New iPhone means new videos

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Since Ashley and I have gotten new iPhones, I have been playing around with the still and video camera on the iPhone 4S. I think that the photo quality is very good — in fact, it is better than our old point-and-shoot Kodak camera that we bought when we finished graduate school. I am having the most fun the video camera, though. When Emily was born, Ashley and I bought a hand-held video camera but, like the point-and-shoot, the quality was not great and I rarely had it on me. With the video functionality in my phone, I am more likely to use it.

A few weeks ago, we went to Bridge Street to walk around on a Friday night, when the bands are out playing. Since Emily loves to dance, she just had to show off her moves.

Then, over Thanksgiving, Emily got together with her cousin Colin and had a good time playing at the park. I took some video and stitched together a couple of clips and still shots into this little movie.

Tired of Children’s Media

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With Emily now a bit older than four years old, I have gotten extremely tired of reading children’s books to her. Now, this does not mean that I am tired of reading to her. While stories like the Berenstain Bears, Curious George, and the Golden Books are fantastic compared to most of the children’s books that have been written, I have read all of the ones we own to Emily (and that is a lot of those books). So, starting this week, I have decided to rebel. Over Christmas, we brought back a lot of Ashley’s old story books from her parent’s house. This included ten or so of the Great Illustrated Classics. So, this week, I picked up Heidi and began to read it to Emily. At first, I was a little worried about how she would deal with that, because my daughter is very opinionated, especially with regards to the story she listens to at bedtime. However, she seems to really be enjoying Heidi so far. We are reading 3–4 chapters a night, with each chapter being 10–15 pages each, with illustrations every other page. Once we get through the classics we have, I may look at introducing her to Nancy Drew, since Ashley and her Mom have collected virtually every Nancy Drew known to man and we have them all stashed in Emily’s room.

I also have a goal to get Emily off of her Disney movie obsession. We have watched about half of My Fair Lady and she likes that so far, so I am going to let her watch the original movie version starring Rex Harrison. After we finish reading Heidi, I am going to show her the Shirley Temple version of the movie. This won’t break her of the Mouse, but it will expose her to other classic films that will not drive me nuts to watch.

September Challenge

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I read a lot about personal finance. I read several books a year on it — most recently I finished the 2005 edition of The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need and I am currently working my way through The Millionaire Mind. In addition, I follow numerous personal finance blogs. All of this recent reading has started me thinking about what I really need and whether there is a way to cut back on spending. So, to that end, I have two cuts that I am implementing for the month of September and, at least one of them, for beyond.

Since before Emily was born, Ashley and I have paid the extra money every month for digital cable because we wanted to get high-definition channels. However, the past few months, I have realized at we, as a family, really watch very little TV. Further, the TV that we do watch is mainly found either on the local channels or on Netflix Instant. So, after talking it over with Ashley, we are going to drop cable entirely in favor of receiving our local HD channels over e air. The one show that we really enjoy and are current on that is not on local networks can easily be downloaded to the Apple TV for a small charge per episode. All in all, I expect this to be a fairly easy transition that should save us somewhere around $70-80 every month.

The second challenge for September is more of a personal challenge for me. Since I do most of the cooking around here, when I get home and don’t feel like making anything, it has become entirely to easy for me to declare that we are going out to eat. Lately, we have been eating out at least one weeknight and just about every meal except for breakfast on the weekends. Also, this does not count the 3–4 days a week that I have been eating lunch out instead of taking a lunch or coming home to eat. Now, that is really ridiculous since I work five minutes from home and it almost certainly takes me longer to grab something for lunch that to come home and heat up leftovers or make a sandwich. So, for the month of September, I am challenging myself to not eat out unless it is meaningful to me. I am making an exception for Ashley and my date night this Saturday and I am debating whether or not I will make an exception for the weekly lunch group I meet with. Hopefully, by the end of this month, I will have broken the eating out habit. It is a bit on the embarrassing side, but we spent almost $500 on eating out this last month so by breaking this habit for me, we will probably save at least 80% of that for September.

These personal spending cuts are inspired by financial reading, but the reason is not really austerity related. While the amounts that we spend, both of cable and dining out, are high, neither one is really breaking the bank for us. Granted, I can find better things to do with the money, but this challenge is more about just making myself do it.

A Small Netflix Irritation

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Ok, Netflix, I realize you want to emphasize your streaming service. I want you to emphasize it to. In fact, I would happily use it exclusively if I could get anything I want to watch over it instead of having to rely on discs for some things. I can even accept that you changed your API so that application developers (including yourself) can only manage streaming content using the API, requiring management of discs to be relegated to the website. I don’t like that as much because your website is a bit of a hassle on my iPhone and most of the time I hear about new movies that I want to watch, I am remote.

However, this final irritation takes things one step to far. I have the Netflix-provided app for my iPad. I can accept using the website for managing discs on the iPad, because the screen is big enough and the experience doesn’t completely suck. But, do you really have to tell me every time I access the site that an app exists for the iPad? I know that already. The reason I am not using that app is because you, in your infinite wisdom, restricted what it could do. Now, you have raised the price of having streaming content plus content delivered on discs. I do not begrudge you the extra money; I known that the content providers are squeezing you to charge more for streaming media. But, do you really have to make it even more difficult for me to access this content that I am now paying more for? Do you really want me to drop the discs completely? For some reason, I think that the answer is yes.

Studying Math: A Slight Change

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I should have known that I was speaking too soon when I mentioned studying the book on Information Theory. I managed to make it a whole section into the book before I realized that I was over my head math-wise and that I needed, first and foremost, to finish up Concrete Mathematics. Additionally, information theory seems to deal a good bit with statistics, so I am going to break back out my book on engineering statistics so I will be prepared when it comes up later. Also, boning up on statistics will help me out if I ever decide to really dig into machine learning algorithms, which I should really do sooner rather than later.