In no particular order:
This being a dad thing is going to work out just fine.
At just a little after 6am this morning (after just three hours of labor!) my wife gave birth to our first child, William Jeffrey Biesnecker (???), a 2.95kg (6.5lb) baby boy. While we weren’t expecting him to pop out quite so soon (the due date was July 13), both baby and mommy are doing fine. The nurses say he’s an eater — he goes through those 20ml milk meals like they were appetizers for the main course — and he’s barely cried even once (though we’ll see how he does tonight).
The delivery went smoothly, and my wife is expecting to stay in the hospital until Monday or maybe Tuesday. Her parents are staying with her during the day, and I’m going to be there at night.
The photo is of Will taken about 3 hours after delivery — he takes after his mom which, I think we can all agree, is a good thing given the options 
Thanks to everyone for their e-mailed, twittered, SMSed, and Facebooked well-wishes!
ItalianPod launched yesterday, joining ChinesePod, SpanishPod, and FrenchPod in the Praxis Language family of language products. Catherine and Marco have been a joy to work with, and their energy comes through in the podcasts (check out their first lesson, You Need a Girlfriend — it’s fantastic).
Having them around is enough to make me want to learn at least a little Italian, so I have been, working their lessons into my study. After reading this post on All Japanese All the Time and doing some research into how Rosetta Stone works (and has become successful) for work, I wanted to try incorporating images into my Anki flashcards to see how it affected recall, and decided to start with Italian.
So far I’m enjoying the addition — while it is time consuming, I think combining mediums is important when learning, and it certainly makes reviewing my flashcards more enjoyable (I crack up every time I see that poor cat). I’m adding photos to all (or at least most — some concepts just don’t lend themselves well to being represented by images) of my flashcards, and I should know in a few months whether or not it improves recall enough to offset the time it takes to create the cards (my gut says it does, though).
Yesterday it rained hard, twice (once in the afternoon and again at night), the sort of rain that punctuates every Central Florida afternoon but is seldom seen in Shanghai. We were thankfully inside during both, and were able to enjoy the thunder and lightning without any of the side effects.
Today it’s wet and muggy, the rain seeming to have none of the cleansing effect that rain should by all rights have.
Post: Is self-preservation a firing offense?, by Joel Martinsen. Danwei, 1 June 2008.
If running out of a classroom at the beginning of an earthquake and leaving your students behind is OK, asks Fan, then why is writing about it not? Maybe because saying things like “I’d save my daughter before I saved my mother, and I wouldn’t sacrifice myself for anyone else” makes you look like like a morally reprehensible bastard? There are probably quite a lot of us who would, in the situation Fan faced, do the same thing (it’s hard to predict how you’d react in an emergency until you’re in one) — but I hope we’d at least be able to eek out an apology.
Article: China’s Cyber-Militia, by Shane Harris. National Journal Magazine, 31 May 2008
The idea that PLA hackers are behind a pair of cascading power failures (including North America’s largest ever blackout) is an extreme one, but given the Chinese interest in asymmetric warfare it makes sense. I have no doubt that the military and industrial espionage described in the article occurs, and I would be ashamed and upset to discover that we aren’t giving as good as we are getting.