We're Moving to Dallas, Texas

I recently accepted a job offer from the Raytheon facility located in Dallas, TX. Things are happening quickly and I've been very busy coordinating our move. Fortunately, the company is helping with our move by providing a moving consultant who will help coordinate the activities. Raytheon is also covering the cost of moving through a combination of lump sum and reimbursement payments.

We have a house hunting trip scheduled for August 8 to 12. The following weekend we're flying to San Francisco for Emma's second birthday. Our actual move is planned for August 22.

It'll be sad to leave our friends that we've made in Los Angeles. However, we're excited about the opportunities that Texas has to offer in terms of raising a family. After lots of research and questioning others, we'll likely buy a home in either Allen or Plano. These neighborhoods seem to have good schools, low crime, beautiful homes and a decent amount of ethnic diversity.

Cost of Living Comparison: LA vs. Plano

Used CNN's cost of living comparison calculator ( http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.html ) to compare Los Angeles with Plano, Texas. For ease of comparison, I entered 100K as the income in LA. This will provide a percentage that can easily be applied to any salary.



This shows that if one's income is around 100K in LA, an income of roughly 64K in Plano will be somewhat equivalent.

Recent LA Quakes

Been having larger nearby quakes recently.

Finally Got A Nintendo DS Lite

I finally got a DS Lite. Almost got one three years ago. But, it was sold out everywhere at the time. Later, I got a Sony PSP. However, the PSP is too slow to load and get to the game. The DS, with its flash based media format, is much quicker. Just turn it on and the game starts almost instantly. Also, you can just close the case and the game will be suspended. Speed is essential if you have a baby at home to take care of. Other factors were that the PSP battery life is terrible and the PSP is not quite as easy to carry around.

I decided to get the DS Lite instead of the new DSi mostly because of the cost. Emma will be playing with it too, so I don't want to invest more than I need to if there is a possibility of it getting destroyed. So far, I only have My Chinese Coach to learn some Mandarin. Emma likes just seeing the device respond to her touch. She also likes the Sketchpad feature of the game to make scribbles on the screen. Will get Emma some puppy game soon.

Update on Linux Mint

After playing with my laptop a little more, I can boot into either Linux Mint or Vista. The default boot loader that Mint installed gave two selections for "Vista" when it found Acer's "boot partition" in addition to the main C: drive. Apparently, Acer has an extra partition containing the boot loader. I had to choose the option for the C: drive partition to boot into Vista. So, I removed the first option from the menu list. Booting into Vista might be useful sometimes. It's just slow as hell.

Linux Mint seems to work pretty well. The only problem I've seen is that the audio player will crash a lot. I haven't looked into the cause yet. Fortunately, I don't use the laptop for much multimedia, so this may not be a problem for me. The main thing is that the wireless network adapter works.

Added on 3/27/09:

I installed the XFCE4 window manager (desktop user interface) for a lightweight, fast GUI. I installed it using Linux Mint's meta-package in Synaptic package manager. XFCE is noticeably faster than Gnome and even has the Aqua (Mac style) theme available by default. Very nice. I also tested audio playback by double-clicking one of my audio files. The Totem player appeared and the song played without any problems! I think I'll be using XFCE for now.

Added on 4/3/09:

Found that the suspend feature doesn't restore correctly on my laptop. Removed the option from the logout option list. Haven't tried hibernate feature yet.

Added on 4/12/09:

Installed Mint on my desktop and it found the wireless adapter correctly!!

Linux Mint for the Laptop

I installed Linux Mint on my Acer Extensa 4420. Seems to have found hardware successfully, including the wireless network adapter. Couldn't boot back into Vista, but maybe I won't fuss with it for now. I didn't like having to wait five minutes for Vista to boot up and getting warnings that I was running low on memory all the time. Now to install my apps.

Got an LG Vu

Last Sunday, I picked up an LG Vu mobile phone from AT&T. It's a nice touch screen phone with Java MIDP 2.0 support. Since it's not categorized as a PDA, my Internet plan is $15 per month (as opposed to $30 per month for PDAs).

Overall, I'm very happy with it. It's not perfect, of course. There are some annoyances here and there. But, it should help keep me occupied during idle moments.

Frozen Yogurt Recipe

After trying a handful of frozen yogurt recipes, I've settled on a favorite (for now):

3 cups (24 oz) plain Greek yogurt
2/3 cup sugar

Mix in a bowl, turn on the frozen yogurt machine (also an ice cream machine), then pour the mixture into the machine and leave for 25 or so minutes. For better results, put into a freezer-safe container and freeze overnight. Add toppings like blueberries, etc.

This recipe is a little similar to Pinkberry in taste (IMHO). Greek yogurt works well, because it contains less water which becomes icy when frozen. It also gives it a slight tangy taste. As far as brand names, Voskos worked the best, followed by Greek Gods. I also tried Fage brand, but for some reason it was very crumbly when frozen. In all fairness, however, I used the total fat (not low fat or nonfat) versions of Voskos and Greek Gods. But (due to availability at Trader Joe's) for Fage I used 17 oz of total fat with 7 oz low fat (yes, strange quantities). However, I don't think the difference should have been that dramatic.

Yummy! Homemade frozen yogurt! Cheaper than buying outside and I almost know the exact ingredients!

The Bloglines Factor

My pick for this year's best productivity booster is probably Bloglines.com. Bloglines is a free RSS feed aggregator. Most blog and news sites provide RSS or Atom feeds. With a Bloglines account, you can "subscribe" to as many feeds as you wish to follow and Bloglines will track new articles and present them to you as "unread" articles. It is presented in a way very similar to how we see our unread email.

No longer do I have to manually visit each of my regular sites and determine what information is new and what I've already read. Although this sounds like it doesn't take much time, it does add up. Now, I can just go to bloglines.com and all of the new articles are there for me to scan at my own pace. Feeds are scanned regularly and new articles are displayed automatically.

You can select to view articles as titles only, summaries or in their entirety. Hyperlinks to the actual article are provided as well. Articles can be marked as unread, etc., similar to managing email.

Not only does this save time from not having to navigate to multiple web sites, new articles are pulled regularly and it makes it easier to avoid unproductive web surfing. For busy people that frequent multiple news or blog sites, a feed aggregator is a must.

What sets Bloglines apart from other aggregators is that it presents new articles like unread email, rather than as a list of articles without old articles screened out. It can be used to follow any site that offers a feed, including photo sharing accounts (i.e., Flickr.com), shopping sites (i.e., dealspl.us), career sites (i.e., dice.com) and many others.

Mmm... Homemade Ice Cream!

We finally tried our new Cuisinart automatic frozen yogurt / ice cream / sorbet maker. I had the mixer bowl in the freezer for a few days to get it nice and cold. It's recommended to have it in the freezer one or two days before using it for best results.

Thanksgiving seemed to be the perfect day to try it out. I mixed the ingredients, turned on the gadget and poured the mixture into the mixing bowl. In 30 minutes, it was nice and creamy. Since we like our ice cream on the firmer side, I transferred it into an air tight container and stuck it in the freezer for a couple hours.

After dinner, we had our ice cream. It was still a bit soft for our liking. But, the taste was good. There was still more than half that we could save for later.

The next night (tonight) it was firm and much better overall. Reminded us of Breyer's. I am very impressed by this homemade ice cream! Looking forward to eating more! There are other recipes we can try too.