Posted on

More baby classes

JY and I just spent the last two weekends in more baby related classes.

This time, the class was on labor and birth of the baby. We went through theory then exercise on how to deal wtih the labor and birth process.

Most of the people in the class were expecting earlier than us. Were were taught relaxation exercieses, positions, breathing techniques, stages of labor, and a bit on baby care.

Overall, it was a good class, took us couple of Saturdays, did provide us with more information on the whole process.

My favorite part was watching the actual birth on video, the babies were so far from what I imagined a new born would look like, it was shocking. Now that I’ve seen what a new born really looks like and understanding why she looks like that, I think I can appreciate the appearance of the new born baby much more.

JY and I also went on a maternity tour on Wednesday. We went through the consultation area, delivery room, post-partum rooms, and the nursery. The highlight of the tour was the last stop – the nursery. Just as we got to the nursery, couple of new-borned were just brought in. We watch in fascination how the nurses look the babies’ weight, dress them, took their photos, took their foot-prints, tested their hearing, and wrapped them. One of the babies was 4 pounds, the other 8 pounds, and they look so much different but both cute as buttons.

Anyway, it’s been a busy week, I’ll spend more time blogging once I get more time.

Posted on

We are back to the US

Just to let you all know, JY and I am safely back to the US.  We arrived yesterday morning.  I went to work today, and JY is still trying to recover from the trip at home.

The plane ride back went very smoothly, we actually arrived an hour earlier than scheduled.

We had a bit trouble when going through immigration, the officer I went through told me JY should be with me even though she doesn’t have a green-card yet.  Then JY got sent to yet another line for people with Advanced Parole.

All in all though, things went great.

Look for more Shanghai trip related articles soon.

Posted on

We are coming back tomorrow

JY and I am flying back tomorrow morning.

There many things waiting to be done when we get back, got to get ready for the baby. We are taking a bunch of classes and we also need to purchase all the necessary baby-related stuff.

Well, it’s been fun in Shanghai, now we are ready to go back to our old life and start working again. I suspect that I’ll adjust faster than JY. 😀

Look for Shanghai related articles soon.

Posted on

I’m in Shanghai

For those of you who are wondering, I’m doing great in Shanghai.

The vacation is going great, although I’m quite busy due to all the people to meet and all the food to have 🙂

JY’s parents are doing well, they are accompanying us to most of the places.

Look for more detail about this trip under the articles section, I’ll put all my trip related articles there once I get back to the US.

In the meantime, please pray for our trip and safe return.

Thanks.

Posted on

Wedding DVD part 2

I’m done with the wedding DVD.

It took a long time to author, but thankfully I didn’t have to redo anything.  There were some imprefections here and there, but nothing we can not live with.  Things that I regreted not doing for this release of our wedding DVD:

  • Should normalize the audio level, it would’ve taken more than 5 hours
  • Should adjust white balance of all frames,, this would’ve taken more than 10 hours
  • Should use more transition during the film, I wasn’t sure whether this helps or distracts.  It would’ve taken an hour at most
  • Should synchronize dance music with the actual dancing, they are slightly out-of-synch now.  This would’ve taken couple of hours.

Other than those things mentioned above, I’m quite fond of the resulting DVD.  I may make the montage section available on my site later.

Now I’m back to packing, my next blog entry will be from China.

Posted on

Wedding DVD

I’ve been really busy for the past few days.

It’s been 10 months since our wedding.  I had not gotten around to put together our wedding DVD since then because there were so many other things for us to do.

Now that we are going to Shanghai, I thought it’d be nice for JY’s parents to see our wedding DVD.  However, that left me only about a week to put it together.

I’m almost done.  My work flow for editing look like this (well, ideally anyway):

   1. Come up with a story board
   2. Capture video from DV camcorder to harddrive
   3. Once all raw footage are captured, import them into editing program
   4. Go through all clips and isolate scenes relevant to the story board
   5. Sequence the scenes, put in background music and dance tracks for the dances
   6. Put in transitions and chapter headings
   7. Create montage using shorter highlight clips
   8. Create disk menu
   9. Author test DVD
  10. Burn test DVD
  11. Correct errors
  12. Author final DVD
  13. Burn final DVDs
  14. Bring final DVDs with us to Shanghai

I’m at step 10 as of now.  The authoring took more than 4 hours to complete, maybe it’s time to upgrade to a faster machine.

I’ll know by this evening if there is any correction needed.

I’ll post a clip on this block once I’m done.

Wish me luck.

Posted on

Shanghai trip planning part 3

We are going to Shanghai!

Well, that’s not exactly news, but we weren’t sure about the trip because of JY’s pregnancty. JY just got the go-ahead from her OB. She was told the baby is progressing nicely, gaining the right amount of weight .

Now that we know we are going to Shanghai for sure, there are quite a few things to prepare. We spent a bit of time packing today, putting all the stuff her mom asked for in our luggage. There are 12 bottles of various vitamins in one =)

There are quite a few other things to plan for, such as the places we want to visit, food we like to have, friends JY wants to see, things we want to purchase both for ourselves and for the baby. It’s going to be a tight two weeks!

By the way, I’ve just re-read the travelogue by one of of friends – Benny Chang. It’s written competely in Chinese and makes a fascinating reading. Don’t expect the same quality of writing from me, Benny used to be a TV news anchor, and words just seem to flow from his pen.

I’ll do the best I can to record the sights and sounds of Shanghai along with my experience, mainly for my own record. Hopefully you’ll find it interesting as well.

Got to go do some more packing now.

Posted on

Losing weight

Today during lunch, my colleagues and I were talking about healthy eating and weight loss. One of my colleagues has actually lost about 50 pounds recently. He told us that his secret was to follow the Weight Watcher’s point system religiously, and to exercise regularly. That really is the only way to real sustainable weight loss.

I’m actually in the same boat. I’ve lost around 30 pounds since December of 2004. I feel much better, with much more energy, and it gives me a great sense of accomplishment.

Simply put, to lose weight, one needs to make sure the amount of energy spend > amount of energy consumed. A rough estimation I’ve come across says 3,500 Calories = 1 pound of body fat. That means, over the long run, to lose one pound, you need to take in 3,500 Calories less than you expend. If you can do that within a week’s time, then 50 consecutive weeks will enable you to lose 50 pounds.

Of course, what I told you about was the “ideal” situation. The body actually maintains an “ideal” weight. If your weight goes above the “ideal” weight, the body will expend more energy performing the same tasks (eating, sitting, walking etc..) to bring the weight back down to the “ideal” weight. If you weight falls below the “ideal” weight, the body will conserve more energy when perform the same tasks, it will try to bring your weight back up to the “ideal” weight. That’s the biggest problem with keeping the weight off.

Anyone who has tried to lose weight can tell you that keeping the weight off is the tough part, especially when your body is constantly trying to thwart your effort.

However, there is hope at the end of the tunnel. The author I mentioned couples of posts ago, Malcolm Gladwell, wrote an excellent article on obesity. You can find it here. In it, he mentioned that there were studies done that proved that once you keep your weight off for more than three years, the body will set that new weight as the “ideal” weight.

I strongly recommend you read that fascinating article, where he talks about all the fad diets and why they don’t work. It’s written in typical Gladwell style, informative, insightly and engaging. I also found Dr. Mercola’s blog very informative. Read the archived articles, a lot of them were focused on obesity and weight loss.

I’ve changed my diet significantly since I started my weight loss program. Now I eat fruits between meals to control hunger, substitute fruits for snacks, eat thing high in protein, fiber, and monosatuated fat. I also try to take a walk after lunch to get some sun as well as some fresh air and I run about 1.5 miles on my treadmill after dinner everyday.

All these seems to be paying off. I’ve lost 30+ pounds since 2004, gotten sick less lately, and I’m able to keep the weight off.

It’s really the only way for weight loss, you’ve heard it thousands of times. Eat less and exercise more. But here, less means less calories, eat more fruits and veggies, which are low on calories and high on bulk (give the sense of fullness). Exercise regularly is also key, if you don’t, you’ll be losing more lean muscle than fat. You have to make healthy living a habit.

Hopefully I can say the same couple of years from now.  😀