Now that Blake's crawling...

Don't you think it's time to put him to work?  Introducing, THE BABY MOP:

How cool is this?

The best valentine ever... I think?

I got pretty excited when my wife sent me an online valentine.  Then I opened it and found this:

For those of you non-techies out there Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, and the genius behind the iPod and iPhone.

Go Steve!  He got his name on a Valentine delivered to thousands of women (and men) he doesn't know.

Private tour of The Children's Hospital

BlogFrog enables and improves online communities. As part of that, we also want to improve offline communities as well. This month we're raising money for Haiti, and in December we did a fundraiser on behalf of The Children's Hospital.

We were thrilled when The Children's Hospital invited us on a private tour on behalf of our users. The Children's Hospital serves the sickest children in a 9 state region. It has the only Level 3C Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in the state.

model of the children's hospital made entirely out of legos

The tour was fascinating. The attention to detail is amazing. No wheelchairs - only red wagons. Art is placed at the kids eye level. Each floor has a "pain free" play area where no medical procedures are allowed (this play area is funded completely by donations). Every room has an XBox 360 for a sense of normalcy for older patients.

the 3 buildings in the distance are nothing but lab space - 1.1 Million sq feet!

The Childrens Hospital is about more than treating sick kids, they also have huge research and advocacy efforts. They have over 1.1 Million square feet of lab space where they are researching curues for the most dibilitating diesieses. They run huge advocacy campaigns to prevent child abuse - since at Children's child abuse is the #1 cause of trauma death (can you believe it?)

The technical highlight of the tour for me was the touring the Gate Analysis Lab. This is a room where they combine infrared sensors and cameras with a pressure sensitive floor to diagnose motor impairments in children. Take a look:

Rustin Banks at Children's Hospital from Holly Hamann on Vimeo.


BlogFrog Newsletter Feb 2010 from Holly Hamann on Vimeo.
Our newsletter from The Childrens Hospital

That was our amazing tour. Tune in this week for lessons learned from the Mom 2.0 Summit in Houston Texas.

Top 10 things Blissdom did right

I learned a ton about blogging and life from the Blissdom conference.  Another post will talk about what I learned about blogging.  This post is about the conference itself.  Following are the top 10 things the conference organizers, Alli and Barbara, and Paula really nailed:

1. Opening keynote by a non-blogger
It was certainly a risky move to open a blogging conference with a motivational speaker rather than a blogger, but the gamble paid off big time.  Kevin Carroll set a tone of inspiration and tone that lasted the entire conference.  The first brilliant move by Alli and Barbara. 

2.  Minimize the choices 
Instead of having many panels in small rooms, Blissdom had just 2 tracks in two rooms.  This made the choices easy and minimized the number of conflicts when you wanted to be in 2 (or 3 or 4) places at once.

3.  Late Breakfast
After a late night of socializing (oh I mean networking), the last thing someone wants to do is get up early.  At Blissdom there was plenty of time to get decent sleep, and still get to eat breakfast.

4.  Location, location, location
At Blissdom the location left all the attendees breathless.  I think it's safe to say that most of us never knew that anything like the Gaylord Opryland with its 3 indoor terrariums ever existed.  And the room was the cheapest I've paid for any conference.

5.  Organizers you can relate with
Many times you feel that conference organizers are a little separated from the attendees.  At Blissdom this wasn't true.  When Alli speaks, she instantly connects on the attendee level (if she isn't crying that is ;)

6. Central Location
I met very few people who flew over 2 and a half hours to get to the conference.

7.  Brands that "get it"
The brands that expo'd at Blissdom were some of the more savvy I have seen.  They got the space and knew how to interact at a conference.  A whole post dedicated to the brands is coming later.

8.  Not too much focus on swag
At these conferences there is a temptation to really focus on the free stuff.  Blissdom did a great job of minimizing this.

9.  Multi-media during panels
Panels are very interactive experiences and you need to be able to present audio-visual helps and cues.  This is the first conference I've seen where the panelists were allowed to display slides, videos, or demos.

10.  No "celebrity" cliques
Everyone was very accessible.  There was very much a feeling of common ground where nobody was above anybody else.  

Blissdom was a great conference that I highly recommend.  Coming up, the things I learned about Blogging @ Blissdom.  Stay tuned!

Blogging about Blissdom from 40,000 feet

I’m now in the mile high blogging club.  The plane doesn’t have wireless, but through the magic of Live Writer (which I have a love hate relationship with) this post will hit as soon as we have a wireless connection again.

 

I have my headphones on, but nothing is coming out of them because I have no music on this laptop.  Those of you that know me, know I love to talk, but the guy next to me has not stopped talking since I sat down.  Literally I think I have said two words.

Now he's telling me about the Tea Party convention with Sarah Palin which was held in the same hotel we were in.

   

Blissdom was an amazing conference for me personally and for BlogFrog.  The things I learned will stay with me for a long time.  I just wrote two other posts that I scheduled throughout the week so stay tuned for my take on the conference!  

4 Steps to keep your family calendar in sync

Like everyone, we have busy schedules.  That’s why we need synchronized calendars.  The problem is that I (and most people in the work force) use the calendar in Microsoft Outlook.  Outlook does not play well with other calendars.  Here’s how we got around that.  (Now that I think about it – this would make a great post for “Works For Me Wednesday”, a great blog carnival hosted by We Are That Family where every Wednesday people post tips about what works for them.

 

Step 1.  You and your spouse each sign up for Google Calendar:

Step 2.  Share your calendars with each other. 

Login to calendar and click settings in the upper right.  Then click the shared settings:

Under “share with specific people” enter your spouses email address and select the option to “Make Changes to Events”.  This means your spouse can see your calendar and add events to your calendar (important).

 

Step 3.  Add events to each others calendars

Now that you have access to each others calendars, you can start filling them out.

 

If you need your spouse to know about a certain event, you can add it to their calendar as well.  There are two ways to do this, you can either “invite them to the event” or you can create an event, click “edit details” then change the calendar to your spouses calendar.  This will make it automatically show up on their calendar.

Step 4.  Synchronize with Outlook

Now you can see each others calendars, but it doesn’t do any good if your spouse uses Outlook, because he/she will never see your new calendar.  The trick here is to have your spouse install Google Calendar sync.  This will sync up his/her Outlook calendar and the new Google Calendar you created.

Works for me!  What do you do to stay in sync?

Why Megapixels don't matter and other consumer myths debunked

I got some great feedback on my post last week about the shady business model of inkjet printers (they give-away the printer then markup the ink), so I thought I could post this week about some other consumer "myths".    

As consumers, we're always looking for "figures of merit" to make it easy to tell if one product is better than the other product.  Sometimes these figures of merit are easy to understand and thus make clear sense like the size of a TV (wow you got a 72" plasma, mine is only 52").

Many times with technology products the figures of merit are harder to understand and thus can be misleading about what is really better.  Here are three areas where people commonly get duped by the figure of merit.

1. Computers.  It used to be that you could pretty much judge how fast a computer was by it's processor speed.  A 750 MHz processor was better than a 500 MHz processor.  This is simply not true anymore.  The true "speed" of a computer is determined by complicated things like the "processor architecture, size and speed of RAM, and graphics hardware.   Manufacturers are mostly to blame - instead of labeling processors according to their true power, they complex pseudo names like "core 2 duo" or "core i5".    

Bottom line: When buying a computer "Gigahertz" doesn't matter, look at other things like processor type, RAM, and graphics support (dedicated is better than integrated).

2.  Internet Speed.  A 20 Mbps DSL line is going to be "faster" than 7 Mbps Cable, right?  Mbps stands for "Mega-bits-per second" and is a measure of how fast information flows, but it is not the dominant factor in determining how fast an internet experience you are going to have.  When you are surfing the internet, the web sites you visit usually can't send information faster than 3 Mbps.  So even if you could theoretically download at 20 Mbps, websites are never going to send information faster than 3 Mbps.  The last thing to consider is "latency".  This is how fast the internet responds before it starts sending information.  Many times this latency can have a much bigger impact on internet speed than the download speed.  In other words, a 100 Mbps connection with a high latency could be slower than a 5 Mbps connection.

Bottom line: Anything faster than 5 Mbps is probably overkill - ask your provider about latency.

3.  Compact Digital Cameras  
This one is my favorite because I used to design imaging systems for satellites.  Cameras are complicated, so the figure pushed by manufacturers is the "Megapixels".  A 10 Megapixel camera takes better pictures than a 3 Megapixel camera.  Not true.

A pixel is a tiny dot that can represent a color.  Your computer monitor is made up of pixels.  My laptop has a resolution of 1280 X 800 which means it has 1280 pixels in each row and 800 rows for a total of about 1 Million pixels or 1 Megapixel.  It works the same way with cameras and you can start to see the problem.  If I take a 10 Megapixel picture, how do I even look at it on a 1 Megapixel screen?

Furthermore, point-and-shoot digital cameras are limited by something called Modulation Transfer Function or MTF.  This means that the lenses in point-and-shoots are so small and cheap, that they blur the scene across multiple pixels anyway.  So a 10 Megapixel point and shoot camera takes just as good of pictures as a 3 Megapixel.  So why do they make 10 Megapixel point-and-shoots?  Because you will buy them over the 3 Megapixel camera.  If fact, you can't even buy a 3 Megapixel camera anymore.  Notice that this is untrue for SLR's (the big cameras) because they have big lenses with a much better MTF, so they can actually use all the pixels.

Bottom line: Anything over 3 Megapixels in a compact camera is a waste

That's it!  I hope you enjoyed this weeks consumer myths debunked!