Unfortunately either he was thinking of someone else, he got it wrong, or I was blabbering in some state of sleep deprivation (all quite possible). I read a number of books. They were all crap. I could have written them. That should tell you something.

And so without further ado, my Guide for New Dads:

1. Never drop the baby. Ever.
2. Bath time is inherently dangerous, buy protective stuff and see rule 1.
3. Don’t worry about the baby, take care of Mom and everything else takes care of itself.
4. Do some cooking and cleaning you lazy bum.
5. If you do 3 and 4 she will let you sleep more, this is all that matters in your life.
6. Have your own baby time when you can have fun and let Mom sleep, this reduces the chance of Mom accidentally/intentionally killing you.
7. Dirty diaper containment systems/furnaces/hermetic sealing systems are overkill for year 1

In all seriousness though, it’s both amazing and overwhelming. I was having a tough time dealing around six months and found inspiration in these words from a man called Warrior:

“A father does it ALL — and he never once whines or complains about being blessed with the privilege and honor to do so. He doesn’t try to find a way out or around. He wakes each day and simply handles whatever it is that is going on in his life.”

Last week I read an article where a reporter asked Steve Jobs about having kids, he said it was “10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done”. Congratulations and enjoy the ride! I have to get back to work…

On the Family front I took a hit by not taking a summer vacation. Between starting a new job, juggling the finances and trips back to the Berkshires it wasn’t in the cards this year. I’m also behind on the College Fund, but we have some plans underway to straighten out the cash flow situation that are moving forward.

On target on the Personal front, getting coached on running has paid huge dividends, live music was a big part of the summer, and I am actually in decent shape. I’ve given up on a specific weight number because I have been lifting a lot more and have been gaining weight while losing inches. As long as I see some semblance of abs and my clothes fit, I score that as accomplished. Q4 is a huge challenge to face though, the one-two punch of crappy weather and holiday food makes this the tough one, but the good news is I am ready to go this year instead of being behind.

Financial goals are actually in decent shape thanks to the sleazy practice of keeping the college fund over in the family goals, really nothing to do for this in Q4 but try and control spending enough to save a bit.

Professional is in good shape with work going well and my first draft of a book done. Marketing Over Coffee is still growing but pretty slowly, it takes a back seat to work and the book but it’s much better than a hobby that burns cash.

That’s about it, on to the rest of the year. I hope your Q4 goes well.

Once you figure out what you like it’s hard to beat the price of Bed, Bath and Beyond when you have some of the coupons that they send out all the time. Surprisingly my favorite drink is the Lime Berry Green Tea, which is getting difficult to find so I’ve been hoarding it. On the coffee side I like Emril’s and Timothy’s as well as the (more expensive) Dunkin’ Donuts brand.

Although the coffee is superb, there has been some trouble with the machine. Occasionally we’d have a problem with short filling – a cup of coffee getting 2 oz or so less that normal. After some experimenting I found two solutions online, one is to beat on it, which actually does work, but the real fix is to leave it on 24/7. One theory is that when the chamber cools you get a vapor lock that the pump has a hard time overcoming. I don’t know about that but I do know that once we turned off the auto-shutoff we were never short filled again.

About 2 weeks ago when I would push the medium cup button it would activate the setup menu. It must have been some kind of short because two weeks later it died completely. It was still under warranty so I sent them proof of ownership and got a new B60-WR yesterday. It looks like a new model because it’s not on the website and the reservoir has a new shape that protrudes out over the drip tray. Obviously there was much celebrating upon the return of the coffee machine.

I only had to send the K-Cup holder back, they said I could dispose of the rest. I had already checked out opening one up and upgrading the pump when it was short cupping but I didn’t bother since it was under warranty. Everywhere I could find info said that the machine was not made to be opened, and I only read one story of a brave soul who replaced a pump. Since I now had one to throw away I thought I would open it up and check it out. You can see the pictures of the Keurig Autopsy here. Most importantly, if you are looking for how to open your Keurig you’ll see my hand written diagram on where you’ll need to drill to get the top open. There are 3 tabs, much like those that lock a car door panel to the frame, that you’ll have to drill to get to, otherwise it’s not possible to open without breaking. You’ll need a hole just under a half inch and have to pull the tabs outward, but you may just want to drill them out, they’re not very flexible. There’s also a bunch of screws to remove before you need to unfasten the tabs, it literally is more work than the thing is worth.

As you can see from the other pictures it’s a marvel of engineering. I now doubt the story of the guy who repaired a pump since there are no fewer than FOUR pumps inside of it. It has 3 boards and about a quarter mile of tubing. I love the thing and was even more impressed seeing how it’s put together. The only thing I would change would be to make a premium one that could be repaired, I’m sure it’s not the best business model but it would be a fun project to mess around with. Of course the risk of home brew high pressure boiling liquid accidents might have something to do with that business model decision…

If you rotate your ipad the display will rotate so that it is always right side up, it even stretches or contracts depending on if you are in portrait or landscape view. This can be a problem if you are in bed reading while lying on your side, or if you have apps that you never want to go into portrait mode (I have an IM client that only shows 2 columns in portrait mode and I always want to see 3). Currently there are two ways to rotate lock – go into settings and set the side switch to lock rotation, or another trick: Double click the menu button and you’ll get a pop-up menu. Swipe the toolbar one screen to the right and you’ll see a rotate lock button on the far left (note that if you set the side switch to lock rotation this button becomes a mute button).

This also got me thinking of other tricks I’ve picked up:

Apostrophe: Being a grammar geek, I use apostrophes often. If you touch the ! and , key and swipe up you’ll get an apostrophe.

Screen Shot: If you hold down the button then click the on/off switch you’ll take a screenshot that shows up in your photo library. You can then click and email it anywhere.

Auto-pause: I plug my iPad into my car radio aux jack and realized that when you are done you don’t have to pause the music, pulling the headphone jack out automatically pauses the music.

1080P Video: The iPad will not play 1080P (because resolution that high on a 10 inch screen is not noticeable compared t0 720p), but I’m not really into re-encoding HD stuff just to carry on the iPad. Good Reader will play 1080p files (of course they are huge, but I’ll take that over re-rendering).

Bookmarking: You can bookmark any webpage to have an icon on your home screen just as if it was an app. Browse to the page you want, touch the box with the arrow icon to the left of the URL, and click “Add to Home Screen”

and, Dvorak keyboard layouts are supported if you use the bluetooth (or the stand version) Apple keyboard.

If you have any other tricks please share. Thanks!

About two years ago I learned that my friend Adam was running every day in his Vibram 5 Finger Shoes. I considered this impossible, as I would have to rest at least one day after every run to get over the aches and pains and let my feet rest. He got into it from Born to Run, and incredible book that I would recommend to anyone interested in running. It talks about technique, but most of all it’s a fantastic story about “The Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen”.

Speaking of fantastic stories, Adam’s is pretty wild too, a guy who at one point weighed over 350 and now is under 200 and training for an Ultra-Marathon (50 miles I think).

I enjoy being barefoot on the weekends so one day we went out to lunch in Lexington and we hit the running store so I could get a set of vibram 5 finger shoes to walk around in.

It was crazy, I was still running in my regular shoes but it changed my stride enough that my knee pain went away. The shoes force you to land on the middle of your foot, if you try to heel strike you realize that after about 3 strides you are destroying your entire skeleton. There is a lot of writing and religious discussion out there as to whether the running shoe and the heel strike is one of the greatest frauds of the last century, I can only judge by my own results.

This year one of my personal goals was to get some training on running form and check it out more. While looking for a coach I found a group that was running a full day clinic at a triathlon expo in Cambridge and spent a day in March with Vince, studying Chi Running, which is in line with what Born to Run is talking about (there’s also Chi Walking, if running is not your thing). I’m still too chicken to run in the VFF’s (I’m still well over 200) so I got a set of Newton Shoes which are a minimalist shoe, they are neutral (no raised heel), which makes them feel flat and much lighter than everything I’ve ever run in. I thought that I would have to adjust to those but from day 1 my feet felt so much better that I’ve never gone back.

If you decide to check this out don’t make the mistake I’ve heard many people make – wearing them as your new shoes. You have to consider wearing them as a workout, I started with short walks with the dog, building up over 6 months to the point where I could wear them all day. Just for walking around, never for running. I’ve had more than one person tell me “I wore them for a day and I was crippled, injured, hobbled, etc…”. From looking at them if they spent a full day in the gym they’d be in the same condition. How about giving 20 minutes a shot first considering that you’ve spent your entire life with your feet in casts?

The results have been amazing, in a 9k race that I started the season off with both this year and last year I was 7 minutes faster. It used to take me two days to recover, I couldn’t run without taking a rest day for my feet and back, now I feel like I could run at lunch after a morning run. Last year nine miles a week was average, I can do 20 a week running faster with less effort, and less pain. Sometimes I even enjoy it. My only regret is that I didn’t change my technique a long time ago. Better yet, I’m glad I never had my toenail removed – for the first time in years it looks normal.

1. Get the dust out. I never used forced air cans anymore, always a vacuum cleaner. They both do a decent job but the forced air just moves the grime to some other (hopefully not worse) place, the vac solves the problem. The key here is put the screws and parts somewhere far away from where you are vacuuming.
2. While you have the box open check to see how much these upgrades would be: more memory, bigger hard drive if necessary, solid state drive if cost effective. These three updates can give huge performance boosts.
3. When working on a machine, especially laptops, if you Google hard enough you’ll find PDFs that the manufacturer’s have for their tech people that show you, step by step, in detail how to do most common tasks like replace drives, memory and laptop screens. Sometimes you will find similar stuff on YouTube (usually from people selling the parts you’ll need).
4. Remove keyboard grime with Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. I used to just suck it up and buy a new keyboard every 3 years or so, they are cheap enough and tend to get gross. Mr. Clean has changed that, I have been using a Microsoft Natural Keyboard for almost 10 years now. You can pop off the keys and wash them in a bucket of cleaner with a brush, vacuum the case out and wipe out the wrist rest grunge with the eraser.
5. I also discourage Bluetooth or wireless mice and keyboards. I’ve never had a cabled set fail on me, but have had plenty of situations where people forget they need to change the batteries in them and are wondering why they are getting weird behavior. I’m also comforted by this as it proves that even though I like to clean stuff I am not compulsive (like people that buy wireless components because they can’t stand to have a cord on their desk).
6. Drill – Just like the pit crew, having a drill with a phillips head tip makes it a lot faster and easier to get cases open and shut. Two things here – spend the money for one with a clutch so you can set the torque instead of stripping screws, and you can usually get a spring extension so if you bend it around a corner – very useful in tight situations.
7. External Hard Drive Enclosure – Two reasons for this – if you are upgrading a hard drive you will use this to clone the new drive so you don’t have to install everything from scratch, or if you are virus busting you can pull the drive from an infected machine and plug it in on some other spare machine to pull the data and not have to deal with whatever stupid reason windows is not booting up (please, not YOUR primary machine for the love of all that is holy, I’ve never seen a cross infection, but that’s nothing to play with). For $30 this one does both the big drives in tower machines, and the smaller laptop 2.5 inch form factor.
8. Rescue thumbdrive  – I have a 16GB stick with a bunch of common tools that I may need to try first before ripping a machine apart.
9. Backups – since it’s family and most of the time I’m upgrading a hard drive, I keep the old drive as backup (or when virus hunting, I usually pull their data to an external drive and then do a clean install, I’ve never found repairing an infected machine to be worth the time it takes). Odds are, even though you tell them every time they have a disaster, they are not doing it. While you are doing that throw in all the PDFs you found in #3.
10. Set minimum thresholds for your IT organization. I used to keep all kinds of spare parts and spend time working on machines over 6 or 7 years old, now I tell people to bite the bullet when I’m going to have to order special parts and can’t guarantee that something else won’t crap out in the next 6 months. Don’t have eSATA hard drives? Time to replace it. I’m also reaching a point that if one of my nieces or nephews doesn’t step up I may say I only support Mac. I’m just not up for spyware battles anymore.

Any tricks/tips you’re using?

Knowing how to sharpen the saw is one of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (which is only $3.99 for the Kindle by the way). Doing some work prior to stepping on the battlefield can tilt the outcome to your favor. For anyone who is a knowledge worker, maintaining your computer equipment is the equivalent of keeping your guns clean. Odds are, as a reader of this blog you are also your family’s IT department, keeping the fleet running.

Over the years I’ve picked up a few tricks on maintaining machines, and during time spent working with the differences that show up in an image on screen vs. in print, I have learned the value of a good screen.

A dirty screen creates eye fatigue, if you aren’t cleaning your screen on a regular basis wait until you have a good layer of dust and clean it up at the end of a long day. You’ll be surprised to see how it takes a load off your eyes.

How to clean it is another question. For years I have used Bausch & Lomb Sight savers, single wipes like the napkins you get at better BBQ joints (better as in food, not as in fancy). These have alcohol in them and they were great for cleaning CRTs, but I’ve heard mixed statements about using them on plastic LCDs. I’ve never noticed a problem or had any scratches, but after 3 years I tend to have either bulb problems where the monitor is not as bright as it has been, or other issues with laptop displays which require a replacement.

Recently I purchased TV Armor, a plastic shield that goes over the TV so now my son can throw Thomas the train at it all day without harming it. It came with a two stage wipe from Brillianize, which did a very nice job so I decided to buy more and run a test of the Bausch & Lomb vs. Brillianize vs. Klear Screen Travel Singles. I was surprised by the results, the key is not in the application of the cleaning fluid, but in getting it all off the surface afterwards. The Bauch & Lomb wipes (from my local BJ’s warehouse) do a good job if it’s not really dirty (or greasy), and if you keep wiping until it’s evaporated. If you wipe quickly and stop it will remain streaky.

Brillianize and Klear Screen are almost exactly the same. The Klear Screen wet wipes are a bit thicker than the Brillianize, but not by much. The dry wipes from Klear Screen are thicker but have a more cotton texture that left some residue not on the screens but on other surfaces such as laptop cases. The Brillianize dry wipes are more of a paper and leave no residue (even cleaning up the Klear Screen residue).

What made a huge difference was that the Klear Screen came with an iKlear, a small Antimicrobial Microfiber cloth. I thought this was all hype until I used it, it took more of the cleaning agent off the surface than either of the dry wipes and gave my laptop and iPad an amazingly clean surface. Once the grime is off with the cleaner if you are only wiping fingerprints the cloth does fine on its own. Since then I have noticed the staff my local Apple store using a similar cloth to wipe down their gear to get rid of “fried chicken fingers” off the hardware.

I have another post I’ll drop in a day or so about other cleaning things I’ve tested, but that’s it for screen cleaning.

PS – I’ve learned that screens are like photographic gear, the more you spent the better they are. There’s a reason why the Apple Cinema Displays cost so much, and it’s the same reason why film and photo editors use them. From my own anecdotal evidence I’ve found that I’ve only needed screen calibrators on cheap or really old monitors. If you spend enough up front and upgrade after a few years, calibration is never an issue.

No real movement on the family front, the big goals there are to get the summer vacation in order and visit my brother, both of which are still in the planning phase. I also need to find a huge pile of cash to get back on track with little man’s college fund, that will prove difficult given the current cash flow situation of the full time mom (a sacrifice that is well worth it in my mind).

On the personal front my fitness and weight loss goals are on track – primarily thanks to mid-foot strike and no processed flour and sugar except for my cheat day. I also had my “fun” goal of seeing some live music (was it really 3 years since I’ve been to a concert?) which I did with the power of the 80′s – Peter Gabriel and Def Leppard.

Financial goals are on track thanks to Run to Home Base, that raised a big chunk of my donation goal, and another donation that will involve us visiting the set of Extreme Home Makeover, which will be excellent.

Work is going very well, in the hobby section the podcast model needs a bit of tweaking, but writing is taking precedent this quarter.

One change I made this year was to hit my weight goal by end of Q3, because it’s foolish to think I’m going to lose weight with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the end of outdoor running in Q4 (all I want to do is maintain, and that gives me some cushion if I’m not at 100% by end of Q3). Only one other bummer, I missed the deadline for the Falmouth Road Race, which would have been my 10th. I may have to get the black Trans Am to go bandit.

Boxwave from Round 1 with Newcomers Acase 2 and Pogo Sketch 2

A while ago I wrote a post about the best stylus for the iPad. Since then I have run more than 10 styluses through the paces. If you want the backstory check out the other post. If you are just looking for the punchline – here it is:

At the time I rated the rubber tip styluses as the best. When you take them out of the box, they have a great smooth feel. The problem is that over time they wear out. From what I’ve observed, after a couple of months of heavy use the tip gets smoother, which then causes it to stick to the screen more and get more difficult to use. For two of them it got to the point where the tips tore because of the friction.

Fortunately, just like Balboa in Rocky 3, one of the best that got smacked down has returned better than ever – the Pogo Sketch. It uses a fabric tip that is not as fast as the new rubber tip, but is faster than the rubber tip after one month – and it stays that fast. The Pogo Sketch was the first stylus I had tested and my favorite until the plastic clip broke off, the new version has a metal clip so it looks like that problem has been solved.

The other new one I tested is the Acase 2. The same rubber tip, but a bit smaller, and a leash so you can plug it into your headphone jack (I’m not really psyched about doing that since if something goes wrong there you are screwed). It also makes some noise and I’m not into the whole jingle bell thing outside of December.

I’ll give it another six months and we’ll see how it goes.

Goals for Q1 2011

The first quarter has already come and gone, and thankfully it took the snow with it. On my quarterly goals things are looking very good, financially the taxes are done and charitable donations are on track thanks to the Run to Home Base (wouldn’t it be great to sponsor me to support Veterans with traumatic brain injury and PTSD?).

Family goals are on track with a big summer trip to catch up with everyone, the personal goals are going well thanks to training on my running technique – ChiRunning which has allowed me to both increase my amount of training and reduce fatigue at the same time. It took me a while to come up with my one “Something Fun” goal, until last month when tickets went on sale for Peter Gabriel and Def Leppard -  my fun will be a summer 80′s revival. Work is going well and Marketing Over Coffee continues to be a lot of fun with the LinkedIn group picking up steam.

I’m glad I stopped to look back because it seems like this last quarter has been  a whole lot of pain, but at least a lot got done. How was Q1 for you?