We’re signing off from Geek Dads @ Home and transitioning into Geek Dads Weekly. This short (about a minute) non-episode is a reminder to our listeners to update their bookmarks, iTunes subscriptions and feed readers to find us at our new locations.

• Geek Dads Weekly .com
• iTunes
• GeekCast.fm

We record the first new show next Wednesday, January 6th. See you in 2010!

It’s two days before Christmas, and Daniel & Joe have a big announcement to make! We kick off with a discussion about Joe’s eBook, Baseballisms: The 2009 Playoff Collection.

We talk about using Twitter for a singular purpose, which leads into our big announcement – Geek Dads @ Home is coming to an end. Today’s our grand finale, but also the beginning of something new: Geek Dads Weekly! We’ll be recording our first show of the new year on Wednesday, January 6th and posting it at our new site, www.geekdadsweekly.com. Of course, we’ll still be right here at GeekCast.fm as well as in iTunes.

We ended the show with a discussion about the 1001 Albums That You Must Hear Before You Die list.

We’re off next week, see you in January at www.geekdadsweekly.com!

== Show Sponsors ==

• Things From Another World
• Signing Time

Notes by Daniel M. Clark.

It’s a Very Special Episode of Geek Dads @ Home! This week we celebrate the one year anniversary of the show, and while I thought perhaps an 80′s sitcom-style Best Of clip show might be fun, we decided that getting original Geek Dads Scott Jangro and Sam Harrelson to join us would be better.

• Sam is getting back on the podcasting horse, and we discuss software options.
• Audio podcasting vs. video podcasting – does video have any advantage over audio when you’re just a bunch of talking heads?
• Catching up with the kids! How have they changed in the past year?
• Dealing with Christmas and visiting Santa
• A Christmas Story – Sam and I had both never seen that flick until we were in our 20′s
• Sam details his history with a Santa Call service back in the early 2000′s
• Moving to tech, we talk about Snow Leopard and how none of us have had any of the problems that have been widely reported in the past couple of months, but we do miss things like Google Gears
• Google Chrome
• Google Wave
• Twitter – Sam’s awesome video from 3 years ago still gets views! Scott’s I Hate Twitter post is still #3 on Google for that keyphrase!
• How Twitter is becoming a primary source of breaking news and is becoming indespensible for some folks.
• Sam left the show to be a teacher, we catch up with how his experiences have been so far. It’s been great, but the school likes to block access to a number of web sites, sometimes inexplicably.
• I describe my experiences with the iPhone so far.
• Dan Bricklin’s® Note Taker – an amazing new iPhone app that allows you to take notes on your iPhone by drawing with your finger. (Post-show note – I downloaded the free version, and it’s as awesome as we described on the show).
• Droid – Scott compares it to the iPhone from his own personal experiences. He owns and uses both.
• Google Voice
• Sticking it to The Man. Steve Jobs is now The Man, when did that happen? Apple is the new Evil Empire?
• Google DNS vs. OpenDNS
• Desktop email vs. web-based and working with Gmail.
• Fringe – a show worthy of recommendation.
• Lost – our thoughts and hopes for the final season, and why none of us liked Charlie (or Boone)
• Dollhouse – it’s done, Sam.
• Sci-fi on TV and in movies.
• Sam is participating in a Klingon Club with students at his school, complete with language and history study & discussion. We have crowned a new King of Geeks.
• The demise of the CrunchPad – none of us fully believes Arrington’s story at face value, we decided.
• The Apple tablet – imaginary capabilities of an imaginary device with an imaginary price point. It might imaginarily succeed, but it might imaginarily fail. Nobody can imagine what will actually happen.
• We wrap with a short bit about the lovely Danika Patrick of NASCAR and GoDaddy fame (Google Images link, safe for work, unless your boss is really uptight).

We had a great time on the show this week, and it clocks in at exactly 100 minutes of geeky goodness. Join us next week for even more!

—- Show Sponsors —-

Things From Another World - tfaw.com/geekdads

Signing Time – signingtime.com/geekdads

[Show Notes by Daniel M. Clark]

We kick off episode 38 with a special guest, Wade Tonkin of GTO Management. Wade is the father of 2 kids, ages 8 and 5. Topics this week include:

• Software reliability – I’m not thrilled with Ubercaster (again, I know – I’m in the throes of a love/hate relationship with this thing) or Skype. Wade has made Skype a major part of his business, though, and has few complaints about it.
• Podcasting & recording hardware – it’s not as expensive as one might think. You can get into a good mixer or microphone for under a hundred bucks.
• Talking about hardware leads into a discussion about Wade’s business, broadcasting local sports over the internet. Joe has some experience in this area as well, and he and Wade trade war stories.
• Wade’s online radio site can be found at www.skagitradio.com, and there’s archives of about a hundred games to be heard.
• After Wade says goodbye to go get his kids from school, Joe and I talk a little Geek Dads history since we’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the show.
• The Geek Dads @ Home 2009 Holiday Gift Guide!
• Supposed Apple deals on Black Friday? We’re skeptical.
• The Feather case for iPhone, I love it.

We put the lid on another episode of Geek Dads @ Home talking about my new nephew, Colton, and how he’s probably going to grow up to be a Texas oil baron. With a name like Colton Sterling, how can he not?

We’re off for the Thanksgiving holiday next week, we’ll see you again in two weeks for episode 39 – thanks for listening!

(Apologies for posting this late. This show was recorded Wednesday, November 11, 2009.)

Show notes by Daniel M. Clark

My son, Ian, is sick with Croup! I describe what that’s been like for the past three days and how parents can deal with it. I mentioned that Eric Nagel told me via Twitter (or was it Facebook? I couldn’t remember during the recording) that his kid got the croup twice a year when the seasons change. That was a mistake – Eric had contacted me earlier in the day about me moving away from Twitter and into Facebook, it was Jared Saunders that told me via Facebook (around the same time of day) that his son gets it twice yearly. My bad.

Speaking of Twitter and Facebook, Joe and I talk at length about me moving away from Twitter and into Facebook. My grand plan is to only use Twitter to interact with people who aren’t on Facebook. During this segment I demonstrate what a Facebook noob I am.

We also talk about FriendFeed and the lack of interest in it since Facebook bought it, the new Lists feature on Twitter (trying to figure out if they’re worth using). Another new thing from Twitter, the built-in Retweet, gets some coverage, too.

We wrap with discussion about baby sign language and the Signing Time DVD series, which we’re just huge fans of in our house.

As the show opens, you might hear audio from the PBS Kids show Super Why in the background. Ian was watching it as I was recording, and Joe and I kicked off with a short chat about programming for kids on the various networks. I reference an article that I wrote a couple of years ago called State of the Union: Modern Kids Television.

Evgenii “Geno” Prussakov, the founder and president of AM Navigator, is (was, depending on when you read this) running a contest that I wrote about in a previous post. Winter’s response to the question “what does Daddy do for a living?” was basically, “Mommy makes the money, Daddy spends it.” Ah, a show title. Perfect.

Will our kids deal in cash when they get older? Will their concept of money be limited to balances on a plastic card that they will swipe whenever they need? The ultimate iPhone app? One that connects securely to any cash register and transmits payments. Zap! Groceries paid for. Awesome. I have a feeling we’re not too far away from that. Joe talks about getting himself into a situation on a toll road because he doesn’t carry cash on a regular basis. Neither do I.

Think Tank! I give my preliminary, unstructured thoughts about the weekend I spent in paradise – or Pelican Hill Resort in Newport Beach, California, as the locals call it. The annual ShareASale Think Tank was last weekend, and if I sound hesitant throughout most of my description, it’s because I lined up some really exciting things for the show that I can’t talk about yet, and I was trying to figure out what I could say and what I couldn’t on the fly.

One thing that I was able to mention is that I talked to a number of people about podcasting, and a few people expressed some interest in doing their own. I say, go for it! The more the merrier – and this means you, Kellie Stevens. I expect your first episode next Monday. Chop, chop!

What is our primary goal for Geek Dads? It’s not to make a million bucks – we do the show because we love to podcast and we love the topic we’ve chosen. If you don’t love what you do, why do it? There are lots of ways to make money doing just about anything.

The whole story behind the failure of The Big Book of Spam and the lessons I learned. If you’re a writer, be a writer. Don’t try to be a marketer, jacket designer, editor and publisher, too.

More about Think Tank, and some hints as to what we might be implementing on the show. Having a weekend away from the kids was fantastic, batteries got fully recharged.

Looks like the problem with the microphone buzzing last week wasn’t Ubercaster‘s fault. After some technical difficulties this week, I determined it’s Skype. <sigh>

Drobo. Quite possibly the biggest disappointment in recent memory. I’ve said before how well it worked, but over the course of the past month, I’ve have to reformat and reset a dozen times or more. It would work for a little while, and I’d talk about how efficient and cool it was, then something would go wrong. That cycle repeated for weeks. I really, really wanted this thing to work, but it simply doesn’t. Tomorrow, I’ll be calling tech support and if they can’t work something out with me, I’ll be giving up on it and I’ll try to return it for a refund. I’ll follow up with the final result as soon as I have it.

Lastly, a bit of talk about changes at Facebook, immunizations, and the degradation of journalism in modern media. Nothing too heavy, right?

On the 180th day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… 180 bucks’ worth of L.E.D.s
On the 179th day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

That could go on for a while, as our guest this week knows full well. Eric Nagel has been designing and implementing fantastic Christmas displays at his home for a few years now, as evidenced by these YouTube clips from 2007 and 2008:

This year, the planning started about a half a year out, back in July!

Before we get to the holiday goodness, we talk about a few goings-on in the tech sector: using Dropbox to manage the Geek Dads WordPress backups, the failure of Danger, the failure of SwissDisk, and the risks involved with cloud computing. If you are not backing up your web-based files, your blog databases and everything else, chances are, nobody is doing it for you. Back it up!

Eric then gives us a solid twenty minutes on how his house gets decorated for the holidays every year. 6,500 lights. 1,000 feet of extension cord. An FM transmitter for music, and a video of Santa playing in an upstairs window. This is the very definition of awesome.

We finished up with a bit of affiliate marketing talk, a mention of ShareASale Think Tank and Affiliate Summit.

Learn more about Eric at EricNagel.com and follow him on Twitter.

Sorry for the short show notes this time, I’ll be updating with some killer links once I get my stuff together for Think Tank. It was a busy day yesterday, and it’s going to be a busy day today – I love being a work-at-home Dad!

Geek Dads at Home Joe and Daniel get into a variety of topics this week including recent posts Daniel made regarding Not So Unnecessary Baby Products. We also talk about the 20 most important iPhone apps for parents, domaining as a business, comedians and using Twitter to distribute someone else’s content.

The author of The Almighty Dad web site, Keith Wilcox had a popular post that Daniel decided to write a response for. Maybe we should do a shout out to Keith or some of the other Dad bloggers including The Geek Dads to do a point / counterpoint discussion about all of these products.

We get into the realm of domainers seeking out valuable real estate on the web and waiting for the right opportunity to sell it.

Daniel points out that he has read some recent discussions about new top level domain pricing and how it will impact the best domains on the web. Will this be something that can truly be enacted?

We were sent a link by a listener with Mashable’s 20 Fantastic Free iPhone Apps for Parents.

Some of the best:

Sit or Squat – The Bathroom Finder

The Time out App

KidStatz Lite

We also talk about using ICE in your cell phone contact list as a way to provide critical information to EMTs in case you are unable to communicate who they should contact if you are disabled.

Daniel mentions that he can fall asleep at night while listening to Patton Oswalt and George Carlin and I bring up someone I follow on Twitter who has taken to putting Steven Wright quotes throughout all of his stream. Daniel likes a guy named Mitch Hedberg.

We finish up talking about the motivational or inspirational quotes that people put into twitter that have a tendency to come across as insincere. We talked about it in our last podcast, but the sense is many people try to put a positive spin on everything or emulate someone like Gary Vaynerchuk when they shouldn’t.

Of course, we end up with another Twitter client called Mixero that does great grouping to help keep the noise down. The entire app is designed to help manage twitter accounts into groups, but without missing the important tweets.

As a teaser for next week’s show we discuss using Dropbox as a way to get the Geek Dads at Home backups stored securely. Daniel has a script for automatically uploading the emailed file.

If you’d like to be a guest on the show, get in touch with us via the contact form, and if you have a few minutes to kill, how about answering a few questions in our listener survey?

While Daniel and Joe patiently refresh their GMail accounts looking for that elusive Google Wave invite, they decide to chat up a number of Geek Dad at Home topics, before bringing on a stay at home Dad as this week’s guest. If you stick to the end of the podcast, our guest touches on some interesting observations he has about how people are not being honest in their social networking. It would actually be great to explore those impressions a little bit further.

First we have to address a change in Ian’s sleeping pattern which has put Daniel behind the eight ball in terms of his own sleep. Is it the fact that feeding has changed due to Angela working out of town or something else?

We talk again about the challenges of getting a critical mass built up in services like Identi.ca and Friendfeed in order to be more useful, and how it also applies to Google Wave. Without friends to interact with on Wave, the feedback from the alpha testing is that it is a challenging platform to comprehend.

I use my wish for Baseballisms to have real time conversations during the playoffs as a way to demonstrate the value of Friendfeed over Twitter. During the playoffs having a vibrant conversation taking place in a Friendfeed Room rather than on Twitter would be a much better experience … but then Daniel comes to the conclusion that it is a reincarnation of an old AOL Chatroom!

We get to the hot item of a new service that Google in introducing called Side Wiki .. unfortunately during the conversation I had something stuck in my head that incorrectly identified it as “Search Wiki” .. Sorry. Replace the word Search for Side and you will have the right name

We had some fun with the Wayback machine on The Internet Archive. At the Wayback machine we find an early Daniel site from May of 2001 called The Writer’s Block.

We also find my first cracks at a Frontpage site for Campusstores.com from November of 1998, and a later version that still had some graphics in the Archive for your enjoyment.

Our guest this week is Sam Shepard, who is the author of a blog called PunditDad and father to Lucy who turns two years old very soon. As a dad he immediately chose to impose exact routines throughout the day that have had a great impact on the habits that she has formed.

Sam is using Meetup.com as a way to generate a local Dad’s community group since he has recently moved to the Chicago area. He is still looking for an actual get together prior to winter coming, but takes full advantage of the parks in the area to spend quality time with Lucy.

He has also recently had to cope with a case of the croup with Lucy. As parents will do, we get into the illnesses that we’ve recently had to deal with and try to decide which is better, to get sick now and pick up immunities or expect it to come when the kids get to school and are exposed to many more germs.

Turning the conversation to Sam’s use of the internet, he made the very interesting point that he is sensing Facebook has jumped the shark. He considers many people’s updates as “false positives”. He would like to see more people really being honest about what they are feeling and less of the rosy pictures that tend to be presented.

Sam, who is not immersed in social media but understands that the entire channel is based upon trust, observes that we are getting a skewed vision of taste makers perspectives. Marketers are not getting the real valid data that they believe they are extracting from these streams.

Interesting!

If you’d like to be a guest on the show, get in touch with us via the contact form, and if you have a few minutes to kill, how about answering a few questions in our listener survey?

It’s Friday, September 25th. It’s a bit before 8:00am. I’ve been awake for four hours. That’s not normal.

We recorded this podcast two days ago, Wednesday afternoon. It’s my turn to edit the show and write up the show notes. Wednesday night wasn’t great – the kids were… let’s just say they were difficult. Thursday morning, my wife left for two nights out of town.

That, hopefully, explains why I’ve been up since 4am and why the podcast is just now getting posted.

I’m tired. But that’s how a stay-at-home Dad rolls sometimes.

Okay, a little more upbeat… the show was fun! We covered some good family topics and some important geek topics, too. Let’s run down the list:

• Branding and kids’ toys (“Thanks for learning with LeapFrog!“)
• Baby sign language with the Signing Time series of DVDs
• Exer-saucers, or what Joe calls ‘the circle of fun’ (pictured)
• Updates on Ian – he’s almost crawling, and it’s just about time to set up the play area fence & gates
• Betty’s Not a Vitamin
• Continuing from last week, discussion about backing up your data
  • My experience calling around various data recovery services
  • Getting and setting up a Drobo for local storage
• Ripping DVDs and buying DVDs vs. streaming on Netflix/Hulu and similar services
• WordPress permalink structures, SEO, site loading speed and caching
• More about how the show is put together and ditching Ubercaster – for now, at least
• Did you know that Joe is an old, old man?
• Finally, we talk about that age-old question: if I knew then what I know now?

A fun hour of geek dad-ness. If you’d like to be a guest on the show, get in touch with us via the contact form, and if you have a few minutes to kill, how about answering a few questions in our listener survey?

See you next week!