Jesse and G

Fiona surprises us every day with new things she picks up. Lately those surprises come in the form of mimicking. For example, last morning I told G to close my door so I could get some shut-eye. Fiona, who had just woken up asked the same thing from G after she got changed. It was really cute how she demanded that from my wife.

So today after eating breakfast, I was sitting on the couch watching Fiona play with her cereal bowl. Fiona started pouring water into an empty cereal bowl when I semi-sternly asked her to be careful and not to spill the water on the coffee table. Fiona paused for a second, put the full cup of water down and went to the pantry. In the pantry, she opened a drawer, pulled out several cloth napkins and a place setting and came back to the coffee table. At the coffee table she laid down the place setting and proceeded to lay out napkins around her work area. How is that for being careful!

It’s really crazy how fast they learn. Mimicking is one thing, but coming up with something brand new unaided is something else. Daddy is proud of you!

Before I start telling my story about the AT&T iPhone 4S debacle, I have to take a step backwards to give this story some context. In April of last year Fiona took my iPhone 3Gs and dropped it to the ground. That long drop destroyed the antenna and I could not get a signal. I further destroyed the iPhone after I tried to “fix” it. Oh well, mistakes were made.

After the iPhone was destroyed I went into the old electronics bin at the house and got out my original iPhone. The mothballed phone booted back to life with no problems at all. A quick call to AT&T got the iPhone back into action. I decided to use the old phone because based on the yearly iPhone product cycle I should see a new iPhone model coming out in June or July – or this is what I thought. As time went on and the June and July dates started nearing, my hopes of a new iPhone model release started disappearing. I went to Macrumors several times a week to look at the latest rumors on the iPhone; all of it pointed to a long wait.

The iPhone eventually came around October. I am definitely not the type that would wait in a very long line just to get the new iPhone, so I thought I would do myself a favor and order directly from AT&T. The call was a simple one to make and within 10 minutes I had ordered a new phone. I had made sure before I purchased the phone that I would be saving myself time – the sales representative told me I should receive my phone within 5-7 business days that was a lot better than the wait listed on the Apple store site. Horray for me!

Fast forward a week and a half. My hopes were still high that I’d get my iPhone within a couple of days, but I was starting to feel anxious. I ended up calling AT&T directly to get a status update because no word had reached me for a long time. After getting a sales representative I was dismayed to find out that the original sales person had misquoted the wait time; instead of 5-7 business days, I was looking at 21-28 days. What?! I was really frustrated and let AT&T know it, but again I figured I only had a few weeks to go. If I had waited since April for a new phone, I could certainly wait another 2 weeks.

The next few weeks passed fairly quickly with work being so busy. I finally got an update from AT&T; the package was on its way. I had a few bad days at work, so I was really looking forward to my iPhone 4s. The estimated delivery date was Friday and I definitely had that circled on my calendar. Friday finally came and I tracked the delivery hourly on FedEx. The package was delivered exactly as predicted on Friday. I had made sure somebody was at the house for delivery, so I should have expected the phone when I got home. Work was busy so I didn’t get home until around 6 pm. When I got home, there was no iPhone waiting for me. A quick search around the house yielded no package. I figured our nanny had placed the package in a strange place, so we called her. No package ever arrived and our nanny had been there all day.

I was pissed. The FedEx delivery tracking showed that the package was left at the door and there was no package there. I called AT&T right after I got off the phone with our nanny. This begins the really frustrating part. I called the main customer support line and was diverted to the sales department. After explaining myself to the first sales representative (a call that lasted about 15 minutes), I was told that I couldn’t be helped; the department that could handle this was not the one I was speaking to. The sales representative put me on hold while I was being transferred. I waited for another 5 minutes and finally somebody back on the line. It wasn’t the new department, but another sales representative. At this point, I was even more angry. I ended up explaining myself again and got the new sales guy to transfer me again, this time to another sales representative from the same department. Three strikes! I was livid. Yet again I explained myself to a sales rep that again could not help me. I wanted to cancel my order at this point. The fourth sales person was a little more helpful than the last few. Instead of just sending me to the department that could help me, she explained what department that could help me – the secondary sales department. Apparently this department was responsible for placing my order and giving the first inaccurate estimate that got my hopes up.

The call to the secondary sales department was terrible. The person who took my call probably didn’t know what to do. I was put on hold several times each time taking 10-15 minutes before they got back on the line only to tell me to wait a bit longer. Finally the AT&T guy came back and told me that the investigation department was closed and they would call me back within 5-7 days. Yes, they would call me when they got to me. I would have to wait yet another week for any word on the matter. The entire phone call from start to finish took close to two hours. Because I immediately called AT&T after I got home, I didn’t even eat dinner.

A week passed and I still got no word from AT&T. I called the secondary sales department directly and found my investigation wasn’t processed yet. I was told it was “close” in the queue and I should call back in a day or two. This song and dance repeated itself 3 times.

Just this last weekend I did my usual routine and called secondary sales. I got a helpful woman this time and after looking into my account it was revealed that the iPhone that was delivered to my house was activated by somebody – just not me. Apparently somebody came up to my house and stole the phone! Not only did they steal the phone, but they were already actively using it. I asked if there was a way to take legal action against the individual, but AT&T could not do this. The only punishment they got was they were billed for the phone, just like I was a month prior. It really seemed to me that I was being punished. How come somebody who unlawfully stole my iPhone had a working phone before me?

So after all this, the woman informed me that the reimbursement was still being processed. This was a little different than the previous report; the credit was actually in the queue. I asked the sales woman what AT&T would give me for all this heartache I was put through and she informed me I could get a month credit on my cell phone bill – this was only for the voice, I wouldn’t get a credit for the data part of the plan.

I really wanted the iPhone 4s at this point, so after getting off the phone and accepting the credit I went to the Apple store. Getting a promise that the reimbursement was coming within a day was enough for me to get the phone. A short time in the sales queue at the Apple store, I got my phone. It really only took me about 30 minutes. So guess what carrier I got? After all the BS I was put through, I ended up going back to AT&T. I did a thorough investigation and found I still got the best deal at AT&T. I really would have liked to have gone to Verizon, but they couldn’t touch the deal I got – I got “grandfathered” in to my original plan with AT&T.

Was it worth it in the end? I would say yes, because the phone is really awesome. After using the original iPhone for almost half a year, it was such a nice change. The original iPhone was revolutionary, but it was still old technology in today’s smart phone world.

One word of caution. If you ever think of purchasing a phone directly from AT&T, don’t! Save yourself the trouble and headache and avoid the secondary sales department like the plaque.

The Chan family will soon be getting another member. G is pregnant with our second child.

The first pregnancy was really rough on G and this time around it’s no different. Almost every morning I wake up to the sound of my wife violently vomiting into the toilet. To make matters worse, the flu season is currently in session and the whole household got sick including G. After two weeks, she still has a cough. Having never been sick with child, G avoided cough medicine only to find out that it is not recommended by the doctor; the physical act of coughing pushes on the diaphragm and exerts unhealthy force on the child. We have since gotten cough syrup, but the cough still lingers.

The baby is doing just fine though. G recently went to the OBGYN and our little one measured in at 15 weeks (G is only 14 weeks pregnant). This is no surprise to us because G has been eating like crazy lately. To ease the morning sickness G has to constantly eat.

Our due date is May 15. At first this sounded far out, but time has been flying by; I’ll blink and the baby will be here. I’ll have to enjoy my time with only one child because I know it’ll get crazy with the second. I thought I didn’t have any free time for myself now, but I know it’ll be redefined for the second. Luckily G’s parents are right down the street. I’m already building my “batman signal” in the backyard to call out for help.

I’m not sure we will post weekly pictures of G during this pregnancy, so we will have to post a little bit more.

This year marks the second year we’ve celebrated Halloween at our new house. Yet again the whole family gathered, including the grandparents, to carve pumpkins. Everybody had some cool pumpkin builds and mine was no different. I have recently gotten into electronics, so I added a geek twist to the pumpkin carving theme – I embedded some electronics into mine!

The core of the geek pumpkin is a small attiny85 chip that’s attached to a shift register. The shift register shifts in bits that light the teeth in sequence. For the eyes, I configured the attiny85 to fade in and out LEDs using PWM.

Because the inside of the pumpkin was a little damp, I wrapped the electronics in a small project enclosure.

Now came the easy part – embedding the electronics into the pumpkin. Once the pumpkin was gutted, I just poked some small holes for the eyes and teeth using my drill.

I used a drill bit that fit the LEDs snugly. After putting the project box at the bottom of the pumpkin, I pushed the LEDs through. Here is the completed build.

To get Fiona’s small little pumpkin to glow, I also built a quick circuit with a 555 chip to flicker like a candle – her pumpkin was too little for a candle.

Now that I’ve got the geeky stuff out of the way, on to Fiona. This year Fiona dressed up as a dinosaur. Grandma did an awesome job crafting the costume just like last year. The care package with the costume in it also came with some children’s books on dinosaurs. Every night leading up to Halloween we read the dinosaur books to get Fiona psyched up. On Halloween night the whole family came over. Frank and Shari, feeling the Halloween spirit showed up in costumes. The actual trick or treating wasn’t that exciting. Many of our neighbors weren’t home, so we only visited a few houses. Fiona still had a blast despite the lack of neighborhood kids. It was tough getting Fiona back to the house because she was really enjoying it at the end, however, that might of been the sugar talking.

It was a dreary day in San Diego, but that didn’t stop the Chan’s quest for adventure. Giovanna and I made a pact that we would go hiking this weekend and despite the forecast for rain we kept to our plans. With the Subaru packed full of Fiona’s stuff we took off from Carlsbad in a flurry of rain. Setting our sights for a hiking trip in East-County San Diego, we fueled up on some Starbucks and started on our travels.

I decided to try out a hike recommended in a San Diego hiking guide. The guide described the hike as a “Sierra Nevada-like hike” that included trees, streams and a small pond. In case you have heard that trail description before you might of guessed where we were headed; it’s a place called Doane Valley. According to the directions, the trip should have only taken about 30 minutes. Things were going to plan until we got to the turn-off. The turn-off to the trailhead should have only been about a half a mile. Scanning the available turn-offs, nothing looked right; we kept on passing plenty of turns, but they all led to secluded houses out in the boondocks. After going about a mile and a half, we decided to turn back. Before the first turn-off, we noticed some farmers tending some orange groves. Once returning to that spot, we stopped and asked for directions. “Do you know where we can find Gomez Trail?”, we politely asked the farmer. “Why yes, it’s that dirt trail just behind you.”, replied the farmer. Looking behind our car, we located the turn-off. The Gomez Trail turned out to be a fire trail fit for only the most rugged 4×4. Not to be discouraged, we actually tried to drive on the trail with my Subaru. I didn’t get more than 100 feet into Gomez Trail before I decided to turn back. The directions told us we had to travel 7 miles on that “road” and there was no way we were going to continue with a one and half year old with dark skies overhead.

Giovanna and I didn’t let our spirits get down. Just a few miles down where the Gomez Trail was, we saw another hiking spot. The name of the park was the “Open Wilderness Garden Reserve”. It was a case of serendipity because the hike was great. The hike was only about 2 miles, but we got to see a duck pond and also an old barn that was used as a milling house in the early 1900s.  We included some photos of the hike below.

So I’ve been steadily brewing for months now. Ever since I stepped up my game (and monetary commitment) to the craft and bought my kegging setup, I’ve been brewing constantly. Taking out the bottling step definitely made things easy. The bottling process at the end was always something I dreaded; the worst part of brewing is cleaning and there is a lot of it during bottling. First you have to clean each individual bottle. I used to keep my beer bottles in a big bin. Before depositing the beer bottles to the bin, I tried my best to clean them. The theory was I would clean each bottle and keep it in the bucket and be able to quickly sterilize everything in a big bucket of BTF (Iodophor). In reality, I didn’t clean the bottles enough and before the bottling step, I found green molds growing at the bottom of most of the bottles. At that point, I’d have to start using some serious elbow grease to get out the yuck out. It took hours to finally clean and sterilize the bottles. That wasn’t even the end of the headache. Once you got clean bottles then came filling part. I tried to be careful again, but I eventually spilled beer all over the place. I’m a clean freak when it comes to bottling, so if I got a little beer on the side or top of the beer bottle I would sterilize it again – this is all to ward off contamination. Knock on wood, but I haven’t had a bad batch yet. Not only do I clean the beer bottle, but I also my work area. After I finish cleaning the bottle and work area, I’m back to bottling again. Rinse and repeat about 50-60 times and the work is done. Wait, let me repeat that… 50 or 60 times and I’m done. I neglected to talk about putting the caps on the bottles, but that isn’t much trouble at all. In fact, every cap I put on a bottle seems like a small victory.

So now that you have some idea of what a pain bottling is, imagine taking that all out of the picture. Yeah, it is much better! Like all hobbies I choose, brewing is yet another craft you can always improve on. In a continuing effort to make better beer or make the process more efficient, I decided to try to cut out the longest part out of the brewing process. All the beer I brew use all-grain recipes; this means I don’t use malt extract. You’d think the longest part is the mash and sparging, but it actually is a later step, or should I say, the last step before fermentation. If you haven’t guessed, it’s cooling down the beer after the boil. Before you can put yeast in the sugar rich wort, you must first cool the liquid to around 70 degrees. I used to use an immersion chiller, but even with this, it took me several hours to cool the hot wort to room temperature (I live in San Diego). I read on several beer brewing forums that you could quickly chill beer after the boil using a counter current wort chiller. This technique has cold water go past the hot wort in the opposite direction. You can pretty much go to a full boil at around 200 degrees to 70 degrees using a counter current wort chiller. Instead of waiting 2-3 hours to cool the liquid, I can do it in 10-15 minutes.

I always admired how people documented every step of a DIY project. I haven’t done this for any of my projects, but I though I’d try it once. Oh, I forgot to say that I decided to make my own after I started pricing counter current wort chillers on the internet. Without going into each site and what types are out there, most systems cost around $150 with more elaborate systems starting at $300. This was way out of my brewing budget. Ok, so onto my tutorial.

First, let’s go through my shopping list.

1. 50 Feet of 1/4″ refrigeration copper tubing
2. 3/4″ diameter plastic hosing
3. 2 x 1/2″ t-joint copper tubing
4. 2 x 1/2″ to 1/4″ copper reducers
5. 5′ of 1/2″ copper tubing

I was able to get everything from a local Home Depot for about $40.

Now to the assembly. Take the 1/4″ copper tubing and straighten it out. By straightening out the copper, it’ll make the next step a breeze.

Straightening out the copper tubing

After the copper tubing is straightened, it should look like this.

The straightened copper line ready for the next step.

Now that you’ve got a straight line of copper, it’s time to open up the garden hose and insert it over the copper tubing.

Garden hose inserted over the copper tubing

Now that you’ve got the garden hose surrounding the copper tubing, it’s time to curl it. I used a soda keg to wind the garden hose / copper tubing.

Winding the garden hose around a soda keg

It’s also helpful to have somebody guide the garden hose while the other person is ensuring the garden hose is wrapping tightly.

Pops helping me wind the garden hose

At this point you’ll have a wound garden hose around the copper tubing. It’s now time to make the attachments. My brother and I took turns sodering.

Marty sanding the copper tubing before sodering

The finished copper endings

The above image didn’t resemble the final setup. I first got 3/4″ copper tubing and after assembling the ends, I found the 3/4″ diameter garden hose didn’t fit over the copper tubing, so I went back to the drawing board and got 1/2″ copper tubing (for the ends). Just imagine the 3/4″ fittings with 1/2″ fittings.

I then inserted the assembled fittings (in the picture) over the 1/4″ copper tubing inside the garden hose and cinched the garden hose over the fittings. After everything was snug, I sodered the 1/4″ copper tubing to the assembly.

Now you get to see pictures of it in action.

Using the counter current wort chiller

Chilled to 70 degrees straight to the fermenter

Having cut down my brewing process by a few hours, now I can brew a batch casually in an afternoon. Yay!

So after a two year hiatus, I’m back to brewing. Now that it’s not so hot in San Diego (not that is a valid excuse), I brought down all my equipment from storage and am back to work.

One thing I don’t miss is the cleaning. Because my gear was rotting in a total of 3 garages over the course of two years, everything was in need of a thorough cleaning. Even after cleaning, I’m still crossing my fingers and hoping there is no contamination. After transferring the beer to the secondary, it still tasted ok so I think I’m in the clear.

The worst part about brewing!

Aside from the cleaning, it was fun getting back into brewing. To make my transition back in to brewing pleasurable, I chose a recipe I probably couldn’t mess up; I chose to brew an IPA. Well, I guess I should take that back because there is still room for error even with an easy ale.

Everything went well from start to finish except for a little accident while sparging. When tilting the hot sparge water, I ended up spilling a bunch of it on me. The water was a piping 165 degrees, so that hot bath wasn’t that much fun. It didn’t help that my wife who was helping me at the time couldn’t stop laughing. Little did she know I burned the shit out of my arm.

Gotta get that wort

Sparging!

In the end the OG reading was 1.039 and the FG was 1.01. I wanted to get an OG reading between 1.050 and 1.060, but I guess that is fine. This likely means the alcohol content of the beer will be around 4.5%; a little low for an IPA. In about two days I’ll see what it tastes like.

Fermenting

So I’ll follow this post with another as soon as my kegerator is finished. Oh, and I’ll let everybody know if the beer was tasty or not. I might wait for another week to drink considering I just drank myself silly at Aren and Sharon’s wedding. It was fun as hell, but I’m paying the price. The start was a little rough due to my illness last week, but I hit stride when it was needed most – at the wedding itself.

We’ve been meaning make a post about our vacation for awhile now, but got really busy when we got back home. It’s hard to think that roughly a month ago we were relaxing on the beaches of Cancun!

The flight to Cancun and back was definitely not fun. Each direction had two legs to it. These weren’t any small little puddle hops, but long 3 hour flights. Fiona made her presence known on the first leg of the journey. Our little one could not go to sleep and stayed up crying and wiggling all over the place; the seats to the front and back of us were her personal jungle-gym. We were fortunate to have an empty seat going to Cancun on both legs of the trip, but going back we weren’t so lucky. Vacationing with kids is almost an oxymoron. The stress levels were at peak levels on the bookends of the vacation due to the difficulties with Fiona.

Although the traveling was stressful, there were plenty of good times waiting for us in Cancun – well apart from our first night in Cancun. Fiona had a hard time adjusting to the time difference and we had to transfer Fiona to Gung Gung and Grandma. Well, let me clarify, Fiona was moved to Gung Gung and Grandma’s closet. There is no need to call child-services; the closet was actually the most quiet place in both suites.

The great thing about the vacation was doing nothing. I took the liberty of sleeping in until 10 am each and every day. Once I got up, the day itself was really lazy. A few trips to the swim up bar interspersed with reading, filled the rest of the day. In the evening, we had some family dinners and occasionally G and I got to escape to have an adult dinner. This was all because of the parental units. Without them, we wouldn’t have had such a great time.

It was great seeing everybody together. Mom, Dad, Marty, Emily and her boyfriend Ray all made the trip to Cancun. We not only saw family, but also friends. The Shafers were also vacationing down in the Yucutan Peninsula the same time as us and dropped in for a visit. Coincidentally, the day after our visitors came was the day I got a nasty hang-over.

Like all vacations, it wrapped up quickly. We were soon ushered to the airport where we went back to the hustle and bustle of San Diego. The rest of the family stayed in paradise for another week. Jealousy oozed out of every pore of our bodies. Oh well, good things never last.

So what do you think Fiona’s first words would be. If you were a betting person and thought the logical choice, you’d probably would guess some swear word. Think you got it right? No, thankfully not. Two weeks ago Fiona said “Daddy” or “Da-Da”. Yes, papa chanimal won the bragging rights to Fiona’s first word. Mommy came late last week, but it wasn’t numbero uno. I didn’t gloat that much (other than in this blog) because I think the first word being “Da-Da” was a sore spot for G. Fiona really is a Mama’s girl at heart; she could care less about daddy – I think she’s still a little sore that daddy wasn’t at her first birthday. She’ll be scarred for life. Oh well, I guess we will definitely have to have another one. I’ll make sure I’m at her/his first birthday this time around. I promise… right now.

Fiona had a doctor’s visit the other week and she was in the 90-95 percentile in height and was 75th percentile in weight. That’s impressive, but her cousin Grayson is even larger. I think last time I checked their blog he was off the charts both in weight and height.

The title is a bit deceptive. We aren’t really living off the land, but here at the Chanimal household, we have started our own little garden. It’s a far cry from self-subsistence, but give us some time; we’re working on that.

It was a fun project from start to finish. It involved quite a bit of wood working and general troubleshooting. What I had sketched out first in Google SketchUp wasn’t exactly what I ended up with – in the photo gallery I included the first sketch. It might look like the planter in the rest of the photos, but we had some last minute alterations. Most of these changes came about after we started planting stuff. After pouring 12 cubic feet of soil in the raised planter, we started to notice some engineering abnormalities; the planter was bowing out in the center. The raised planter could probably survive for quite a while just like I had it, but that wasn’t enough for Papa Chan – no, it had to be rock-solid. I couldn’t invite any of my man-friends over with that potential disaster. I wouldn’t hear the end of that one. Thinking I just needed to reinforce the 2 x 4s on each corner, I hastily threw some angle brackets on each side of the planter. Again, that would probably do it, but that wasn’t good enough for me. This feat of engineering wouldn’t go down in the annals of history with the likes of Tacoma Bridge or the New Orleans Levees.  Now the problem with reinforcing the underside of the planter was that I already a crap ton of weight on it . I needed to raise it a bit to put some wood reinforcements under the bottom. Using a little ingenuity, I got two car jacks (thank you Jim for letting me borrow yours). Once the bottom was jacked up, I reinforced the botton with some a small length of wood  and to preventing horizontal bowing, I put some wooden dowels that ran the width of the box. Overall, it’s pretty fucking sturdy.

Now after most of the structural issues were solved, I came to the second issue, water. Yes, after watering the garden, I noticed a shit ton of water raining down on all the stuff I stored under the planter; I had made a bottom rack on the planter and planned on using it for storage. To solve that problem, I installed a length of PVC roofing panel on the bottom of the planter to collect all the water run-off. I wish I could’ve used a metal panel, but I really had no way of cleanly cutting the material. To tell you the truth, it was hard enough cutting the PVC panel straight.

So having the hard part done, now we’ll come to the inventory of edible delights we planted. Here is the full list of vegetables and fruits we have growing outside our kitchen:

• 4 varieties of strawberries
• 3 varieties of lettuce
• 4 varieties of tomatoes
• 2 zucchinis
• cantaloupe
• 3 bushels of cilantro (not sure if a bundle of cilantro is called a bushel – it doesn’t sound right, but I’m sticking to it)
• 2 basil plants

We’ve already managed to use the basil in some pasta and hopefully soon we’ll be able to make a huge salad with the lettuce.

In line with keeping our garden nice and vibrant, we also decided to start composting. Actually, we’re not quite sure what came first, the need to garden or compost. Either way, we have a really stinky pile of shit in the backyard. I’m sure our neighbors love us and the surrounding wild life. Yes, even in San Diego we have critters.