As November winds down and we head into a long holiday weekend here in the US, I thought I would share something whimsical. It starts:

Every year, my wife and I devote the month of November to convincing our children that, while they sleep, their plastic dinosaur figures come to life.

Absolutely brilliant. The pictures are incredible and what an amazing way to tie into the amazing imaginations that kids already have. These types of mysteries, whether it be dinosaurs or Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, are all part of what being a kid should be about. I only wish I had thought of it first.

—

via Marco Arment

I’ve noticed a trend developing about myself the past year or two: if I’m not learning new things I am completely frustrated.

The past few months have been excruciating. I’ve been working on contract projects or repeating things I’ve learned before. My frustration level boils over. I’m irritable. If I have to write one more UITableView I think I could kill someone. And the last project I worked on was almost all UITableViews.

When I think about it, though, I had fun early on as I was starting to learn how storyboards work, learning what to do (UITableViews are a heck of a lot nicer, leaving me wanting to maim instead of kill) and what not to do. (Segues. Ever.)

This year the most fun I had was working on Javascript and jQuery and attempting to make Equals run in a web browser. Oh, sure, it was painful at times but the exploration was incredible. It felt like every sense was alive.

This isn’t restricted to code, though. Learning new business concepts, about marketing or advertising or minutiae of business is interesting, too. It’s just that the new learning opportunities seem to manifest themselves more often in code. There is always something new to learn there.

While we aren’t making much money from powerOne anymore, the learning opportunities associated with completely redeveloping the app have been overpowering. I know in my head this doesn’t make sense and that we can improve the product by improving the existing code base, which is a heck of a lot less expensive than starting over, but the allure of writing it again is so strong.

Head or heart, which will win? I guess we will all find out soon enough.

You won’t change what you don’t track.

I’ve heard this phrase before but never put a lot of stock in it. After all most people won’t change what they do track, also. I think this is going to join my lexicon of great phrases. [1]

When I was a teenager I weighed 155 pounds sopping wet. I never had to work at it. I just had a very high metabolism and was athletic. In college I put on a few pounds but was generally pretty lean for my height, staying around 165-170. After I graduated, though, and when I started sitting on my butt for a living, I ballooned. At my heaviest I was 220.

For the past decade I have fluctuated between 205 and 220, occasionally getting down as low of 200 but rarely dropping below it. I’d like to be about 190. What has made this worse is my on-again, off-again fascination with physical exercise. I’ve always been athletic and played sports when I was younger but never could stand the idea of running on a tread mill.

A couple of years ago I started riding a bike more seriously in the summer and finally forced myself to join a gym for the off-days and winter wet. 4-5 days per week I’m there with some combination of weight training, elliptical and swimming. [2] My weight has stayed pretty steady at 205 but I never seem to drop below that.

See, I like to snack in the evenings. I have this sense that I eat fine all day and then in the evening, after the kids are in bed and watching a little tv, I snack. Mostly it is healthy stuff but I do like a cookie and a glass of milk. Anyway, if I could just stop snacking, I figured, I’d lose the weight. No amount of will power  seemed to work. I always gave in.

This weekend my wife introduced me to My Fitness Pal, an app and service that tracks exercise and diet. What works is that they have a massive trove of foods already in there so the pains of entering aren’t so bad. Saturday I started tracking and I can tell you that the reaction was instantaneous.

Suddenly I had no desire to snack in the evenings and even my meal choices were changing. [3] My desire to exercise improved, too, so I can eat what I want. It turns out my competitive streak took over. There’s a little number at the top of each day that tells you how many calories ahead (green!) or behind (red!) you are for the day. I’ll be damned if my numbers gonna be red!

I couldn’t believe how fast the change happened for me. Literally within hours I was thinking about my intake and looking for exercise opportunities. It will be interesting to see if I can keep this up but if so I bet I shed those extra 15 pounds in no time.

Once I master this game, I’ll have to raise the stakes. I’ll need that cholesterol counter to show me green and red.

—

[1] Two of my favorites are “Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance”, the 7-Ps, and “Cash is King.”

[2] In the winter. In the summer it is a couple of days per week to supplement by three-time per week bike rides.

[3] I was right. The evening snacking was killing me.

I was at a conference in Bend, Oregon, and met this guy Matt who was working on a sports email newsletter. I have followed sports since I was a kid. At one point I knew just about everything one could know about every player on every team.

But now I don’t have that kind of time. I get Cleveland Indians, Browns and Cavs news during the day and keep up with that. In the evenings I usually glance through the headlines at espn.com. But that’s it.

So when I met Matt and he told me he was working on a daily sports email newsletter I was intrigued. We talked about the idea for a bit: highlighting the non-obvious stories, the human interest ones, the ones ESPN just doesn’t report. I mentioned the story last year about the NFL player who blasted the Maryland lawmaker for being critical of another pro football player’s pro-gay stance, which never was mentioned on espn.com. He agreed that this is the kind of story he is interested in.

A couple of weeks ago he released his first issue. I thought I’d try it for a while and if it wasn’t to my liking, I’d unsubscribe.

I’m happy to say that the stories he reports have been incredible. Each issue includes about six articles and I’m happy to say that sometimes every one of them is too interesting to pass up. Monday’s issue had a story on a double murder in Brazil over a soccer game, how The Ohio State marching band is putting the screws to the competition, why kids still love baseball, and a story about a Japanese pitcher who had won 30 straight ball games. The best in that issue, though, was a story about a Nigerian basketball player who was fascinated by snow. And this was only Monday!

Enough of me going on about it. Check out Slugball. It’s an incredible dose of daily sports human interest stories right in your email box.

I’ve spent a lot of time traveling the past month and was at a great number of events. At every event I went to they have some personal identification to  attach to the body, whether that is a badge with a clip, a badge on a lanyard to hang around one’s neck or a sticker.

The badge is important. These events are often quite loud and it is hard to hear a name. Plus I found I met so many people that names ran together, so having a badge to refer back to is important. The badge itself really only needs to say one thing — the person’s name. And the first name in particular needs to be very large. Bonus information is a company name, which can act as a conversation starter. (“So, what do you do at XYZ Corporation?”) It amazes me how few conferences get this right.

Since I have been at so many of these in the last month and I repeatedly see the badge screwed up, I thought I would provide a primer on proper badge etiquette.

Hang it high as close to the face as possible without being weird.

This is the best place. By hanging it as close to the face as possible — and assuming the name is big enough — it allows me to quickly glance down to see your name without truly diverting my entire head. By being able to glance down quickly, this keeps me from admitting visually that I forgot your name already. When hung lower I end up spending the entire conversation trying to figure out how to look at your name without looking like I forgot your name, which in essence causes me to miss the entire conversation.

The name needs to be as big as possible.

Come on! You’ve got a whole card to work with. Write it big so I can see it. There’s no reason to save the rest of the card for anything. In this case the conference name is bigger than the person’s name. Do they really think I don’t know what conference I’m at?

Don’t play hide the name badge.

This one drives me nuts. The conference goes through all this trouble to provide name badges and then you stick it on a shirt and put on a jacket. The badge is behind the jacket. What’s the point of that?

Lanyards work but it isn’t the best option.

Lanyards — the piece of rope they use to put the badge around your neck — works, too, but they are usually too long. When talking to someone the badge usually ends up around the sternum, which when talking to someone is too far down to glance at and easily see what it says. Remember, at conferences we don’t talk at a normal distance. At conferences, just to hear the person you are talking to, we tend to stand at an inside-my-aura distance. This makes a low-hanging badge extra hard to see since the angle is all wrong.

Backwards name badges suck, too.

The lanyard badge above is a great design. It is very hard for it to flip backwards. But most lanyards have one tie in the middle and thus flips around backward. If you are organizing a conference, don’t be cheap. Buy the better lanyards. If you are at a conference with these flippable badges then it takes constant vigilance to keep it facing name-out.

If you are female don’t hang it on your breast.

For goodness sakes, I feel like a total creep the entire conversation if I need to look at that badge. Really. Even if you like it, I don’t.

I really don’t want to be glancing at your chest. Because of the placement I tend to glance fast — I don’t want to stare at some woman’s chest — which means if I miss the name I have to glance again! Oh, how humiliating.

And finally, never, ever hang it on your belt.

Seriously, folks, no one in their right mind wants to stare at your crotch.