Background I have a fairly unusual personal background. My parents immigrated to the US from two very different countries: Finland and the Philippines. When I grew up, dual citizenship was kind of a murky thing, which seemed to be frowned upon and discouraged. But after the turn of the millennium, there was a sea change …
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Open Live Writer
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 …
23andme Thoughts
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 …
Purging Material Possessions: Books Edition
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 …
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Getting an apostille for a birth certificate in California
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 …
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Movie Update
Iron Man 2 is not a very good movie. Terminator: Salvation is completely awful – it’s an unintended parody, and completely out of character with the earlier movies in terms of plot and pacing. Moon, however, is excellent, and well worth watching.
Overdue…
It’s time for the standard “I’ll try to update more often” post. Seriously!
Broken Headset
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 …
What’s the matter with kids these days?
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 …
HAWX and Control Schemes
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 — …