I’ve been keeping some rough notes as we’ve gone along:

Week 3-6: At-home pregnancy tests are coming up positive. 10 to 12 off-the-shelf home tests used. 

Week 7: 1st prenatal appointments made for week 8. Massive blood loss on Wednesday evening leaves us thinking we had a miscarriage. Canceled the prenatal appointments.

Week 8: Miscarriage expected, baby found instead. “Strong heartbeat”, says the doctor. First time we saw the heartbeat on ultrasound. 

Week 10: Ultrasound shows 2 weeks of growth in 2 weeks. Saw arms and legs move on ultrasound. Looks like corpus c. is on right ovary.    

Week 11/12 plan: High-tech ultrasound screening scheduled, geneticist consult scheduled, blood sugar check, nurse practitioner mtg.

Week 12: Nurse (blood sugar/insulin), genetic consult, need insulin supplies. Call this week.  Nuchal translucency ultrasound screening set for for Friday. That Friday: Full scan done too. Nasal bone looks good. 12wk4d by measure. Screening is clear.

So we’re heading into week 13. As Amy and I are relative late-comers to this whole parenting thing, we’ve been very concerned about the possible genetic issues that might occur; it looks like we’re clear. This was the reasons why we’ve taken so long to mention it, and one of the big reasons I haven’t been posting to my journal here.

I’ve got a ton of people to let know and if this is the first you’ve heard about it, don’t be surprised or put off. We’ve been keeping this more quiet than normal and as you might imagine, we’re putting a lot of plans together to prepare for everything.

I may document some more stuff here later, if I think it will be interesting to all four of you who read this. We’ve got 20 or so sonograms that I can share with you if you’re interested in looking at blurry grey dots on a black background that may or may not resemble some under-developed body part. I, of course, have already set one as the background on my phone.

(Just change the square brackets to angle brackets and slip this into your .htaccess file)

My efforts were complicated by my web host who turned off access to the file but made it look like a “404 File not found” error rather than the real error: “403 Forbidden” which sounds far more ominous.

The way to discover this for was to open the URL to the xmlrpc file directly in Safari and then bring up the Activities window which showed the text “forbidden” that was otherwise hidden from view. What tangled webs, indeed.

If you are in Portland Oregon and are missing channels 32-99 of your extended Basic (analog) cable through your TiVo, continue reading below.

On Friday March 6th, your TiVo’s guide was told that Comcast’s Analog Channels had been reduced to channels 2-31. You may have gotten a TiVo message saying that ‘Channel 32 (Versus) has been dropped’.

This schedule change has happened about 4 months too early. Comcast is planning on removing the 32-99 channels from analog and broadcasting them ONLY in digital. (Note: this is a different transition from the one that is going on with BROADCAST channels.) Most all of the cable companies are going to digital transmission on their own networks. Comcast in Portland is planning on doing this during the summer of 2009. Comcast is offering two free DTAs (Digital Transport Adapters) to every subscriber. I picked up one at the office on NE Sandy.

Because the guide information’s publisher jumped the gun, you are now stuck with a TiVo that thinks it only has channels 2 – 31. In order to get this fixed, you will need to do one of the following:

A) Wait until the guide is fixed. (TiVo and Tribune Media have been notified, though adding your voice may speed up the process.) I was told the updates to the guide data only happen after 4 to 5 business days. Considering the issue was reported on Friday, I’m guessing that the earliest we would see this fixed in Thursday, March 12th or as late as Monday, March 16.

B) Get the DTA converter box. This box is meant to provide the digital equivalent of extended basic service to your television. You don’t get the On Demand stuff or the music channels, but you do get your full channels 2 – 99 back. You can re-run the Guided Setup to get this box configured. (Takes about 40 minutes if you do everything right the first time. A lot of that is waiting for the guide data to come down.)

If you get the DTA from Comcast and try to set it up, be sure to select “Comcast Digital Converter” as the name of the box. NOTE: In other threads you may see this referred to as manufactured by Pace. While this is correct, you cannot use Pace as the Set-Top Box manufacturer in the guided setup. Read the TiVo’s screen very closely: “What is the name of the company on the front of the Set Top Box?” That name is Comcast, not Pace. I thought I was being smart by using Pace, but that’s exactly wrong. You must use the “Comcast Digital Converter” as the name/manufacturer of the converter box. I spent the better portion of 6 hours trying to get the (****) thing to work before realizing my error.

Today I walked into a service center to talk to Comcast about the flakey channel changing that I was experiencing with my TiVo trying to control this ancient digital box. (They misunderstood my original complaint and thought I was saying that the DCT2244 was not getting the right channel from Comcast, when in fact it was that the TiVo wasn’t able to exactly replicate the Remote Control signals the DCT2244 was expecting.) I thought they were going to say “Well tough luck. We have a TiVo-like box that you should use pay for instead.” But actually the customer service person was actively trying to figure out what Comcast could do to fix things. Actual customer service… can you believe it?

Right then and there she offered me a much newer digital cable box (Motorola DCT-2524) which is an updated box in the same series. I took it home and plugged it in, reconnecting each of the wires and connectors from the old box to the very similar new box, and voila, the TiVo is once again changing channels like a champ. Yay.

(They said to bring back the old one when I get the chance. “In the next week would be great”. Wow, that’s… laid back. That’s also not normally the phrase I would use with monopolies.)

Bottom line: our Series 2 TiVo was not working well with the old DCT2244 box, mostly because the Tivo was using “IR Blasters” to pretend it was a remote control but was failing. However, with the new DCT2524 there is a direct serial port connection which works perfectly. Comcast had the serial port enabled (it seems that the cable company can turn it off or on at will and some cable companies refuse to turn it on) and didn’t charge me for exchanging the box, or even ask for a deposit while I’m in possession of both boxes. Again, yay.

So Portland Comcast gets points for 1) being laid back, 2) being helpful, and 3) giving me a full-featured, upgraded box with no hassle.

However, on the way out of the service center I saw a flyer about Comcast’s own Digital TV Cutover. Oh boy, that’s a whole ‘nother entry.

A: Someone should make a mash up of [New Order's] Blue Monday and Ministry’s Halloween.

R: Is that really good idea?

A: Well, they could call it ‘Blue Halloween’…

R: Oh, that’s much better than what I was thinking of… ‘Everyday is Monday’!

That’d send chills down your spine!

A) Integration: Integration is the path that we see the iPhone taking us down as many other tools are doing. You can’t hardly find a cell phone that is only a phone now. Your average digital camera has audio playback of MP3s. Your average MP3 player also plays videos. My phone is a combination address book, note pad, camera, photo album, movie player, music player, weather reporter, stock ticker, scoreboard, text messenger, pager, flashlight, and watch.

B) Wireless interfaces or control at a distance: voice-activated interfaces are the most common way of dealing with miniaturization or other situations that are hands free. Remember, operating hands free can be by choice, not dictated by the situation as with phones in automobiles. The advances in voice-activated dialing from cars has migrated to Bluetooth headsets. Once we get used to talking to our appliances, everything will be more easily controlled. Think of microwave ovens with an interface you can tell “cook this for 3 minutes” and you don’t have to figure out which particular combination of buttons that specific model uses.

Car keys are evolving into key fobs that simply unlock a car as you approach with the fob in your pocket or handbag. By why have a fob-sized device when you only need something large enough to hold a battery. Or take it a step further with an RFID-based sliver of silicon that uses radio wave itself to power the transmitter.

Every mainstream video game console today comes with wireless controllers. The next big leap in connecting home entertainment systems is wireless using W-USB or WiFi. Network Attached Storage like Apple’s TimeCapsule take the storage of digital information and put it in the back room, away from the physical interface elements entirely.

In my next post, I’ll run through some of the effects that these changes will have on some of our current devices and see what the future might bring to them as well as what additional devices may appear.

Example #1: the Mac mini from Apple. The dimensions of the physical box are largely the size of a cigar box, squared-off. The width and depth of the device are largely dictated by the minimum size necessary to contain a CD/DVD removable optical disc. The height seems to be the minimum necessary to stack all of the ports and connections on the face opposite the slot-loading drive. The Nintendo Wii also is hardly larger than optical disc drive.

Example #2: the Apple iPhone and its clones is largely a screen with a phone, web browser, music player stuck behind it. The physical dimensions are largely dictated by the size of the screen. There’s a bit of room at the top and the bottom that’s not screen that could be removed, but there’s no room left to right. The depth of the phone is seriously minimal, but even that could be reduced—as Apple recognized when they brought out the second generation model where the only physical dimension that was changed way the average depth of the device.

Example #3: Televisions are largely the size of the display area. Some of them add more for speakers and control buttons, but they are nothing like the old ‘console televisions’ that have been gone a long time now. The vast majority of the human interface for these devices has been transferred to the remote controls (which are like a plague of locusts in our living room).

Example #4: The portability of a medium has been a factor in terms of it’s length of adoption. This is mostly driven home by the movement of 12″ vinyl records and LaserDiscs out of the mainstream formats, replaced by the hand-sized optical disc. But going back even further we can look at hard drives (which started as 24-inch platters in the IBM 350) or floppy disks (starting at 8 inches). Even removable Flash RAM started out at at PCMCIA/PC Card size which is just larger than a credit card and are currently available as MicroSD cards the size of the fingernail on my pinkie finger. I don’t see a need for SD to get much smaller since after a certain point, it becomes too difficult to grasp onto, much less manipulate such a small piece of plastic into a slot.

William Gibson talked about ‘microsofts’ in his early fiction, which were essentially memory storage in the form factor of a toothpick. The smallest-volume item that is made for consumers that I can think of are Tic-Tacs. Can you think of something smaller?

For media, there is no minimum requirement for the size since the physical interaction is with the device that used the media, not the media itself.

So what does this tell us about upcoming electronics? What are the ways around this miniaturization limit? I’ll talk about that in my next entry.

Please Vote. Please Vote based on issues.

As part of that effort, we paid off one of our credit cards last year (Card A) and have kept it at or near a zero balance for a while now. So the Card A people sent us, on a monthly basis, these blank checks to use “for whatever you want” with minimal interest rates. Wow, how nice of them.

The Offers: The checks come in two flavors: 1) 0% interest for 12 months (after which it reverts to an unacceptable percentage rate over 20%) or 2) 3.99% for the duration of the balance. One of the fine print items was a 3% transaction fee that capped off at $200 I had to keep in mind.

I mostly ignored them for about a year, but they were certainly tempting. We had a nice credit limit and the idea of jetting us off on some spur of the moment getaway certainly crossed my mind… but I knew it was just putting off (and increasing!) the cost. I’ve looked at the offers each month. I just needed to find the right time to use them: a time when they would save us money rather than cost us.

The Summer Situation: This year had me flying solo to Montana for a death in the family ($700) and over the Fourth of July Amy and I went on a follow-up road trip to the same town with a side trip for a day in Salt Lake City. (Amy went to a small private liberal arts college there.) The vacation travel costs themselves were fine (lodging $300, gas $250) but we also made some major car repairs in preparation (exhaust system, tires $2,180) so the total came to about $3,400, which we had put on Card B.

In terms of using credit wisely, I think we did okay in this instance. We had very little warning about my flight so there was no time to save for it. We needed to get the car repairs done, but we had been holding off. The family reunion trip forced the issue since we had to get there on the Fourth of July with the rest of the family. We tapped into our embryonic emergency fund to pay for some of the car repairs and cover some of the travel costs, but the $3400 remained on Card B. We traded money for time.

Cunning Calculations: Now with things settled down a bit on the home front, I have had time to re-assess our accounts and look at how we could take advantage of those checks from Card A. I looked at a few of our debts: credit union car loan, credit union personal loan that we used for some debt consolidation last year, and Card B.

The first thing I did was use a generic loan calculator to figure out that with our normal monthly payment, the debt on Card B would have cost about $2,000 in interest and taken over 4.4 years to pay off.

Next I calculated the same monthly payment against the 3.99% rate plus the 3% transaction fee. The transferred debt would cost about $1,000 and take 3.3 years to pay off.

(Paying off the personal loan with the 3.99% checks + 3% transaction fee would have saved us $20. Paying off the consolidation loan would have saved a whopping $2. Neither of these seemed worth the effort.)

Amy and I are both distrustful of large banks and corporations, so I tried to be as cautious as possible. In the end we decided to go for it. All told, we’ll save $1,000 by using these checks.

Warning: Avalanche Zone: Obviously, if we could pay more on a monthly basis, we could knock down both the cost and the length for repayment. We’ve been using a combination of techniques to work down our debts and by next March both the car and consolidation loans will be retired at which point we’ll be able to pile on a bunch of money to wipe out the debt. I think we’ll be done with it by next summer. The Debt Snowball plus automatic withdrawals from paychecks have been a big help in making sure we get these all taken care of. (See the Debt Snowball article at GRS or read the wikipedia article. Amy actually thought up and started practicing the debt snowball style before she or I ever read about it. She’s the smart one in this house.)

…With a Cherry on Top: For those of paying close attention, you may be asking: But what about those 0% checks? Wouldn’t they be an even better deal? You’re right but that’s also a gamble. If for any reason we don’t get that debt paid off in 12 months, the interest rate sky rockets. This is flat out gambling that we won’t have any major financial hits in the next year. I’m not a total pessimist however.

We used the 0% checks to pay off $500 of the debt and paid the balance with the 3.99% offer. I’m willing to gamble that we will pay off $500 in the next 12 months, even if something major comes up. It saves us about $100 in interest, which is a nice bonus.

Other families have much larger amounts of debt to deal with. These 4 figure debts are peanuts compared to what others are facing. But Amy and I are getting our money house in order. These exercises with smaller amounts make me more confident about the larger amounts that we might see in the future. (House? new car?) If I’m not getting rich slowly, I hope I’m at least getting smarter.

1) The end goal? The Star Trek Holodeck: a 3-D representation of a scene that can be viewed from any angle. Putting aside the hokiness, this is what TV is heading towards: a reproduction of an environment in all physical dimensions.

2) In order for this to be feasible, flat 2-D capturing is useless. Video today is taking a series of bitmap images. The next gen of video will be just be stereo 2-D: 2 images of the same scene at the same time. Great, so we’ve replicated the depth of a scene, but we’re still stuck with the single perspective of the original pair of cameras.

3) If stereo images for ‘faux-3D’ isn’t enough, then what we need are more cameras, right? Well, then where does that end? Do you build a giant sphere of cameras, all pointed towards the center of the action? This might work okay for a movie like Cube but for, let’s say filming a climb of Mount Everest, this isn’t the way to go.

4) There are two basic ways of representing images in digital formats: Bitmaps or Vectors. Bitmaps are grids of pixels: perfect for paintings, documents and flat video. Bitmaps are great for when you have an image that you might want to make smaller, but they are useless for making bigger. If you take a 100 pixel by 100 pixel image and make it 1 mile by 1 mile, you’re going to get individual pixels that are 50 feet by 50 feet. However the same image made up of vectors could be made of very small 1 nanometer pixels and still be an accurate representation of the image.

5) If we want the ability to view a scene in all of it’s physical dimensions, we will need to capture the points in space (x,y,z coordinates/vectors) of as many elements as we need in order to re-create the scene. Take track events portrayed in a movie like Chariots of Fire. In order to truly capture the event, we’ll need to track the spacial locations of every significant element. I would guess these to be the track, the starting line, the finish line and the runners.

6) This should be subdivided down further however. Not just the runners, but the various body parts of the runners: legs, arms, heads. Maybe fingers? How about the starter’s gun? the trigger on the starter gun? the finish line tape?

7) We need to decide what’s truly important to capture: The runners, yes. The starting line and the finish line, yes. The crowd? Mmmm, maybe. Certainly films for decades have been using ’standard crowd noise’ in place of recording actual crowds on the set of the film. Movies have been adding crowds to stadiums using mannequins, inflatables, or digital post-production. Maybe the specifics of the crowd are unnecessary for the scene.

8) We need to capture as much as possible, but we could extrapolate from a small set of points a number of the other points. Perhaps we know where the starter gun is, but instead of keeping track of the official that is pulling the trigger, we simple estimate the height of a person that would be holding a gun at a certain angle and height and make an approximation of the official. We know how the ribbon at the finish line would move and float given the motions of the players and the wind and the tautness of the tape. Do we need to know the exact location of a runner’s knee if we already know where their hips and toes are at? Maybe, but we probably don’t have to know where the ankle is at if we know where the heel and the knee are at.

9) Once we have those points in space, we can recreate the locations, but short of capturing the location of every thread of the clothing being worn or each lace of each shoe, we’re probably going to want to capture a ’skin’ or a ‘texture map’ that would be used to wrap around the skeletons (vectors) of the runners. The skin could be captured ahead of time, or could be extrapolated from a video feed. We’ve already seen projects that take varied photographs and collects them into a multi-faceted view of a single object. In much the same way, a set of stills taken over time could create a texture map.

10) That same capture of the texture maps could be used to extrapolate the x/y/z of the original skeletons. Today’s motion capture techniques have relied on ping-pong balls taped to actors in green body suits and similar set ups. Those configurations are simply work-arounds that allow us to capture the models easily with today’s technology and are ultimately, unnecessary. Once we have the visual processing tools that are necessary, we can forgo the artificial set ups and special configurations and rely on the original video captures.

11) This sort of capturing and transmission becomes possible once we move from thinking of capturing a flat plane of pixels to capturing the coordinates and texture maps of a scene. The information that is captured can be still captured by a single video camera, given enough processing power. But when we add a second camera, we can collect better textures and more accurate coordinates. Add a third and the quality of the capture increases again. Add a dozen and you’re capturing every detail needed to analyze an event in everyday scenarios.

12) What does this all offer? Imagine watching Chariots of Fire from the actual point of view of one of the runners. Or from the officials. Or the finish line tape, or a shoe of the runners. Or directly overhead. The amount and number of perspectives is immense. Imagine changing the scene by adding a 100 mph wind to it. Or altering the track so it goes in a loop-de-loop.

13) And talk about scalability: If you want to transmit this scene to someone, you have the option of A) sending a fully-rendered image like you would to a current television, B) a pair of images to a stereoscopic video display (Yes, that’s by my employer), C) or a small set of the captured data to a cell phone/Personal media device for display of a low-res, animation style rendering, D) or a full feed of all the details to a computer-enabled display that could use a mouse or 3-d mouse that could be used to navigate around a scene.

14) Today we are capturing the equivalent of a single, low quality texture map. Soon we will be capturing higher quality single texture maps, but this is just a baby step forward. We need to build tools that will take those bitmaps and break them down into component parts: Vectors of skeletons, plus texture maps. We blend in approximations of the missing texture, enhance the scene with up-close photos, and extrapolate to fill in the additional x,y,z coordinate points we’re missing. None of these techniques are outside of our reach.