Letter to Evan, T = -1 month

Dear Evan,

There's still about a month before you're born, but it almost feels like you've been with us already.  We've already set up your bed and toys and have your outfits picked out for you.  You won't know it at the time, but you'll be be born right around Christmas.  You'll live through many Christmases and Seasons Greetings in the future, but this holiday season will mean the most for us.  This is the best present that we could ask for and the best start to a new year and new life.

You already have a fan club.  You've had your picture taken more times than most stars and everyone's already excited and waiting to meet you.  People have been asking about you all year-round.  Many people are going to come and visit you as soon as you arrive, some literally traveling halfway around the world.  Your grandparents will be here soon to join us, so you'll be surrounded by family.

You've given us quite a few scares this year, but I know that everything will turn out fine.  We can already tell that you're a growing, healthy baby.  Maybe you're a little shy since you always seem to be covering your face when we try to peek at you with the ultrasound.  But you're not a pushover.  You know what you want---if you're hungry, you're always kicking until you get fed and then you're quiet and satisfied.  But other than that, you've been easy on your mother.  No morning sickness, fatigue, swollen joints or other pain.  She just misses her sushi and morning coffee.

Speaking of your mother, I hope that you take after her.  She's beautiful and smart and assertive and the strongest person that I know.  Throughout this year, she's become even more strong.  She's been poked and prodded by doctors more times than ever before in her life, but she's been braver than ever.  She'll help keep you safe in this world---she's already been watching over you all this year and she'll never stop.  Even with only half of her genes, you'll be getting a head start on the world.

I can't wait one month.  I can't wait to meet you and show you everything in the world.  I can't wait to see you laugh, to pick you up the first time you fall, and to wipe away your tears.   I can't wait to read stories to you, to play pretend with you, and to hear the stories of your life.  I can't wait.

Love,
Your Father

June 29, 2011

August 24, 2011

August 24, 2011

October 19, 2011

Anticlimactic End of Days

The past week has been pretty surreal for people on the East Coast.  Last week, we had a moderate size earthquake that was felt up and down the entire eastern seaboard.  I was at work when the earthquake struck, actually in the middle of a teleconference with some people from our Pennsylvania site.  There were a series of small rumbles and the room started to shake slightly, but it was weak enough that I thought it could have just been some construction.  However, when the person on the telecon mentioned that her room was also shaking, we immediately thought it was an earthquake.

In typical fashion, my company over-reacted and we had to evacuate for a couple of hours to make sure things were safe.  Luckily, there really wasn't too much damage up here in northern New Jersey.  Even more luckily, it was a nice, warm summer day and it was nice to sit outside.  Interestingly enough, I've lived for seven years in California---in all seven years, I had only experienced one earthquake and it was weaker than this one on the East Coast.

Only several days later, everyone panicked again when it looked like Hurricane Irene was settling in on a collision course with New York City.  The news media had a field day with it---there was 24-hour coverage on every station and predictions of catastrophe.  Really, what could be better than having a disaster hit the biggest media market in the country?  Particularly a slow moving storm that crawled it's way up the East Coast?

The hurricane bullseye

Due to the coverage, everyone went crazy.  We stopped by the grocery store on Friday and it was a mad house.  Shelves were literally cleared bare.  People were carting out gallons of bottled water.  There was no milk or bread to be had---that always confused me.  If you're worried about being trapped at home, why would you stock up on perishable food like bread or even worse milk?  It doesn't make sense.  People were filling up their bathtubs with water.  We hunkered down at home Saturday and waited for the storm.

And it turned out that we survived with barely a scratch.  By the time Hurricane Irene got up here, it had turned into Tropical Storm Irene and its wind speed had died down.  We got hit with essentially a day long rain storm---not even any thunder or lightning.  We didn't have any flooding and the power might have flickered for a little bit, but otherwise we were unscathed.  We did lose our cable tv and internet, but that's probably not something worth complaining about.  (Remember that Morton's Fork?  I guess that decision became pretty easy...)

To be fair, we were pretty lucky.  There were certainly places that got hit a lot harder than us and there are still some places without power.  And there were a few downed trees around the neighborhood which made getting to work like navigating an obstacle course.  Check out some of the hurricane photos.  And most of the warnings were concerned around overland flooding, which has been an issue.  Still, it does feel pretty anticlimactic after all the dreaded warnings of another Katrina (one tv station was even prediction running out of body bags...)

So, an earthquake and a hurricane...and there were a couple of tornadoes this spring and some crippling blizzards this winter.  What's next?  The end of days?  2012?

At least I can cross off celebrating a birthday in the middle of a hurricane from the list...

In Memoriam

This weekend (yesterday actually) was the one year anniversary of the day our first cat, Marquis, passed away after his battle with chronic renal failure.  He had been diagnosed over a year earlier and his death hit us pretty hard since we had been dedicated to his treatment for a year and he had seemed to be doing well until his health just crashed at the very end.  It was one of the motivations to start this site in the first place.

Last image of our Snowshoe cat Marquis

I had been meaning to write more about our battle with feline chronic renal failure, but it was a subject that I've been avoiding for awhile.  Certain breeds of cats such as Siamese and Snowhoes, of which Marquis was, tend to suffer more from chronic renal failure or CRF.  CRF, as opposed to acute renal failure, is a gradual weakening and deterioration of the kidneys.  Acute renal failure might be due to the cat eating something toxic, but can usually be treated with full recovery.  However, chronic renal failure is more insidious.  Kidneys are strong organs, but unfortunately this has the side effect of not being able to detect the progress of CRF until more than 70% of the kidney function has been irreparably lost.

The kidney has several important functions:

1)  Filters out waste material from the blood (these tend to be nitrogen-containing molecules from the breakdown of proteins from food)
2)  Regulates electrolyte concentration (sodium and potassium ions, which have an effect on ion channels)
3)  Produces EPO (erythropoietin), a hormone involved in producing red blood cells

Once the kidneys become compromised, the body slowly gets weakened, which accelerates the deterioration of the kidney function.  The blood starts to accumulate waste since the kidneys are not as effective at filtering them out.  This can be tracked through blood tests for creatinine and BUN (blood urea nitrogen) levels, which are markers for this waste.  Elevated levels are a key marker of renal failure and are one of the first indicators of CRF.

So how can we treat this?  The standard method is to approach the problem from two directions.  The first is to switch to a low protein "renal" diet.  This is food that has low amounts of protein (which contain phosphorus and nitrogen) so that when the body metabolizes it, there are less nitrogen-containing waste products poisoning the blood.  There are several veterinary diets that you can use, but you can also look up the phosphorus levels of common cat food.

Dry Cat Food Phosphorus Analysis
Wet Cat Food Phosphorus Analysis

The other approach is to dilute the waste products in the blood stream.  This is done by giving the cat water---most CRF cats tend to be more thirsty than normal due to this.  As a result, the cat urinates more frequently which also helps to remove the poisons.  Wet cat food is highly recommended over dry food to the water content.  But to take it one step farther, one standard of care is to give the cat subcutaneous saline injections directly---the saline is then absorbed into the bloodstream.  This is not a pleasant act, but Marquis was actually very good about it---in the morning we would sit him on the couch, pinch up the skin of this neck, and then slowly inject the saline.  He would sit there and wouldn't complain and we would give him a treat afterwards.  He became used to it after a while.

Subcutaneous saline injection therapy for CRF cats

There are other more involved treatments that you can do, such as potassium supplements (to make sure that the cat's electrolytes are balanced), iron supplements (to battle anemia due to low red blood cell count), and EPO injections (highly expensive).  We ended following the diet and saline injection approaches.  We found a low phosphorus wet food and we gave him daily injections of ~50 mL of saline.  This worked well for Marquis---he lasted for over year and basically showed no symptoms of his illness until his kidneys finally started to fail.  At that point, he became too sick to eat regularly and he quickly lost his weight and strength.  At the end, he had lost more than half of his weight and wasn't able to walk or stand.  It was heartbreaking.

CRF is a devastating disease and it is a terminal disease.  However, there are steps that you can take to treat it and give your cat good quality of life.  Some good sites that helped us with it:

Tanya's Comprehensive Guide to Feline Chronic Renal Failure
Feline CRF Information Center
Sub-Q Survey of CRF Cats

And the best community for owners of CRF cats is at The Feline CRF Support Group at Yahoo Groups.  This is an amazingly supportive community of people who have been through CRF.  They gave us very kind messages of support and understanding and helped us get through the situation.  Thank you!

The Cost of Fatigue

It's been a while since I last updated, mostly since I've been putting in a few extra hours at work and have been too tired when I come home.  I've never been a morning person, but now I've been getting up around 6 am to get to work.  And sadly, going to work early never means getting out of work early---I usually end up staying until well after 5 pm.  By the time I get home, I'm exhausted.  Partly it's because there's so much work to do (our group is very lean and stretched out), but I wonder if partly it's because I'm not as efficient as I can be.  As with most of this generation, I can feel my attention span dropping and have trouble focusing.  It would be easy to blame all of the distractions of modern life, but part of it is I think due to simple fatigue.  I'm just not getting enough sleep.

And it's not just me.  According to a study in Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 38% of surveyed workers reported "low levels of energy, poor sleep, or a feeling of fatigue" during the past two weeks.  It's estimated that fatigue costs an average of 5.6 hours a week in lost productivity.  Interestingly enough, this is one disadvantage is demographically opposite of the standard---fatigue hits white workers harder than black workers.

The National Academies estimate that fatigue costs businesses around $150 billion annually, with another $48 billion lost in vehicle accidents.  I suspect those numbers are actually a little conservative since fatigue is such an undefinable factor.  How do you quantify fatigue?  How do you measure lower efficiency and performance?  It's like a vicious cycle---you're tired at work, so you don't get as much done and you feel more stressed, which makes it harder to get a good night's sleep, rinse and repeat.  On top of that, each night adds to your overall sleep debt so that by the weekend you can hardly move.  And sadly, my body is so trained at waking up early on the weekdays that I have a hard time sleeping in on the weekends.

I think that I'm doing pretty well at work, but I've always wondered how much more productive I could be if I could only get an extra couple of hours of sleep.  Instead of starting the day before 8 am, what if I didn't show up until 10 am?  I'd lose a couple of hours, but I'd feel a lot more refreshed and recharged at the start of the day (which is why I think this is better than having a nap time in the afternoon).  I bet I could recoup those two hours with more energy and efficiency and get even more things done.  Which is better, having a good solid 30 hour work week or a tired, cloudy 40 hour work week?  I guess this is related to that innovative idea that quality of life can improve quality of work...I think the answer is pretty clear, but that's why I'm not in management...

A Morton's Fork

Updates have been a little slow recently, partly because of late hours at work but also because our home internet connection has been flaky recently.  It's been cutting in and out, with outages lasting from minutes to up to hours at some points.  It's been a little frustrating and it's made me realize how much we depend on the Internet.

I remember first learning about the Internet and being able to go online when I was in high school.  At that point, it was using a modem to dial into the local university bulletin board service and then using Lynx as a crude text browser.  You had to wait until no one was using the phone line so you could dial in with your modem (some of my dedicated friends even got a second phone line to use with just their computer!)  When Mosaic and Netscape first came out, it was a revelation of colors, blinking text, and midi music as the idea of home pages exploded.  Since then, it's been an exponential increase in the rise of the Internet.  I was able to get my first taste of high speed internet access at college, where all of the dorm rooms had ethernet wired in.  In grad school, I was able to escape the anchor of having a heavy desktop computer with the freedom of a laptop and wireless internet access.  And in the last couple of years, mobile computing with smart phones and tablets has exploded.

During this evolution, the Internet has taken over more and more of our lives.  We manage most of our financial and shopping online now, as well as most of our personal and social networking.  We download news and upload our ideas.  It's come to the point where people have been diagnosed with Internet addiction---they can't turn it off.  This was the unenviable pedestal that television had reigned over for decades.  Hours spent staring at the television screen has been replaced with staring at computer and phone screens.

So, now which would you rather choose?  A life without television or the Internet?

Well, with our flaky internet connection, we now had to face that dilemma, that Morton's Fork or even Sophie's Choice.  We had been using a cable splitter to connect our television and cable modem to the same line, weakening the signal.  While our television was okay, it wasn't enough signal for our cable modem to use.  It turned out that if we cut out the splitter and hooked the cable modem up directly, we got a robust signal and internet access at the cost of our television.  You could only have one without the other.  So now we had to choose---television or internet access?  The real answer:  get Comcast out here to fix the problem (woohoo, deus ex machina!)

Photography: Misty Spring Mornings

One of the things that we like about living in the Northeast compared to California (and there aren't that many...) is that you actually get to experience all four seasons rather than just slightly drier or wetter variations of the same weather every day.  Autumn is probably my favorite season, but spring is a nice change coming out of the cold, dark winter.  Unfortunately, at least in New Jersey, it does feel like spring gets short changed.  Real spring only seems to last for a few weeks before we head full on into summer.  Usually the seasons is punctuated by heavy rain before the summer heat rolls in.

Although it only lasts for a short while, one of my favorite things about spring is the fog that forms in the morning before the sun has had a chance to warm the air.  It makes everything, even the morning commute, feel a little more mysterious and ethereal.  It makes you wonder just what's around the corner.  Early one morning, I decided to stop at a park on the way to work to just sit quietly in the fog for a while.

Getting ready for summer

Food: Roast Chicken Comfort

Pardon the interruption, it's been a while since the last update.  It's been a busy month, both at work and at home.  We've been making a conscious effort to try and cook dinner most nights, which usually means that our whole night is taken up.  By the time I get home, I have to start dinner.  By the time we finish eating and cleaning up, it's almost bedtime in a vain effort to get enough sleep for another day at work, leaving little time for other things.  Rinse and repeat.  It takes a lot of effort to break out of the routine, but now that the summer is almost here, it's starting to get easier to try and get out of the house.

Since we've been cooking a lot, even if we don't have time to make something fancy, we'll still try and cook a something quick that doesn't sacrifice taste.  One of those dishes that everyone should know how to make is a roast chicken.  It's one of those meals that is deceptively complex---it looks like a gourmet meal, but is actually very easy to make.  It's also a great meal for a budget, since often buying a whole chicken is cheaper than buying the separate parts!  Not only do you get more meat, but you can use the bones and giblets for making stock.  It almost spiritually brings you closer to the food---you're not just working with processed, unrecognizable fillets of protein.  You use the whole animal without wasting any part.  It's comfort food and very Americana and it wasn't that long ago that most politicians promised a chicken in every oven.  Yet I think the roast chicken has sadly been replaced in most households with chicken nuggets.

To make a roast chicken, all you really need to do is sprinkle some salt and pepper all over and plop it into an oven for a couple of hours until the internal temperature registers 180 'F.  That's it, it's so simple that anyone can do it.  Taking a step beyond that, the variations are almost endless.  Since it's such an easy recipe, a roast chicken serves as a springboard for almost any culinary directions.  For this recipe, we decided to make a slightly stronger rub to give the chicken a slightly deeper taste.  We used:

Dry Rub
2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp ground allspice
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp ground cinnamon
Pinch of cayenne
Freshly ground black pepper

We patted the dry rub over the chicken and then placed chunks of butter around the bird---we were lazy, since you could rub the butter all over and under the skin for an even crispier taste, but this way the butter melts and bastes the bird during the cooking process.  We threw a few garlic cloves and half of a lemon inside the cavity for good measure.  The bird was then placed over a pillowy bed of roughly chopped vegetables, including potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, garlic cloves, and onions. The breast-side is placed down so that it doesn't overcook and dry out while the thighs and legs are still cooking.

The fully assembled bird ready to go into the oven.

The whole assembly was placed into an oven pre-heated at 475 'F.  The high heat is to avoid the initial temperature drop after everything is put in.  The heat was then reduced to 375 'F and the chicken was roasted for about 2 hours, checking for done-ness using an internal meat thermometer.

And that's it!  The chicken came out great and the vegetables were nice and soft.  Even better, the vegetables had soaked up the butter and chicken drippings, giving them a nice savory flavor.  After taking out the chicken and vegetables, you can use the residual drippings to create a gravy---you just need to add a little bit of flour and water to the chicken drippings and bring to a simmer.  

The finished product

Not only is this easy, but it also makes the entire house smell wonderful.  Even better, it doesn't actually take too long---we were able to prepare this after coming home from work.  Unlike slow cook recipes, which require the whole day, the chicken meat is still firm and the skin is a nice, crisp, golden brown.  Since we're using the whole bird, there's enough leftovers to last for several meals---this makes a nice lunch and sure beats bringing a ham sandwich to work.

Science: Migration Patterns

As the threat of another layoff approaches, I've noticed that my workplace has become younger and younger.  It's becoming tough to find older workers as they've been "retired" in the past several years to make room for younger (and cheaper) kids coming out of school.  (How does this loss of experience impact the industry?  My guess is we're not doing ourselves any favors...)  The idea that you can get a single job out of college that will last you until retirement feels naive and there's a feeling of general acceptance that you're going to have to move jobs several times over your career.  In fact, it's become almost a cliche that the fastest way to rise in your company is to leave to go to another company for a few years and then come back for a promotion and higher salary.  It's not a coincidence that there are dozens of pharmaceutical companies littered across New Jersey---you can literally shuffle between all of them during your career.  Still, moving feels like a huge commitment, particularly if you're a homeowner rather than a more mobile renter.

For example, my parents have had a relatively stable career.  They've mangaged a restaurant business in the same town for over thirty years.  As a result, we never really moved around too much when I was growing up.  We stayed in the same city in the same house.  In fact, we only moved once from a duplex to a single family house when I was only a couple of years old.

That got me interested in seeing how usual that is---do people usually stay in the same home working at the same job?  It feels like more and more people are no longer considering their current jobs permanent or even long-term.  As a result, it would seem like people must be moving homes more often as well.  Particularly since it's so easy to move around now, you're no longer confined to your hometown to wait for jobs to come.

It turns out that you can do some digging in the US Census Bureau's website and find out a lot of interesting information.  For example, the average American moves 11.7 times in their lifetime.  At first that seemed remarkably high to me, but after thinking about it, I've moved 7 times so far in my life.  The first time was with my parents as a toddler, the last was buying a home for the first time, and the rest inthe middle were various apartments I had through college and grad school.  We now live in a rather petite townhouse and it seems quite likely we'll have to move at least once or twice more even if we end up staying in the same local area, let alone considering the possibility of moving to another state.

If we look at the demographics of moving, not surprisingly people in their twenties have the highest percentage moving rates before settling down in the thirties and forties.  Interestingly, there's a relatively high percentage of chilren from 1-4 years old who move, likely due to new families moving into larger homes.

So how has the average moving rate changed over time?  If there is a sense that jobs are less secure now, then I would expect average number of people moving should be increasing.  Plus, the decade experienced the housing boom and more and more people buying homes than ever before.  The Pew Research Center has an interesting report from the recent Census data and their own surveys.  Overall, surprisingly to me, the annual American migration rate has been declining the several decades.

One of the possible reasons is that the overall American population is growing older, and thus settling down.  Another reason cited is the rise of the two-body problem and couples with two careers.  This may deter moving since it it is more difficult to relocate both partners.  My wife and I certainly experienced that anxiety as we searched for post-doctoral and industry positions in the same area.  And I guess with the downturn in the economy, there simply aren't that many jobs out there to even leave home for.  Interestingly, the downturn in mobility appears to have started all the way back in the 90s (there's an interesting blip of increased moves in 1985, which I wonder what was the cause for), which spans periods of economic growth and decline.  I wonder if there is a sense of trying to make your home a more permanent place, particularly in an age of increasing consumerism and the rise of a superficial, throw away culture.  If you have to replace your belongings, your gadgets, even your job on a regular basis, maybe we're trying to make our home give us a sense of grounding.

Spring Thoughts

Although spring officially started over a month ago, it usually doesn't really feel like spring is in full swing until around Easter.  Spring awakening seems to go hand in hand with the Easter idea of rebirth---the world seems alive again after the long, cold winter.  The days are longer, the air is warmer, and you can smell life stirring in the air, often literally as pollen starts to take flight.

If there's been a year that's needed a spring, it's this one.  The Northeast is coming out of long, hard winter where it seemed like every week there was another blizzard to fend off.  Work has been going at a grueling pace.  After several years of regular layoffs that you could set your watch to, the office is now as lean as it can be.  Morale is low and people are overstretched.  And it's not just my office---this does feel like one of those jobless recoveries.  The stock market is doing better and housing prices are starting to creep up, but the jobs aren't there.  One of the unfortunate lessons that companies have from the recession learned is that in tough times, you can stretch people out and make do with less.  But in the short term memory of business, this situation soon becomes the new baseline.  Tantalizingly, we were actually interviewing for several positions in our group before the mandate came down to stop all hiring.  And worse, that there will be another series of layoffs again this summer.

Still, it could be worse, and I'm not here to complain, especially with the thousands of people with similar experience that are jobless.  However, it has been a tough couple of months for our group.  There's been a lot of hardship and heartache, particularly at a time when everyone is overwhelmed already.  The husband of one of my coworkers suffered a heart attack recently.  Luckily, he is now recovering, but it was a dangerous situation.  The doctors had to perform emergency bypass surgery and he's been trying to recover since.  Another coworker discovered that she had a relapse of ovarian cancer.  She just had surgery last week to try and prevent the cancer from spreading, and hopefully the news will be good.  And probably worst of all, another coworker tragically lost her 9-year old son last week to a sudden, unexpected infection.

At some point, signing a card and sending flowers just doesn't seem like enough.  How do you react when someone loses their child or faces death?  What can you do?  What can you say that doesn't feel trite or trivial?

Luckily, I have not been in a situation where I have lost someone very close to me.  The closest I've come is when our cat passed away last summer (which, incidentally, was one of the drivers for starting this site).  Even writing that makes me feel bad---as heartbreaking as it was to hold our cat while he passed, it sounds incomparable to losing a child or husband.  Part of me wonders whether it would have been luckier to experience death at an earlier age to help make it easier later.  Then another part of me condems that thought as possibly the ultimate selfishness---death is likely not something that you can prepare for or that ever becomes easier with experience, and I'm sure that friends who have lost loved ones would find it reprehensible to wish to experience it sooner.

In the end, these are reminders that life can be tough enough as it is without people trying to make it tougher on each other.  Hopefully spring is truly here and to make things better.

Driving on Green

So now that we have two of them, we must really like the Prius.  In fact, I think that the Prius is a pretty slick car that has a lot of things going for it beyond just being a hybrid.  Some things that we like:

1.  It's surprisingly roomy.  It's a four-door sedan with a hatchback trunk, which really helps increase the amount of useable space.  We've been able to go to Ikea and comfortably load up the Prius with boxes (yes, I know, another sign of yuppieness).  The passenger space is roomy and you can easily fit five people.  To be honest, if you're going to stick with a sedan, than the Prius is one of the better options just in terms of space---to get any larger, I think you'd have to go with an SUV or minivan, which we weren't enthusiastic about.

2.  It's a very quiet ride.  This is mostly due to the electric engine that assists the driving, but overall the Prius has a very quiet, very smooth ride.  The first time we test drove one, it almost felt like we were gliding over the road.  Maybe we aren't manly car men, but I've never really quite understood the need to have a loud engine.  I vastly prefer putting on a cd and actually being able to hear the music in good quality.

3.  Driving is fun.  Okay, so a lot of people are going to pick on the fact that the Prius has a smaller engine and you're not going to win any races with it.  But, I still find that driving it is fun, but in a different way.  As I mentioned before, for me, driving was mostly a chore to get from point A to point B and with the amount of traffic on the East Coast, all you can do is just sit back and go with the flow.  The live average mpg readout on the Prius changes that.  Every ride now is a game to maximize your mpg.  Can you get your numbers a little higher?  How many miles can you get on this tank?  You look forward to driving the next time to try and increase your score.  There are loads of information online about how to best drive a Prius (e.g., search for "Pulse and Glide" and other hypermiling techniques) to improve your mpg.  Currently, I've been addicted to the iPod game Tiny Wings---driving the Prius is almost like a real-life version.  You look for hills to glide down and then fly off.

4.  It's made me a safer driver.  One would think that glancing at the electronic display would be distracting, but I find it the complete opposite.  Focusing on the mpg  readout has made driving much more interactive for me and has arguably made me a safer driver.  I pay much closer attention to the traffic patterns and the road conditions all around me.  I'm constantly watching where the surrounding cars are, where the traffic lights are, the incline of the road, all to maximize the Prius' efficiency.

5.  And, of course, the tremendous gas savings are nice.  I have a short commute, so now I can literally last nearly a month without filling up with gas and when I do, it's only twenty bucks out of my pocket.  My wife has a longer commute, but now she can last nearly a week without stopping for gas, whereas for her older car, she was stopping for gas almost every other day.

To be honest, if you were going to get a run of the mill four-door sedan, I would think that the Prius is right up there even without considering the fact that it's a hybrid.  So while it's still slightly embarrassing that we now have two Priuses/Prii parked in our driveway, we actually enjoy them quite a bit.

A Tale of Two Hybrids

This is the story of how we became a two-Prius household and how we started to blur that light between everyday hippie/yuppie and super hippie/yuppie in less than a year.

It seems that generally whenever people get a new job, especially their first real job coming out of school, the first thing that they get with their newfound income is a shiny, brand new car.  Usually, this is to replace the rusting, beat up car that got them through college or grad school (as a side note, it was always amusing to me that when I was doing my post-doc at UC Irvine in Orange County, the professor/post-doc parking lot was filled with old Hondas and Toyotas while the undergrad parking lot was packed with Mercedes, BMWs, even Maseratis).

However, I was never a real car guy.  A car, for me, was a tool to help facilitate getting  me from point A to point B in a relatively easy manner.  Bonus points if the ride was smooth and wasn't loud enough to drown out the stereo.  But while some people really enjoy the act of driving, it was mostly just a chore for me, something that had to be done.  As a result, I didn't really drool or geek out over new cars like other people.  I had my beat up Honda Civic and it worked fine for me.  So when I started my first real job three years ago, I didn't even think about getting a new car.  It also didn't hurt that I tend to be relatively frugal, and if I could avoid dropping thousands of dollars at once, that was fine by me.  I was just going to drive that Civic until it died.

Unfortunately, that happened a lot sooner than I thought.  After only two years on the job, it was pretty clear that the car was falling apart.  As in, literally falling apart.  Various pieces of the car started falling off.  It was almost as if the car had suffered a stroke---none of the electronics on the right half of the car worked, including the windows or locks.  While it hadn't died, it was clearly dying.

So off we went to find a new car.  Although I'm not a car nut, I do like new technology.  And I've been becoming more environmentally conscious as well.  Plus, with gas prices rising inexorably, getting a car that gets good gas mileage was a must.  So if I had to get a new car, I definitely looking to get a hybrid.  By this time, the Toyota Prius had been out for nearly a decade, so it was established technology, but still relatively cutting edge.  We gave it a test drive, and we were astounded at how smooth and quiet the ride was.  Although this may be partly due to us being used to a loud, old car that was falling apart, the hybrid electric motor makes the ride significantly quieter.  The console had a futuristic, space-age feel to it that befit a car with new technology.  It was almost like being in the cockpit of a spacecraft.  Needless to say, we ended up walking out with a Prius, getting a decent deal on a very slightly used 2009 Prius in "Spectra Blue Mica".

Our First New Prius

Meanwhile, my wife was still driving her old BMW, which was approaching fifteen years of age.  It was a good car, handled very well, and got decent highway mileage.  She had been driving it for almost ten years, so it was her baby.  However, the car was starting to show its age.  Last year, it broke down on the Turnpike while we were driving to the city.  One of the engine coolant valves broke and the hood of the car started smoking.  We had to stop the car in the middle of the highway during rush hour to avoid overheating the engine.  Needless to say, it was a nightmare to get the car towed and fixed.  Maintenance for these old European cars can get ridiculous.  However, we sucked it up and got it repaired and it seemed to be okay once again.

However, my wife recently switched jobs and as a result her commute ballooned from 8 miles to nearly 50 miles one way.  We hemmed and hawed over having her drive the Prius, since it gets better mileage, but ultimately we decided to have her drive her car until it died and avoid putting a lot of miles on the new hybrid. Things were going smoothly until she recently started hearing some funny noises.  She brought the car in to our mechanic and it turns out that her car had some badly bent wheel bearings.  Even worse, the wheel bearings were rusted and stuck to the front axle, so they couldn't be easily removed.  And if we didn't try to repair it, the wheels might eventually fall off.  As a result, it would cost well over a thousand dollars to fix, approaching the total value of the car.  That alone wasn't a deal breaker, but if her car started having these big problems every year like clockwork, it was something that wasn't going to be tenable in the long term.

So just about a year after we went car shopping the first time, we ended up going car shopping again.  We already had a Prius, so we were hoping to get something different.  Although we wanted to get something that got good mileage, in the worse case my wife could drive my Prius and I could drive the newer, more practical car.  However, we were both pretty opposed to getting an SUV or a minivan.  It also didn't make sense to get a fun, sporty car with less room either.  So we ended up looking for other roomy sedans or even station wagons (sadly, there were no wood-paneled station wagons out there).  

However, despite looking around for other cars, we kept circling back to the Prius.  It really is a nice car and it really fit our lifestyle at the moment.  So, although it is a little embarrassing, we ended up getting another Toyota Prius.  Even more embarrassing, the second Prius is essentially the exact same year and model with almost the same mileage.  It's even blue, although it's the lighter "Seaside Pearl" blue.  We are now officially a two-Prius household.  Now it's a battle over who gets the better miles per gallon...

Our Second New Prius

First World Problems

There's not much to say about the events happening in Japan beyond the frenetic up-to-the-minute updates from the news outlets and the blogosphere and wishing them well..  It does go to show that even first world nations are not immune to catastrophic problems.  Nothing can really prepare a country like Japan, let alone a third world country like Haiti, for an event like this.  One wonders what will happen when, not if, a huge earthquake hits the West Coast.  If the response to Katrina can be used as a predictor, we'll be in for some tough times.

There are updates being provided constantly, but one of the more powerful applications of Internet reporting I've seen are before and after pictures of the areas affected.

One of the things that I am worried about is how this might set back nuclear as an energy strategy.  Although the crisis at the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi is still evolving, the airwaves are filled with alarmist fears about nuclear energy.  Even if there is a core meltdown, ala Three Mile Island, the amount of radiation released may still be contained due to the heroic efforts of the plant workers.  The problem is that nuclear and radioactivity are loaded words and most people don't fully understand them.  Instead of reporting radiation numbers using mysterious units without context, I wish people would report them with respect to number of airline flights, X-ray examinations, or even number of bananas.  For example, a coal plant releases 100x more radioactivity than an equivalent nuclear power plant, but no one blinks an eye.  Even at Berkeley, there were official city signs put up declaring that it was a "nuclear free zone" (the chemist in me rolled my eyes every time I saw them, as well as at the whole "organic" food movement, but that's for another time).  It's too bad, since nuclear needs to be a part of our future as our energy consumption keeps increasing...

Up Up and Away

I saw that National Geographic set out to make a real life version of the floating house in Up for a new series called How Hard Can it Be?.  They built a 16' x 16' house and attached 300 weather balloons to lift it up to a heady altitude of over 10,000 feet.  Granted, it looks like the Nat Geo crew only built a shell of a house and used pretty large weather balloons to lift it, but it looked like an amazing feat.  What about lifting a real house using standard party balloons?  In an interesting article, Slate calculated that over 9 million standard helium balloons would be required.

Scene from Up

Real life version of Up

We are pretty big Pixar fans and Up is probably one our favorite Pixar movies.  Up, along with Wall-E and Ratatouille, was the beginning of when Pixar started making adult movies with some nods to kids rather than kids movies with some nods to adults.  Any adult should be able to relate to the basic concept of the balloon house---how can you just float away from all of the stress and troubles of your life to the infinite possibilities just over the horizon.  I just don't know how many children would really understand that.

My wife and I saw Up the year that we got married.  Even beyond the general theme, an early opening sequence, a dialogue-less montage of Carl and Ellie's life together, always makes us tear up.  In a space of only four minutes, it perfectly captures the sweetness of love and dreams full of hope to the cruelty of reality and the bitterness of time.  It's probably one of the finest four minutes of film ever shot, and the perfect motivation to get out and do something before it's too late.

Closing Off Our Borders

In rather sad news last week, Borders Bookstore announced that it was filing for bankruptcy.  They plan to close 275 stores, including the only store close to our house.  In some ways, I suppose hipsters might be rejoicing that a national brand, mainstream bookstore is shuttering itself, except that this is just continuing a trend of bookstores closing.  For example, the main shopping mall in Fargo has been functionally illiterate since B Daltons closed down several years ago---it's depressing when a small bookstore can't survive among the rows of prefab clothing stores.

It turns out that the Borders closest to our house is one of those targeted for closing and they had a going-out-of-business sale this Saturday. All merchandise 20% off!  So we decided to head over there and just check it out---partly out of guilt, since we actually never really shopped there (we've become faithful library patrons), but also partly for the spectacle.

It was like watching vultures circling an animal in its final death throes.  I don't think that particular Borders had ever had so many people in there at the same time.  I wonder if we were close to violating the fire code.  People were everywhere, scavenging for books and calendars, CDs and DVDs, and the line to checkout stretched around the store and the wait was well over an hour.  I had no idea so many people liked to read, and to be honest, I'm not sure if they will actually read everything they stood in line to get.  The family behind us sent their kids scurrying to find any deal possible to stock up.

Was it the sale?  Maybe, but Borders had frequent sales of 20% or even more in the past and they never had a crowd like this.  In terms of savings, despite the 20% off sale, almost everything is still cheaper obtained online through Amazon.  If people were looking to save money, they were doing it the wrong way.

Maybe people were treating it kind of like a game, almost like a push-your-luck contest of brinksmanship.  Sure, if you come back next week the sale might be even bigger.  But this is the final sale of the store---this is it, there's no turning back.  Will your item still be there next week?  Can you afford to do that?  I think people can get tricked into thinking it's an all or nothing gamble, when in fact if you miss out on the sale next week, you haven't really lost anything.

On the other hand, physical stores do lend themselves to impulse purchases.  It's hard, at least for me, to make an impulse buy on Amazon.  You spend more time researching your different options, reading reviews, scouting for the best prices and fastest shipping, and by the end you better be pretty sure you want to spend money on it.  With a physical store, you just go in to do some window shopping and the next thing you know, you're walking out with half a dozen shopping bags.  You need it now and you can't wait for Amazon to ship it to you.  Mobile networking is changing this dynamic, since you can use your smart phone to look up cheaper prices elsewhere, but it still doesn't solve the impulsive "gotta get it now" feeling.

But I think it was also an insight into human psychology---I think that part of the appeal was coming to watch the spectacle of the downfall of the company, and perhaps not just watch but also participate in.  It's a once in a lifetime event.  When will Borders ever close another store in your city again?  You better not miss out! 

We weren't innocent either.  What did we do?  We ended up buying a pile of books to stock up for this year.

Coincidentally or not, this was also the same week that the New York times started publishing a bestseller list for e-books.  Certainly online stores are making things difficult for physical stores to compete in terms of sheer price, but I can only imagine what will happen when electronic books start taking off....

Artificial/Natural Intelligence

Since my wife and I are nerds, the cool thing this week wasn't Valentine's Day (although I did cook her a nice candlelit dinner), but the heavily hyped Jeopardy match pitting human heavyweights Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter against Watson, the computer system built by IBM.  After two games, Watson pretty much wiped the floor with the human competition, although the second day was much closer.  It was a little shocking how easily it could beat them, although to be fair both humans were also competing against each other so it may not be a true mano-a-mano contest.

Still, this is much more impressive than the Deep Blue victory over Kasparov.  Chess is amenable to brute force, algorithmic strategy.  Even Go, a game renowned for its intuition and positional play, is slowly succumbing to computational play.  In this case, it's impressive that Watson is able to parse and understand human language, particularly English with all of its idiosyncrasies and all of the puns and wordplay in Jeopardy.  You can start imagining a future where you can simply talk to a computer instead of interfacing with it through less than intuitive commands.

One nice thing about the episodes is that they showed the top three answers that Watson is considering, along with the confidence levels it has for each, which itself is pretty innovative.  It's a nice insight into how Watson "thinks" about the answers.  I'm also impressed that IBM still has such a strong research division and enough funding and management support to pursue this types of projects.  It's only a company that believes in research that can really kick start innovation like this.

On the other hand, I think claims about artificial intelligence and worries about Skynet are overblown---Watson is essentially a sophisticated database lookup.  I just don't see real "intelligence" in computers yet.  I've always thought predictions of artificial intelligence are exaggerated.  It's similar to claims about nanotechnology.  I've started doing some more work in the nanotechnology field, so I've started seeing some of the actual science close up.  Although I'm not a computer scientist, I am a chemist and I find that the people making the most predictions about nanotechnology tend to not be chemists.  People like Ray Kurzweil are notorious for this, with claims of the technological singularity approaching or dreams of space elevators.  Having worked with nanotubes and nanoparticles, there is no way we're making a space elevator any time during our lifetime.  I also have similar reservations about true artificial intelligence or predictions of uploading our consciousness to the internet.  Despite all of the huge scientific leaps we've covered, I think people just don't realize just how crude our tools still are.

In any case, Watson isn't completely omniscient.  At the end of the first game, the Final Jeopardy category was US cities.  Watson answered "Toronto".  I can imagine everyone at IBM smacking their heads at that moment.

Anyway, some cool links:

You can play a simulated game of Jeopardy youself at the New York Times.  I beat Watson 40-10!

You can also watch an episode of Nova that gives a behind-the-scenes look at Watson.

Food: Valentine's Day Dinner

I guess that we don't go overboard celebrating Valentine's Day.  In fact, my wife vehemently forbid me from buying her any flowers, candy, jewelry, or cards.  Luckily for me, she just prefers a good meal, although she does have some high standards.  So I came home early to make her a nice candlelit meal---her favorite spicy Italian sausage soup with a homemade loaf of bread, steamed crab legs, and the perfect steak.

Public/Private Speaking

We had a global scientific meeting at work last week and I was lucky enough to have been selected to give one of the scientific presentations.  It was a good opportunity to get up on stage in front of several hundred fellow scientists and present some of the research that I've been involved in.

I'm always a little surprised at how much some people fear public speaking.  There's the old Seinfeld quip: “According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death.  Death is number two.  Does that sound right?  This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”

I guess I'm the opposite of most people.  I feel more comfortable speaking or presenting in front of large groups.  A lot of this stems from my experiences in high school.  I was part of the speech and debate team which helped train me to speak in public.  In debate, you have to prepare and give a speech arguing against your opponents with only a very short amount of time.  One of the most rigorous competitions was Extemporaneous Speaking, where you have to prepare a short timed speech after being given a topic only thirty minutes advance.  This really forces you to minimize the two biggest speech problems---you have to be clear and fluid in our language as you don't have time for umms and errs.  You also don't have time to fully memorize a prepared speech (which in my opinion is the worst type of public speaking as it sounds robotic and unnatural).

Another aspect is that giving a speech in front of a large audience almost feels like a performance to me.  I was a first chair violinist in our school symphony, so I became used to performing in front of large audiences.  I think that a lot of this comes from the fact that I enjoyed playing the violin---when you enjoy performing and speaking, then I think you naturally become less nervous.

As a result of that experience, I don't get too nervous speaking in public.  I think that I do give a pretty good speech.  That's not to say that I'm a perfect speaker---due to my debate training, I sometimes talk to fast (gotta cram all those points in time!) and I have been told that I do tend to over-gesticulate with my hands.  Still, after my presentation, I was mixing with the crowd and met with a person who was a member of local Toastmasters organization.  He complimented me on my presentation and speaking skills and even thought that my hand gestures were good, so I felt validated.  However, he did mention that I midway through my presentation, I apparently unconsciously started doing a slight kick back and forth with my foot.  I remember this and it was probably just me getting into a rhythm, showing how I treated this more like a performance.

All of this is not to brag and say that I'm better than other people---in fact, probably completely opposite to most people, I feel more comfortable talking to larger groups rather than smaller ones.  Deep down, I am clearly on the introvert side of the scale and I do think that I am inherently shy.  With larger groups, it becomes easy for the audience to just become an anonymous wall, but with smaller groups it's harder to hide and become impersonal.  I don't think I will ever be the social butterfly or the schmoozer, although arguably those skills are more important than scientific skills for long term success---history is littered with examples of brilliant but isolated scientists who were never able to achieve their true potential.  All of the standard cliches about networking are all true.  It doesn't matter how smart you are if no one knows who you are.  And if you don't know anyone.

As a tangent, this is a problem that I've seen with many professors in academia.  Many of them have a strictly scientific background.  The problem is that managing a research group or a class requires strong management and communication skills---in a word, strong business skills.  I have worked with many professors who had extremely poor social and management skills and it can have dramatic consequences in group happiness and success.  One of the things that I appreciate from my work is the opportunity to take extracurricular training classes in leadership, communication, and project management.  There is a real emphasis on developing both your scientific talent as well as your management talent, and in fact there are two equivalent tracks for promotion with a managerial and scientific ladder.  After attending some of these leadership training classes, I asked the speaker if any professors ever attended their classes---not surprisingly, very few did.

My current position requires extensive collaboration and teamwork.  You have to build your network to advance, so I've been working on improving those types of personal skills, but it is an area that I have to focus on developing.  It's too bad that there was no high school club for this, although in hindsight I suppose all of high school was training for this...

Food: The Perfect Steak

I pride myself on my steaks and I've slowly been refining my steak technique to get even better.  Early on, I used to be a big grill advocate, but I've since learned to love the cast iron skillet.  For one thing, it's available year round and you don't have to worry about preparing the charcoal on the grill (while gas works, I'm not sure it really gets hot enough to get a good sear).  You can really heat cast iron amazingly hot and it has a high heat capacity, so it doesn't lose that heat once you put the meat on.  It's a direct heat contact, so you get a really nice sear on the meat without worrying about flare-ups, and you can then finish it in the oven under the broiler.

This time, we decided to try out a new technique, following this technique.  It still uses cast iron to sear the meat initially, but you then add garlic and loads of butter to the mix.  The butter browns almost immediately, giving a nutty flavor.  While the steak is searing, you then slightly tilt the pan and continuously baste the melted butter over the steak, letting it run down.  What happens is that the milk solids in the butter (the tasty part) stick to the meat, aiding the Maillard reaction and forming a nice, thick brown crust.  The rest of the liquid fat actually streams off the steak, so the result is not as horrifyingly fatty as you would think.  You can then finish the steak in an oven at 350 degrees to get the desired degree of done-ness.  

We tried this on a ribeye (really, the only kind of steak) and it turned out pretty good!  The butter solids gave a nice flavor to the meat.  I think I left the steak in the oven a tad too long, so it came out more medium than medium-rare.  But it was quite tasty and I think the experiment was a success.  There is actually a school of thought that advocates low heat with butter to prepare your steaks with even better, more robust flavor without the charred burnt parts.  I'm going to have to try that next.

I'm pretty much a cast iron convert now.  The great thing is that anyone can easily pick up a cast iron skillet for cheap and make some great steaks.  And, to be honest, I think the results are much better than using a grill.  We haven't rolled out the grill in quite a while.  Mmmm...I'm getting hungry again...

Searing a ribeye (the only steak!) seasoned with salt, pepper, and thyme

Adding butter and garlic cloves to the mix.  The steak was basted with the butter until a nice brown crust formed.  This was finished in the oven at 350 degrees for several minutes.

The finished product having a well-deserved rest

The final product, a little over-done, but still tasty!

Singing and Spelling

Last week we had a rare night out and attended a production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at the Paper Mill Playhouse.  We actually used a Groupon to get a good deal on tickets and we thought it would be a nice way to feel cultured.  Spelling bees have been somewhat fascinating for us and we found the documentary Spellbound to be equally dramatic and hilarious, so we had high hopes for this.

The Paper Mill Playhouse itself was a cute little place.  There are signs for it on the interstate, so we've always been curious about it.  It's apparently the state theater of New Jersey, which may not sound like much especially with New York City so close, but it had a cozy, intimate feel.  The The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a relatively short, one act musical, although they did include a short intermission.  One of the gimmicks is that for the first part of the production, select audience members are called up to actually participate in the spelling contest.  The cast uses this as an opportunity for some impromptu jokes, making up fictitious biographies of the new contestants and selecting outrageous words.  In fact, the entire first half was sharp comedy as the other contestant cast members are introduced, each with their weird little quirks and personality disorders.

However, the show began to fall a little flat after the good start.  After the intermission, the audience contestants had all been booted and the mood shifted from the comical to the dramatic.  I'm not sure the transition was handled that well---since the show is relatively short and there are quite a few contestants, you  never really get enough time to fully empathize with the troubles and hardships hiding behind each little quirk.  I think they were trying to split the difference, but difference in tone was a little jarring and the second half lacked the impact it deserved.  The moral of the story, as the ex-convict doing his community service as a "comfort counseler"  tries to tell the kids, there are more important things than spelling.

Still, it was a nice show and it was good to get out of the house and pretend to be real adults for once.  This production in particular was unique since one of the actresses is physically disabled and confined to a wheelchair.  The choreography had to be rewritten to accommodate her, but it was very smoothly done and we didn't even realize that her disability was not an aspect of the original character.  In fact, this made her story a little more poignant.

My wife is not the biggest fan of musicals, but I think we both enjoyed it.  The next production at the Paper Mill is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which is a classic that I loved as a Classics major (no pun intended).  I'll have to convince her to see it...

The cast at the Paper Mill Playhouse

Photography: Ice Days

We got hit with the remnants of the Snowpocalypse that hit the Midwest this week.  However, instead of blanketing us with snow, the temperatures had risen enough that we got coated with ice.  The forecast predicted the risk of severe to catastrophic ice overnight, with the risk of trees and powerlines falling over from the weight of the ice.

In the end, though, it didn't turn out to be that bad, and definitely not catastrophic.  In the early morning, everything was enrobed in a sheath of ice.  However, by mid-morning, the temperature was almost in the 40s (a heat wave!) and most of the ice had already melted away.  I had to drive down to Pennsylvania for a business meeting and it wasn't too bad at all.  In fact, driving was better than most days since most people were off the road.  The biggest danger was from ice falling from tree branches overhead and from lazy people who didn't scrape all the ice off their car---flying down the highway, big sheets of ice would fly off the roof of their car, so you had to keep a pretty safe distance.

We're not out of the woods yet.  We're supposed to get hit with some more nasty weather this weekend and again the middle of next week.  Apparently Punxsutawney Phil did not see his shadow on Groundhog's Day, so spring is near, although I'm a little skeptical.  This winter feels more like the other Groundhog's Day to me...

Photography: Snow Days

As a I mentioned before, we had a big snowstorm this week and had a snow day from work.  One of the advantages of living in a townhouse complex is that the community organization hires people to plow the snow.  One of the disadvantages is that they are not always prompt.  In this case, although they had plowed a narrow path in the street, there was still a pile of snow on and behind our car, so we couldn't leave.  There's starting to be so much snow that there's no place to put it.  We were naive and completely unprepared, so we didn't even have a shovel---I had to move the snow using an old dust pan, but it worked.

Digging out the car in the morning

After we dug ourselves out, it was actually a little relaxing and we spent the day walking around the neighborhood and taking some pictures.  Afterwards, we ended up going to three different stores before we finally found a place that still had shovels in stock.  I guess we weren't the only ones unprepared...

Running out of places to put the snow

Science: Snow Days

Living in the Northeast, we've been hit with what seems like a major snowstorm every week for this winter.  We've already had two snow days from work this winter, which is more than I can remember since I started my job, and it's only January.  We're already experiencing the snowiest January ever and we're only 20 inches from breaking the seasonal snowfall record.  This week, after 19 inches of now fell, New York City shut down its schools for a day, only the seventh time since 1978.  The temperature hasn't been that cold, which has resulted in dense, wet snow packs that are harder to move as well as slicker, icier roads when the melt freezes overnight.  I have to say, I'm pretty impressed with how fast the area has been able to clean the roads and plow the snow, but there's a breaking point---we're starting to run out of space to put the snow.  New Jersey roads, never the most wide to begin with, are starting to shrink as the snowbanks creep into the outer lanes.

So what's causing all of this unusual weather?  There's a hypothesis that the colder/wetter weather is due to an arctic bulge or oscillation.  As the ice in the arctic melts, this causes a feedback loop where the darker ocean surface absorbs more heat, in turn causing warmer arctic temperatures.  The warmer air rises and causes the jet stream to bulge out much farther south than normal.  The jet stream, which normally acts as a fence to keep the cold air contained over the arctic, then allows the cold air to escape over the mid United States, causing colder weather.  The cold weather hits the warmer, moister Atlantic air causing intense snowfall over the Eastern seaboard.

Of course, the elephant in the room is what is causing the arctic to warm.  Some atmospheric scientists are careful not to draw a trend based on the recent winters, particularly since there are other complicating factors such as La Nina/El Nino effects in the Pacific.  But it does seem like whether we want to admit it or not, the climate is changing, and we better make sure that we're ready for that.

By the way, it looks like there's another system with "significant snowfall" this week as well, just in time for a global conference we're having at work.  Good timing.