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advice and tips kids

Had a small scare at Creve Coeur lake

Today I had a small scare at the CC lake. I was chatting with friends while keep an eye on Sophia the 5 year old. Serenity the 10 year old went paddle boarding with friend with their moms permission. I found out after the fact, and when I asked the moms (my wife and Serenity friend’s mom), who were watching them, they said “we don’t know where they are on the lake”. This made me start to worry. Our quick response is, we rent a kayak to search on the lake. We asked around, not seeing them, increasingly worried, and even thought about calling 911. At this time I asked if we can use “find my iPhone” to find the girl, because the other girl’s mom hanged the phone on Serenity’s neck. It eventually worked, and we found them not too far from where they started, and it’s near the bank too. We were relieved, and did a bit more kayak afterwards.

My lesson here is make sure Serenity has her own iPhone, and help her learn how to use. Basically the friend’s mom called the girls twice, and the girls did not pick up the phone properly (accidentally pressed the “declined” button, thus the ensuing panic). Because this time she had friend’s mom’s iPhone on her neck while she was paddling / using the roar to push forward. And we had to call her friend’s dad to run this “find my iPhone” to pinpoint the particular device. I also want to make sure we have better network: maybe Verizon or AT&T for my whole family down the road. Right now both my wife and myself have mint mobile which uses t-mobile network, and it’s considered not as good as the VZ and T.

Serenity’s mom’s thinking is we should keep an eye on them all the time, unfortunately due to the size of this lake, it’s a bit impractical.

Categories
advice and tips

Covid etc

First I want to make a quick announcement, I moved my website from uudaddy.com to stlplace.com/uudaddy as I decided no longer paying for the domain name uudaddy.com. Today incidentally I found people grabbed my previous domain.

Back to topic, while the guard for Covid is way down in the US. Please note it’s not completely gone yet. In fact the cases are going up in rural Missouri and many other states such as Arizona. A few months ago I create a README.md file in the Covid repo on GitHub. The websites I used to look up the US information are still valid: 1point3acres and coronainusa . I also follow Chris Prener (a SLU professor) and he has some good updates and charts for Missouri Covid as well. Such as this one. His GitHub repo here.

Categories
advice and tips finance

Adjusted my 403b fund allocation a bit

Move some money from the two vanguard funds to the higher return funds. I usually looked at the 10 year return. I understand past return does not guarantee future success, but still…

current allocation: moving from vanguard small cap index and real estate index to Hartford and Janus, refer to below for the performances (two the large number columns, left is 10 year annualized return, the right is the annual return since inception)
Fund info
Categories
advice and tips

Special Occasion Speech: to Graduates in 2020

It’s the worst times, it’s the best times. Pandemic and recession at the same time. For me the best part is spending some quality time with my wife and kids, the worst part is I have not got a haircut for over 3 months.

All these will pass. For college graduates or post college graduates, find something meaningful while living in your parents house, or basement. If Uber retracted the offer for your software engineer job, you may want to find something in the local schnucks or instacart, while continuing to pursue your dream in software development, be a mentor in launch code, apply to jobs at the fields that are still hiring: from Amazon to Walmart…

For high school graduates: your senior year or graduation is really unique, isn’t it? No proms or graduation like in the past: a lot of car parades or yard signs. My 4th grader daughter is graduating from her elementary school this year and I got a flavor of it. I have been in a similar boat in my life regarding college too: I was not accepted to a college of my first choice. I do believe most of you have received admission to colleges or know where you will go next. You may or may not know the status of “will college open or not”? Is it going to be online plus some in person class, or everything online like Cal State? We don’t know. We will find out as time goes. Hope the colleges make the right decisions in the circumstances.

In summary, I want to say don’t be afraid of the unknown or setbacks. Or even small failures. I still remember the night before I boarded the flight to the US for graduate school in 1997. I went to bed after packing all the stuff (managed to close the luggage box), then I could not fall asleep due to all this uncertainty. Step out of our comfort zone, what does not kill us will only make us stronger.