So I was about to try out OnLive this last weekend thanks to a friend giving me his founding fathers key. I was surprised to learn how well it worked! I thought there would be some lag or something – but no, it worked perfectly aside from about one second where there was some freezing during the opening movie of Red Faction: Guerrilla. It was interesting because you could alt+tab out or switch to full screen instantly because the game was not running locally, and my cpu was not being hit hard at all. If you want you can see other people play games live through the OnLive console, which I though was pretty cool – although I doubt I would sit there and watch somebody else play a game when I could be playing one instead

Right now they have about 10 games you can play, and each of these you can play a “demo” – which is the full game but with a 30 minute time limit. At the end of the time limit you have to buy credits in order to play the game. Now here’s where I think they went wrong. The “credit” to play the game, is basically the full retail price of the game. The OnLive service is normally $5/month. So basically you are buying the game like you normally would, and then you have to pay $5/month in place of having your own gaming rig. Another catch – you can only play the game while OnLive is hosting it. Normally this seems to be about 3 years or more, so it’s probably good enough for most games – but then again you just paid full retail price for it. I don’t know about you but if I pay full retail price for a game I want to actually have the game so that I can A) sell it when I’m done with it so I can get another game or B) be able to play the game for the rest of my life if I want to.

Now, I can understand why they want you to pay full price – from what I figure each person that plays the game needs to have a license to play the game legally (just like when you buy a game form the store). So basically OnLive takes your money, and they buy a real license of the game for you. The difference here though is that the games run though the server, so I wonder about the legality of needed a license for every single player, or whether they would be fine with just a license for every single player that is currently playing. For instance: let’s say you have 40 people that want to play Assassins Creed 2. Out of those 40 people, 20 play during the day time and 20 play at night. Instead of charging full price for 40 game licenses, you would really only need to charge for 20 – meaning that the amount each person pays could be halved.

Now obviously you can’t pre-determine how many people will want to play the game and their playing schedule and therefore how many licenses to order and how much people should pay. That being said, this type of approach may not work very well – so let me propose another. You charge more for the service – perhaps $10 or $15/month. Then you charge $20 for new releases of games for the first month or so. Many hard core gamers would gladly pay $20 (instead of the normal $50+) to be able to play the game the day it comes out. After the first month, the game becomes free. What this would allow is any normal user wanting the play a game that has been out for at least a month can play any of the games currently hosted. Now if you only have to pay $10 – $15 a month to be able to play any PC game you want – on basically any device you want – I’d say that would be worth it. I think with a pricing strategy like that, you would be having users flock to you in droves. It would be a service that is better than Steam – since not only would you get a game at discount, but you could play it anywhere after just downloading a few MB client.

Now, my pricing idea might be a little off, and should be examined by an actual legal team and pricing strategist – but at this point I don’t see OnLive taking off without a change such as this. Who will pay $5/month and full retail price for games for a service like that. For that money I would much rather go out and buy a $90 video card and be able to keep the games and/or sell them when I was done with them to be able to re-cooperate some of the cost. If they did implement something like my pricing strategy above though – I could see thousands of people flocking to them. Even me, a guy who is extremely proud of his ‘gaming rig’, would have to consider throwing it out in alternative for a service like that.

I suppose only time will tell how it goes. In any case, I think the OnLive service is an incredible idea, and perhaps even paves the way for the future of gaming, but at this point I think it needs some fine tuning in the finance department before it because the end all be all solution for PC games.

The main reason to point out these errors is simple: Apple is one of those companies who (at least in the public eye) pretty much never admits they are wrong, and pretty much acts like they could never cause any sort of issue or reason for you to dislike their products. On one hand you could judge this as just simple marketing – what company would ever down their own product? On the other hand, there is some merit to a company who can admit they made a mistake. In my opinion this type of “marketing strategy” (if you will) is pretty much just a extension of Steve Job’s egotistical personality, but it seems to be working for them so far. (Note that I do not call him egotistical do to any personal feelings I have, and I could be wrong about his personality if you knew him more on a personal level – it’s just that this is a man who every presentation I have EVER seen him give he acts like he is a man who can do no wrong.) In any case, the point here is that for a company who markets themselves on being perfect, they have made a number of blunders in recent weeks.

1) Delay of the white iPhone 4 and the failure to communicate why
The iPhone comes in two colors: Black and white. While the black one was readily available for shopping on June 24th, the white one was no where to be seen. Nobody seems to know why either – the phone just simply is not available. Thus far, the only comment Apple has offered is that there was a delay in the manufacturing process due to some unforeseen difficulties with building the white iPhone. Now, I’m no genius, but I can tell you that when you are building two of the same exact product except for the color of the plastic casing – there shouldn’t be much of a problem there. In any case, the main issue is that this was a blunder, and while Apple did have many black phone available, they now probably have quite a few people who were bummed to learn they would be forced into getting a black phone if they wanted to be an early adopter. (Not that at the time of this post, Apple says they will be shipping out white iPhone 4′s in the second half of July).

2) The lines on the first day of sales
What company DOESN’T want lines like the ones phone outside Apple stores on July 24th, 2010 @ 7AM? I have waited in many lines (Playstation 2, XBox 360, New rides at theme parks, etc. – NONE of them have come anywhere remarkably close to the ones I saw outside the Apply store the other day. There were literally thousands of people there, and this was just for one store! The lines continued all day long, never slowing down even till 9 PM when the stores closed. If you’re keeping track, that’s 14 hours of having hundreds of people waiting in line at any given point. Now – here’s the problem with that.

a) Regardless of the stores inability to sell phones fast enough to dwindle down such a line, it’s just not good customer service to have that many waiting in line at one specific time. The reason is simple – some people just aren’t going to wait the 5+ hours to get a phone. Sure, they have a good chance of coming back to get a phone later, but lets say they are in an area where no phones will be available after the initial rush, some people might just get another phone instead. Also it aggravates people that they have to wait in line so long.

b) Many phones were reserved – meaning that you were guaranteed a phone BEFORE a person waiting in the stand by line if you came to the store. So what does that make the standby line? As I said above, there was constantly people in the reserve line for the full 14 hour day the store was open. Since those people are guaranteed a phone before stand by people – what’s the point of even having a stand by line? Surely you don’t expect people to stand in line for 14 hours before being told “sorry, we’re closing up shop” (that’s how riots get started).

Apple made an argument that the initial sales expectations were drastically under estimated, but I think at this point that just shows that Apple needs some better forecasting people. This is the fourth iPhone the company has sold, and every year the initial turnout overwhelms Apples forecasts. I don’t know how Apple gauges how their initial turnout might be, but I’m guessing that if you are basing it on having “just a few more people than last year”, you’re doing something wrong.

There are also steps they could take to please people more instead of just letting them wait in line. Many Apple stored had employees handing out food and water to customers waiting in line. Instead, they should have judged how fast they were selling phones, and then given people tickets to come back in a certain time frame where the line would be drastically shorter for that customer. You don’t even have to re-invent the wheel on this one Apple; just ask Disney how their Fast Pass system works – YOU NEED THE EXACT SAME THING. Also, Apple should probably just tell people that you should only come to the store on opening day if you have a reservation, and turn away people who want to stand by (or at least inform them that they have no chance of getting a phone that day) and then announce a different day (perhaps two days later) where stand by orders will begin being taken place.

3) The yellow tinge
Many of the phones bought on opening day came with a yellow tinge or what appeared to be warping on the screen. Now apparently the tinge was due to the type of adhesive that Apple (or more specifically Foxconn) applied when adhering the glass to the device. The adhesive eventually evaporates, leaving the screen crystal clear, but since they were apparently making these phone and shipping them out so quick, the evaporation process was not complete by the time the phones were sold. The initial reaction to this was that many people were livid about their brand new $200 or $300 phone that seemed broken once they got it (especially since they had just stood in such a long line undoubtedly). The problem here is that (as far as I know) there was no specific announcement or in-store advisement that such a problem was existent. Whether this was just due to Apple not communicating the issue or (again) that Apple likes to pretty much deny there is never a problem with their product, it seems like something that Apple should have taken extra steps to make sure people knew that the problem was not permanent and that if the issue was still existent after say 5 days, the phone would be immediately replaced.

4) The “awesome idea” antenna that took a wrong turn
When the iPhone 4 was unveiled, many people were shocked at how the steel casing of the phone was actually the antenna itself. In all honesty it is a stroke of genius as there was just no more room left inside the phone. The problem though is that, while the phone gets great signal when you are not touching it, the second you pick it up the phone will drop to 1 or 0 bars. Let me make it clear: a cell phone – and item that is extremely portable and (at least with my use) is constantly thrown from hand to hand during a majority of its use – that gets bad reception based on the way you hold it, is an utter design failure. How Apple in all their testing did not see this is beyond everyone. To make matters worse, Steve Jobs himself replied in an email to a user who emailed him about the problems with a simple “Just avoid holding it that way.”. (Again, this points to my accusation that Jobs is egotistical. Phones have been around for 150 years, but apparently it took 150 years before Jobs could finally tell people that they don’t know how to hold a phone).

Now, there is a simple workaround solution to such a problem – just cover the steel bar with something non-conductive. Interestingly enough though – for the first time Apple has a protector for the phone called a “bumper”. The bumper, unlike most phone cases the protect the majority of the phone except for any part of the user interface, just surrounds the steel bar – making it the PERFECT solution to the attenuation problem. It leaves the mind to wander though if the bumper was in fact created as a resolution to this problem in the first place, instead of being a protector of the phone. Whether it was or not – it does make Apple lose some goodwill as now peopel might thing Apple is conning them into having to purchase another $20 piece in order for their phone to work. No tons of people are calling for Apple to release the bumper for free in order to fix the problem; what a pain in the neck for Apple AND the consumer.

5) Customer Service
Being that Apple prides themselves on being a “perfect” company (or at least in their minds or marketing approach), the employees at the Apple stored were instructed to give a “no rush” attitude toward potential customers. The draw back to this? Some customers spent an hour of more of an employees time in order to pick out a new plan, have a tutorial on how the phone worked, sign paperwork for a new contract with AT&T, etc. That might sound nice, but when there are thousands of people standing in line, it can make for the line just seem that much longer. Some people merely wanted to buy a phone without a plan, some people already knew exactly what plan and phone they were getting. That being said, Apple could have handled the lines better just by managing the different types of customers they had. Imagine if they had two lines – one for customers who knew what they wanted, and one for people who had questions, needed to know how to work the phone, etc. Better yet, they could have teamed up with AT&T better to just sell the phone first, and then have AT&T agent outside the store waiting to hook the phones up (obviously you’d want to have some police there to handle the people who think they are going to buy the phone for $200 with a two year contract and then get out of talking to the AT&T guy about getting the contract or something – but I’m sure that could be worked out.) Think of how much quicker the lines would have gone, how many fewer customers would have just left the line after seeing how fast it was going, and in the end how many people were less aggravated by the little old lady who spent an hour and 15 minutes learning how to use a device that others had been using for four years.

All in all – none of these issues are that major, I think all of them can be resolved somewhat simply – it’s just that with Apple starting to see the increase of sales in a strong looking competitor (Android), with the “no error ever” attitude they seem to take, and also the amount of good will and amount of additional revenue (I saw people leaving lines by the dozens – will they return?) Apple is losing out on with all this issues, they might want to go the extra mile just to insure that future releases are more clearly communicated and organized. In addition they should have caught the antenna problem in testing and just included the bumper for free (although this would be admitting a mistake with the phone itself – so go figure).

And with this, I’m done “debugging” the Apple iPhone 4 issues. Good night.

sudo apt-get install nagios-nrpe-server

next, we should check and make sure that the service is actually running. We can do this two ways
sudo ps -Al | grep nrpe

This will show a line where the process is started. If it just comes back without stating anything something is wrong. Another check is to make sure you machine is listening on the nrpe port

netstat -an | grep 5666

Next, we need to set up the Nagios server to be able to check our machine.

sudo nano /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg

and change

allowed_hosts=127.0.0.1

to

allowed_hosts=127.0.0.1,x.x.x.x

where “x.x.x.x” is the ip address of your nagios server. Now restart the nrep daemon so it reloads the settings

sudo /etc/init.d/nagios-nrpe-server restart

Now go on the Nagios server and run the following command

/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_nrpe -H y.y.y.y

where “y.y.y.y” is the ip address of the machine you just installed nrpe on. If it works it will respond with the version of NRPE you just installed on the machine.

That’s it!

First off, the PowerEdge 2650 only works with x86 (32-bit) windows. Windows Server 2008 R2 is ONLY 64-bit, so you’ll need to use Windows Server 2008 (no R2) instead which has a 32-bit version.

The next problem is that there is no DVD drive on the 2650 – you can’t even get one from Dell. Being that the only media for Windows Server 2008 is in DVD form, that’s going to pose a problem. “I can install from a USB drive with some trickery” is what you might be saying. Jokes on you, the 2650 does not support booting from USB.

“Alright, so if I can magically install it, will it work?”. Well, yes and no; there are a few limitations. If your drive works off a PERC III/DC, Dell will not support your system in any way as they claim there is issues with getting drivers to work for it through Windows Server 2008. You can get a PERC 4/DC for some money from Dell (and some luck from the spare parts department) but moving you array over to a different controller could be a lot of work if you are looking to maintain your current RAID drives or are hoping to still be able to dual boot back to an existing Windows install on the PERC III/DC. Note that Windows Server 2008 WILL install just fine onto drives on a PERC III/DC, it’s just that it’s not recommended or supported by Dell, so do it at your own peril.

Another huge problem is that there are no NDIS 6 network card drivers for Broadcom network cards in the machine. In fact until recently Dell didn’t even have any drivers at all for the cards, but they apparently got some drivers out for basic functionality, The problem with no NDIS6 is that you won’t be able to team your network cards – something that is pretty important for a server in my opinion. You could always get an Intel PRO 1000 card from Dell, but that’s more money.

There are more limitations and the limitations I mentioned above are more clearly defined here.

Suffice to say, a MUCH better decision (unless you have some extremely important reason the machine has to be Windows Server 2008 ) is to just install Windows Server 2003 (in my case Enterprise edition to overcome the 4GB barrier).

I just wish I would have known all of this BEFORE I spent so many hours turning up all these wonderful “gems”, but perhaps I can save someone else the trouble.

I spent a week looking on Ebay for a $100 laptop and finally came across a Dell XPS M170 laptop. It has a 2Ghz CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a nice 256 Geforce Go 6800 Ultra video card. The problem was that the repair shop that was selling the laptop couldn’t seem to fix the video card. Apparently installing the drivers for the video card crashed Windows, and before Windows loaded there was lines all over the screen. Once Windows loaded though it used the software rendering Windows XP does when you don’t load the drivers, and the screen then was perfect. Figuring that I didn’t need the laptop for some super power usage, I bid $128 on it and won!

I got the laptop a few days later, and sure enough the bios post screen and anything screen show BEFORE windows loaded was all screwed up. Once Windows loaded though, it was fine. Being that I’m the technologically curious sort, I decided to look into seeing what it would take to fix the video card anyways. First, I found a replacement video card on Ebay, but it was $300 – that’s out. Next I found an ATI Rage 32MB card for $60 on some website and figured that could be nice if I wanted. It would definitely remove any chance of the laptop being a gaming laptop though (hence the XPS namesake).

I figured all hope was lost. I read a few posts talking about how apparently ALL the M170 series and models from around that time had extremely crappy nvidia cards and they all seem to malfunction at some point. Then I read about one guy who took his laptop apart, and baked the video card in his oven to get it to work. At first I figured it was some crazy idea, but I looked around and apparently it’s a pretty common process to get video cards to work – even desktop video cards.

After researching it a bit more, I found that you do the following

1. Get a cookie sheet and cover it with wax paper
2. Ball up four pieces of aluminum foil that are about 1/2-3/4 inch apart. (Really it doesn’t matter how big they are,but it needs to be at least this big I’d say)
3. Place your video card WITH THE GPU FACE DOWN on the four balls. You want to make sure that the balls are in places that will not effect any conduits. The best place for this is like where scre holes are if it’s a laptop card. If it’s a desktop card, just examine the card closely and try and find the best places to do it where the pcb looks empty
4. Cook the card for 8-10 minutes (I did my for 9) at 385 degrees Farenheit
5. Take the card out and let it cool for 1 hour. DO NOT touch the card, it will be extremely hot.
6. Put the card in and boot the machine up

With any luck the laptop should be working afterwords. Note you should do this only at your own risk, I do not accept any responsibility if you card dies. That being said, the consensus around the net is that this is pretty safe and won’t really hurt you card.  I guess how this works is it melts the solder just a little, which if there are any extremely small gaps in your solder, it will help to close those gaps as the solder will expand as it melts.

Anyways, back to my experiance. So I took apart the laptop, luckily Dell had some excellent instructions for how to do so and it took me about an hour. I did the above and nervously paced the kitchen while the card was in the oven – hoping that I didn’t break the card, which would leave me with a screaming wife

“Why did you mess with it? It was working before!”
“Yeah but I was trying to make it better!”
“Well now it’s broke!”

On a side note – guys, never try to make something work better when it was already kinda working before…without expecting that if you fail your wife will want to have words with you

DING DING! 9 minutes were up and I took the card out of the oven. Turns out one of the resistors had fallen off. I’m thinking the solder that held that resistor on must have been the problem all along. After looking at it in dismay for about 15 minutes, I decided I was going to try and solder it back on. I had never soldered anything in my life before, but I did own a soldering iron and some solder, so I went to work. It took me about 20 minutes, filled with lots of “OH NO!” and “WHOOPS!” as I figured out how fast solder liquefies and then re-solidifies and made multiple errors and burned myself. In the end though it pretty much looked like it was on there.

I put the laptop semi back together (semi back together = all the parts are connected but the laptop still looks like it got dropped out of a ten story window as the pieces are everywhere). And voila! It worked!!! I was able to load Windows up and the drivers installed successfully. I installed my Starcraft II beta and gave it a few rounds against a computer – no problem (side note – Blizzard did an awesome job of making Starcraft II work for even low machines ).

So, I guess I’m all set – I basically bought a $128 laptop and then made it worth about $300 more for only a few hours of work. I’m definitely thrilled about the whole thing, and I learned how to solder (kinda) and a trick to fix video cards.

Below are the pictures for my “fix”. I unfortunately didn’t take any pictures beforehand and I didn’t take any pictures afterwords cause I thought I had broke it. Anyways, these are what I got, hope you liked my story

GPU face down

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Make sure the GPU is on the bottom of the card, not the top. The top will get slightly hotter than the bottom and since more delicate parts are on the GPU side (i.e. - the GPU itself), you don't want that getting as hot.

So after a year, we decided to go with another solution: ESET NOD32. Now, I had heard about ESET a few times, but only heard about NOD32 in passing. It definitely isn’t a well known name like Symantec (blargh) and Kaspersky are. Still, I read on multiple sites that as far as virus catching goes, Kaspersky and NOD32 catch about the same, it’s just that Kaspersky aims more on the management while NOD32 aims more on the side of minimal performance intrusion. (BTW – if you were wondering, Symantec has only like a 94% chance of catching viruses, whereas Kaspersky and NOD32 are more like 99.8%. I dunno where I found that study, but just Google it if you don’t believe me – it’s out there somewhere)

We did the 30 day trial first, and the NOD32 guys we’re really good about getting us the licenses we needed to do a proper trial. After 30 days I was pretty impressed! I didn’t have one complaint from any employee, and the fact that it uses the same software for both the servers and the desktop machines is really nice – you just have to configure the servers a little differently with a profile.

Now, I will admit that the profile situation can be just a tad confusing with NOD32, but once you understand that the Default Policy is different from the Server Policy and the default one is the one you need to edit – well, it’s easy from there. I’d even say it’s easier to manage than Kaspersky as there is only one screen of management options versus the 50 of Kaspersky. Sure, Kaspersky might be trying to break it out for you so that it’s easier to manage, but all it left me with was looking at screen after screen after screen trying to find specific options.

The support isn’t that bad either, they’ve gotten back to me within 24 hours on all my issues. Additionally, for Kaspersky, you have to deploy the client, and then the client MUST reboot before it can fully take effect. With NOD32, the client does not even have to reboot, so it’s awesome for getting the client out there quickly.

I really just can’t say enough about the performance though – it really is amazing how little footprint it has. Even during a system scan, users at my company with less than stellar pc’s (i.e. 512MB of RAM or less) don’t seem to notice.

Anyways, if you are getting rid of Symantec (which you should do even if you have a gun to your head), McAfee or are having a hard time with Kaspersky, at least give the NOD32 trial a try – I don’t think you’ll regret it

First, I’ll say this thing comes with about 5000 pieces, so beware when you first open that box! The instructions are actually very good though, and the way that Ikea has designed the bed to be put together makes it very simple for one person to be able to build it. For instance, I know I have built many pieces of furniture before, and most of them require you to hold some piece of wood up or something while screwing it into a different piece. With this bed, before you have to screw anything together, there are little wooden pegs that hold the pieces next to each other so that you can easily screw them in.

I took me about 3 – 3 1/2 hours to put it all together by myself…well…the boys would tell you they helped, but I’m not so sure if I would call it helping more than I would call it ‘They arranged my tools and screws about 50 times’ . In the end though it was actually one of the easiest pieces of hardware to put together and the instructions are very clear on what goes where, no having to sit there for 15 minutes figuring out which piece they are talking about and what screw hole a screw needs to go in. There is no drilling involved and all you really need is so hex keys (they come with it if you don’t have any) and perhaps a flat head screw driver for turning the cam heads if you put them in wrong.

The boys really liked it, and it’s the perfect height. I think my wife said it’s only 54 inches tall or something, so for toddlers – you don’t really have to worry about them falling out. The only bad thing about it is that the top mattress has to be 5 inches tall at maximum. Most mattresses are like 6+ so that could be a problem, but then again you could just buy the Ikea bedding – we happened to have a 5 inch tall mattress ourselves. I guess you could also use the bed as just a single twin bed with a frame around it – all you have to do is flip it over.

This would make it great if you have one kid now and want to plan for another one somewhere down the road and need the space. On the other hand, you could use the frame to hang some pink shear or something and make a nice princess bed

Anyways, now they have more space in their room, and we have a crib mattress for Kaden. Who knows, perhaps this will keep Ethan in his bed more at night since now he has to climb down a ladder to actually move about

In order to create an anonymous connector, you need to perform the following steps:

1. Go to Server Configuration–>Hub Transport in Exchange Management Console.
2. Click “New Receive Connector…” on the right in the Actions list.
3. Create a new Receive Connector with the Custom Usage Group, call it “Anonymous”
4. For Remote Network Settings default values are 0.0.0.0 -255.255.255.255, where you can add IP address range (for example if you have clients who are talking with exchange on port 25), or/and specific IP Address of the remote server that requires relaying permissions. Since you are making this an anonymous connector I HIGHLY recommend that you set it to only specific IP’s or IP ranges on your subnet – not just any IP.
5. Once the new connector is created, double click it
6. Go to the Permission Groups Tab > check Anonymous Users

Now, that will set up Anonymous users using TLS/SSL authentication. You might want to add additional Authentication methods via the Authentication tab as well, but that’s up to you.

Now that this is done this will allow you to send emails to recipients inside your organization (or to be specific, domains listed under Organization Configuration–>Hub Transport–>Accepted Domains). If you want to be able to send to additional (external) domains, you need to grant the anonymous user group in Active Directory abilities to relay. In order to do this, you must enter the following command using Exchange PowerShell :

Get-ReceiveConnector "Receive Connector Name"| Add-ADPermission -User "NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON" -ExtendedRights "Ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient"

Where “Receive Connector Name” is the name of your connector. If you followed my advice above, this would be “Anonymous”. This command is actually adding permission into Active Directory for the Anonymous Logon group, and assign the permission for that group to allow external relaying on that connector.

Dead Space was one of my favorite games last year, so I really can’t wait for this one to come out. The combination of the emptiness of space and the horror that can occur is awesome. You step into a room through an airlock and that room has a hole into space where meteor hit the ship or something. You step in the room and try to make your way through the debris, when suddenly you notice that there are some monsters in the room…and you can’t even here them coming – there is no sound in space, except for the heavy breathing you hear in your self contained suit.

Anyways, it looks like this time around Issac will be fighting it will take place in some city called “The Sprawl” on a planet instead of a ship (or perhaps the city is inside a giant ship?) – not sure how that will effect things like the anti-gravity sequences but I’m sure they’ll be there. Issac also has a new suit that just looks awesome, although I think it would have been better if the suit looked more like the suit you get at the end of Dead Space 1 for beating the game. I guess him getting that suit is not really part of the plot though so *shrugs*

Anyways, have to get this game when it comes out

Anyways, since Kaden was born last week, I have been staying home to help with the duties my wife would normally perform. Two things I have learned thus far:

1) Swiffer vacuum is god’s gift to parents of toddlers
2) Milk is like the most easy to spill and yet the most incredibly painful stuff to remove.

I dunno who made up the saying “You shouldn’t cry over spilt milk”, but I can tell you that after I find that I have to

1) dry up the milk
2) Scrub the milk with water to clean up the mess
3) Clean the area with some type of cleaner to remove the stickiness (apparently water does absolutely nothing to remove the stickiness no matter how hard you scrub)
4) Dry the area
5) Make a new batch of milk for the kid who now spilt the milk

it takes long enough that when you see a kid spill one little spot of milk – it does make you want to cry.

Now, to my wife she might think nothing of it to do all of that cleaning real quick, for a guy who’s not used to doing it though, it can be tough. Gives you more respect for that “magic” that goes on in your house