Oh the things I learn around mothers. Today one of my labmates asked me how baby Su was doing. For some reason we got onto the topic of C-sections and how a third of all babies born in the US are delivered by C-section! She then proceeded to tell me me that her baby and another friend's baby were both delivered through C-sections. She said that neither of her nor the friend had bothered to read the book chapter on Caesarean Sections in their pregnancy book because neither of them even thought it was going to be an issue. Surprise!

Soooo, I think I'll read that chapter tonight... juuuuust in case.

 

Yeah, we're about 5 weeks late posting this video, but thought you might be interested anyways. At this point in the baby's development, you can tell the gender of the baby. Feel free to try to guess yourself based on what you see and what the doc says. *shrug*

   

SPIE08

Pretty much all of the pics are from us having fun. We really did attend the conference though.

   

iJustine at Apple iPad unveiling

Last week I happened to be in San Francisco at the same time Apple made their announcement about the iPad. Ran into Justine Ezarik from iJustine.com. While I was in San Francisco for a research conference, I skipped out on the morning presentations and checked out the media circus next door instead. Snapped a few extra pics while I was there.

   

It's been about a week since we've moved into our new place and things are still cluttered all around. The apartment has become a collection of mini-organization projects everywhere. One such project is our book collection. We have a buttload of books. Our old place had a third bedroom to store/display our books, but it's clear that there's no room for them in our new place. We made the decision to only have a handful of books on our tiny shelf, and the rest of the books will go into storage. That would have been all fun and good, except that I need some of these books from time-to-time and don't want to be hunting through 5 giant storage boxes each time.

I did a little research on how to catalog books quickly and easily. I absolutely did not want to be the guy typing in authors/titles for hours and hours. I came across a few book cataloging projects online and finally came across LibraryThing. I would describe it as social networking for book lovers. They have a nice search engine where you can just input the ISBN number for a book and it'll fill in the rest. But even that can be slow, so they have a feature where you can use a webcam to scan the barcodes of your books and the website will import them into your virtual library. Webcam scanning isn't completely integrated into their service, so it required a little extra effort to get it to work.

Of the 128 books I scanned last night, most of them were easily recognized by the system. The few that returned errors were due to custom barcodes stickers that the bookstore placed over the original ISBN barcode. I estimate that we have close to 400 books here so it's really much more efficient than brute-force typing each book into a spreadsheet.

I've tagged the books with box numbers, designating where they're going in storage. Later when I need to find a book again, I can just search my LibraryThing catalog and find its location. If this PhD thing doesn't pan out, could I be a librarian?

   

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