Paul commissioned me to knit a tie-dye, Grateful-Dead-inspired, tie. I made it, he gave it to the UCSC Chancellor at a press announcement. Cool!

Kids car seats are getting bigger (apart from the ultra-portable infant seats). Three reasons why, all related to new safety requirements:

1. LATCH (Lower Anchors and Tethers for CHildren) are anchor points in cars that make installing carseats much safer since roughly 2003 when they became standard in all passenger cars. Manufacturers of car seats have made them bigger as a result. The seat needs to accommodate a strap between LATCH points as well as routing for old-fashioned seat-belts. The tether for the top of the seat, which goes over the back of the car's seat back and fastens there, has caused the manufacturers to make the back of the carseat taller and have a little more room for hardware above the kid's head.
2. Around the same time as LATCH, the US has seen more stringent regulations for when car seats must be forward facing or rear facing. To save parents from buying multiple seats, there are convertible seats that can be turned around somewhere between infancy and toddler/preschool age, and still be used up to 60 pounds in some cases if the kid is not too tall. Of course, seats that can be converted from rear-facing and reclined positions to front-facing and upright positions have bulkier bases to accommodate the different LATCH points, seat belt slots and tilt options.
   
3. New requirements and recommendations for booster seats for kids up to 6 years old and 60 pounds (or even 8 years old and 80 pounds) have been enacted in many states in the last three or four years. A pure booster seat, to raise the kid and position the belt safely, is currently thought to be best for school-age kids once they're too big to sit in a full carseat. However, in order to provide an option that parents can buy to last from pre-school through school age, many forward-facing car seats are now convertible to pure booster seats.

In my recent research, I found it's hard to buy a mainstream car seat that is not convertible either from forward to rear facing, or from forward-facing (with a seat back) to booster seat. I was looking for a seat for a kid over 22 pounds and over 1 year old, that is 16 inches wide and lightweight. And the main special requirement? FAA approval.

I'm going on five more trips with my kid in the rest of 2008. I usually need a car seat when I get to my destination. I also need something to keep my kid in the airplane seat more securely. Even if you believe airplane crashes are so low probability that it's not worth worrying about, I can vouch for the sanity that comes from a wriggly kid well-secured in an airplane seat. I held somebody else's baby during turbulence on a recent flight (while the other mom vomited repeatedly) and I was glad my own kid was asleep and strapped into a car seat with a five-point harness. He didn't even wake up during the turbulence, because I didn't have to wake him up to hold him down during the stomach-inverting drops of altitude.

Using the car seat in the airplane has become a real problem at his current height, however. It's so bulky (thick back, thick seat) that in coach he runs out of leg room and can already powerfully kick the seat in front of him. Time to start investigating alternatives, and as I found out, the alternatives do not reasonably include lightweight, narrow, FAA-approved seats that are also legal in cars in most states.

Here's how airplanes are different from cars, as far as child restraints are concerned:

• No LATCH points. I don't know if airplane seats will ever have LATCH points.
• Airplane seats are designed to recline/fold. I think this is why booster seats are forbidden by the FAA. So are seats that can convert to booster seats.
• Not as much room, obviously. It can even be hard to bring a toddler-size car seat down the aisle, let alone fit into the width and depth limitations of coach seating.

FAA did recently approve a harness product (CARES) that has no seat or back parts at all. It attaches to the airplane seat back and to the seat belt and looks like it will hold a wriggly kid and handle turbulence. It's the only legal option for booster-seat aged kids on planes, aside from just using the regular lap belt. I've purchased one and will certainly mention if it doesn't work well.

Since I still need* a car seat at my destination, I'll probably start putting the Britax Roundabout into checked luggage. *Big sigh* -- it will be years before I'm likely to travel without checked luggage again. If it weren't for carseats, I can pack my own clothing and my kid's for 3-6 days into one carry-on.

* As a final note, let me define "need" in the last paragraph. It turns out the law in BC, for example, is different for residents and visitors. Residents must use car seats for kids up to 40 pounds, but visitors can omit car seats with children over 20 pounds. On average that weight is reached at nine months! A slightly heavy baby might reach 20 pounds at an earlier age and still not be able to sit up on his own. So although the law doesn't require me to have a car seat on my upcoming trip to Vancouver, I have decided I need one.

I'm making good progress on the public health statistics visualization site. I just added the ability to use pycha's multi-line line graphs:

This shows the incidence rates of kidney cancer in the Northern California population, according to the NCCC.

Whew, I finally got the right minimal equipment to do off-camera flashes. With my Canon Digital Rebel, this meant

• Canon Off Camera Shoe Cord OC-E3
• Canon 430EX Speedlite Flash for Canon Pro1

I meant to do this months ago but got the wrong parts -- a flash synchro cable and hot shoe adaptor that just don't all fit together in a way that connect the camera to the flash (a $25 mistake at worst, and I still haven't had time to find out if they might be useful anyway).

Anyway, here are my first photos with this setup, with our cat as a model because she stays still better than other live models in the household (!). The one with whitish carpet and wall as background was really the first photo, slightly cropped but otherwise unedited, just connected the flash pieces and snapped the camera in automatic portrait mode. The one with the dark background is not even in an unlit room, it just had the nice effect that the flash lit the kitty and stuff you can't see, while overwhelming the less-lit background into black.


Only three weeks until Zack Arias' One Light Workshop. Hat tip to Ted Leung for letting me know about that workshop and inspiring me to try all this.

The site I'm building will make public health data more accessible. This means both findable and visualizable. Kai just came by my office and demonstrated a use case for both aspects of accessibility for this data.

Kai's task this morning is to put together a presentation which involves talking about the "long tail" of diseases: for every common disease that pharmaceutical companies target, there are a hundred orphan diseases. Pharmaceuticals typically ignore these because the revenues from a drug targeting an orphan disease are necessarily small.

A good graphic for Kai's presentation would be a classic long tail graph, with specific incidence rates filled in: possibly lung cancer on the left with a high incidence, tuberculosis in the middle with a vastly lower incidence, and Ebola at the real tail end. But how do you fill in the numbers for incidence of these diseases -- say, for the US, for a given year?

• National Cancer registries cover only cancer incidence and mortality
  
• CDC Mortality data covers all diseases, but mortality instead of incidence (e.g. prostate cancer is very common but not a common cause of death)
• CDC tracks infectious disease incidence, but not incidence of most non-infectious diseases
• The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute publishes incidence of hemophilia
• The National Health Interview Survey counts things like anemia, and while you can find that page on the CDC site, the data are presented very different from data on cancer or infectious disease...
  

So pulling together incidence rates even for a presentation is hard, and if you wanted to do science it would be even harder to ensure that the same population was looked at. Googling this stuff is harder than you would think. It's fun doing something about this kind of use case.

In order to keep my life and work organized, the tool I use to track tasks has to be streamlined and seamless. Do you know what I mean? Any hassle or delay, and I'm likely to get distracted or postpone the bookkeeping of adding a new task or updating the status of a task. If I'm hampered in bookkeeping, I fall behind and the system becomes less trustworthy so I can even fall out of the habit of keeping it up-to-date simply because it's already not up-to-date. It requires discipline as well as ease-of-use.

My system is not just one single task list. That would be too long. Instead, it's organized roughly as "Getting Things Done" suggests, into contexts. This is crucial, for reasons I won't go into now. So one of my requirements is that I have several groups of tasks, and a task can only be in one group/context. Another requirement is that I be able to mark tasks as "done" to make them disappear (but not deleted).

For three years now I've been using iOrganize. It's a small and reliable note-taking program that I don't mind running constantly in order to do bookkeeping at a moment's notice. It has folders for "notes", and lists notes by title within a folder. Click on a note and a view pane shows the body text. I have a couple conventions to make this function as a task manager: I mark the tasks that have top priority with a ** so they show up in a quick search, and I drag a note to the _Done folder (which sorts last with the underscore) to mark as done.

The thing is, I unthinkingly upgraded to a new version when prompted, and a few things are driving me crazy, and worse, driving me towards dis-use.

• The search function now only searches in the current folder. This breaks my ability to quickly use search for ** to find top tasks. Even though the functionality to search all folders is still there, it now won't show me which folder the search results are in.
  
• The drag to the _Done folder now changes the view to the _Done folder, when it used to (and I really want to) keep the view on the source folder, the context where I'm getting stuff done.
  

... *sigh*

I have been experimenting this morning with TextMate's awesome extensibility to see if I could use it for a task manager since I run it constantly anyway, but am running into barriers. Can I downgrade my running version of iOrganize instead?

Shortest recognizable quotes

Three words

• I'll be back
• Feed me, Seymour
• Yippee Kiyay, M*F*
• Et tu, Brute
• Phone's ringing, Dude
• Run, Forrest! Run!
• As you wish.
  
• Clatto... Verata... Necktie?
• God is dead.
  

Two words

• A Handbag!
  

One word

• Inconceivable!
• Stella!
• Doh!

Well, recognizable to me, anyway. I'm surprised I can't think of any more two-word quotes.

Three thumbs up for the Chariot Cougar 2 I bought a couple weeks ago. When you use something day to day the smoothness of use matters a lot:

• One thumb for the easy way it attaches to the bike. It's got a ball joint to slip into a socket, held with a pin, and the pin is held with a rubber cover, and then a safety strap in case all that fails, but it's still fast to put together. Somehow with the Burley I never got snappy at getting everything all at the right angles.
• One thumb for the carrying capacity and organization thereof. I went to the grocery store today with D. and came back with two big (cloth) bags plus a watermelon. There's two exterior pouches in back, one of them very big yet it folds up when not in use, and small side pouches inside the cab for the spare yoke or Darwin's stuff.
  
• One thumb (Darwin's) for the comfortable, secure safety restraints. The chest yoke comes down over his head and snaps to a strap between his legs, and the seat belt snaps over that. Snap, snap, done.
  

When you use something day to day the smoothness of use matters a lot. I'm enjoying this.

You may ask if I'm turning into a diligent environmentalist, abandoning even my Prius in order to bike to work and the grocery store. Ok, well even if you don't ask, I'll tell you, there's are different things mixed into the satisfaction return of this practice. There's saving gas, yes, and knowing where I can find a spot to park without frustration. There's the physical well-being from exercise and feeling sun on my face or at least fresh air. I like to think I look pretty cool on the sharp red bike with red trailer, so yes there's a bit of pride too! Whatever keeps me pedaling.

Programmers sometimes shave yaks. But fiber artists sometimes engage in yak [hair] spinning, plying, winding and fulling -- and best of all, yak whacking. Yea, verily. Not sure which I'd rather do or not do right now.

Unit testing and doc testing are working in the Django-based project. A couple wrinkles:

1. In the unit tests, I created some model instances in the setUp() method easily. I then discovered that the setUp() method is called before every method in the test class, not just once when the test class is instantiated. Ah yes, I remember this from Java days too. Is there some deep reason why tests (in this case functional tests) shouldn't share the exact same setup but need to recreate it? The fix that seemed to meld most smoothly with what the unit testing framework offered, was to tearDown() all the model instances after every test method, even if I was going to use the same work for the next test.

2. Django only seems to pick up doctests in the models module. I found a hint online (can't even find it anymore) about creating a "__test__" dictionary and putting this in models.py worked:

__test__ =  {"1": Source, "2": DataFrame}

In this case Source is a class in models.py, and DataFrame is a class imported from a file called query.py. The labels "1" and "2" are arbitrary and I don't yet know how they're used. What worries me about this is that I don't want to import everything into the models module in order to test it.

Finally fixed the archives link. The only way I could figure out to do it within the limited time I gave myself was to throw away my custom template and use a Blogger layout. Less control over other things, but it is better having inaccessible archives.

Sometimes programming goes too fast, and I actually have to stop and think.