Oh my god, I'm a stay at home mom!

This shouldn't be too surprising, since I haven't worked in over a year, but before now I was in denial.

Until my son was born I was earning more than my husband.  I decided I'd like to stay home for the first year of my son's life so I quit my job, naively believing that I'd be able to find part time employment after a year out of work.  Last month, I dusted off my resume, added my most recent experience, and sent it to a few people.  The response I got was less than encouraging: "The chances of finding part time work in the IT industry are virtually nil."

Now, I'm not wedded to the industry.  In fact, I'd be quite happy doing something else, but I'm not prepared to take an entry level position just to start working again.  It's just not practical; working is too expensive to get paid beans.

The going rate for childcare in our area is about $75/day (wombats) and competition for places is fierce.  If you already have your foot in the door, it could be a few months before you can pick up an extra day of care each week for your child.  If your child doesn't already attend childcare, you can expect it to be a year.

Childcare covers the hours between 7am and 6pm, with hefty penalties if you are late to pick up your child, which means you have to be strict with your work hours.  There's no option for half days, or any reliable way to pick up casual days (for those times when you really need to attend a meeting on  day when you don't normally work).  This is when the other types of care kick in: nannies and daddies.  Which you choose depends on how much dad earns and how much you travel.  If this is a rarity, dad might stay home for the day, but if dad earns a lot or you travel a lot, then a nanny is a cheaper option.  The going rate for a nanny in our area is about $17/hour.

Not that I want to have my child in childcare for that much time.  Sure, it's nice to have a break from changing nappies and conversations with someone who sounds like the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoons, but I'd still like to be one of the primary carers in my child's life.

Another hidden cost is the loss of government benefits when resuming work.  If I were to work three days a week, for $20/hour, I would forfeit about $3,500 in government benefits, making my effective tax rate about 30%, compared with the tax rate of 16% for people without a child.    Combining taxes and lost benefits with the aforementioned cost of childcare makes my marginal take home income only slightly better than if I were in the highest tax bracket.  Of course, the Australian government makes it easy for all Australian parents to weigh up the cost of returning to the workforce by making the cost depend on your partner's income and your prospective income, tax rate, medicare levy, tax offset, family tax benefit A, family tax benefit B, and childcare benefit, not to mention the family tax benefit supplement, which they don't even remotely try to explain how it is calculated or who is eligible for it.

There are other costs to working: transportation, work clothing, out of hours baby sitters.  I read a quote from one woman who was spending nearly $200/month on the magazines she read on the train!

Of course, there are costs to staying home as well, most notably the lost experience and contact with the industry that will ultimately result in lower wages when I return to the workforce, which could haunt me for the rest of my working life.

For now, I've decided to stay home a little longer.  Each day I feel my market value slipping away, but I try not to think about that because if I am already unmarketable after one year out of work I in danger of becoming a permanent housewife if I stay home too long.

The digital eye sees things differently

I recently attended a party with my son's playgroup.  After the party, one of the mothers generously gave everyone CDs of the photos her husband had taken with his new digital SLR (dSLR).  As I sat there scanning through the hundreds of photos, it slowly dawned on me that I would not have been able to take the equivalent photos with my digital camera.

The photos from the party were great.  The subjects, almost exclusively one year old babies, were in focus, caught in the moment of smiling, laughing, opening a present, stealing a cupcake, discovering a new toy.  The exposure was good, the colors were crisp, and the backgrounds were pleasingly fuzzy.  Like I said, I couldn't do this with my camera.

What's wrong with my camera.  The short answer is that it is about five years old.  Although has a pleasing feature set for an amateur photographer (also known as an enthusiast), including aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual exposure settings, manual focus, a zoom lens, a flash, a remote control, burst mode (with auto focus - which is increasingly uncommon these days), and spot metering, it is slow.

This is reason #1 why I couldn't have taken the photos; babies don't sit still for very long.  It's something I have been struggling with since my own baby started smiling.  It took weeks of trying before I was able to capture the moment for the grandparents to see.  So I started looking for a new camera (which is part of the reason the blog's been so quiet recently).  With everyone complaining about the slow speed of digital cameras, surely the designers had done something to improve it.

And they have.  I talked to some friends, asked strangers about the cameras they were using, found some reviews (if you're interested in really detailed reviews of digital cameras look at www.dpreview.com), and decided on one I liked.  It was smaller and lighter than my current camera, and it had a 12x optical zoom.  All I needed was to play with one a little to be sure it lived up to its hype, so I made a trip to the local camera shop and had a play.

It was peppy.  It was so much peppier than my current camera.  But my husband thought it could be better, so we asked to see a dSLR for comparison.  Actually, not any dSLR, but the same model used to take the photos at the party.  It was peppy.  It was very peppy.  And after taking a few photos with it, the compact camera felt just as slow the one I had at home.  As we walked out of the store, we concluded our next camera should be a dSLR.

Then we decided they were too expensive.

Since I was stuck with my old camera, I decided to revisit it's functions to make sure I was getting the most out of it.  After the shutter delay, my biggest gripe about my camera is the depth of field.  Imagine complaining about images being too focused, but that's what's been bugging me; I cannot take photos with a shallow depth of field.  This is reason #2 why I could not have taken the photos from the party with my camera.

Shallow depth of field: the subject is well focussed and everything else is blurry.

For those of you who aren't photography buffs, the depth of field of an image is the range of distances from the lens that appear crisp and focused.  It is commonly used to reduce the emphasis on parts of the image that are not relevant.  In the aforementioned pictures of the babies, it was the unfortunate background.  It is also commonly used to give a two dimensional image a three dimensional feel.

The traditional thought about depth of field is that it is inversely proportional to the size of the opening of the lens (aperture) so larger openings yield images with shallower depth of field and smaller openings produce images with more of the image in focus.  Aperture is measured as the ratio of the lens length to the diameter of the opening, therefore a longer lens has a larger opening than a shorter lens at the same aperture number.  The largest lens opening for a lens is always less than the length of the lens, and most lenses are three to five times as long as their largest aperture.

Using the aperture priority mode, I opened the lens as much as possible and took a few photos of my son.  Everything was in focus.  I tried getting closer, so the relative distance to the subject (my son) and the background was greater.  Everything was in focus.  I got even closer.  Now the background was slightly blurry, but still clearly distinguishable, and my son's face was starting to look distorted.  No matter what I did, I couldn't get a satisfyingly shallow depth of field.  Clearly there was more to it than just aperture.

The lens redirects scattered light onto the sensor, shown at left.  A shorter lens (top) makes a smaller image on the sensor, but a smaller sensor means the image can still be framed the same as with a larger lens and sensor combination (bottom).

When investigating digital cameras I came upon the term equivalent length, which means the length of lens on a 35mm camera that would produce the same field of view.  It's only natural that people would be interested in the equivalent length, since prior to the switch to digital cameras, nearly everyone used 35mm cameras and a large proportion of them had a sense of the field of view provided by a 28mm lens versus a 105mm lens.

One camera I looked at had a lens that was equivalent to 35mm at the wide end of its range, but it was actually only 6mm long.  This is accomplished by reducing the format size or sensor.  The image projected onto a small sensor does not need to be as large as the image projected onto a large sensor for the resulting picture to fill the same amount of the frame, so a smaller lens is used with a smaller sensor for equivalent framing. This camera's sensor was only 5.8mm across, or roughly 1/6 of 35mm.  But was this 6mm lens really equivalent to a 35mm lens?

I found a nice explanation of depth of field versus format size at www.wikipedia.com.  The smaller the sensor is, the deeper is the depth of field for a given aperture and equivalent lens length (where the camera is the same distance from the subject and the image is framed the same, assuming the same aspect ratio).

This is a really significant thing for photographers who want to use depth of field to their advantage to consider when selecting a camera.  My digital camera's sensor is 7.2mm across.  That means an image shot at 2 meters from the subject with a 35mm equivalent lens at F2.8 will have a total depth of field (from the near limit to the far limit of acceptable focus) of over 4 meters (according to the depth of field calculator found at www.dpreview.com), whereas with my film SLR it will be about 0.6 meters, and about a third of that with a 4"x5" format camera.  Let's put this into context, if the image is shot in my living room, the background would always be in focus on my digital camera, but nearly always fuzzy on my 35mm film camera.

So when you see a camera spec that states the lens length as 35-135mm equivalent, you should now know that it isn't.  As it turns out, only a few of the most expensive digital SLRs available on the market today have a sensor as large as 35mm film.  The vast majority of consumer digital cameras (as opposed to professional digital cameras) have sensors between 1/9th and 1/3rd as large.

Incidentally, I've just recently started getting prints of my digital photos and have discovered that they all have a blue cast (well, really it's cyan).  That's reason #3 I couldn't have taken the photos from the party.  Maybe I will get a new camera soon.

The death of free to air?

As mentioned in a previous post, I gave up watching TV.  There was a caveat, that I would watch one or two of the best shows (where "best" is entirely subjective).  Well, the new season has rolled around and the TV is still off, but the VCR is working pretty hard.  I've got it recording the one or two best shows every week and now have eight weeks of them on tape with the intention of watching them when I feel like watching TV.  So far, I've watched one hour.

Now, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is going to become a horrible mess, even with just two shows, trying to keep track of what's been watched and what hasn't, making sure the tape in the VCR has enough capacity, and is positioned in the right spot.  But technology comes to the rescue (or would, if I were earning money and could justify the expense) in the form of a digital video recorder (DVR).  Many of these little units (often paired with a DVD recorder) can record up to a hundred hours of TV, and allow you to pause and rewind live TV or start watching a show already in progress from the beginning while still recording the end, instantly navigate through your recordings by means of a menu (rather than having to scan through hours of programs to find the right spot), automatically select items to record using a broadcast guide, and provide a commercial skip function.  Why has it taken so long for these to be widely available?

Now, the commercial skip function is not a new idea.  It is nothing more than a 30 second fast forward that can be repeated a number of times and exists on my five year old Korean VCR.  The difference is that with digital content, it is possible to instantly skip an entire ad break of predictable length without even scanning the ads in fast motion.  Television broadcasters will have to become increasingly clever to force people to watch at least some of the ads.  My guess is that the length of ad breaks will vary more and shows will be scripted so that there can be more ad breaks.  There will be a premium on the last ad space in a break (or perhaps the last few in a longer break) as the first few will be able to be skipped more readily than the last without missing the return of the show.

As fewer people see the ads, they will become less useful marketing tools, and networks will have to become more creative about how to pay for the cost of purchasing or creating shows and delivering them to viewers.  Advertising will become increasingly insidious and difficult to avoid.  Shows will decrease in quality as they incorporate product placement to pay the bills, as seen in "The Truman Show" or "Survivor".

As people can watch whenever they want (after the initial broadcast) networks will no longer be able to use high profile shows to increase the viewership of the duds placed between them.  Whereas we may brighten up at the prospect of fewer bad TV shows, the reality is that there will be fewer good TV shows, because they are the ones that cost money to produce.  I suspect this will force free to air networks out of business or searching for a new profit model that includes either a subscription price (as with cable or satellite TV) or pay per view.

For those of you living in the US, the TiVo has been around for quite some time and provides the functions described above for a subscription.  In many areas of the US high proportions of people already subscribe to cable TV due to poor reception.  Not so in Australia, where cable TV does not include the free to air networks, but with only 2-6 free to air stations, depending on where you live in Australia, many people subscribe to cable just to have more choice.  My guess is that the growing availability of DVRs will be the death of commercial free to air TV.

Some people don't care for economic expansion

I just finished reading Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger, which is the story of the five years he spent exploring the Southern part of the Arabian Peninsula in the late 1940s.  On the surface, this is a book about an explorer traveling through the deserts of the Saudi Peninsula known as "The Empty Quarter" and is classified as a travel book.  But this book is significant because Thesiger was one of the first Westerners to travel the area, where he had the unique opportunity to live amongst Bedu and meet people from many of the tribes in the area.  Though he never learned to identify the tracks of his camel, he was a keen observer of the people he traveled with and among, and has documented the lifestyle and values of a people who are now almost extinct.

All of the people in the area were Muslim.  Many of the tribes he encountered were acutely xenophobic and anti-Christian.  Material possessions were few; his travel companions generally owned camels, guns, the shirt they were wearing, and little else.  Even settled tribes seemed to have very few possessions.  His travel companions were willing to kill for their tribe or traveling companions as a matter of honor.  They were generous to the point of poverty, always offering food to anyone they met while traveling, even if it meant they went without any food for the day or longer, and Thesiger's companions seemed incapable of saying no to a request, even if it threatened the provisions required to cross the desert.  It is also clear that there is great variation in degrees between different areas and tribes, with some not so concerned about Christians and others calling Thesiger's companions infidels because they were accompanied by a Christian.

In the five year period in which Thesiger completed his travels the area was in constant turmoil.  Tribal alliances were complex and the areas of conflict were constantly shifting.  Thesiger follows these tribal conflicts like a local, and recounts tribal conflicts that consolidated power and facilitated exploration for oil in the period between his travels and when he wrote the book.

The rigors of the desert created a society that differs dramatically from our own Anglo-Saxon society.  This book provides insight into where the Muslim religion was formed, and the growth of values that seem utterly foreign to many westerners, which is especially significant in the current climate of Christian-Muslim animosity and the global threat of terrorism. 

Thesiger aspired to define neither Arabs nor Muslims in this work.  However, his keen observations of the Bedu peoples amongst whom he traveled provide insight into the values of both.  Thinking back on my geography education, reading this book would have broadened my understanding of the Middle East far more than the chapters of our text book on the topic managed.  On top of all this, it details the challenge of crossing a desert five hundred miles across by foot, with only the provisions they could carry on their camels, amongst warring tribes.  It's well worth reading.

Recycled clothes to ease the travelers conscience

I bought a pair of high tech travel pants today, the kind where the material is partly composed of old plastic bottles.  The tag had a picture of the aforementioned bottles awaiting conversion into these pants.  As I started to examine the picture, I expected to see lots of Coke bottles; Coke is ubiquitous.  But I saw only one or two.  The vast majority of the bottles in the cage were water bottles.

I only rarely drink bottled water.  It is generally reserved for occasions when I need the bottle more so than the water.  I am fortunate enough to have lived my life in places where there is a safe supply of clean water delivered directly to my taps.  Mind you, I did start filtering my drinking water a few years ago when we lived in a house where the water ran brown for the first few seconds whenever you turned on the tap.  However, even when I travel, I usually drink the local water if I've been told by a local that it is safe (the one exception to this is when I visit my mother's house, where I can't stand the taste of the water after brushing my teeth).

A while back I went to Belize.  I spent nearly a week in a small town that would hardly exist if it weren't for the tourists.  On one of our excursions we noted that Coke was still delivered in glass bottles which were sent back to be refilled, but all the local tourists carried a disposable water bottle rather than a reusable bottle that they filled at their hotel.  Each of these disposable plastic bottles came with a little plastic cap to cover the mouth piece, which was further wrapped in plastic to keep it in place during shipping.  These bottles, caps, and little plastic wrappers were all over the roadside.

When I went to Spain a few years later, it was nearly impossible to get water that wasn't bottled; Restaurants didn't serve it and there were no drinking fountains.  The expectation was that everyone would purchase their drinking water in a bottle.  In fact, no matter how nice the restaurant, if you asked for water it was delivered to your table in its original plastic packaging, never decanted, so that it would be obvious that it was not tap water.  I guess this is for the same reason that bottles of wine are always opened in front of the customer.  I can imagine a stuffy old man quaffing his glass of water and puckering his lips as he says, "Hmm, a citrus bouquet, with rich mineral undertones."

About 90 billion liters of bottled water is consumed each year in the world.  The Italians drink the most per capita, but Americans now drink over 4 billion liters of it.  Friends of mine consume bottled water because they perceive it to be cleaner and more healthful than what is available through the tap.  It pays to take care when purchasing bottled water, though, because up to 40% of it comes from a tap.  When in the U.S., where community water supplies are among the cleanest in the world, it hardly seems worth the bother to get your water from a bottle rather than the tap.

Anyway, all this bottled water requires a lot of bottles.  In a place like small town Belize where they barely have garbage collection, the bottles are as good as garbage.  But in Australia and the U.S. they can be turned into pants that are designed to be worn on trips to exotic places with dubious water quality.  It's appropriate that the people creating all that plastic waste are the same ones purchasing the high tech pants.  It's too bad the recycled pants will reduce waste where the tap water is safe and not from the destinations where the pants are intended to be worn.

Why I'm teaching sign language to my child

I guess I'm not an entirely conventional mother.  One of the ways this evidenced itself was when I tried explaining to my child's day care minder that we were teaching him sign language.  She reacted with surprise; she had never heard of hearing parents teaching sign to a hearing child.

To be fair, I had never heard of teaching sign to a hearing child until I noticed a friend of mine had an uncanny ability to figure out what her daughter wanted even though she wasn't speaking.  Her daughter only knew about ten signs, but was using them to communicate valuable information.  As soon as I found out about this, I acquired copies of Baby Signs by Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn and Sign With Your Baby by Joseph Garcia.  Then it seemed like I was seeing references to baby sign all over the place: books at the bookstore, DVDs at the baby goods store, classes at the local community house, articles in the weekly baby newsletter.  Most of the women in my mother's group had heard of it, though I think I am the only one who is actually using it.  With all this exposure, I was surprised that someone in the childcare industry had not heard of it.

There area number of supposed advantages to teaching your child sign:

• It takes years for children to develop the oral skills to say all the sounds in their native language.  Manual dexterity develops much earlier and research suggests that infants develop the ability to use language before they develop the muscle coordination required to speak clearly.
• Learning to communicate at an earlier age reduces frustration for both the child and the parents.
• Using sign allows children to learn fundamentals of language earlier.  Garcia found that children who learn sign language are speaking about objects at the age when children who aren't using sign are only starting to identify objects.  Acredolo and Goodwyn concluded that babies using signs understood more words and learned to speak more easily than babies who weren't using signs.

My child can only say three words orally, but he's currently using at least five signs.  Like all children, these words have a much broader meaning than a fluent speaker would attribute to the same words.  For instance, the sign for potty may mean "I need to use the potty", "I have just peed", or "There's the potty".  But what a relief!  Instead of crying, if he has a sign for what he needs he silently moves his hands.  I no longer need to guess if he is thirsty or hungry.  When he signs "potty" I know he either needs to use the potty or needs a nappy change.  Sign hasn't turned him into the angel child; he still yells when he wants something or when he is unhappy, but only when he doesn't have a more effective way to communicate or doesn't get what he wants.

He seems to be so excited about being able to identify something and share that with us.  For instance, he recently started using the sign for "hat".  He now signs whenever he sees a hat or a helmet, not only when he wants to put one on or look at it more closely, but also as if to say "hey, I see a hat and I know what it is, and I can tell you that I know what it is."  This creates opportunities for conversation that would not have happened if he weren't initiating it.  These conversations expand his understanding of the world and of English.

As it would be when learning any language, my son's pronunciation is at times difficult to understand.  For instance, the sign for "more" can be confused with clapping (I'm still not sure which one he is using), and it took me at least a day to figure out his sign for drink.  But now that his pronunciation is familiar, it is becoming very easy to understand him.

When I first started this process, I used signs from ASL.  Then I started looking for variations because some signs are just too difficult for a young child with limited manual skills.  I'm not opposed to making up signs, as Acredolo and Goodwyn suggest, and as I learn to understand my son's "pronunciation" I realize that the official sign doesn't matter all that much as long as we understand what he's saying.  Since very few people he interacts with are likely to know sign, it doesn't really matter what signs we use.

It has taken very little effort to teach our son the signs he knows.  Because I own two books on baby sign, we have an accessible reference to learn new signs ourselves.  Then it is just a matter of using them at the right moment.  As my son learns more signs and expands his interest in the world, I learn more signs to share with him.

All I want for Christmas is a pizza cooker

I recently noted at the local home wares shop a window full of pizza cookers.  This appliance looks like a  large, round sandwich griller.  I can't imagine why anyone would prefer to own a specialized appliance just to cook pizza rather than use their oven.  Everyone already has an oven.  Pizza cookers require storage space and are probably harder to clean than the pan you use in the oven.

Each year I note a new appliance like this on the market, something that is essentially the same as an existing, and possibly even useful appliance (I do find the sandwich griller very useful), but in a different shape or size.  They are supposed to allow you to prepare something that you already prepare some other way.  They quickly end up gathering dust in the most inaccessible cupboard available.

Why don't the home wares companies ever come up with something truly innovative.  I'm waiting for someone to develop a compact, energy and space efficient system to wash and dry Ziploc bags.  That's something I'd pay $100 for.