According to the stack of baby books on my nightstand my wife and I are going to be such horrible parents that next to us Joan Crawford will win the Mother of the Year Award.

This is our first child so we’re reading a lot of these baby advice books.

Right now we really don’t know what to expect other than what we’ve seen in numerous television sitcoms: a comedic madcap rush to the hospital in a taxicab driven by someone wearing a turban and speaking in broken English, lots of screaming, a bunch of fun-loving witty comments by the doctor (played by Robin Williams) and someone insisting that we start boiling water.

To write a baby book all you need is one simple concept and the ability to restate that concept with amusing anecdotal stories for the next 220 pages. For example, a book about how to feed your baby really only has one rule: “Feed your baby every 3 hours.” But it won’t sell unless you give it a snappy title and write ten chapters worth of rubbish all more or less pointing to that concept.

Title: The Foolproof Perfect Mother’s Super Method for Baby Feeding
Chapter 1: How This Book Came About
Chapter 2: How We Discovered This Revolutionary New Method
Chapter 3: How Babies Respond To This Revolutionary New Method
Chapter 4: Wrong Ways To Feed A Baby
Chapter 5: How To Feed A Baby
Chapter 6: Questions About How To Feed A Baby
Chapter 7: Stories of Astounding Success From Mothers Who Have Used This Revolutionary New Method
Chapter 8: Stories of Baby Deaths From Mothers Who Have Not Used This Revolutionary New Method
Chapter 9: Other Scientists Who Have Letters After Their Names and Agree with Us
Chapter 10: Charts No One Really Knows How to Read

The idea here is that you’ll get so tired of reading the book that you’ll immediately throw it away in frustration the moment you don’t need it. This forces you to buy the book again when you have another baby two years later.

All of these books are written as though there is only one Universal Baby Truth and if you question anything in the book then you are now the parenting equivalents of what would happen if Hitler and Skeletor decided to adopt a child together.

Here’s a sample passage from one book:

“To hush your crying baby you should pick it up as prehistoric women did. If you allow your baby to continue to cry it will surely think you don’t love it, will probably grow up to deal drugs or run a whorehouse over on the bad side of town and will almost definitely vote Republican.”

The next book has slightly conflicting words of wisdom:

“You should only sooth your crying baby if you are a baby-hating monster who wants nothing more than to destroy your child’s life and lead him or her into the depraved life of a shoe salesman or professional blogger.”

Many of these books have whole sections dedicated to important topics like Choosing A Nursery Color, Your Baby’s New Liver or How To Blow Your Nose When You’re Pregnant. I fully expect to come across a chapter which tells me I should not, under any circumstances, Leave The Baby on the Roof or Let The Baby Drive the Car After Dusk.

Unfortunately none of these books provide the information you really want. In chapter 12 you’re reading about packing your bags and getting ready to go to the hospital and then, magically, in chapter 13 you’re holding your little one for the first time and reading all about feeding and changing diapers filled with chocolate pudding.

I’m no doctor, but I’m pretty sure something fairly important happens in between going to the hospital and dealing with poo. I think it’s called “birth” but I’ll have to double-check.

My wife and I will continue to read these books and to compare notes with one another. A lot of these books are so poorly written that I’m not even bothering to read the last couple of chapters. I still feel pretty prepared for the time when my wife goes into labor and I finally get to ask the obstetrician:

“Okay…the baby comes out of where now?!?”

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Everything is computerized these days so you’d better know how to use one. Your bank is computerized, your car is computerized, your coffeemaker is computerized and, heck, even your computers are computerized.

It won’t be long before even your socks will be computerized and filled with USB ports and Bluetooth enabled functions and 24 channel sound cards.

“Beep! Warning! Impending foot sleeve incompatibility detected! I am a black sock. Your have a blue sock on the other foot.”

“Leave me alone. No one will notice…’foot sleeve’…?”

“Beep! ERROR #4475C! DUPLICITOUS HUE CONFLICT! I am paired with a non–matching sock! Change at once!”

“Who’s going to see them? I’m wearing jeans.”

“Beep! NULL VALUES not accepted! Prepare to self–destruct! Ten…Nine…Eight…Sev–”

“Okay, okay, okay…”

I don’t have to worry about such matters because I am what the professionals call computer literate. You can tell I’m a professional because I often say important things like: “Is your RS–232 interface paralleled with your DRAM I/O card to avoid the maximum packet collisions in that Linux BitTorrent environment?”

I can tell you’re impressed.

As a result of my vast computer knowledge and experience, I am often asked to help friend and relatives how to solve their computer problems.

I confront these situations by immediately falling to the ground, writhing in pain, and pretending my appendix just imploded. And then I feign death. After I’ve been dragged out from under the table and hit with 4,500 volts from a defibrillator I’m more than happy to help anyone work with a computer.

I have noticed there are two types of people when it comes to teaching computer skills:

Type 1: Female

Most women have an unfounded fear of computers which stems from their limited exposure to computers and machines. Machines never hurt anyone intentionally except in those sci–fi movies where the toasters all become super–intelligent and then join with the other kitchen appliances like the blender and go on a mass–killing spree and dominate the world with their mighty and awesome blending and toasting powers. But this rarely happens in real life. Troubleshooting with women typically run along these lines:

“Aaaaiiiiiieeeee!! It isn’t working! I think I broke it!”

“Is it turned on?” I ask.

“What!? It has a switch?! Aagghh! I think I lost it!!”

The conversation goes downhill from there. Once the computer flashes on, trouble really begins. The woman is scared to death, and that leads to problems.

“Okay, now type in your name,” I say.

“What? Now? You mean touch it?!”

“Unless you have some mental powers I don’t know about, yes, you’ll have to touch it,” I say, feeling very much like a Democratic President.

It should be said that nervous people have no sense of humor when dealing with computers. Her hand slowly hovers over the keyboard. We wait. The sun rises. Her hand drifts over to the first key. We wait again. The sun sets. The room grows silent as sweat beads on her forehead. Tension looms in the air as only tension can.

Wham! She thrusts her finger down with enough force to register on the Richter Scale. Then she lightly lifts her hand and repeats the process for the rest of her name.

“Why are you hitting the keys so hard?” I ask.

“I don’t like typing,” she replies. Hmm. The physical strain must be too much. While female may sound bad, she is nothing when compared to the…

Type 2: Male

Most guys are very comfortable around computerized equipment because they experience it everyday in the form of 30,000 gadgets he attaches to his belt everyday. The male computer users expects the computer to do anything and everything right away. Having no use for such things as instructions, general knowledge, or proper care, he is very ill-suited for a computer or, really, anything other than sitting around eating cheese doodles and watching TV.

When I sit down and I show a guy how to perform a few quick computer tasks he picks it up right away and proceeds to wipe out his hard drive, and the hard drive of everyone in a three mile radius, with the push of one button.

“Why did you just do that?” I ask through clenched teeth.

“I’m trying something. Leave me alone,” he responds.

The male computer user doesn’t like to ask too many questions and often puts himself into tricky situations. I usually don’t worry about this except when he begins to ask: “What is the password?”, “Which bank do you use?” or “Why are the Soviets bombing Nebraska?”

Instead of treating the computer with respect, a guy will tend to treat it as though it is an old football buddy. He pushes it around, slaps it on the back, tries to give it a beer and has a grand time with it. He uses DVDs as Frisbees (which do fly well) and hits the monitor in the same way he would kick a tire. At times like this, I like to just sit in a corner and whimper.

Most people, however, fall between the two major types (in computer knowledge…not “male” and “female”). For instance, some people talk to their computers (a bad idea since computers have a big enough ego as it is). Others simply use computers as paperweights (one of the more practical uses). And many see the computer for what it really is (i.e. a really neat way to play games and view porn).

As computers dominate our world, we should all familiarize ourselves with these amazing machines and try to learn as much about them as I have.

After all, you never know when your IP address will match the baud rate of the hard drive and cause your bitmapped internal gigabyte memory structures to re–boot…

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As I’ve written before, I’m not exactly busy at work right now. I spend most of my day looking for things to do, surfing the web and listening to my iPod.

I’ve been doing this for several months and I’m already to the point where I desperately need the twin drugs of an Internet connection and a charged mp3 player filled with groovy tunes just to make it through the day without bludgeoning myself to death with a stapler.

And then this morning arrived.

I pulled my iPod off the charger and noticed the dreaded Sad iPod icon on my screen. This made me sad, too.

Beneath the icon was the URL http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/. I went to work and immediately pulled up the web address. Sure enough, there were all sorts of tips on how to deal with the little sad icon, including Apple’s standard cheery “5 R List” of ways to fix your iPod: Reset, Retry, Restart, Reinstall, Restore.

Of course none of these even remotely worked. Everything I tried immediately ended up with me getting the sad iPod icon once again.

Frustrated I turned to the blogosphere and started searching around for anyone who might have had the same problem of me. And, of course, many people did. There’s a reason Apple’s iPod support page has a Google Pagerank of 8.

After an hour or so of surfing around I came up with this analysis of my situation:

I had a broken iPod that was resistant to all the usual methods of repair. If I couldn’t get it fixed I was going to have to send it into Apple. So I decided to do what many of the blogs out there recommended:

Purposely drop my iPod to the floor.

This had worked for many, many other people even though Apple’s website (wisely) doesn’t mention this possible fix. I couldn’t quite bring myself to dropping my $300 iPod to the hard tile floor on the off chance that it would spin or wobble on the way down so I did the next best thing: I held it and slammed it onto a pad of paper on my desk (providing some cushion so I didn’t crack the case), charging port down.

And like mana falling from heaven, the tunes started playing.

Apparently there are really SIX R’s in the Apple repair repetoir: Reset, Retry, Restart, Reinstall, Restore and Ram.

While I thanked the Jobs Gods for resurrecting my iPod I couldn’t help but wonder WHY such a ridiculous fix worked. I did a little more poking around it and turns out that the hard drive cable inside a lot of iPods manages to work itself loose to the point where the connection is no longer valid. So the iPod is looking for the hard drive, the cable isn’t completely connected and your iPod get sad.

Dropping (or banging) the iPod basically jolts the cable back into the socket.

This worked for me and it appears to have worked for countless others. I cannot, of course, take responsibility for anything you do to your iPod. I’m fairly certain Apple doesn’t recommend this method of fixing it. But then again, this fix doesn’t require you sending your iPod away…

Oh, and if you’re having battery issues with your iPod, I stumbled upon the excellently titled “The iPod Battery Unplugged” page. I didn’t need it but I learned some things…

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Author’s Note: Due to the overwhelming response on Digg about this controversial iPod repair method I have decided to help the many people who are still a little unclear on how this method works. I am listing simple instruction on how to assemble your own iPod Repair Kit which should hereafter be known as the iPad™.

Required Materials:
iPod with Sad iPod Icon
Pad of Paper, any size

Optional Materials:
Pen
Beer
Hovercraft
Llama
…you get the idea.

Assembly Steps:
1. Put the pad on the desk.
2. Optionally, write something on the pad with the pen.
3. Done.

How to Use:
1. Hold the broken iPod in your hand, charger port down.
2. Ram your iPod against the pad firmly, but not hard enough to go through the desk or send the iPod flying out of your hand.
3. Test iPod.
4. Repeat as necessary.
5. Have a celebratory or condolence beer.

Here is the finished product:

For the shockinging mechanically inept, I’ve even put together a page where you can buy them premade.

iPad Order Form

See? I told you I wasn’t very busy at work right now.

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