Assuming the world doesn’t come to an end (per the Mayan calendar – which really has my 9 year old freaked out, btw), 2012 promises to be a pretty significant year of change for us. First and foremost, Kathy and I have decided it’s time to move “home”. From a purely practical perspective, we’ve outgrown our current house. There are five of us and only 3 bedrooms. While the bonus room is fully finished, it already does triple duty as my office (I work from home and need an isolated space), the guest bedroom and general storage area. It’s no longer practical to keep the older two in one room – they’re going to kill each other – nor does it make sense to put the girls together given the age disparity (9 and almost 2). If we’re going to move, the obvious place is back to Philly. The pull of family has always been strong – no surprise with 4 parents, 5 sets of brother & sister in-laws, 11 nieces and nephews and my own sister in the area. Plus my in-laws are entering their 80s and we don’t want our kids to miss out. Barring a fantastic career opportunity that needs me to be elsewhere… we’ll look to head home this year.

Speaking of work, it’s a bit of back to the future at IBM. In mid-2010, Bruce Morse retired as VP of IBM’s Unified Communication & Collaboration and it was 6 months before a successor, Caleb Barlow, was named. On January 1st, Caleb will be leaving us to take over as Director of Product Management for the new IBM Security Systems division. As when Bruce left, I’ll be stepping in on an interim basis until a new executive is named or management settles on a different structure. It goes without saying that I’ll still be doing my day job during the transition – running the IBM Sametime product management team.

But back to fun stuff… my daughter’s Victorian dollhouse is fully shingled (1500 individual wooden shingles glued on one at a time) and painted a beautiful bubblegum pink with antique white trim. It’s even covered in miniature Christmas lights for the holidays. The kitchen cabinets have been sanded down to bare wood. There’s a bit more prep work, with a quick “finish” sanding required, and then I can paint. If I could convince Kathy to stop scheduling all of these holiday activities, I could use this time off to really make some progress. Like that would ever happen. With the cabinets out of the way, I’ll turn my attention to the rest of the detail work that needs to be done to make the house sale ready. I need to rework K-9′s ears as my 2 year old loves playing with him and has crushed the radar dishes. The big Starship Enterprise model still sits in the box… waiting for a little time and attention. And I almost forgot! My son is in 1st grade and a Boy Scout. Earlier in the year, he had the fastest boat in his Tiger Cub Den in the Raingutter Regatta. Now we have to put together his Pine Wood Derby car for the big race in February. That ought to be a lot of fun, too.

Like I said, 2012 should be really exciting.

I started writing this blog to document my progress in building a robot dog modeled after ‘K-9′ from the British science fiction show, ‘Doctor Who’. But as you’ve probably noticed, there haven’t been many posts on that topic for a while. My excuses last year were many and partially documented here. At work, I took over my team in March, my VP retired in June (and wasn’t replaced until January), one of my team (and friends) was in and out on medical leave, we kicked off a new strategic initiative, looked at a number acquisitions and so on. Personally, there were soccer games, ballet, school plays and girl scouts. Oh, and my wife gave birth to our third child last February. This year hasn’t been much different. It took several months to get the new boss up to speed and the three people I’ve hired to augment my team have been moving along their own learning curves. Things are just starting to relax a bit. At home, well, there’s an 8, 6 and 1 year old.

K-9′s exterior is complete and my neighbor has helped me work out the motor wiring. I’m at a point where I really need to sit down and do the programming. The problem is after 12-15 hours in front of a computer screen for work… I have no desire for more. Instead, I’ve been much more interested in working with my hands. To that end…

I had built a doll house for my daughter 3-to-4 years ago and am now painting it. She picked out a bubblegum pink for the exterior walls and my wife suggested antique white for the trim and windows. I’ve also just ordered the Polar Lights Star Trek Enterprise model – which is nearly 3 feet long when complete. I haven’t built a model like this since I was a kid and can’t wait to start. But I’ve promised myself I would finish one project (the doll house) before I start another.

And we’re redoing our kitchen. We had new countertops and appliances installed and we’re having the hardwood floors refinished for the entire first floor. But refinishing the cabinets is my job. I just picked up a new DeWalt quarter sheet sander and it’s awesome. I did a test run on the island and took off the 23 year old finish in no time. As a bonus the dust collector port fits my my shop vac so there’s virtually no dust. It is a tad noisy running the sander and shop vac at the same time… so sanding will be limited to the weekends.

Right now, I have to get back to a game of ‘Cutthroat’ Uno.

The drop-off itself was uneventful. It took over two hours to handle all the paperwork and get her settled. One of her good friends will be her partner this week, so she knows at least one person. When we left, the two of them were chatting away happily – joining the larger group heading for a swim test at the lake. I had to remind her to give her mom a hug good-bye. That’s as it should be, I guess.

I wasn’t expecting how I would feel now, though. I always get an update on the day’s events at dinner. And I put the kids to bed unless I’m traveling. Tonight… well, I don’t know how she did in her swim test and she’s putting herself to bed. I know this will be good for her. A little taste of independence will help her grow.

It’s just… we’ve reached a milestone in my family.

Individual responsibility and accountability are at the heart of what it means to be American. These characteristics manifest themselves in different ways. Politically, it’s a 200+ year debate about what role the government should play in “taking care” of the citizenry. The longstanding battle over universal healthcare wasn’t just about how to pay for it and the impact on private enterprise. For many, it was really about the individual’s right to make their own decisions (good or bad) and live with those consequences. In an emergency, like 9-11 or the recent extreme weather in the South, individual responsibility meant reaching out to your neighbors and helping the community through the disaster.

In that light, the reaction to bin Laden’s death is neither joyful or vengeful, it is fitting. A 10 year quest to hold accountable the individual responsible for the horrific deaths of thousands of Americans has come to a close. It’s a mix of relief, pride and a sense that justice has been served.

First, both of these are great devices. I haven’t had any problems with being heard on either… even in windy or noisy conditions. If anything, they are too clear. (My wife complained about the intense noise when I called her from a hotel corridor just as the staff walked by with a cart full of rattling glasses. It wasn’t that loud in real life.)  Of course, both can be paired to multiple devices (like my iPhone and laptop) making switching call sources easy and both feature deep software integration with IBM Sametime.

The Voyager Pro UC has a some nice features that really enhance the overall experience and improve usability. For example, when you turn it on, a pleasant female voice says “Power On. Talk Time 6 hours.”. This is really useful. Other headsets I’ve used play different tones or flash the LEDs to communicate this information…. which requires me to remember what it all means. This is much more obvious. Even better, it has a sensor that can detect if the headset is on your ear. If so, it tells the cell phone to direct the audio there. If not, the audio stays with the phone. If you’ve ever received a call and scrambled to find your headset or fumbled with the phone settings to quickly turn off the bluetooth, you understand the utility of the sensor. Finally, while this unit will pair to my laptop using the built-in bluetooth, it also comes with the smallest USB dongle I’ve ever seen. The dongle is useful because it provides the headset with dedicated bandwidth and ensures that your audio is not disrupted by other bluetooth traffic. (Yes, I have a lot of bluetooth gear.) Since the dongle is so small, I’m not worried about it snapping off if I leave it in my machine all the time.

Of course, nothing is perfect. My biggest issues is that I can never quite get the ear bud fully seated in my ear. The resulting gap lets in surrounding noise and requires the the volume to be all the way up for every conversation. The volume buttons are also small and on the top of the device… so they aren’t the easiest to find when wearing.

The Jabra Extreme doesn’t have sensors  and doesn’t speak. But it’s really, really small and sits securely in my hear. It fits so well I don’t need the over the ear attachment to keep it in place. It also has a “real” power button. This old fashioned slider switch shows a red background when off or a green one when on. The switch is so convenient I can leave the Extreme off when not in use and quickly turn it on when a call comes in… extending battery life. (Contrast this with other headsets where you have to hold down the main button for 1-3 seconds to power up then wait for it to do so.) Speaking of battery life, this unit is supposed to have 6 hours of talk time… the same as the physically larger Voyager Pro UC. I believe the Voyager rating because I’ve used it. I need to test the Extreme.

On the downside, I find the “accept call button” on the Extreme difficult to press when on my ear. Only the front end of the button can be pressed as the back side doesn’t move. You wouldn’t think it would that big a deal to press a button 1/2 of an inch long… but I keep hitting the wrong end. Like the Voyager, the Extreme comes with a bluetooth dongle. But this one is big… actually longer than the headset itself. I’m already worried that it will be quickly broken by my one 1 year old (she likes to grab Daddy’s computer) or when I move the laptop around the house.

Really, my complaints are minor though. I look forward to using both of these in the future. (And yes, I am on enough conference calls that I need two headsets to get through the day.)

My setup for the past few years consisted of Dish for satellite TV, Verizon / Frontier Communications for land line voice and Time Warner Cable for broadband. The total bill ran ~$140 per month. A few weeks ago, Time Warner Cable called and offered a triple play package with faster internet service and a better channel lineup for $15 less per month.

Initially I was reluctant, but I’m already married to Time Warner for internet access. You would think that Research Triangle Park, North Carolina – surrounded by Duke, UNC & NC State – would be blanketed by fiber. It may be somewhere. But where I live DSL tops out at 3MB/s and FiOS isn’t available. Since I work from home and do a lot of video, audio and web conferencing – not surprising given my role in IBM’s Unified Communications and Collaboration business – high speed broad band is a requirement. Once you lock that part of the puzzle into place, the triple play package made some sense.

So a week into it, the experience has not been all that good. It has some pluses. We have many more channels, a number of kids channels we didn’t get with Dish and the internet was pushing 25 MB/s over the weekend. However…

• We ordered a whole house DVR. This includes one main box and several playback devices for secondary TVs. The installer gave us a Cisco main box and Samsung playback boxes. Apparently, this was a mistake as the different brands are not compatible. We haven’t been able to use the secondary TV’s to watch any recorded content.
• Which might not be that big a deal if we could use the DVR on the main TV. That has been unable to play any recorded content without first resetting the Cisco box each time.
• And I have to say that Dish spoiled us. The Dish DVR let us pause, rewind, fast forward live TV from any TV in the house. It also let us record live TV or set timers from any TV. None of that is possible with the Time Warner whole house DVR. All timers have to be set on the main TV and you can only rewind, pause & fast forward recorded content. (Assuming you have compatible playback devices.)

My wife is on the verge of telling them to take the whole thing back. They’re coming to fix the box situation tomorrow. We’ll have to see how this shakes out.

My wife has a major birthday soon. As a birthday surprise, my five sister-in-laws drove down from Philadelphia yesterday, showed up a the front door and whisked her off to dinner… where about 15 of her girlfriends were waiting as a second surprise. My wife is very close with her family and this meant the world to her.

So my sisters & sister-in-laws are still here today. Some just went off to tour Duke. Some are checking out the SouthPoint Mall and some are walking around our development’s lake with my kids.

I am alone… in my house… not working… and have nothing to do. (Alright, there are a dozen things I should do… but none I have to do right now.)

This is so weird.

My 5-year old son saw me getting ready to rake the leaves and asked if he could help. Of course, I said. A few minutes later he came down the stairs dressed just like me – jeans, grey t-shirt, baseball cap and a huge smile.

He had fun for a while raking, jumping in leaf piles and squishing the leaves in the yard waste bin. After a while he decided he needed a break. I intended to keep working… but saw him lay in the grass with his hands behind his head and his little red Phillies cap on. It was so cute, I went and laid down next to him. We spent the next 15 or so minutes watching the clouds and finding shapes (there were a lot of alligators on this particular day).

When I kissed him good night, he told me how much fun he had with me in the yard.

Just a great day to be a dad.

Well, today is our last full day in the Outer Banks. Tomorrow we pack up and head back. The good news is that we still have the weekend at home to “recover” before I have to return to work.

Without Internet access, I actually had time to read two and a half books: Craig Ferguson’s American on Purpose (on my iPad), Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban and The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan. (I’m still working on the last one.) The internet and TV are great things. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to get lost in something that hasn’t been reduced to a 2 minute clip on Youtube.

I also had some time just to watch the kids play. Chris, 7, and my daughter, Grace, 7, were the ring leaders. My godson, Zack, 3, was happy to run around and yell near the other kids. But my son, Jack, 5, had a hard time. The older two didn’t want to play with “a baby”… and he felt he was too old to play with Zack. When they did play with him, he was the outsider…. the villian in the super hero game or the like. He just wanted to play with his big sister. There was a lot of coaching for Jack and several warnings to the older ones. It’s a tough situation and I remember the feeling from when I was a kid. The desire to belong is powerful.

This week we’re staying in Corolla in the North Carolina Outer Banks. The kids are all staying in one room, sleeping in bunk beds. Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of sleeping the first night (Friday). So none of the parents were all that upset when the thunderstorm hit on Saturday after only about an hour and a half on the beach. Sunday, however, we were able to stay on the beach for 4 hours and it was wonderful. It was low tide and there were sea shells everywhere. Grace and Jack added two large bucketfuls to their collections.

There was a sandbar that let us get very far into the ocean and the kids loved jumping the waves. When it was just Grace, I’d let her stand in front of me and jump the waves herself (as opposed to holding her hand). She was very proud of herself.

As for Jack, we decided to build a simple sand fort right on the water’s edge as the tide was coming in. It was a race to build a sand wall big enough to hold out the waves. We lost … but it was a blast.

Unfortunately, that night Jack wouldn’t eat dinner, fell asleep oddly early and developed a fever overnight. While the rest of the troup went to the Corolla Light House on Monday, Jack and I spent the day traveling to and from Outer Banks Urgent Care. He didn’t mind so much as he got a Wendy’s Frosty and got to spend some one-on-one time with Dad. (I brought my iPad and read Winnie the Pooh to him while waiting for the docs in the exam room.) It was strep. Fortunately with a couple of doses of antibiotics and another night’s sleep, he’s got his mischievous smile back.