I’m still slowly working my way through the idea that there’s a living, gurgling, farting little baby inside my wife, and I’m responsible for it.

We went to the baby doctor again yesterday and it was a pretty short visit. They didn’t take a gallon of blood from my wife, they didn’t make her strip down and wear a little paper gown, and they didn’t do anything to make me say, “ewww.”

Instead my wife just leaned back and the doctor took a device which looked like a small Fisher-Price karioky machine and stuck the microphone part up against my wife’s stomach. At first we just heard static. Then, as the doctor moved the microphone from left to right, we began to hear a fast and rhythmic swishing sound.

“Wow, what did you have for dinner?” I ask my wife.

The doctor, now wise enough to ignore me, explains, “That’s the baby’s heart beat.”

We all listen for a few seconds. It’s an interesting, very reassuring sound when you first hear it. Perhaps even more than the ultrasound, the sound of a heart beat is a very concrete example of… well… the idea that I’m going to be a father and my wife is going to be a mother and our lives are going to change forever.

We listen to the heartbeat for a few more moments and then the doctor pulls the microphone away and says, “Everything seems normal so far…”

It’s all music to my ears.

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Finally, a piece of software that works exactly as advertised: NaDa!

It’s easy to download, easy to install, is trouble-free, runs on any platform (even cell phones) and performs perfectly! Their website is filled with images of happy people, which means Nada will make you happy, too.

Best of all, it doesn’t cost a thing… Yep, it’s totally freeware!

My own struggles with bad software would vanish if only my company began using NaDa to solve all their problems. It certainly couldn’t make the problem any worse and it’s a lot less expensive than the crappy software I have to continue to use now.

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Lately our office has taken to playing a little game we call “News or Spam?”

Here’s the way it works: We each take about five minutes in the morning to scroll through our miles of junk email and then surf around various news websites looking for attention-grabbing headlines.

Then we each take turns calling out one spam title and one news headline title, and everyone has to guess “News or Spam”?

So you could read out, “If You’re Ordering Pizza Today, Beware!” and let each person in the office guess if that is a spam title or a real headline. Can you tell? Here’s the answer.

If you work in a really enterprising office you might want to keep score or start a betting pool. If you work for a government agency you probably have the time and funds to form a league and start wearing team shirts with your name embroidered on them.

Obviously some news sites are better than others when it comes to using headlines. We mostly use cnn.com, Msnbc.com and USAToday.com because they usually carry the most important stories of the day, like what happened on all the reality TV shows last night.

By the same token, some online publications simply don’t lend themselves to this game. I would not, for example, try to fool anyone with a headline from the Wall Street Journal (though the Journal of the American Medical Association does sometimes work surprisingly well). So, to recap:

Bad Headline: “Trade Gap Widens Between China and Indonesian Economic Forces”

Good Headline: “Britney Nude Photos Make Chimpanzees Happy”

It’s fun.

It’s best played on company time.

And, yes, you’re getting paid for it…

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