The 13-pound gummy bear!

Courtesy of Slashfood, a food blog, witness the bizarre glory of an actual 13-pound gummy bear.

I'm the only member of the Chen family that doesn't adore gummy bears. Well, gummy things of all sorts: gummy apples, gummy peaches, gummy lychee, sour gummy treats, gummy coke bottles, gummy worms, gummy geometric shapes, gummy well...you get the idea.

For the die-hard gummy thing fans out there, check out the complete photo album.

Who can read this blog?

Ok, so the previous post was all about who's coming. This post is about who (in theory) can actually read this blog.

Following a tip from the Download Squad blog, I plugged this blog into the Juicy Studio Readability Test. The test digested all the text on my blog and figured out how much education (on average) you'd need to read those words and sentences. After cranking through 535 sentences and 4,472 words (in about half a second), it concluded this blog has:

• A Gunning Fog index of 7.64 -- in other words, you'd need roughly 7 years of schooling to understand this blog.
  
• I think that's high, but there are probably a few entries here and there with some long words or difficult concepts.
• An index of 7.64 puts us right between True Confessions and Ladies' Home Journal in difficulty. Reader's Digest is a 9, Newsweek is a 10, TIME a 11, and Atlantic Monthly a 12, in case you're curious.
  
• A Flesch Reading Ease of 74.5 out of 100, with higher being easier to read.
  
• According to the Juicy Studio site, writers are encouraged to aim for an index of 60-70.
• A Flesh-Kincaid grade level of 4.94, another way to calculate the years of schooling you'd need. I think this result is far closer to the truth.
  
• If anyone wants to volunteer their 4th or 5th grade student to do a sanity test, let us know.

It's illuminating what computer algorithms can deduce about readability from just looking at the words on a page. Try it yourself on your blog.

Side note: when I was at Oracle (shortly after the Iron Age ended), one of the coolest products I saw was an add-on to the Oracle database called Oracle Context (today's it's called Oracle Text, and it's a standard feature of the Oracle database). It analyzed words in a document much like the Juicy Studio site does, but it went one step farther and tried to understand the text rather than just count syllables and sentence lengths.

One thing you could do with the product was move a slider to control how much it tried to condense the text while preserving its meaning. You could literally create summaries of long articles in real time. It worked surprisingly well given that computers can't really understand text yet. I imagine it's gotten better, but I still haven't run into anyone in the real world that uses it. Sure would have been useful for 10th grade US History classes.

Who's reading this blog?

So we've had Google Analytics watching this site for a little over of a month, and I recently took a peak to see a few things, such as:

• Who's dropping by
• Not that many people (<100 visitors a week)
  
• Where you are coming from -- as one would expect, mostly Bay Area folks, but in the past two weeks, we've had visitors visitors whose ISPs are reporting they are located in:
• Pittsburgh, PA
• Choi Hung, China
• Lake in the Hills, IL
• Clawson, MI
• Suffolk, VI
• Lawrence, KS
  
• Winkler, Manitoba (Canada!)
• Aylmer, Ontario (Canada again!)
  
• Bangalore, India
• Caracas, the capital of Venezuela
• And some city in Sweden that I can't even copy and paste correctly into Blogger's text editor: it's filled with cool letters I can't type with my US English keyboard
• What browser and display resolution you're using
  
• About half are using IE 6.0 on Windows XP at 1024x768 screen resolution
• May I suggest a leaner, faster, more customizable, less risky browser?
• Also, indulge in a bigger monitor :-)
• Where you're coming from (in other words, what Website were you on when you clicked through into this blog)
• About 1/3 come directly by following a bookmark or typing in the URL directly
• A little less than 1/3 come from some other blog
• The rest Google can't figure out

I have no idea how accurate the data is (I would imagine the browser type and screen resolution data is more accurate than the location data), but's it fun to watch nonetheless.

Aquarium of the Bay

Colin's been eager to see sharks for a while now, so we satisfied his curiosity today at the Aquarium of the Bay at Pier 39. The highlight of the visit was cruising through an underwater tunnel, complete with moving sidewalk, where you can see all kinds of sea creatures, including sharks, sting rays, anchovies, sturgeon, rock fish, and starfish -- swimming all around you.

Since I'm unlikely to get scuba-certified, it was as immersive an experience as this land-lubber will likely get.


Upload Video at DropShots.com

Mmmm...chocolate pudding

With whipped cream! Our omnivore Katie digs in at Fresh Choice, where we had lunch with our good friends Rob, Jen, and son Aidan. We were too busy eating to get good pictures (typical!), but we were priveleged enough to watch Aidan get his first taste of ice cream. He'd make a surprised face the second it disappeared into his mouth (probably reacting to the coldness), but after he recovered, he'd lurch for some more. Too amusing. 

Even more photos

We've experimented with a few photo hosting sites for a few years now:

• We began with the now nearly-defunct Webshots (it doens't always pay to be the first mover)
• ...then moved onto Shutterfly and similar sites mostly optimized for ordering prints and mugs and stickers and other stuff
• ...and even dabbled a bit with the super-popular Flickr (now part of Yahoo)...gotta love the tagging system!
  

There sure are a bewildering number of choices these days. I imagine the choices will narrow some as the industry consolidates. Wonder when Google is going to throw down and create the online companion to its awesome photo organizing software Picasa? I'm actually hoping they'll just extend Blogspot itself, but who knows what they're up to?

Anyway, for the time being, we're settled in at Smugmug.

If you're wondering where to set up your own digital photo library, browse through a few of these site comparisons:

• Greg Reinacker's detailed blog entry
• Wired magazine article
• PC Magazine's photo site roundup
  

Hanging out with Uncle Feo

Cameron enjoys a good laugh with his Uncle Feo (Fedora's brother) in an appropriate T-shirt (if you can't quite make it out, it says "Uncle Feo loves me").

Live action video

Upload Video at DropShots.com
OK, we finally got our DropShots account set up (thanks to John and Amy for pointing us their way), so here's a video clip of the Dynamic Duo and their jumping antics. Watch for Ryan's Karate Kid move! Also, you'll see Colin get so engrossed (and hot!) that he'll have to take off his socks to enhance his jumping pleasure.

Manifest Destiny

Here's that pic of Colin I was thinking about -- for some reason, this just cracks me up. He looks like he's Master of the Universe in this shot.

BTW, for those of you that use Picasa to organize your photos (which I highly recommend after trying both Adobe Photoshop Album and ACDSee Photo Manager), here's a tip: you can type a color into the search box (the same one you use to search your own tags or what Picases calls labels). Picasa automatically indexes your photos so you can search by colors. The color searching isn't foolproof, but it does usually manage to pick out the main colors in each photo.

I remembered Colin was wearing his blue jacket in this picture. (You can also get Picasa to search by dates such as "December" (which will show you all photos taken in December regardless of year) or camera settings (such as "f/2.8" for aperture and 2048 for resolution). Handy.

A stroll around the neighborhood

I love this shot of Katie marching determinedly along. It reminds me of a shot of Colin when he was smaller that I'll try to dig up and post.

The background looked rustic enough that I thought I'd try the sepia treatment. 

Air Kee

We dropped by the Kees on Christmas Eve, and the kids had a rollicking good time. Colin hasn't seen his buddy Ryan in quite some time, and I think they made up for the prolonged absence with vigor -- yup, lots of yelling and running around and jumping. We got a tiny vision of what life might have been like had we had two boys in a row. :-)

Here's part of the evening's festivities: jumping off the plastic playset in an attempt to touch the ceiling. The soundtrack to accompany this daredevil stunt was the yelling of "I almost touched the ceiling!" three times.

Colin's turn

Unfortunately, the angle of this shot makes it look like Colin's just tippy-toeing on the playset. But he's not: he's several feet off the ground, trying to touch the ceiling just like his buddy Ryan.

All hail Princess Kathryn!

For Christmas, the always generous Uncle Feo gave Katie, um...that's Princess Kathryn for us commoners...an entire chest full of princess outfits, complete with accessories like the wand, the tiara, heels, and the of course, the chest itself. Needless to say, the Princess was delighted.

Although Katie is somewhat of a tomboy (she likes Colin's rescue and construction vehicles nearly as much as the next boy), she can't resist the girly outfits now and then. 

Ooooh, a dollhouse

OK, Katie is only sometimes a tomboy. She does tend to gravitate towards the toy kitchens and dollhouses. Not, interestingly, to dolls themselves (she's more of an "animal friends" kind of girl), but she does love the little fake furniture.

The first two Christmas toys she opened were a new Care Bear (which she correctly identified as Friend Bear in about half a second -- a claim her parents would have to verify on the Web site later) and a crib to put her in.

Zooming through the skies

Colin and Katie were all ready to sing the Little Einstein theme song together this morning, but Katie got distracted by her breakfast (a granola bar of some sort, I think), so here's Colin going solo. If you don't know the words, scroll about midway through this blog (or search for the word "lyrics").

Time for the tree!

The kids were so excited about decorating the tree this year. I'm not sure whether they believe in Santa Claus or not, but seeing the tree and its lights and presents underneath sure puts them in a festive mood. 

Pocket camera psychedelics

So this is what happens when you:
1. Can't control your camera's aperture size or exposure length
2. Can't stop shaking the camera around because it's tiny -- and cold out

Oooh, pretty colors. :-)

Touring the neighborhood's holiday displays

Our neighborhood seems to have gone all out this year with their Christmas displays. So a few nights ago, I bundled the two oldest kids up, and we went on a self-guided tour. We stumbled across this surprising display at the end of the road: it's a life-size take on a snow globe. It even blows fake snow around.

Since Colin has been desparate for it to actually snow here (Fedora remembers it snowing in San Francisco at least once growing up), he found the whole thing fascinating.

Two weeks ago, we actually saw frost on the roof and lawns while walking to school in the morning. So it's definitely been cold enough for snow. We've taken to wearing gloves and mittens. Amsuingly, Katie calls hers "mittmens" (to go along with the "buttnons" on her clothes). 

Katie and the bear hat, take 2

Here's Katie hiding inside the bear hat. In the background, you can see a football game on. This year -- just like last -- you have to provide your own entertainment (as Katie is here) because neither of the professional teams nor the Stanford Cardinal are providing much of their own. 

Katie's turn with the bear hat

 

The popular bear hat

We like to all take turns wearing the bear hat. Well, maybe Fedora doesn't. But me and all three kids do. :-) 

The tricycle

In the days right before Loudcloud become Opsware, there was plenty of stuff lying around the office, abandoned by coworkers moving on. This tricycle was one of the castoffs (I wonder if it was purchased with venture capital?), so I rescued it. The kids enjoy riding it around my parents' house these days. 

Katie and Leann ("the cuz")

The two girls pose in their red red dresses at a birthday party for Fedora's uncle. I'm not sure what look Katie is trying to pull off here, but I think it's pretty funny. 

The California State Railroad Musuem

Over Thanksgiving, we took the kids to the California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacremento. We took the Amtrack from Hayward up to Sacramento, and the museum was an easy walk from the railroad station, though we did get slightly turned around right outside of the train station -- the path isn't very clearly marked for pedestrians. 

Amtrak

The Amtrak was clean, smooth, spacious, and even had a snack car. Our train was no match for Japan's shinkansen (bullet train), of course, but it was smoother than I thought it'd be given our experience riding the Caltrain around.

The kids found the trip a touch on the long side (especially compared to our short jaunts on the BART, the Caltrain, or the SFO shuttle train), but it sure beat driving back and forth!

All aboard the museum train

The railroad musuem operates a steam train that takes a short 30-minute trip along the Sacramento River. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, they had a Santa Claus and guitar-and banjo-strumming duo on board as well. Here we are waiting for Santa Claus to come through.

Santa Claus

Only Cameron consented to pose with Santa Claus aboard the Santa Train. Well, come to think of it, I'm not sure he really consented either. For some reason, neither Katie nor Colin seem to be into the whole Santa thing. It's just as well: we'd rather keep the focus of Christmas on Jesus. 

Our tasty late afternoon snack

We enjoyed some Deep South fries just before heading home on the Amtrack. Mmmmm, french fries. Possibly Katie's favorite food of all time -- and believe me, she has plenty of favorite foods. :-) 

Colin training for his future career...

...as a stockbroker.

(It's actually one of those exhibits with the audio commentary piped through the telephone handsets. Katie used hers to "talk with mommy".) 

The Amtrak

Here's Katie on the Amtrak train coming home from Old Sacramento. Ah, the romance of train travel through the sunset.

I was initially a little worried that the Amtrak would be full given that it was Thanksgiving weekend. But both trains (coming and going) had plenty of room for us. When we got on at Hawyard at around 8:30 am, the train was pretty deserted -- but by the time we got to Sacramento, it was pretty full.

The train route from the Bay Area to Sacramento is actually pretty scenic: you see a lot of the actual bay and there are plenty of recognizable landmarks along the way (e.g., the Golden Gate Bridge, the Carquinez Bridge, Berkeley, the UC Davis campus, and others). 

The mail train

The kids explore the mail car. Trains played an important role in getting mail across the country, and the USPS had entire cars dedicated to sorting and transporting post.