It's a balancing act

So I decided, quite randomly, that I wanted to see how accurate my Wii Balance Board was. You see, we do a lot of test weights of Patrick on the Wii Balance Board and I thought it wouldn't hurt to have some idea what the margin of error was.

(As an aside, the HomeBrew channel is brilliant and adds much value to the Wii. Thank you, Nintendo, for not being ridiculous with your DRM. We can all understand that you don't officially want to support HomeBrew but not actively fighting it is a net positive. We do our weights through the balance board app in HomeBrew.)

Having taken many science courses, I quickly determined that it is effectively impossible to authoritatively prove out the balance board with the tools I have at hand. That is, I don't have any object that I can trust for a true reference weight, and regardless I don't have a number of objects to prove out the accuracy over a range of test weights. My concern, for what it's worth, regarding the range of weights is that my mom used to have an old scale that her 300+ lb husband had stretched the springs on. It was accurate at low weights and not at all at high weights. That is, I believe that there are physical characteristics to a scale that are influenced by the net weight. I don't know if this is accurate given the type of pressure sensors used in the Wii Balance Board but assume so.

The one thing that you can demonstrate is whether the scale is at least consistent.

I did 12 sample weights on an approx 98 kg object, myself, with a standard deviation of 40 grams. Because of the small sample size, my worst sample was two deviations out with most occurring within one deviation.

I then took a barbell weight that was 10 lbs / 4.54 kg and repeated the same experiment. The standard deviation rose slightly to 60 grams, again the worst sample was two deviations out with most occurring within one deviation, and the difference between the two averages was 4.56 kg. I'm not sure how much I want to trust the accuracy of a barbell weight so am willing to accept on the face of it the 20 gram discrepancy in expected weight.

Given that an unfilled diaper is approx 20 g and a filled diaper can be anywhere from 50-80 grams (I base this on the hospital lab scales that we used to measure each of Patrick's diapers when we were in hospital which had an effective accuracy of 1g), I think the error factor on the Wii Balance Board is negligible.

Whenever we've done a test weight at the drs and returned home, it's identical so I suppose in the end that's all that matters. (I don't use Patrick as a reference weight because he can excrete or take in 100 grams between drs and home theoretically.)

It's contest season

So it's time for the bi-annual Toastmasters contest season, and for once I'm not in a position (i.e. area governor) where I am excluded from competing.

This Spring will mark the International Speaking Competition as well as the Evaluation Competition.

Traditionally I don't do well at International Speaking but given that I can ham up a baby speech, I think I'll be in good stead. I'm thinking of doing a speech on "firsts" as there are many humorous firsts during the pregnancy/childbirth/infant stages.

Evaluation, on the other hand, I tend to do ridiculously well at. Last time out (2 years back) I took second place for Northern BC.

This year will be somewhat frustrating in that I can't move on in the competitions as I'm geographically challenged.

Club level: Prince George, BC

Area level: Valemount, BC (300 km East)

Division level: Dawson Creek, BC (400 km North)

District level: Osoyoos, BC (800+ km South)

So even if I win at club level there's no chance I can compete at area, similarly division, etc.

Either way, I'm going to come out and compete... I am looking forward to the season regardless :)

Curry

Since my son was born my wife has taken a hiatus from the daily cooking. That is, other than a pair of meals I've cooked every dinner.

This, of course, means that I've been able to indulge myself in cooking South-East Asian cuisine. There are a couple reasons why I cook this way:

I used to live on 20th and Spruce which meant that for many years I was directly behind the local Vietnamese place - the Thanh Vu. Named for the two owners - that is, Thanh and Vu - the Thanh Vu was and is an amazing experience. At the time I was involved in boxing, Thai kick boxing and kung fu three times a week. When we were finished our classes which were on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we'd head by the Thanh Vu and have whatever they wanted to dish up to us that night. So for a couple years, I ate Vietnamese at least three times a week.

This was also reinforced by a long string of food-related illnesses caused by my lack of common sense in the kitchen. Putting it succinctly, I was a very capable baker when I started living on my own but not so good with cooking protein. When my friend Jon decided to intervene definitively and teach me to cook (he was a newly trained chef himself) he chose to stick to the simple chicken + rice + veg combination. Cubed chicken is pretty much impossible to under cook so my incidence of self-poisoning dramatically decreased.

If you combine these two things with the fact that I'm obsessive compulsive, you can see why I evolved the way that I did.

Looking back over the last couple weeks, I believe I can safely assert than in the last 20 meals I've cooked there have been no repetitions. That is, all adhere to a basic chicken + rice + veg layout but the specifics are pretty drastically different.

For example, for tonight I pan fried chicken with sesame oil, yellow bakers sugar and garam masala. I then took a vindaloo sauce, added a cup of coconut milk and reduced it all down to a rich cream. A great success overall.

Yesterday I pan fried tofu with cashews, deglazed the pan with a citrus 5-alive mix, and then added this to a more traditional yellow curry. Lots of texture and flavors.

We've done chicken madras, thai coconut soup, peanut satays, and so on, over the last month. It's been truly fantastic. Selfishly, I am looking forward to my wife's cooking which is more along the lines of heavy stews, roasts and hearty food like this.

(As an aside, if anyone is aware of a good online recipe application, particularly something that plays nicely with Google Apps, then I'd love to hear about it. I'm not opposed to something that I could run on my Debian box but a web interface is ideal for the smart phones in the house.)

Google Accounts

So after many (many!) months of teeth gnashing, I finally was able to migrate my Google Apps account forward so I can actually use it for software outside of Apps. The stumbling block in the process, no surprise, had been me all along.

Basically, I elect to pay the mighty Google $50/year to host a myriad of services on my behalf for my personal domain pachogrande.com . I have moved into this model because, frankly, Google's bells and whistles make it far more attractive to me than self-hosting my own content. It's not that I couldn't do it - after many years of, in fact, doing it I've accepted the inevitable and moved into the cloud.

I'd like to pretend that there is a good pro/con argument for this but there probably isn't. Let me pretend though:

Pros:

1. Cloud hosting means that essentially nothing is ever down.
   
   Yes, I know that you could probably do a search and find some combination of circumstances when one of my online services wasn't available, but I can't identify any personally. I can very definitely point out circumstances previously when in order of relative occurrence my ISP was down for maintenance, my hosting box/software therein was broken through some combination of upgrades and random circumstance, and my DNS provider themselves had issues.
2. The platform naturally evolves. That is, the in-place upgrades that occur en masse in the cloud magically cause new features to emerge on my hosts.
   
   So when Google adds some new RSS standard output - it just magically appears on all my sites. Online forms automatically migrate over to use the new CAPTCHA architecture. When the new iOS upgrade comes out for my phone and breaks Safari browsing, within hours the whole architecture evolves to support it cleanly. Without me jumping through hoops or generally being conscious of it.
3. Everything plays together nicely.
   
   So on my workstation, I export a JPEG out of Lightroom. Picasa grabs the image and inherits the caption automatically. It recognizes most of the faces therein without my involvement. I manually tag the last person as I'm anal. Picasa is smart enough to recognize the embedded Geotagging. I decide the photo should be in my baby's photo album so right click Add To -> The Baby Journey album. The album is already set to automatically sync so transparently the image is uploaded to Picasa Web Albums which sends out notification to the people who have either subscribed or whom I have designed previously of wanting updates (mostly people not on facebook). Picasa updates my Google Contacts so when I browse my address book for a particular person (say Jon Stewart) I can see all of the photos he is in, including the most recent. Because Picasa has RSS feeds, my twitter automatically is updated with the new photo as well my non-email using cousin has it show up cleanly in his Google Reader.
   
   My involvement in all of this is minimal. I enter a caption once in Lightroom. I add the photo to an album. I tag one person who was missed out of the 19 who were recognized. Nothing about that is onerous - everything just flows and works.

Cons:

1. I have no idea who is doing what with my data. If I was seriously concerned about privacy (or zee Germans in the night) then I would have grave concerns about all of this. Literally my phone will tell you where I am within a couple meters in pretty much real-time. From my photos alone you can see where I was when and given that I'm OCD you can infer my patterns pretty transparently. I have enough publicly available information about me that you could analyze me ten ways to Sunday, and with private access to my email/calendar you can see just about anything of consequence. Really, I'm on genealogy sites so how hard would it be to find my mom's maiden name?
2. I don't have a unified copy of my data for backup purposes. Now, I certainly have copies of everything in every system - my email syncs offline, my blog posts are available locally, my photos are on my hard drive - but the full unified experience really is only available online so a catastrophic event would cause me some short term grief.

Having done it both ways, I do personally believe that cloud hosting is the best solution for personal / small business hosting. There are exceptions to the rule - need for data privacy primarily or need for specialty software - but overall it's pretty attractive.

Now all this being said, my latest spot of drama was all caused by the seemingly infallible cloud architecture, or at least the human factor involved with it (read: me). When I initially switched over to Google Apps there were a small number of online applications that wouldn't work with this but bizarrely required the free gmail account - Picasa was one, Latitude was another. So I cheerfully signed up for a gmail.com account, set it to forward to my pachogrande.com account and then set my gmail to alias as my pachogrande.com as well so everything played nicely.

What I didn't realize is that the Google architecture was smart enough to recognize that there was a potential conflict between someone@pachogrande.com as an alias and someone@pachogrande.com as a formal account so when they did the big upgrades so my Google Apps account would "just work" with Picasa/Latitude, my account was not upgraded. I kept getting a weird message when I signed in saying my account hadn't been migrated due to an address conflict.

Meanwhile, I cheerfully continued making things worse my alternately signing into one or the other account (although fortunately being entirely consistent depending on the app) which ended up spreading my data evenly between the two.

Finally it occurred to me that there had to be a fix and sure enough Google even had gone so far as to include an embedded youtube video with the error message that walked me through the whole explanation in painful detail. I've since removed the alias, the account migrated OK and now I'm starting to switch over the individual apps that were tied to my free account.

To give a practical example of the stupidity of this all, I now have a situation where my Blogger account is tied to my gmail.com account and can't be removed, and the only way I can post to my blog was to invite myself @pachogrande.com as a contributing editor. I'm not sure how a person fixes this (would welcome any outside thoughts) but is irritating to say the least. I suspect in the end I'll have to export out the posts, create a new blog, and import back in the posts. If that's the worst glitch that comes of it all, then that's OK. :)