa Clara County Clerk Recorder’s office. The cost is still $21.00, although if you order them online or with a credit card, additional fees will apply.
UPDATE (12/20/2016): As of July 1, 2016, in Santa Clara County, all birth certificates are now available through the County Clerk Recorder’s office, starting 4 weeks after birth. You no longer need to go through the Public Health Department for certificates less than a year old. The cost is now $28 for each copy. This is a link to the Birth Certificate page on the Clerk Recorder’s site.
As an aside, I was missing this crucial step, as it is not called out on the California Secretary of State’s Authentications information page, and none of the other government sites I read while researching this really mentioned it. While the SOS page does mention the limitations on what signatures can be authenticated by the Secretary of State, it does not mention that even though the birth certificate is a certified copy, that its signature cannot be authenticated by their office.
At the end of this process, you should have an apostille indicating that the birth certificate is an authentic document, valid for use in the country you requested.
Iron Man 2 is not a very good movie. Terminator: Salvation
A few weeks ago, my beloved Plantronics Discovery 925 started acting up — the microphone on it was apparently failing. People that I called using the headset said that they could only hear me very faintly, although I could still hear them just fine. A couple of support e-mails to Plantronics later, and I received a refurb replacement. I’m not thrilled with the fact that it’s a refurb, but it seems to work just fine.
Normally I would be annoyed that something I bought failed so soon after I bought it, but I like the headset so much that I felt more relief than anger when I got my replacement.
A couple of weeks back, we were given tickets to the Toshiba Classic, a PGA Champions (aka Senior) Tour event here in Orange County. We were in a corporate hospitality box on the 17th hole, which was a nice way to watch the proceedings compared to simply slumming it out on the grass.
The sponsors and advertisers were interesting — apart from Land Rover and Jaguar (to be expected), there was also a Botox tent giving away free promotional items. That, I think, tells you all you need to know about the fanbase at golf tournaments…
At any rate, inside the corporate hospitality box were a couple of kids, probably between 10 and 13 years old. They were golf fans, which I guess is acceptable if you grow up in that upper-crust type of environment. However, they weren’t simply golf fans — they knew players on the Champions Tour and were rooting them on quite vigorously.
I don’t know about you, but when I think of “youth sporting idols,” the PGA Champions Tour is just about the last thing that comes to mind. I may not have been the coolest cat on the block growing up, but at least I was hipper than that…
I played the demo for Tom Clancy’s HAWX recently, and was pretty disappointed in it.
I found the plane to be quite difficult to control (for no good reason), and the “action camera” mode is extremely disorienting. You are forced to use the “action camera” for part of the tutorial, and it’s quite maddening — for a tutorial mission, I found it to be pretty hard!
Flight action game developers seem to love using the Ace Combat control scheme, where your plane’s rudder is mapped to shoulder buttons on the controller. Unfortunately, I feel that this setup makes it very difficult to actually control your plane — it is really hard to yaw and do something else with the triggers at the same time. I much prefer having the rudder control on the second analog stick, as we did in Secret Weapons Over Normandy. The control scheme in SWON maximizes the number of flight controls you have access to at once. In HAWX, the camera control is mapped to the right analog stick. This seldom-used feature effectively wastes one of the main control mechanisms.
While I’m on the subject, SWON (like HAWX) had a “simplified” flight mode. The SWON simplified mode auto-rolled your plane — you essentially flew with the left stick only. The concept behind it was that beginners could “steer the reticle” and concentrate more on shooting stuff (the fun part!) rather than flying. Unfortunately, in HAWX, the “simplified” mode doesn’t seem to be much different from the regular one! The plane is still quite hard to fly.
Like many jet combat games, the combat feels pretty impersonal because of the distances and speeds at which engagements take place. HAWX ups the ante, however, by including targeting/evasion assist modes where you press a button to enter the special mode, at which time you slalom through a bunch of “gates” that appear in front of your plane. When you have passed through enough gates, you will have a good missile lock, or evade an incoming missile, depending on how you entered the mode. The implementation is technically solid, but it really abstracts away the idea of fighter combat — you’re just flying through gates much of the time. There’s no feeling that you’re fighting against another pilot just like you in the other plane.
Overall, I was pretty disappointed. The game looks quite good, but the gameplay seems lacking.
The other day, I went to Express to buy some clothes. As it turns out, clothing retailers are still engaged in pretty heavy discounting, even after the holiday season – not entirely unexpected. However, while I was shopping, I was asked if I needed help by no less than five different salespeople – multiple times by two of them. I was in the store perhaps 15 or 20 minutes, and I’ve never had that level of attention while shopping. The cherry on top was the cashier asking who it was who helped me with my purchase – I simply said that I didn’t really need help to pick out what I wanted. I’m guessing I disappointed some, or all, of the salespeople with that one.
The whole experience had a very strong Glengarry Glen Ross vibe to it – I wonder if there was something similar going on, or if it was just that all of the salespeople were highly motivated to keep their jobs (or earn a commission) in these lean times.