Baby Corporation of America
50 State Street
Omaha NE

To whom it may concern,

I recently purchased your product Baby 1.0 in February of this year. I was diappointed that it took over ten months for it to be delivered following my initial purchase. I was however impressed with the fine workmanship in the product and believe that it was worth the long wait. My wife and I have been very pleased with the Baby 1.0 thus far and would like to send our thanks to your company for making a wonderful product. We have taken many pictures of ours and have been able to share our Baby 1.0 to entertain our families and friends. I have some suggestions for improvements on the product based on my brief experience. Please don't take them in the wrong way, I just would like to provide some help as you design the next generation of this wonderful product.

1. The refueling mechanism has some obvious issues. The first problem is that it tends to require refueling in the middle of the night. It would be preferable for the refueling alarm to be quieter and to build a mechanism to prevent the need to refuel at night.

2. There appears to be a problem with the design of the refueling process. When we place the fuel into the mouth area it often leaks back out only a few minutes later and often leaks out in large spurts. This appears to be wasteful of the fuel and requires us to fuel the Baby 1.0 more often. It also tends to make a mess of the decorative clothing that our families purchased for the Baby 1.0 and increases the frequency of changing.

3. There is a problem with leaving the Baby 1.0 alone for short periods of time. Despite having entertained it thoroughly and often feeding it until it is in the rest state it still sounds the alarm when placed on the floor next to me if I do not directly interact with it. While this behaviour is quaint it would be nice for it to just sleep on command.

4. The walking mechanism appears to be defective. Other of my friends have reported the same problem but apparently it somehow fixes itself after a while. For now this isn't a problem yet for my wife and myself but some people may expect it to operate upon delivery.

5. The smiling function has no apparent pattern. My wife, myself, my parents, and many other people have attempted to determine how to make the Baby 1.0 smile and have found that while the product often smiles it does not have a specific pattern that it follows or any inputs that will make the product smile.

6. It doesn't appear to be fully compatible with the diapers provided. They often leak causing stains on the decorative clothing.

7. The folds of fat that formed in the neck after the first few weeks tend to collect the spilld fuel requiring a complete simonizing of the product more than three times per week.

8. The crying alarm mode appears to only be resolved by the feeding of the fuel from the organic nozzle. An alternative "off" switch to the alarm such as a special code or voice command would be appreciated for those of us who did not get the fuel dispenser installed. While it is good that the Baby 1.0 provides the secondary fuel dispenser it is attached to the first one in such a way that there is no way that I can dispense fuel and the Baby 1.0 appears to not be fully compatible from the provided bottle fuel dispensers.

9. The pacifier interface needs to be improved. The basic problem is that the pacifier does not stay in the Baby 1.0 feeding hole on it's own. After a short period of time, and this was proven with multiple third party pacifier products as well as the built-in finger pacifier, the pacifier invariably falls out of the Baby 1.0 feeding aperture. The product has no way of automatically placing the pacifier back into the feeding area. The result is that the alarm sounds and the pacifier needs to be manually held in place for hours until the product transitions into the rest mode. If there is another solution for this please let me know.

10. The product appears quite fragile. While we have not dropped ours yet we fear that dropping the Baby 1.0 would break it. A steel case or protective coating would improve the apparent durability.

11. Lack of choice for colors for the clothing accessories. Since we purchased the girl model we noticed that 99% of all available clothing accessories are in the color pink. While we are not opposed to this color we also feel that a variety of colors for the product would make it more interesting and allow us to enjoy it better. We looked into the blue clothing availble for the boy model and were concerned that it would cause confusion. Some better ways to differentiate boy vs. girl models than colors for the accessories would be helpful.

12. The product gets heavier over time. We were initially very happy when we received our new product and it weighed only 6 lbs. 12 oz. but since then it has increased in weight to over 12 lbs. While we expected some growth this is causing a problem both with the accessories no longer fitting properly with the Baby 1.0 and it has become harder to carry. A slower growth curve would be helpful for us to get the most out of the large volume of starter accessories that we purchased.

13. It doesn't appear interested in the toys yet.

Well that about does it for my helpful suggestions for now. We do love the product so keep up the good work and we can't wait to get a look at Baby 2.0 when it ships.

Sincerely,

Dan Housman
Proud father of baby Madeline Eve

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OK. I learned my lesson with Movable Type. When I originally set-up the MT version of the blog I created it as a file using Berkeley DB. This file got corrupted for some reason a little after the last post on December 9th. The result was that I had to rebuild all the entries after reinstalling the application with a mysql database. That, and the constant needs of my little girl, explain the delays on updating the blog. But now it resides in a nice and stable mysql database which is hopefully less prone to problems and it runs on the latest version of MT which hopefully is better able to resist trackback spam.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In case you never get a chance to hear it this is what Madeline sounds like when she cries.... Madeline crying.

Posted by Melody at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was informed by Jeremy that Sting sang the key lyric "I want my, I want my, I want my MTV." on the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing. I should have known it because the tune is very similar to "Don't stand so, Don't stand so, Don't stand so close to me." The conversation came-up as we were discussing some new technologies where you can make these short mixes with three second clips of your favorite songs. There were some copyright issues apparently where you could make a mix using songs you hadn't bought but not with the songs you had purchased. The short Sting bit with the same tune had gotten into a whole legal battle about it because the record label for Money for Nothing wasn't the same as the Police label and the song tune was identical despite it being a parody.

Posted by Melody at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While trying to do a number of activities with Madeline at home today I realized that the basic physics of a father preclude feeding a baby from a bottle and typing at the same time. While this may not pose a major health risk to myself I was trying to figure out if a one handed person could feed a baby from a bottle at all. If the one handed pitcher Jim Abbott can be a major league pitcher and have a great fielding glove then people ought to be able to feed a baby with one hand. My solution for now is to lay the baby on a flat surface and feed with the bottle while the baby lies on their back. Unfortunately the only flat surface available to me at my desk is the desk itself and that is both an unsafe place for a baby and in need of a lot of neatening. So I had to stop working with the computer while feeding. I do see the need for one handed keyboards and decided to take a peek at the internet to see if anyone has designed a nice one handed keyboard. I found the following:

How to type with one hand (normal keyboard)

Maltron one handed lefty

Well it looks like there is already a booming one handed keyboard market so I'll stop prototype development. The other option is just to figure out how to get Madeline to type for me instead of crying for milk. With enough time I think I can get there.

Posted by Melody at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah was reading the Secrets of the Baby Whisperer. I am not a fan of the book because it reads like Men are From Mars and Women are from Venus and tries to suggest that there is a right way to parent a child such that the child goes to sleep when you want them to. The right way is a solution involving rigid scheduling in order to build a "routine". This also includes anal retentive tracking through forms or spread sheets of information like when the baby was taking a bottle, pooping, peeing (as if you can really tell), and sleeping. It gives you a test to see how rigid you are and then tells you how big of an adjustment it will be if you are someone like me who is very lackadaisical about things like forming rigid schedules and locations for my baby to sleep in. Didn't we evolve from nomadic tribes? These sorts of problem solving books only occur in a modern society where problems like obesity, anorexia, and dating strategies are major problems that don't make people lose much sleep in less affluent countries where survival is a more central focus over optimizing comfort.

Sarah isn't pushing the book but is reading it. She took some quiz that tries to give your baby a personality test and determined that Madeline falls into the categories of "Spirited" and "Grumpy". From what I can gather that is a tough combination where a "Lazy" and "Happy" baby would be very easy to care for. But given our own personalities it is only fitting to have a spirited and grumpy baby.

I also scanned through the book that Scuz and Erin got us that has quotes at the bottom of each page. I liked the following quote from Mother Theresa. She was very smart.

"The hunger for love is harder to remove than the hunger for bread."

Posted by Melody at 04:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been reading Fear and Loathing in America Vol II. I had been looking for a real book but decided to pay some homage to the late Dr. Thompson by purchasing another of his books. Maybe some of the money goes to Juan? It isn’t a real book because it is a collection of letters from Thompson during some tough years in the late 60s mainly focused on his inability to write a book on the death of the American dream. The introduction is written by some famous prolific writer who cautions any new writer to not try follow in Thompson’s footsteps because he is unique and all who have tried it have failed. There goes my career as a gonzo journalist blogger! Most of Fear and Loathing in America is quite dry and I was hoping it was going to put me to sleep tonight from 3:30 AM until now but it hasn’t worked the trick yet. Madeline isn’t keeping me up tonight with any crying or eating needs. I just can’t seem to fall asleep properly.

I may have caused this insomnia inadvertently by going to the MIT Venture Capital conference today for a few hours. In general I heard a bunch of people talking about the future of wireless and their many investments. The woman from Intel said that we should expect more hardware products integrated with services, like the iPod or Tivo. I was tempted to pitch her on the laptop lo-jack but our patent has likely lapsed because of we didn’t want to pay the $1,500 in taxes on it. Why should an inventor need to pay taxes on a patent that isn’t making any money? I thought the cell phone always was integrated with a service but I guess her point is that there will be more types of hardware.

I then listened to Allaire talk about Bright Cove. The business strategy for Bright Cove sounded similar to a business model Chris, Peter, and I were talking about before we all went our separate ways as the ChannelWave management diaspora. But Allaire had done a far more competent job than we would have done including getting strategic investment from AOL/Time Warner and placing Barry Diller from Interactive Corp. on their board. Maybe it was a good thing we didn’t try to play in that space. We would have gotten crushed like a grape. But seeing an idea I had come to life and having little role in it left me with a feeling that I may just be doomed to become a sideliner in the whole information revolution.

So hanging out in bed with Madeline and Sarah made me wonder silently to myself about the future. I wondered about whether Madeline would be disappointed in me for not being a great Internet magnate titan or the molecular biologist that discovered the secret to everlasting life without aging. Will I ultimately be a disappointment to her? Where will the money come for this house we need to move into when we get bigger than the three of us if I can’t be the founder of the next Google? Sure, these aren’t things that should keep anyone up at night. But they do work there way into my head.

We had watched March of the Penguins earlier tonight. Maybe it is best to be satisfied that the chick makes it back safely into the water to form the next generation. It is getting colder outside and we felt it on our walk through Brookline today. Tomorrow will be the first Pats game where I will need the full winter treatment.

Posted by Melody at 05:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Among the things you hear about in the class on nursing are the big health benefits of nursing. The challenge with nursing a baby is that the food source, Sarah, is not free to move away from the growing infant, Madeline. Now that we are getting more creative with how we spend from time instead of hiding inside the house or going to the wilderness where nobody would mind if a breast was hanging out milk has become equivalent to freedom. In order for Sarah to leave Madeline for any period of time she needs to have pumped an ample supply of milk. We also need milk for being more polite in various social situations like eating dinner with friends at a restaurant since it looks better to whip out a bottle than to pull up a shirt. So far Sarah hasn’t been able to create a strategic milk reserve so each trip has to be carefully plotted against the available milk. When she went to work yesterday Sarah’s mother came and fed Madeline the majority of the remaining milk that had been stockpiled over the course of two weeks of pumping. The only remaining supply was a frozen eight ounces or so of suspicious milk pumped after we went out drinking a week ago for her birthday. Now we are faced with Sarah going to work two days next week and she needs to keep pumping to get ahead of the curve. But little Madeline tends to drink the milk as well so it will be an interesting quest for milk freedom this week.

Posted by Melody at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)