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My adventure with electricity part 1

I spent a large part of my Thursday night, Friday and Saturday morning trying to fix the electrical problem.

It all started when JY called me at work on Thursday morning, she told me that the wall outlet that’s next to her looked burned-out, and that there were no electricity in two of our bedrooms. My house is fairly new, and I hadn’t dealt with anything so serious (to me at least) before. So I told my wife to stay calm, and told her I’ll take care of it when I get home. JY’s pregnant with our first child, she’s already under a lot of stress, I definitely don’t want to add to that stress.

When I got home, I found just as JY described. The wall outlet had a burned-out face plate. The prongs on extension cord attached to the outlet were burned as well.

I decided the first thing to do is to research. So I brought out couple of those thick home-improvement books, got a crash course on electrical systems. I decided to practice what I learned.

I first gathered some basic tools, removed the faceplate. The receptacle behind looked burned-out as well. I decided the first thing to do is to get a new one. So I turned off the circuit breaker that controls this area of the house, then remove the receptacle.

I brought the receptacle to the closest OSH, I was looking at all the receptacles they had there (there were quite a few), when a nice lady who works there asked me if I needed help, I was relieved that I was not alone facing my problem. She took a look at the burned-out one I brought, and told me to get the professional model, which is supposed to be much better. I asked her a bunch of questions, got the answers I needed, then went home with the shiny new professional receptacle.

Well, maybe because it was the professional model, the instruction on the box was really skimpy. One thing I noticed though, there were 8 holes in the back instead of the 4 holes on my original one. I was a bit concerned, don’t know which holes to plug the hot and neutral wires into. I tried all eight, none of which will screw tight enough to keep the wires in. I tried for half an hour without much success. The problem was it was the duplex model, it’s meant to be for pairs of hot wires. Anyway, I called OSH again, got the same lady who sold me the receptacle on the phone, trying to figure out why I couldn’t get it to work. Well, it took me on the phone for 10 minutes to figure out it’s not going to work. So I drove back to OSH, got the consumer model that looked exactly like the burned-out one. It took me 5 minutes in total to install it.

By now, I felt pretty handy. It’s the kind of invincibility one feels due to lack of understanding.

I then went to the main control panel, and flipped the switch to the ON position. However, the switch immediately jumped to the tripped position and I saw an arc. I didn’t know what to do, so I flipped the switch one more time, and the whole house went dark.

To be continued…

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Photos from my new Maxxum 5D

We spent most of Saturday with JY’s friends whose daughter, Felicia, was having her birthday party.

Actually, we originally wanted to visit JY’s friend Stella and remedy a regret we had. Stella graciously offered her son Bruce, to jump on our marital bed right after our wedding. It’s part of Chinese tradition, because Stella and her husband had one girl and one boy, and that their families are all intact, having her son jump on our marital bed was supposed to be auspicious. By having Bruce jumping on our marital bed, along with dates, peanuts, gui yuan, and lotus seeds spread along the bed, we were wishing we would have at least a girl and a boy as cute as Bruce and her sister Iris. And thanks in part to Bruce, our daughter Lauren will be born soon.

Unfortunately, we lost the photos that I took during the “bed jumping” ritual. I was busy moving stuff around to prepare for JY’s move to my house, and somehow misplaced the photos.

I decided to make up for the mistake, and take some more photos of Bruce jumping on a bed with all the nuts so I staged a repeat performance. I also wanted a chance to test out the Maxxum 5D I bought in anticipation of my daughter’s birthday.

Both worked out well. Bruce was a bit reluctant at the beginning because he was very sleepy, but once he got into the spirit, he was jumping up and down without being prompted. Here are some photos of him doing just that.
PICT0034    PICT0031    PICT0037

After that, we went to another friend’s house for her birthday party. There were four families there not counting JY and me, five girls of various ages, and Bruce, the only boy. We were well fed and had a great time. One thing I can tell you for sure though, having so many children in the same house can sure result in utter chaos. The children had quite a few problems, sometime they were able to resolve themselves, the other time, adult supervision was required.

It all worked out well in the end. JY and I had a great time, and that’s the last party we will attend before the birth of our baby because our baby can arrive anytime now.

I’ve linked to the photos I took at Stella’s place and during the party below. As I mentioned, I used my Maxxum 5D with a 28-135mm Minolta lens, and a 5400 HS flash. Most shots used bounced flahs. BTW, for those of you using Minolta, the 5400 HS flash won’t work in TTL or ADI mode. You need to set the AE to Manual, and change the flash output manually on the flash itself. It’s a pain. That’s why a lot of these photos are from the same distance and the same angle.

Here are the photos from the party.

Keep looking here for updates on my daughter’s progress.

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We named our baby!

As many of you know, we spent quite some time searching for the “perfect” name for our baby girl.

Our last post, Naming our baby part 2, garnered a lot of attention. Apparently, the author of the Freakonomics book commented on it as well.

We were overwhelmed by all the response, and went through each one of the comment carefully before we settled on Lauren Alexandra Wang.

We don’t believe that we’d go wrong with any of the final candidates. For a detailed explanation of our the selection methodology to get to the final candidates, please refer to the Naming our baby part 2 post.

There were many good tidbits of information in your comments. We decided to settle on Lauren Alexandra Wang because it rolls off the tongue quite nicely. It also has a timeless feel to it. Both my parents and JY’s parents can pronounce it without much difficulty (they are no non-native speakers of English), although they think Alexandra is a bit long for their taste. According to the statistics on the Social Security Administration’s website, both Lauren and Alexandra are fairly common names, however, we don’t personally know anyone named Lauren, so it’s should not be a problem telling her apart from the other kids.

The name Stephen Dubner recommended, Lucienne Rachel is a great sounding name as well. We did have two concerns though. First of which is Lucienne is a bit hard to spell and pronounce for the baby and her caretakers. And secondly, we are afraid people will shorten it by calling her Lucy instead, which is not as great a name.

Atara and Aviva are both very nice sounding middle-names, however, we think they are a bit too unconventional. We want our daughter’s personality to attract people’s attention, not her name 😉

Thank you all for your help. We’ll have pictures of Lauren Alexandra Wang as soon as she’s born.

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Parenting Book Recommendations 我爱看的育儿书籍

I’ve been asked by some friends as to the parenting books one should read.

I’ve put together a brief list of the books that I’ve read on Amazon, you can find the books I recommend here.

Enjoy.

In Chinese:
好多朋友问我该看那些育儿书籍。我在Amazon网络书店上收集了一些我看过而又觉得必读的书。你们可以在这找到这个 list.

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External Cephalic Version or C-section?

JY just came back from her examination. Her OB told her that because the baby’s head has not dropped, and that her scheduled delivery is about 3 and half week away, we should schedule a regular C-section. Her doctor gave us the choice of either A. performing an External Cephalic Version or B. a C-section. We need to make a decision soon.

The doctor also told JY that we can always cancel the C-section if the baby’s head does drop down into position. The only thing is the C-section will be 5 days earlier than her expected delivery date, so I don’t know if that’s enough time for the baby to work her way down.

JY and I have been doing a lot of research on this topic. The ECV basically involves the doctor trying to move the baby’s head into position by applying external pressure. This will be done on the day of the delivery. The risks are numerous, including the possibility of torn placenta or umbilical cord. If that happens, an immediate C-section will need to be scheduled, which is quite dangerous for both JY and the baby.

As you can understand, both JY and I are quite anxious about the decision. We’ve been praying for the baby to get into position for delivery. We’ll need to pray for the wisdom for the right decision. We’d like to ask you to pray for JY and the baby as well, please pray for the safe and smooth delivery as well as peace of mind for JY and me.

Thank you very much.

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Merry Christmas everyone!

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. JY and I spent lunch with a group of friends over hotpot, we did the usual gift exchange. We got some nice Hershey’s chocolate gift, and exchange with another couple (thanks Jeff and Iris) for another kind of chocolate that JY liked. I spent Christmas eve in Church watching a wonderful performance by our church choir, while JY stayed home resting.

Since JY’s birthday’s very close to Christmas. I bought her a Christmas-cum-birthday gift. A Dell Inspiron 6000 so that she won’t take up all my computer’s time, more time for me to blog! 😉 Truth be told though, she’s been very gracious, and let me use the desktop whenever I ask.

End of the year is always a good time for reflection, and I’ve done a bit myself. Looking back, 2005 has a been a truly blessed time for JY and me. We got married late 2004, since then we’ve worked out our differences, have a schedule that both of us are comfortable with, enjoyed each other greatly, and now we have our first child scheduled for January 2005. We thank you all for praying for us, and would ask for you to keep us in your prayers.

Merry Christmas everyone!

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好戏推荐：Nanny 911

不知道大家是否知道现在电视上有好几个关于抚养孩子的show。我和JY最爱看的是Nanny 911.

Nanny 911每星期一晚九点在Fox播出。Fox也有一个关于这个Show的网站。

每星期的show都是同一个形式。
先放段需要帮助的一家人的录像。这些录像大多数是非常令人错愕的。我和JY总会想，真的有人这样生活的吗？
然后三个中的一个Nanny会被选中来帮助这个家庭。三个Nanny的名字，经验在网站上有介绍。他们都是英国人，因为这个show最初是在英国播出的。
接下来被选中的Nanny会花一天时间来观察这个家庭。剩下来的六天，Nanny会帮助这个家庭改善他们的生活。
最后结果大都是Happy Ending.

我喜欢这个show的原因有几个。一是对于没有孩子的人来说，这些家庭是些很好的个案，作为反面教材非常有效，使我能看到家庭可能出现的问题。二是我可以从每一个个案中学到发现问题的方法。每个家庭的问题有不同之处也有相同之处。很多时候表面上的问题有更深层的内因。三是不同Nanny解决问题的方法也有不同和相同之处。还有个原因是这些家庭个案开始都有看起来几乎不可能解决的问题，但是每次经过了节目大部分的问题都被解决了，使我有了更多面对孩子将来可能出现的问题的信心，当然祷告和求神的帮助还是我们主要的方法。
因为JY怀孕，很多人告诉我做父亲没什么窍门，就是要变做边学。其实人从别人的经验及教训学到的东西也很重要。
我想跟大家分享下到现在为止我从Nanny 911之处所学到的一些东西。

第一：孩子问题的种类。
孩子问题是最明显Nanny 911的部分。包括：打人，撒娇,耍赖，撒谎，没有责任感，做有危险的事，不尊重父母，过分依赖父母。

第二：孩子问题的内因
我学到的最重要的一点就是很多孩子的问题其实是父母的问题。而且内因的识辨需要有经验作为基础，Nanny 911的Nanny都是有很多经验，所以能很快认清内因。内因包括：
打人，撒娇：不会互相沟通（很多时候是父母也不会沟通，孩子跟着学）
撒谎：对父母的惧怕(有的家长体罚）
没有责任感，做有危险的事，不尊重父母，：父母的赏罚不分明
过分依赖父母：父母溺爱

第三：孩子问题的解决方法
总的来说孩子问题的解决方法是要对症下药。对于我所看到的来说，先是要订家庭规章。规章包括：学会沟通，赏罚分明，爱的外在表现。再就是设立赏罚制度。奖励一般是有一个全家都能看到的板子，做对事就加一块，积攒到一定数量就可以换奖品。惩罚一般是Timeout，让孩子可以自己思想做错的是，但事先要告诉他到底做错什么。培养父母和孩子之间的沟通也是一门重要功课。不会沟通的孩子只会用暴力，撒娇耍赖得到想要的，而不是通过沟通来使父母了解。还有就是要详细的日程表，只对于孩子尤其重要，他们对生活中的秩序的要求，例如何时睡觉，何时上学，何时起床，何时吃饭，何时午睡等等，是很明显的。而且制定作息时间，并且遵守，对父母的生活影响更大。对于父母不足的地方，Nanny大多数时间会私下和他们讨论，这样他们不会在孩子面前丧失威信。父母的言行，尤其是行为，对孩子的影响很大。父母之间不互相尊重的家庭，孩子之间也不会互相尊重，而且孩子不会尊重父母。

我在大学学过一些儿童心理学。最近又在看一些这方面的书。但是理论与实践需要相结合，Nanny 911提供了一个验证我所学的理论的机会。

我想很多父母会不知不觉的用自己父母教育自己的方法带孩子。但是儿童心理和生理学都有了长足的进展。我认为作为父母既要学到理论上的东西，又看别人孩子的个案，综合自己孩子性格及遗传因素，制定孩子的发展计划，这样对孩子的成功发展应该有益。

JY补充：
看了这个节目以后，发现其实两三岁的孩子很多时候已经有自己的想法了。家长不能一味打骂或者一味溺爱，以为他们什么都不懂。他们同样需要沟通，注意：是沟通，不是教训。要面对面，心平气和，互相之间平等的状况下进行，不要给孩子你是权威的感觉，不要让他们害怕，目的是让他们把一切都说出来。家长一定要认真听孩子的解释，不要不把他们说的不当回事，要反省分析他们的话，其实有的时候错并不在他们，而是家长自己。
双方沟通以后，家长要告诉孩子“我们爱你”，然后耐心地告诉他（们）错在什么地方，应该如何做。这样教育孩子的效果比较好。
在这个节目中，nanny经常用这个方式和孩子交谈，而且还教那些家长如何去做。

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Naming my baby part 2 给宝贝起名之二

OK. It’s been awhile since we wrote our first naming the baby post.

Since they, JY and I have done quite some research, trying to find the best way to name our baby. I told JY that I remember reading from somewhere that the name one gives to the baby has a long-lasting impact on the baby’s life.

I finally found out where that information was from, it’s from the excellent book Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. I will review the book very soon, so look for the review.

In the last section of the book named: Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet? the author addressed the topics of how a person’s name affect how people perceive him/her. It was loosely based on profession Roland G. Fryer Jr.’s work on black and white difference on achievement. The research was based on the study of 40+ years of child birth certificate data from California. In it, the author used statistical method to find out all the best and worst (whether popular or not) names for boys and girls.

To shorten it, basically, we came up with a new set of names for you to judge. The difference between this time and last time, was JY and I spent quite some time pouring over the data in the Freakonomics book, and identified a set of desirable names based on the weighing of the attributes. We’re also now including the middle name as well. The second column uses the middle initial, and the third column listed the name without the middle-name.

Please leave your comments in the Comments section.

Lucienne Rachel Wang       Lucienne R Wang   Lucienne Wang
Sophie Clementine Wang     Sophie C Wang     Sophie Wang
Ella Lucienne Wang         Ella L Wang       Ella Wang
Lauren Alexandra Wang      Lauren A Wang     Lauren Wang
Lauren Atara Wang          Lauren A Wang     Lauren Wang
Hannah Clementine Wang     Hannah C Wang     Hannah Wang
Rachel Alexandra Wang      Rachel A Wang     Rachel Wang

Edit:
Since this post is garnering a lot of attention, here is our baby name research methodology.

  • The initial set of names are from “most popular names in 2015” section of the book mainly.
  • We then looked at the origin of the name, the meaning as well as the “Mother Year of Education” from the book. Here is the resulting matrix:

    Name

    Origin

    Meaning

    Mother Year of Education

    Alexandra

    Greek 

    protector of mankind

    14.67

    Atara

    Hebrew

    A crown

    16.00

    Ava

    German

    A bird

    14.97

    Aviva

    Hebrew

    Springtime

    16.18

    Clementine

    Latin

    Merciful

    16.23

    Ella

    Old English, old German

    Beautiful fairy

    woman, all

    15.30

    Emma

    Old German

    Universal, all embracing

    15.23

    Hannah

    Hebrew 

    grace of God 

    14.44

    Lauren

    Latin  

    laurel leaves, honour, fame, spirit

    14.58

    Lucienne

    Latin

    Light

    16.60

    Maeve

    Greek, Latin

    Goddess, a purple flower

    N/A

    Rachel

    Hebrew 

    little lamb, an ewe, one with purity 

    14.51

    Sophie

    Greek

    Wisdom

    15.45
  • We then put the first name, middle name, and the last name together, and judged them on the sound of the name, the initials, and the anagrams. We also want the origin and the meanings of the first and middle names to be in harmony
  • Finally, we went through a google search on the final candidates (first and middle names) making sure there is no one with that name that is of notoriety.

What do you guys think?

大家可以帮我们孩子选个好名字吗？

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Randal is the next apprentice

Just as I predicted in an earlier blog entry, Randal is the apprentice.

I don’t think he won by coincidence either. In my mind, he is no doubt the most qualified candidate this year, if not the most qualified ever.

He exhibits many traits that contributed to his victory. First of all, he’s smart, with so many different degrees, he’s actually over-qualified for this job. Secondly, he is a natural leader. He works well with people, lead by example, and trust and respect the people he works with. Thirdly, he is very strong in organizational and communication skills. And finally, he handles emotions well. You all remember that his grandmother passed away at the beginning of the whole process, Randal actually took time-off from the show to attend her funeral service. It would be hard to recover from such tragedy, however, he was able to gather himself and performed the jobs assigned to him extremely well. I honestly don’t know if I could have handled it as well myself if it were to happen to me. People like Randal will do well regardless where they work, and I myself am learning to become such a person.

However, Randal won not just by being himself. People often make the mistake of attributing victories solely to someone’s character. Randal also worked hard, and thus had an outstanding record. I do think he made a mistake of not paying more attention to the weather forecast for the final task. However, we all make mistakes, how to deal with these mistakes is what tells good leaders from others. I think Randal handled the situation well, he made a decision to move it indoors, and committed himself and his team to make the event a success nevertheless.

Now, we come to the other finalist, Rebecca. I didn’t realize she was so young, only 23 years old. She acts in a mature and professional manner, so it’s easy to have thought her of being older. I admire her audacity of persevering through her broken ankle. She’s another example of people distinguising themselves by dealing with and overcoming adversity.

I never imagined that she would go so far. I thought she would be eliminated through the interview process, which didn’t take place this year. She was good at what her does, however, she really just started to shine toward the end, especially when she was teamed up with Randal. So her later success might be the result of her teaming with Randal, but doing regression analysis on the correlation will be impossible because the data is not there. She has a long road ahead of her, and she will be even more successful as she gains more experience.

One thing surprised me was Donald’s decision to fire both Alla and Felicia in one sitting. I thought that was a wrong decision by Donald, giving up Alla, who seems to possess all the right skills and characteristics of someone who works for Donald. However, after her comment on Rebecca on the finale, I wasn’t so sure she’s the right choice for the apprentice. There are people who see the world in binary mode, black or white, good or evil, smart or foolish etc… However, the world is much more complex than what can be described in binary bits. I think what ultimately failed Alla was her simplistic views of people and her abrasiveness, both are counter-productive in a business environment. People are not simple, they have many motivations, diverse background, values, and principles. It’s also difficult to pin the failure of any particular task to a single person (well, unless that person is Marcus, but I digress). It’s also tempting to focus entirely on someone’s negative side, even in the boardroom. I think her hammering of Felicia was perceived negatively in that boardroom, and ultimately resulted in her ousting. She’s also quite abrasive, meaning she lacks the finesse to influence without offending. It’s someone hard to do, and this is what distinguish Randal from her, he can lead without being perceived as forcing things on people.

This season is definitely better than last (third) season, on par with season 1, and maybe not as good as season 2, although I’m biased because I got hooked on season 2. This season there was no colorful characters like Omarosa or Sam. The rewards were not as nice, and the tasks were not as diverse (mostly product promotion).

I heard the Apprentice is coming to LA this year, hopefully it will remain as energetic and entertaining.

Job well done Randal, congratulations.

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Purpose Driven Life article by Mallcom Gladwell

As you may already know from my previous posting that I studied The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren in my bible-study group. It was a great book, has lots of practical advice for practicing Christians.

As you may also know, I’m a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell. He was the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, two of my favorite books.

Now I just found out that Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about Rick Warren and his church. You can find the article on Malcolm Gladwell’s site, it’s called The Cellular Church

This articles digs deep into three main areas:

  1. Rick Warren the person and pastor
  2. The Purpose Driven Life
  3. The Saddleback Church – the cellular church

From what Gladwell has written, I gathered Rick Warren is a fascinating pastor. He leads one of the largest churches in the US, likes to give hugs, dress casually for his sermons, learned a great deal from Peter Drucker, follows and improves upon Charles Spurgeon, and sometimes borders on audacity.

The extraordinary success of the Purpose Driven Life is not coincidental. It’s Rick’s conviction, his ingenious way of marketing it to the other churches through his prior-established relationships, and the way the book is designed to be studies in small groups. It’s both surprising and inevitable that the books has sold 23 million copies. The new story of how Ashlee Smith was able to convince Nicols – a convict to let her go after sharing the Purpose Driven Life with him was also mentioned in the article.

The Saddleback church today has twenty thousand members and occupies a campus of 120 acres. That is a huge church, compared to my church, which has around 300 people with couple of acres of land. The amazing size and growth of the church was the main focus of the article. The idea of having small tightly-knit cells as an unit has been done elsewhere. Rick Warren actually made it work better through his unique blend of pragmatism and understanding of management principles. He actually rented the Anaheim Agnel’s baseball stadium to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Saddleback church.

There are a lot more information in the article, mainly from academics trying to put what Rick Warren has accomplished into perspective. There are some sections that in my mind are not dubious intention, such as section 5, I did not see the relevance of Christian Smith’s study to Warren’s success.

Anyway, this article definitely makes an informative reading, especially for someone who has studied The Purpose-Driven Life, or someone who wants to know how to grow their cell group or church.

Please share your opinion under the Comments section.