Netflix, Please Stop Offering my Toddler Dexter

Dear Netflix,

I have been using your service for a long time now. I love your prices. I love getting little red movie envelopes in the mail. I love your scalable model. I love the fact that I can have a huge queue of movies and not have to start the decision process over again every time I walk into the store. Recently, I have also been enjoying some movies or TV shows on demand. Your streaming service is excellent.

Over the years that I have been using your service, my family has grown. I now have two kids. My toddler loves watching shows streamed from you. Since both I, and my toddler, love watching shows on your service, I have a problem.

Dexter, specifically, is my current problem. He is crafty. He plans ahead. He shows up in the recently viewed list right along side shows full of animated diggers and back hoes. 

From reviewing your site, I only see the option of blocking myself from watching movies above a particular rating. This is a nice feature, but cutting off the ability to watch instant shows does not feel too good. Any chance of offering a streaming account for kids? Just another set of credentials for a customer that already has unlimited access already? Having visibility into the account to only show shows that are rated appropriately based on who is currently signed on would be awesome.

Your Loyal Customer,

Jacob Taylor

Invited to "Waiting for Superman"

I follow Tim Ferris. A few days ago, he sent out an invitation to Waiting for Superman. I have been heads down building my new company and I figured this was actually part of the Superman franchise. I watched the trailer. Yikes!

I need to see this movie. According to the trailer, the US is near last among the industrialized nations in many areas (math being one.) The one area where US is the top: Confidence. Ouch. It is too easy to correlate what people say with the results these days. Confidence without follow through is a recipe for disaster.

Worried for the future and our children.
Jacob

Thanks for All the Hits

Last month was a stellar month for my blog.

First, it was the 2 year anniversary of the blog. I had no idea. I will post more often.

Second, last month we had more hits than in the previous 47 months.

For the first time in quite a while, How to Zoom on Amazon Kindle, is no longer the top article for the month. That prize has now fallen to: Does Anybody Think Messing with a Drivers Reality is a good idea? Thankfully almost nobody is running around querying Google for "Messing with driver reality". The traffic came from my Twitter followers (@thejacobtaylor), FeedBurner readers, and referrals from: Lenore Skenazy

Lenore, you have quite the interesting blog. I agree that we spend far too much time with our kids locked up in little boxes worrying in fear if there is a possibility that they can get hurt on an inside corner. That being said, sometimes, just sitting there watching the kids playing can be aerobic exercise.

Today, I watched two little boys get in a disagreement over a doll. They each grabbed a limb and started to pull. This bothered me. When one of them made a fist and started to pummel the other one in the face, I got them to stop immediately. I still have not figured out what to do in situations like this. Neither of these children were mine. Both had parents within about 100 feet. In fact, I later heard one of the parents complaining to the child that was being punched in the face repeatedly about his name calling. I am not entirely sure that he was paying enough attention to the furious motion on the play structure. He looked up after I made it clear that activity had to stop but, kids being kids, it stopped much faster than it takes for a human head to rotate. As it was, neither kid appeared to be getting hurt and they stopped after hearing my voice. I am thinking that they heard that if they did not stop hitting each other in about 5 seconds I would be there with one in each hand.

Just to clarify, when I wrote the title of this blog entry, "Thanks for all the Hits." I had not intended to share  the punching story. I am leaving the title because brutal puns are apparently part of my nature.

Thank you for reading.

If you write in English and you have thoughts that don't involve endorsing a product or a link farm, please feel free to comment.

Jacob

Does anybody think messing with a driver's reality is a good idea?

3D Image of Child Chasing Ball

Illusion in Street Tries to Change Driver's Attitude

Can you imagine driving down the road and seeing this image? It looks like a child, right in front of you. If you were distracted, you have only seconds to decide. Should I swerve into oncoming traffic or into the tree, or drive straight over the child. Personally, for me, I am pretty sure what the answer is. First, protect the defenseless child, second, protect the passengers in my car (if any), third protect other drivers. Please note that the odds of me just running over the "child" are really low.

On the other hand, there is a chance that I could be suspicious of the optical illusion. Now you are forcing me to alter my view of reality and question my ability to perceive what is around me. I am not questioning if I am driving too fast. I am more distracted than a drunk driver, questioning if what I am seeing is correct, marveling at the illusion, thinking about taking a picture, thinking about calling someone, ...." All while driving a several thousand pound vehicle down the road. Hrm.....good idea? I think not.

Assuming I pass the test, realize it is an illusion and drive over it, what next? I have run into this scenario almost exactly in real life. My best friend at the time was driving. It looked just like the image. Ball comes out from blind spot (he stoppes and says wait for it), child comes out from blind stop, stops, bends over to pick up ball, and right then looks up for the first time. If he had not been paying attention, the child would likely have died.

Now, if this kind of artwork gets people ignoring this kind of image in the road it will cause people to do something very dangerous. They will have a mental bucket that says, "a fake image on the road". This is bucket to which they will likely only assign fake images. When they are distracted though, there is a chance that they will put a real child with a ball or other object into that bucket. We really do not look at things. We glance just long enough to classify them and then mentally hold up the fake object. How many times have you clearly seen something only to later look closer and find out you were completely wrong. If you cannot think of an instance, contemplate monsters you could see before the lights were turned on.

For the sake of my children and other's children, please don't place mind altering images on the road. You will only end up killing people!

Jacob

Considering a new Target Domain

I have been spending more and more time getting involved in my daughter's school. It turns out, just like large companies, they have many technology related issues. I have shamelessly stepped forward and entered the fray.

That being said, it looks like Adaptive Intelligence Inc's software could actually be a great fit for schools. I am looking into what I might have to offer.

I am also starting to participate in Project Cornerstone. As far as I can tell it is a project that has been working to build the leaders of tomorrow. It is also showing results. From a high level, they are helping encourage people to learn, read, and provide a safe environment for themselves and others. If all works out, I will blog on the "Developmental Assets" that they consider key to success in school and in life.

I am hoping to grow greatly from my involvement in this program and also to help others around the world by documenting the experience and highlighting resources, activities, and effective techniques.

Jacob

"Developmental Assets" is trademarked by Search Institue. Search Institute is also trademarked by Search Institute. (does anybody else hear an echo, I cannot give attribution without giving attribution for my attribution).

Nobody Died at My House Last Night

I know, yet another sensational title. I do find them quite entertaining though.

Yesterday morning, I made my morning rounds to say good morning to everybody. You would not think this a big deal until I mention that I have 6 bedrooms 4 bathrooms 4 large heartbeats and 5 small ones to keep track of. No, I have not started breeding genetically engineered pack hunters.

My daughter is now 5 and has been wanting a dog for a long time. We are currently between houses and renting and would rather delay a dog until she can help provide more of the care for it. Fish were the obvious answer. We went to the store, looked around, window shopped, checked prices, and left. We actually left without purchasing any fish. How cruel is that?

A little while later, we went back to window shopping at the pet store. Aeryn was so cute with the little fishies. I could not help myself. Yousun threw up her hands and said it was "on you." We picked up a darling little Aerial tank and two female bettas. I like predatory animals. Not vicious mind you. Interactive. Smart. Fast. Sleek. When you walk in the room, they notice you and react. When you do things near them, they are trying to watch and figure out what you are up to. In fact, when we were feeding them about a week ago, one of the pellets missed and stuck on the lip of the tank partially over the edge (it was wet). Before I could get to it and push it in, one of the bettas jumped out of the water, snagged it, and went back in.

They are crafty little buggers. Unfortunately, those two just did not want to play nice. The bigger one was getting bigger at a very fast pace. The little one was not. One night, I came in to feed them and I did not even see the little one. We looked all over. There really was only one place to hide, the huge castle that I was convinced to buy for the tiny tank. I very carefully, very slowly, raised the castle out of the water. Still no fish. I turned it over, no obvious fish. I carefully put it back into the water. We kept looking and interacting with the other fish. Then, Aeryn noticed that the fish was poking its head out the front door. Seriously, it was popping out of a front door in a house that was about the size of its body. It liked its home.

The problem was, the interior decorating of this molded castle was not actually designed to be gentle on fins and scales. The poor little girl was scraping herself raw in spots on the edges. The castle came out. Now that she did not have a good place to hide, the other one got a little bit more aggressive and the fish came out.

We then went out to the store and purchased a tank for me and three goldfish. A few hours later I had a tank with three goldfish and one agressive betta. It turns out that she had probably never seen anything as big as one of these goldfish and they had not seen something like her that they could not eat. One test pucker later and the betta was shooting across the tank at insane velocities. She quickly figured out the narrow places to hang out.

Yesterday, when I did my rounds, I found one of the goldfish was stuck to the filter. Poor little thing. I don't know why it died, but it was only a few days. It might have been the tank or the other fish. No damage was obvious and the filter definitely did not cause it. Aeryn walked in right when I was about to clean it up. Thankfully she does not appear to have been traumatized by it. That night I was off buying more stuff for bettas to hide and two more bettas. Aeryn was finally going to get her replacement betta.

As it turns out, the betta that we purchased for her might have been a boy. If you don't know. Bettas are also called Siamese Fighting Fish. Two boys will fight to the death instantly. The top of the cup said girl. We later found out that the side of the cup said boy. When introduced into Aeryn's tank, they performed some impressive displays, and started to arc around each other and move in slow circles. I thought they were being friendly.

Then the slow circles started to leap in different directions by an entire body length instantly. Occasionally they would end up in odd positions. After one of those lurches, the agressive girl betta had a nice long chunk of fin in her mouth which she slowly proceeded to slurp in like a kid with a spaghetti noodle. She quickly found herself out of that tank.

A little while later she was in my tank with more foliage and hiding places. As I was writing this, two of the bettas were actually snuggled together side by side in a hollow that I had scooped out of the rocks. They are pretty little fish.

The goldfish are acting like they are pressed for space. Many times, one of them will chase and follow around the other fish. I thought he was just being frisky, but I only see one of the signs that it is a he so I am not sure. Oh, the other odd thing is they look pressed for space in a 20 gallon tank.

We shall see. I hope they are all happy. I hope they all live a long time. In the meantime, I will continue doing my daily body count to make sure everybody is still here.

Jacob

Let's Try to Remember the Silver Lining

Once upon a time, I was a young eager college student. No matter what happened, either to me, or to someone else, I was able to find some kind of silver lining. I would usually attempt to use the silver lining as a way to help the person affected feel better. I got rather fast and good at finding and pointing out the silver lining. The pinnacle of this occurred in the Acapolco's in Westwood over a dinner.

One of my Friends, Mario, had something bad that happened to him, or he lost some opportunity. I immediately came back with what was good about this situation or event. At this point, I don't even recall either the cloud or the silver lining. I only remember Mario's response. He was quite taken aback. He sputtered a little bit, and then said, "You. You and your damn silver lining." I guess he was not ready to feel better yet. He did not refute my positive spin on things. I hope that spin still helped.

In the grand scheme of things, I find two things really striking:
1. Things really seem to be going rather well in general. While there are lots of bad things going on (say war, repression, financial crises, ...) most people are living their lives as normal without too much effect.
2. People are far more gloomy than pretty much anybody has a right to be. I have encountered people that are very down because of things that do not directly affect them. It is good to feel for your fellow people, or for the environment. It is important to have empath.

It is critical to take a moment and remember what is going well and what you have. Focusing on the little slights, disappointments, and failings is the path to destruction. There will always be something wrong. There will always be something that could be better.

Too many people appear to be on that slippery slope. Today I watched a person screaming obscenities to someone else because she "stole his parking space". This one section of the lot was a little crowded, but overall, it was not too hard to find spots. What if she had actually maliciously planned her move, waited until the right second, and jumped in there taking his spot with glee at the mere prospect of his frustration? Would it be worth pulling to the side of the road, getting out of the car, and screaming obscenities at her? How about being thankful that you can breathe, are able to yell, have a car that can easily drive to the next spot, and presumably have enough money to shop.

I think we have somehow slipped into a culture where things need to be perfect for us to be happy. Once we reach that state in any area, we tend to raise the bar. One clear example of this was a goal that my wife and I set. We agreed that we would feel quite comfortable once we reached that goal. Now that we have exceeded that goal by 20x, I am hearing how uncomfortable the current situation is. What happened here? Why do we need more now than we did before? I think we are desperately questing after perfect and always raising the bar in life. I think continual improvement is important. I always strive to learn, grow, and be the best that I can be. I do not set the bar at perfect. People make mistakes, something always goes wrong, or something unexpected comes up. I will never be perfect. All I can do is be great, be myself, and handle the challenges of life with poise and confidence.

On the positive side, people are helping each other at unprecedented rates. The malls were packed with people purchasing Holiday gifts. I bet there were many wide eyed children fantastically happy when they opened their gifts. The stock market has made a pretty impressive recovery. Many companies are being started right now. Innovation is surging to amazing levels. It is easier than ever before to afford the necessities of life.

We need to support each other and work together. The future is coming and we will be there. Our kids will be there. Please take a moment and reflect on what is going right in your life. What is the best thing in your life right now. Mentally hug it. You will feel better. Not only will you feel better, everyone around you will feel better. Maybe, if there is a big enough effect, the people around them will feel better too.

Jacob

Good Vs. Evil or How to Avoid Flaming Death for your Children

I realize that when you think about the battle of Good Vs. Evil, power strips are probably not the first thing you think about. They were not the top of my list either. Then again, when the transformer in the back of my house decided that 50 years of reliable service was more than sufficient, power strips suddenly became far more important in my life.

Fried Transformer on Pole in Backyard

It was 11:30 at night and I was minding my own business. The kids were asleep, we were ready for bed. Right before going to sleep, I was compulsively^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H performing one last check of my email from my iPhone. Right when I hit the email application button, all of the lights went out, there was a loud buzzing sound, followed by a really loud thunk, a bright flash of light, and three battery backups starting to scream at alternating intervals. The timing was so perfect, that I did not want to touch my iPhone for a few seconds. After making sure that this was a localized issue and not a major calamity, we went to sleep. By the way, battery backups on network connections are very cool. I was browsing at over 30Mbps during a neighborhood blackout. Go Comcast!

In the morning, the power was still out. I placed a quick call to the power company and they were in front of my house in less than 5 minutes. They quickly identified that the transformer was indeed past its prime, installed in a very inconvenient way, and was adding a physically uncomfortable amount of live power to the pole (did I mention the rain already). As a side note, the person describing the live power situation, who had just climbed down from the transformer on that pole, may not have used the term "physically uncomfortable" when letting HQ know that they had to bring a team out to replace the transformer.

After a very short while longer, and someone putting a set of wires bridging our wires to the transformer a few houses down, we had power again.

Man Climbing Pole to Give us Power (Jumper to the Rescue)

Mostly. It took a little while to notice, but there were three areas of the house without power still. After a little investigation I found out that three of the circuits had been tripped at the circuit breaker. I am very glad that I had the system changed a few years ago. The old one would not have tripped. Two of the circuits went back on right away, the third, tripped again immediately.

For those of you following at home, we are finally going to talk about power strips. It turns out that during the power spike, the power strip in my daughter's room had a rather large surge go through it. In fact, it was more than the power strip could handle. When I moved out the bookshelf and flipped it over, you can see the damage.

Power Strip Flipped Over After Outage

It was busy trying to light my daughter's bookshelf on fire. You can see the little scorch marks where heat was starting to light the bookshelf and some minor scorch marks on the wall. After all was safely unplugged and the devices were checked (they actually all made it), I took the fried power strip back to my office and opened it up.

What Fried Power Strip Looked Like On Inside

I was pretty impressed. If you look closely, you can see that the fuse appeared to have been bypassed by the capacitor exploding and shooting out fire (roasting the fuse). I wonder how hot it was. It was bad enough, if I am correct, for the whole fuse area to get completely roasted and have heat to shoot out the holes. I don't know how long it was frying, the circuit tripped quickly and I did not smell smoke from the device and it did not trip the smoke detector in the room, so I don't think it was frying for long. I will now officially designate this power strip as Evil. Sorry to the sympathizers out there, but if you try and bring flaming death down on my children while they sleep in their beds, you are Evil.

Ok, now that we have covered Evil, you must be wondering what is good. Well, all of the APC power backups and the Belkin power backup came through just fine. I was sitting at my desk trying to work the next morning and I plugged in my iPhone to charge it. Nothing happened. I looked at the power strip on my desk. Only one of the three lights was on. No reset button. It turns out that this power strip was fried as well. Here is a picture of it:

A Good Power Strip

This power strip was sitting on my desk, next to my computer, under my monitor. It was sitting inside a pile of nice flammable receipts (really need to categorize and file those). No damage was visible, nothing was scorched. It was plugged into a much larger 20A circuit with a new direct line back to the fuse box. If anything should have fried, it was this power strip. It turns out that the manufacturers thought of what would happen in an overload and built the thing to burn itself out, instead of burning your house down. Not a bad trade off. I now dub this power strip Good. I am going to happily order a few more. They have models that offer surge protection and ones that don't. Please make sure you get the surge protected version if you want it.

Power Sentry 5-Outlet PowerSquid Surge Suppressor

The new transformer is properly installed more than two houses away. This took less than 4 hours and I had power the entire time. I love Silicon Valley Power. Santa Clara utilities are the best I have ever experienced.

I am pleased to say, that at least in this instance, Good triumphed over Evil.
Jacob

How To Set Your Baby Down Without Waking Them Up?

I have found an interesting technique that allows me to set my baby down into a crib or bed without waking him up. Typically, if I get my baby to sleep in my arms, he will wake up when I lay him down. All new parents know how frustrating this can be. It can be particularly daunting when they are teething and being awake means discomfort and crying.

I started thinking about what might be happening to wake them up. My first thought was that changing the angle they were on, from vertical to horizontal, was the issue. With my first child, I would carefully sit down in bed up against some pillows and slowly lower down until they were horizontal. This would take a long time and would still frequently wake the baby up.

Recently, I wondered if it might be the change in pressure when setting the child down. Here they are, in a nice comforting hug basically with pressure on their stomachs, chest, legs, ... and when they are set down, they are on a harder surface, and that comforting presence is removed.

Now what I do, is carefully set the baby down. I do not worry about them waking a bit and opening their eyes. That is sadly bound to happen. I then put both of my hands on their chest with fingers splayed and press about the same amount that they were getting when over my shoulder. Please make sure that you do not press too hard. This should basically be a reassurance that you are there and love them. I then keep pressing for a few seconds. The moment the baby relaxes again, I put a blanket on and walk off leaving a peacefully sleeping baby behind. No crying, no fuss, just a happy content baby.

Please let me know if this works for you, or what you do to get your baby down to sleep.

Happy New Year!
Jacob