It is the former generation’s responsibility to tell the current generation how they did it better. The facts are pretty indisputable however, I am going to live longer (hopefully) than the previous generation and my kids longer than mine. Some things…. the current generation does better. Like living. We are intimidated by change so we all romanticize the past. Human nature I guess, but absurd if you are part of a generation that fully knows this and then partakes in the romantics anyway.

So a few things are driving this post and they are as follows:

1. The dishwasher in our house stays full and no one empties it other than the adults.
2. When the dishwasher is full, the sink becomes a dumping ground for dirty dishes
3. I do all of the laundry in our house and I put the girls clothes on their bed and expect them to only put them away. Never happens unless I nag them hourly

While emptying the dishwasher seems easier than hand washing to me, Azul grew up in Mexico and did not have that luxury. The family did dishes every night, hand dryed, and put them away. She suggested that we stop using the dishwasher and have everyone wash the dishes as we used them. She explained that even when she moved to the states they would use the dishwasher as storage for grocery bags and other kitchenware. What?! In this century? Hand-washing? The kids groaned when we implemented the new rule and so did we once we realized we’d have to lead the charge by doing it also.

Implementation complete. Results: A great idea which has worked so far. While we still have to ask them to clean their dishes occasionally it seems to be much easier to manage than the alternative. Leave me a comment and give me some ideas on how to enforce this whole putting the clothes away and I might have an easier life rather than having to nagging Mr. Mom.

Here are a couple of ways men could use it for their jobs or hobbies:

Coach
Find Drills and pin them to your Coaching Drills board
Find Directions to away games and pin it to your Softball board
Find shopping sites for equipment and gear, pin it to your Softball board

Father
Find information on the boy who is texting your daughter and pin it to your Destroy Possible Boyfriend board.
Find schedules online for the various teams your kids play on and pin it to your Kids Activities board.
Find flower shop deals and pin it to your Take Care of Wife/Girlfriend board.

There you go, welcome to Pinterest men!

http://pinterest.com/ryantaylor16/

Some of the effects you get with a camera when there is no artificial light flooding your shots is pretty awesome. Leave a comment and tell me what you guys think.

[Show as slideshow]

Hannah made the JV team for softball. I had expected her to make the Freshmen team….. because she is a freshman. This week she worked out with the varsity squad which was cool. I think it was a temporary thing but again it exceeds the assumptions I had made.

Hailey played in her first basketball game today because of her extended Arkansas vacation. I expect Hailey to keep up on the court. I expect Hailey to take a couple of shots, I expect Hailey to shoot free throws. I do not expect her to play aggressively on defense, drive the ball up the floor weaving in and out of traffic, pull down rebounds and go right back up with them. Today, I could not believe how much she had improved in her game.

I didn’t score (keep a book) the game, but I will next weekend. I am sure she had 10 defensive rebounds and more than that on offense. She scored 6 points. She hit two free throws. She kept a very tall girl in check all day.

So far 2012 has been the year that my beautiful girls have exceeded their father’s expectations. Unfortunately for them, that just means I have adjusted my expectations.

I expect straight A’s this semester. Hannah should be starting for JV and batting over .300 as a freshman. Hailey should be scoring 12 points a game and hitting at least two shots outside of 10 feet. Let’s see if they can meet their dear old dad’s expectations.

My Farewell Ball from Front Porch

My job now….. find another job. Is someone looking for a superstar? Is there a company who needs a 2010 Lance Berkman and would be pleasantly surprised with a 2011 Lance Berkman? Here I am. Finding you is my job now; I started working my new job on Friday the 13th.

Unfortunately, but predictably, I was laid off one week ago today. I debated writing anything concerning my layoff but I needed this catharsis. First, let me say, I am not upset with the company for doing what they felt was needed and I wish them nothing but the best. They have a great product and a bright future. I now have relationships that will outlast the employment and experiences to help me in the next step.

This post could be named many things, but I will stick with what it will take to become a superstar again for another company. I have been a superstar for several companies and always felt like I aligned myself with the business needs of the customers. I will summarize.

First, ABC Financial Services was a great organization and with some of the best people I have ever had the opportunity to work with. They developed a great business model for health club billing and developed Datatrak, a SaaS (Software as a Service) model for their needs. Paul Schaller once told me how smart he thought I was as a budding professional and encouraged me to take my talents on the road for them. I became a software trainer, a QA guy, and implementation engineer for Datatrak. Those were not official titles but when you are in the field and a new product hits production, you become all of them. I traveled extensively for ABC, flying all over the country: sales engineer, field operations engineer, travel tech, account manager. All of these titles were interchangeable since the customer determined the title, you were whatever they needed you to be. In a role like that you begin to understand the importance of knowing the business and customer needs from front to back. Something I have attempted to do at every stop afterward. The experience I had was truly important to jumpstarting my career and confidence.

I won two Schaller awards while there which was the equivalent of being a superstar. I remember my experiences with ABC Financial as being the first place where the customer truly was the most important thing.

Leaving a job where you travel 22 days out of a month to work a job that has set hours is something that can take a while to get used to. You have been used to being on call with customers, calling your colleagues all day everyday, booking flights, hotels, rental cars, planning your next trip, etc. All of a sudden your life gets quiet. Very quiet. Before, you used to wake up ready to tackle the day as a “bigshot” as one of my co-workers, Sal Corrente, used to say. Thank you Paul. Thank you Sal. Thank you Mike Millican. Thank you Mark Walker.

I resigned from ABC after moving to California and chose to work locally so I could maintain a closer relationship with my daughters and be there when they needed me as opposed to being needed while I was there. The move was beneficial for my personal life and health.

Secondly, I started at Front Porch as the support team leader and worked from 8AM to 5PM everyday. This was quite the change for me, but I enjoyed a set schedule and a great technical staff. I was there for 3 years and worked for Kathy Fields and Kari Olson. Kathy was promoted to director and I became the support services manager. My team was top notch by the end and the people I hired are still working there today.

The things I learned at this company will stay with me for the rest of my life. Kari, our CIO, was a very demanding and hands-on manager. If I could personally offer thanks to anyone from my past it would be her. She has the managerial style that forces great planning, communication between teams, as well as, the ability to identify possible failures in a plan before implementation. She is a great leader and as a result I have benefitted.

I worked well for Kari and Kathy and as a reward I won the Core Values award twice there, becoming a superstar for the company.

I recently read the autobiography of Steve Jobs and felt after reading it, he might have been one of the most charismatic men to ever lead a company. He was not generally loved but well respected by his co-workers. I admire his ability to find great people, encourage them, hold them accountable, reward them, rinse and then repeat. He built a pretty strong company and I see my former bosses in the same light. They all knew how to motivate their troops and make superstars or as Steve would have said, A+ players.

The layoff is still fresh in my mind and I am sure I will look back at the experience in a different light once I have had time to reflect. I will save it for another time. In the meantime, are you looking for that missing piece, your superstar?

I received a text message recently with emoticons in it and found it intriging since I do not have Emoji or anything installed but yet I could still read it.

As it turns out you can send emoticons on iPhone pretty easily and you’ll find the icons are…… extensive.

On the iPhone home screen open General > Keyboard > International Keyboards > Choose Add New Keyboards > now select Emoji.

You can see there are many icons to choose from and by swiping left to right you can choose many from a collection. The collections do not necessarily coincide with anything I would deem intuitive and especially when you have an icon of Mr. Hanky involved. OK, so it’s not necessarily Mr. Hanky but it is Apple’s version of a pile of smiling poo.

Apple version of Mr. Hanky

The COMAND system will also show live weather and traffic. My in car system does not do that but I do have an unlimited bandwidth on my iPhone data plan. To the app store I go!

There are all kinds of free GPS turn by turn apps but the one I was looking for I wanted to be able to find Points of Interests or POI quickly and easily as well as report traffic jams, police stops, etc.

I was able to find Waze .

When you download Waze, you get:

* Live community-contributed traffic information and road reports + notification when approaching police traps, speed cams, heavy traffic or hazards on the road
* Free traffic by-passing navigation featuring voice-guided, turn-by-turn guidance
* A 100% live map + real-time road monitoring & automatic re-routing as conditions on the road change
* Ability to create or join local driving groups, plus the option to link up with other drivers for carpooling
* Foursquare, Twitter & Facebook integrations, plus fun, geo-gaming elements

Pretty cool turn by turn GPS for your iPhone and a pretty nice interface. Tell me what you think!

I have a Canon MP495 wireless printer which you can pick up at Wal-Mart for about $50. It allows you to scan and print from your computer wirelessly which is perfect because we hide the printer under a nightstand so as to keep our Zen style :S) . I don’t have a desk since everyone uses laptops and this was a prerequisite for having a printer at all.

For the purposes of this post, I will tell you that currently Facebook hosts 4% of the photos ever taken. Of the 140 billion photos they are hosting I am sure more than a couple were taken with an iPhone. If you have an iDevice then you may want to print one or two. Once you have your printer setup the rest is done on the iPhone/iPad and is really quite easy.

Download the Canon Easy-PhotoPrint app from iTunes. Link here

When you open the app it should automatically find your Canon wireless printer. I have several pictures I took on my iPhone and I can choose to print photos from my library in the app. Choosing the photos then adds them to a queue. You choose to open the queue when you are ready to start your printing magic.

It works a charm and the quality is really good for a $50 dollar printer.

From now on, I am going to use the wireless scanning portion of this software to do my expense reports. Getting my moneys worth from a free app.

See the result for yourself.

Softball is such a small part of what will be your life but I hope that it teaches you some of the same lessons it has taught me. Winning and losing each teach important lessons in humility. Working towards a team goal is one of the most rewarding things you will learn from here on out. The friendships you form through sports are long lasting and you will remember them with nothing but smiles.

Congratulations Hannah! I love you and I could not be more happy for you to reach one of your personal goals.

As your new team develops, I thought it would be cool to equip you with one of the things that will help you “blend” in with the new Gold and Green colors of your new team.

Your softball helmet has always been red or dark blue as seen in the picture above. I took the time to fix that. Your helmet is now a Matte Dark Green and has the gold C on it. The C is not a perfect match but I am sure it will do until Bagger Sports calls with the new decals. Hope you like it and I look forward to seeing you playing this spring.

Your new Canyon helmet

A Gold C, We will get the right one later