Enter the Ninja

To start one of these Travel Bugs you need to get a tag for them online – these have a unique number for each item.  Then I found some small enough items that I had lying around the house, and yes they are a little geeky – a rubber Ninja, a small Snowspeeder and a Master Chief (from Mega Blocks) – then you drill a hole in them, but the tag on, register the code online, and you are off.  Then I seeded these items into two of the local geocaches that we set up in town.  And off they go.

I got an e-mail today that the Ninja had moved and that he was now somewhere in Germany – and the last I had heard about him he was in Boston. Turns out he left there and went to the Atlantic Wildfowl Heritage Museum in Virginia Beach before heading over to Kuala Lumpur and then up to Germany.  This is pretty cool and makes me want to do more traveling.  Even more fun is that people sometimes take pictures of him along the way.

This is the Code Ninja at the “Peace Pole” cache

This is a view of the  Kujukushima islands. Crazy, cool and fun.

The Ninja’s latest check-in was on April 1st, 2012 at “Fels in einer Baumkrone” near Königstein im Taunus in Hesse, Germany.  He was picked up with the comment “Bei Ichabod gesehen als er den Ninja in Königstein wieder ausgesetzt hat.” which Google Translates to “When Ichabod has seen when he exposed the Ninja King in stone.” which seems quite deep (any German speakers out there that have more to add?”).

The “Master Chief” has also been around.  Last I heard from him he was stranded in northern Canada and declared “lost”.  He spent 7 months MIA, but was found again and traveled to the “Waimea Canyon Earthcache” on Kauai, Hawaii.

Then “Bobe499″ picked it up and took it to “Turtle Beach” while he was on his 40th wedding anniversary in Hawaii at the “ Mauna Lani resort”.

The Master Chief was last seen at the “Ramblin’ Wreck” in Byron Georgia (just off I-75 if you Florida people want to check on him) – but was reported as MIA (again?) on February 7th (he keeps disappearing, but I think he’ll be back)

Last I checked on the “Snowspeeder” – he’s had less activity but also a fun ride.  He made a slow ride down to Atlanta, but then headed for “de la Suéde” in Lyon, France.

This is a picture from the geocache site – shiny!

The Snowspeeder now rests in “DU BON VIN”

… which is in the south-east of Frace near Saint-Jean-de-Muzols overlooking “Le Rhône” (river).

So, I just wanted to share as this really cheered me up today, made me want to travel, and was a nice positive surprise.  Also makes me want to set off a few more this summer and see how they go.

I had heard rumors/tweets about this but wanted to “get it from the source” and I did find a link to the Windows 8 Consumer Preview Product Guide for Business.  This 16-page guide is worth a read if you are interested in such things.

I was pleased to read on Page 4 in the “Line-of-business app development” section that …

“Enterprise developers can create Windows 8 apps that are critical for their business and feel confident that they maintain control over the deployment and access to their apps. Businesses can load their Windows 8 apps onto their domain-joined PCs running Windows 8 Consumer Preview, bypassing the Windows Store. An app that is created in an enterprise can stay within the corporate firewall and be centrally managed, updated, and distributed.”

This is very good. When you have to manage and support 10, 100, 1000, or more computers, it is important to be able to “manage, update, and distribute” to them easily and hopefully at the level of the operating system.

A little later, Page 6 “Choice in form factors” we learn …..

“32-bit and 64-bit tablet computers that run Windows 8 can also integrate into your existing management infrastructure. These tablets can be managed in the same way as traditional desktops and laptops, so IT professionals can ensure that these devices can easily be added to any business.”

Again, positive, and getting cautiously optimistic, so it looks like tablets are in on the management and can be “easily be added to any business”.

But, only a paragraph later ….

“ARM-based tablets running Windows 8 are ideal for workers who are constantly on the go and need a long-lasting battery. ARM-based tablets use less power than 32-bit and 64-bit devices and workers can rely on the extended uptime of these devices. Although the ARMbased version of Windows does not include the same manageability features that are in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, businesses can use these power-saving devices in unmanaged environments.”

What?  The “ARM-based tablets” (i.e. the lightweight mobile devices, ala the “iPads” running Windows for “workers who are constantly on the go” … yes … yes … but this “version of Windows does not include the same manageability features” but “businesses can use these power-saving devices in unmanaged environments”. What?

So these can be used, just without the capability to secure, deploy, or manage the devices or applications on the devices? Um. So. What?

People want their mobile devices; people want their tablets; people want an iPad but many are waiting to see, in a corporate environment, what Window 8 may deliver in this area.  But if they wait it out, and loose all of the “manageability”, “security”, “updates/distribution/apps”, then the biggest value, in my opinion, of these devices may be lost.  Many business features that rely on role-based security, managed environments, compliance requirements (e.g. PCI, PII, HIPAA), rely on these features.

While third-parties may step in and fill this gap, as they have started to do on the iPad and Android tablets, to have these functions not be part of the core functionality of Windows 8 will be a major issue.  Tablets need to be able to be centrally staged, secured, and have software/patches deployed and updated, in order to meet many of these needs.  Hopefully enough people will ask questions about this to encourage a change on this direction.

Four notable issues I’ve had seem like they could be turned into solutions by someone who has the time and resources to do so (i.e. I’d like to be a user/consumer of these services and not the developer).

1. Agendas, schedules, handouts for meetings, conferences, and events – still largely paper even though most people have a device (phone, laptop, eReader) with them.
2. Books and materials at conferences/presentations – the vendor and book areas at conferences are still selling and moving a lot of dead trees
3. Lack of easy access to popular fiction for a single read-through (e.g. library or rental)
4. Notes, links, highlights, bookmarks, etc. are all confined to a single volume/eBook – study guides, syllabus, class notes cannot span multiple volumes

I’d like to detail each of these – for now I’ll start with the first

Agendas, Schedules, Handouts

A few weeks ago I attended the Maker Faire Detroit at the Henry Ford Museum – great time.  When you get to an event like this there are hundreds of different exhibits to go to across a few football fields of area and through multiple buildings.  There are also scheduled events (e.g. the Diet Coke / Mentos performance, PowerWheel Races, Storm Chasers speaker / movie, etc.) that you don’t want to miss. Almost any conference or event will have materials like that include documentation, details, maps, and more.  How can this type of content be captured for use on eReaders and distributed easily at the event?

Or, whenever I run a meeting or attend a meeting there are usually agendas and handouts for everyone.  This is true for professional presentations or even regular class meetings at a college or school.  How could these materials be created by the organizers or teachers and sent to the devices of those in attendance?

There are really two issues here: 1) content generation / authoring, and 2) distribution.

“Save As … eBook”

The first is hopefully the easiest.  This content is typically already created and available either as a Word document, web site, or app.  Unfortunately Word (and other word processors) are primarily designed to print to paper, or “print” to a file (typically PDF or HTML) that will be printed or viewed later.  The PDF formats of many of the handouts/schedules/etc. are often available and can be sent to a reader like the Nook.  Unfortunately many of the readers are not “letter paper sized” – in fact some of the most popular readers have about a 6-7” diagonal screen size as opposed to the 14” diagonal of letter paper.  This either means that the reader must scale and zoom the content (annoying) or it tries to auto scale and flow the text (works sporadically and not well with images).  So what we need is for Word to have a “Save As … eBook” feature that would enable the text and images to be saved correctly as an eBook file.  It would be cool if this would include the table of contents, links, and images in the correct format.

Also, much of this kind of content is already available on the web – sometimes in far more detail than the printed equivalents (and perhaps more up-to-date).  Web pages can support a different set of style sheets and formatting for when a page is printed.  Why not have an equivalent for “Save As … eBook” for web browsers.  You could save all or part of a web site down to an eBook file that could be used and viewed “offline” for this purpose.

eBook File Standard

Unfortunately for the industry, Amazon adopted a proprietary format for the popular Kindle eReader – the “.mobi” file.  Nearly all of the other eReaders support the industry standard ePub format.  Because of this, there is really no single file format that would work for everyone.  Until this is fixed, or it is easy for a Kindle to convert and read an ePub, there would have to be at least two different eBook formats that would need to be saved.

There is an updated version of ePub (3.0 http://idpf.org/epub/30 ) that is out as a public draft already.  Hopefully the awesome new features (HTML5, CSS, Media (Audio/Video), SVG, and more) will tempt Amazon to supporting this on the Kindle and bring a standard to all devices (like MP3 did for digital music players).

eBook Distribution

Assuming that the organizers/presenters/teachers can now create eBooks easily, how do they get distributed to the devices? This is a little trickier, but not that bad.  For the scenario where one person wants to share a single document with another person, this functionality already exists in the Nook’s “Lend Me” for specific books.  But this is still a device-specific function between two eReaders from the same company.  What needs to be developed is a standard and devices for wirelessly serving up books.  What I am thinking is something along the lines of the “MiFi” devices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiFi)  that enable WiFi internet connectivity over a wireless carrier.  If a presenter/speaker/teacher could have one of these devices, they could upload their files to it and then they could be made available to any eReader out there (in fact, a semi-intelligent device could even translate the uploaded file into other formats as they are uploaded or on the fly).  Then, if I am a presenter I can send my files to the device, let people know they can connect to it, and then anyone who has a mobile device or eReader can get all the files they need.  Alternately there could be an online service that you could access that could contain files for download (ala DropBox or even YouTube) but for eBooks.  It could work much like Twitter hashtags – give the audience a particular tag (e.g. #myconference2012) and they could pull up a list of eBook documents that could be added directly to their device. That would be so nice.

Security and Revenue

The clear issues with this type of solution would be that you may want to secure who can gain access to your documents, and you may want to be able to charge for them (and the eReader makers might want to find a way to make their money too).  But to do “open to all and free” it shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

Any takers?

Bill Hybels kicked off the day with five big questions and four helpful group exercises to work with leaders of any organization.  How do you determine if your leaders are under challenged, dangerously over challenged (DOC) or appropriately challenged?  Or even better how can you help your leaders reach that optimum level where they can operate at peak efficiency.  How do you deal with challenging people?  Are you evaluating, facing and resolving the problems facing your organization?  Do you routinely re-evaluate the core purpose of your organization?  Finally, Bill observed that all leaders need to get their “bell rung” by having situations that force them to ask the hard questions and get out of their comfort zones.

Next we were presented with perhaps the best and most authentic and realistic discussion of modern entrepreneurship I have ever heard, from Len Schlesinger.  So many presentations of the ideas of entrepreneurship present it as requiring determined people with high-risk new ideas, usually in the technology arena, and needing a great deal of venture capital. In reality, most entrepreneurs prefer low-risk, not necessarily original ideas which typically see something that exists already and find a way to do it better.  Similar myths about new ideas and inventions are that they are based on research and predictions about the future based on the past.  In reality the future is always a non-linear extrapolation of what has come before.  You can’t predict the future – but you can create it.  Because of this “Action Trumps Everything” (which just happens to be the title of Schlesinger’s new book.  But sometimes frequent action leads to failure, but Len noted that if you are working on new ideas “by failing you probably learn what nobody else knows”.  Facing new efforts with the idea of “affordable loss” and taking “smart small steps” with regular action leads to success over time with new efforts.

I wouldn’t want to follow that presentation, but next up was a man that spoke with passion, ideas, compassion and intelligence that I have not heard from a politician in a long time – I don’t even know Cory Booker’s political party but I would vote for him for office in a minute (and be very tempted to campaign for him).  Booker is the mayor of Newark, New Jersey (who’s life and story were detailed in the movie “Street Fight”).  His inspirational stories of his life and experiences in one of the most challenged (and oldest) cities in the country covered a range of issues and ideas on topics ranging from housing, to violence, to finding the best in every person.  He struggles with many peoples’ willingness to settle for average, status quo, and things being done the way they always have been done before.  He talked about “televisionism” and quipped about the various reality TV shows that have taken up residence in New Jersey.  He challenged all of us, with all our different organizations, to not settle but rather “do something”.

After being challenged about several “comfort zones” of leadership and ideas, Brenda Salter McNeil kicked off the afternoon with some inspiring and wise words about bridging cultural divisions in our community, country and world.  She walked us through the modern-day implications of Acts 1:8 and how we need to build community with those closest to us, those near us but with some differing views, and also those who are as different from us as possible.  She also observed that we often need catalytic events to help us to mobilize people to go and do what is necessary.

With all the different topics today, it was easy to feel like we were “channel flipping” – except the quality of the presentations were so much higher than what is available on television.  Case in point was who came next, Seth Godin.  I have read several of Seth’s books and am familiar with a lot of his ideas.  He took us through a similar theme of average efforts leading to even more average products.  He reviewed his work how modern “tribes” turning social structures upside down and the laptop being the new means of production in the information and social age.  Seth also reinforced the idea of failure as an important option and possible outcome, noting specifically that “if failure is not an option than neither is success”.  His most striking illustration is that people need to “Stop Bowling” – meaning that, the whole point of bowling is in doing a repetitive task, over and over, and just trying to do it a little better the next time.  He compared this to competition in the bottled water industry, “What are they going to do, make the water wetter?”  Do great new things, “Don’t wait to get picked – Picked Yourself!”

To cap off the day we had a challenge to not only come to the conference for ideas and inspiration, but also to turn ideas into action.  Steven Furtick is a young, energetic and gifted speaker with a contagious passion to have faith in the big things that can be accomplished by faithful people.  He took us through a modern retelling of 2 Kings 3 where the armies of Israel and Judah found themselves desperate for water.  Through the words and actions of a spirited Elisha, they found that they needed to “make the valley full of ditches” (NIV) and that God would supply the water that they so desperately needed.  We can act in many different ways, in faith, but “Only God can bring the rain.”

I am looking forward to another day at the conference tomorrow, and the days afterwards as I take what I’ve learned there and found ways to put it into practice – but for now, some sleep.

Maker Faire is a difficult event and concept to explain, but there is a lot of great information on the web describing the event.  I’ve described it as “think of a Science Fair, but for both kids and adults and multiply that by 1000, and you get close” – you’d still need to add in a few dashes of “State Fair” and “Carnival” and even “Music Festival” and maybe a little “Car Show” and “Star Trek Convention”.  The main idea comes from the idea of a “Maker” and/or “Hacker” meaning people who love to invent, create, innovate, merge, and modify just about anything – from electronics and technology, to machines, to transportation, to food (growing/preparing), and inventors and tinkers of all sorts.

I’ve been a subscriber of Make Magazine from O’Reilly  (the main sponsors and organizers of the Faire) since the premier issue. We’ve had a great time making several of the projects over the years from Make, and want to do even more – even more so after the event this weekend.  This is really why I believe that the Maker Faire was an amazing success in my opinion.  We left the day with all kinds of ideas and desire to go out and create new things – with more questions than answers but inspired to see what we could do – and I really think that was the whole point of the event.

The short story, and “take-aways”, from the day are probably this:

•  There are still things to be invented – big and little – and really the only obstacle to creating something new is imagination, time, and a little know-how,
• 3D printing has arrived. I remember how the first computers from HeathKit and Apple came as kits with parts that you had to assemble (and even procure) yourself. This is now true with 3D printers – all the parts you need are available with instructions that are fairly easy to follow. So you can “print” plastic parts, pieces, toys. It is a relatively slow process now (think dot-matrix printers from years ago), but fairly quickly you can go from an on-screen 3D model to an actual part you can hold in your hand within an hour (or less).
• Developing custom electronics and hardware is past the early-adopter stage and going mainstream – with the Arduino and Netduino and all other similar platforms, you can have a fully functioning programmed, debugged, tested and production hardware/software project for <$50 with virtually unlimited expandability (well not for $50, but you can add what you need).
• A little competition will drive people to create some amazing products – making learning and creating fun and challenging has some amazing results.
• Integrating the XBox Kinect into projects on the PC (and elsewhere) is also past the “hacking” stage and into the mainstream – if you can code and haven’t tried it, you are falling behind (and I am talking to myself more than anyone).
• And most importantly, building a community of makers, artists, creators, learners, etc. is a main key to success – people learn and do more with a support system than alone – period.

Some Highlights

When we approached the Henry Ford Museum at about 9:15 the traffic was already stopped about a mile or so away for parking, and I really wondered how this would work.  You see about 50-75% of the Maker Faire was outside in the parking lot of the Henry Ford Museum – taking up the entire regular parking lot.  But fortunately the Ford Corporation owns the properties across the street and we were able to use all of their parking lots.  Still, the long lines (moved quickly) of cars, and then the growing swell of people added to the initial excitement of the day.  Plus, during the walk down to the entrance you could see some of the larger elements of the Fairgrounds including the race track, MouseTrap, and huge mechanical fire-breathing dragon.  After getting our tickets we started in a tent that was sponsored/manned by the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum.  This was a a great start to get you thinking a bit like a scientist/inventor and was a good example of how the day was intended to be much more “hands-on” than just a passive experience.

Bicycle Built for 7

The “hands-on” nature was further emphasized as we all signed a safety waiver and got a bracelet before going further (not an experience for the timid, or a “padded playground” here).

The first area we explored included just about every kind of wheeled transportation imaginable – and nearly all were hands-on (with a bracelet). These included bikes with tires that were 10 feet high, we fit all of us on a “bicycle built for 7″, and Anna sat in (but didn’t ride around this time) on a motorbike where you actually ride inside the wheel.

Maker Shed

The “Maker Shed” (and there were several large “circus tent” style areas with different exhibits) was really the “science fair” feel part of the Faire.  We saw everything from embedded electronics, to plans for backyard geodesic domes, to solutions to cast/mold props for movie sets (including masks and forms to create any kind of alien or creature).

A few examples … yes, if you look closely, that is an “Easy Cheeze Printer” that you could print your name in cheese on a cracker.  Next is me talking to a guy who really reminded me of LeVarr Burton explaining how he used a fairly simple process to work with kids to create BioFuels from corn and other organic materials.  And, at first glance you might think that is a frog undergoing dissection, but actually it is an art project representing a frog dissection using knitting (did I mention there were a huge number of crafts and craftsman at the Faire?).

Free Range Learning

We took a planned break from the heat (95 in direct sunlight for most of the morning) and went inside the museum (air condition break) to the Live Stage area.

We caught the end of a presentation by Sean Casey and his Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV) (borrowed an image from the web)

This is a highly modified SUV with heavy weights and ground effects (to stop the tornado from lifting the vehicle).  The “turret” on top is actually a mounted IMAX camera which enabled him to get some never-before-seen-and-lived type footage from the base of a tornado cell – which just happened to be showing at the IMAX theater in the museum as well.

We stayed through the following presentation which was a very well assembled and produced effort by Maria Anderson from the LIFT Institute at Muskegon Community College.  She has graciously put her presentation and video online at http://edgeoflearning.com/?p=2920.  She walked us through a model where really life-long learning can be achieved using a “Maker Model” of learning, reflecting, tweeting, collaborating, blogging, reviewing and continuing on in a cycle of continuous investigation and learning.  This is the kind of thing that really makes sense when you talk about it.  The “Free Range” style of learning could replace a more “Caged/Factory” style learning that exists in many institutions today.  Free the learner/creator and let the learning and creating flow.  Some very fun, cool, and encouraging ideas (with some actual research and backup to support it).

Power Wheels Racing & MouseTrap

After a nice lunch and a chance meetup with some old friends (hey Bill and Ethan!) we headed outside to view the MouseTrap and the Power Racing Series.

The MouseTrap really escapes easy description – if you’ve seen the board game, and can imagine scaling everything up to “people-size” (i.e. the marbles in the game are now full-sized bowling balls and the crane/towers in the game are now 3-5 stories high) and then you add a carnival/gypsy-style music/performance, then you can approach what we saw there.  It was very cool seeing how they geared, and levered, and propelled, and dropped, and flung around the bowling balls through a “Rube Goldberg” style machine that ended up dropping a 2-ton actual bank safe to simulate the smashing of the mouse in the trap.  The “take away” from this was probably that anything in your imagination is possible, even if you have a fairly twisted imagination, and as long as you have a lot of time on your hands.

Right afterwards it was on to the Power Racing Series races.  This was really fun, and something it would be fairly straightforward to get into.  Imagine (or if you were there remember) taking one of those Power Racer toys that kids have been getting for Christmas over the last 5-6+ years – you know the ones like the Jeep or Barbie car that looks like a mini-version of the vehicle but runs on a rechargeable battery and goes 1-2 miles per hour and runs over pets, etc.  So get a used Power Wheels vehicle (people nearly give them away when the first battery runs out or they have to store it for a season) and spend up to $500 fixing it up (save the receipts, re-use/recycle parts to save money) and then race it against a bunch of other crazy people who are doing the same thing.  This means hacking these toys to go 15-20+ miles per hour, with actual rubber tires, upgraded motors, welded up frames, and more (but clearly little “wasted” on safety devices).  It was a very entertaining event (with bonus points given for crowd-pleasing performances (even if you “lost” the race)) and, again, a success because the discussions of “we could do that” or “how did they do that” or “I think my cousin has one of those in the attic” started almost immediately.  Competition, fun, and engineering hacking – all coming together in a really fun event – win-win.

Fire Breathing Dragon

A highlight just because of its scale and dramatic effect was the Gon-KiRin fire-breathing dragon

MLive got some good video and follow up on this here.

First Robotics & Kinect with Lifelong Learning

Heading back inside we visited the First LEGO Robotics and FRC (full-scale robots) display.

The FRC bots were demonstrating their ability to recognize different inflatable rings and shapes of different colors, and manipulate them in many cool ways (shown here stacking just the circles).  These were quite impressive.  The contrast here, to me, was that the budgets for teams like this are in the $10,000-$40,000 range and the time they spend on the projects is in the 100s-1000s of hours.  Still quite impressive, and an accomplishment to be sure, with an obvious contrast with the Power Racers outside.  The nice thing about the Maker Faire is that it has the whole range of items and projects from the Makers/Hackers (e.g. Power Racers) to the higher-end Engineers (FIRST Robotics).

Finally found the Kinect with Lifelong Learning exhibit built by friend and hacker Don Burnett, but just in time to miss him at the event.  They created a very fun (with a nice line up to try it out) kiosk with a Kinect that Washtenaw Community College has built and used to foster education and creative thinking.

This is also when the second of two camera batteries decided to die for the day so the last hour or so is memory-only …

Coke Zero and Mentos to end the Day

Right at 5:00 the guys from Eepybird gave a wonderful educational and entertaining presentation on the wonderful world of Coke Zero and Mentos eruptions.  Throughout the day kids were able to shoot off a Coke Zero Rocket Car (Anna’s shot out over 200ft – the temperature supposedly has a lot to do with the reaction).  At the end of the day there was a “performance” including 160 or so bottles and 600+ Mentos.  I found a nice YouTube of this event here.

Final Thoughts

I’d really like to make this an annual trek to “The Faire”.  It was fun, entertaining, thought-provoking, and really encouraging to the creative and adventurous parts of all of us. A good goal would also be to plan to not only attend in the future, but also participate/present in some way in the future. That is really the key part of a community – the give and take that makes us all better because of it. It would also be interesting to see if we couldn’t do a smaller scale version of this somewhere in West Michigan, or even very scaled back with just a small group to get started. Interested? Let me know …

The factors in this weight-loss program are pretty straightforward: more/smaller meals, calories, protein, water, activity/exercise, sleep, and support.  Some medical weight loss programs include medication or even surgery – this was not the case with this program.  You go to the office weekly and weigh in and attend a session for support and information.  Every-other-week you see the doctor and get blood tests (which became important for me – see below).  The sessions rotate between a dietitian, exercise physiologist, and a behaviorist.

Calories

The idea was to eat six times a day – small meals (150-250 calories) – and try to hit a calorie goal (1050 for me) each day (no more, no less).  The theory is that there is a minimum number of calories that you need every day (had never heard this) for your body to operate and not think it is starving.  It was interesting to talk to another person in the program who had hit a “plateau” and hadn’t been able to lose weight in 2-3 weeks, then they added 200 calories to her daily plan and she had two very good weeks of weight loss in a row – on more calories.  I still need to figure out more about how that works.  Then there is the amount of calories that people burn each day just “being alive”.  For me that was calculated at about 3250 calories per day.  There is a little scale with electrodes on it that somehow sends electricity through your body and figures out these numbers as well as fat, muscle, water percentages – again, not sure how it works, but glad it does.  So the “magic number” is 3,000-3,500 calories which, in theory, equates to one pound (i.e. if you eat a deficit of 3,500 calories you’ll lose a pound, if you eat 3,500 extra calories you’ll gain a pound).

Protein

I’d heard of the Atkins-style diets where you basically cut out all carbs and super-load on protein, so when this diet started stressing protein heavily I was concerned, but this went away fairly quickly after some discussions with the doctor and dietitian.  The theory with the protein (in every meal) is that there are several factors that make your body think it is hungry.  These include having something in your stomach (i.e. eating 6 times a day instead of 3) and having your body digesting/processing food – this later process is where the protein comes in.  It takes more time and energy to process protein, which keeps your body busy / burning calories / feeling full.  And all I can say from experience is that it really does work at keeping you feel full even on a ridiculously low calorie diet.  I can eat carbs, fruit, vegetables, etc. and feel hungry very quickly.  But add some nuts, yogurt, protein bar, lean meat, etc. and you can go for several hours without really feeling hungry.

Packaged/Plan Food

On this program you use the “diet food” you order and pick up each week at the office.  This food is engineered to provide the reduced calories but also provide the protein for the meals and snacks.  The food isn’t great – but it also isn’t terrible.  There are a variety of food and flavors ranging from powdered drinks and protein bars to full lean cuisine size/style microwave meals.  The routine and the pre-packaging was really what saved me during the first 4-5 weeks.  The first two weeks were brutal with basically bread/carb withdrawal and getting used to more/smaller meals and the reduced calories.  I had headaches, cravings, and generally felt nasty.  After four or five weeks things did get better, and after five weeks I had to change my diet from the regular one (more on that below).

Water

Drink a lot of water (64oz min per day).  Always have a drink of water ready, and even drink sometimes when you aren’t feeling thirsty.  I had several 24oz bottles of water that I consciously kept full and tried to drink from on a regular basis.  All that you are burning off and your body is using up needs to be filtered and flushed out of you somehow – the water helps.

Activity

Have some kind of regular activity.  At the beginning of the diet, exercise was something that was much more of a pain to try to do.  I did the minimum, and pretty grudgingly.  As you lose weight you gain energy and it takes less energy just to move around.  I remember camping in the fall at a site where we have to hike back our equipment before we set up camp – and it is 1/3 to 1/2 a mile.  In the fall it was tiring just getting back there.  In the spring (50 pounds lighter) it was almost enjoyable getting back there fully loaded with stuff (and still lighter than in the fall with nothing).  Activity comes with losing weight, but you need activity to lose weight.  So even if you start doing the minimum it will result in actually wanting to do more in time.

What I Liked

The Routine

I knew something about myself – that if you could just give me a set of steps: 1,2,3 – a,b,c I could follow them exactly.  If you give me a 100 calorie pack of nuts, I will eat the pack and not open another one.  If you give me a bag of nuts and say eat 100 calories and then stop, I could end up eating the whole bag.  I handle this now by taking the bag and separating it into 10 baggies of 100 calories each, and then it works.  But having the routine, logging everything I eat, drink and do for activity, works well for me.  This program had routine and weekly accountability and support.

What I Didn’t Like

The Packaged Food

Over the last few years we have been trying to eat more and more local fresh fruits, veggies, and lean meat from local farmers and vendors.  This program seemed to be going back a few steps in this area by eating a bunch of highly engineered and processed food.  I had to let this slide for a while at the start to get into a routine that was working for me.

My Kidney Scare

Every two weeks we get blood drawn and labs done to review with the doctor.  In week five I got a call a few days later from the office telling me that my kidney/renal numbers had jumped basically from a “1″ which was normal to a “5″ which they had never really seen before (that high).  So I needed to go get that lab done again somewhere that could verify the number, and if verified I needed to be admitted for some tests and to get the levels back down.  To make a long story short, the lab read a “4″ when I got there and I got to spend the night in the hospital as they did a scan of my kidney and heart – thank God both were fine.  Basically it was concluded the my body was burning a lot of fat and lean tissue in the beginning of the diet (big guys can lose 7-9 pounds in the first weeks pretty easily), I was eating a much larger proportion of protein that I was used to (and a lot of it in liquid form), I was taking medication for high blood pressure (which I am off now – hopefully for good) which was a “water pill” which reduces kidney function, and I had been taking ibuprofen because of the regular headaches.  In short, my kidneys were overloaded.  So I went on a “renal modified diet” which included a lot more fresh veggies, fruit and different protein along with some of the product (2 of 6 meals a day).  I got off the medication and stopped taking ibuprofen (and haven’t had either since – and blood pressure is even lower without it now). My numbers were back to normal in under a week and I kept up that diet for the rest of the program.

So I did end up solving the packaged food issue (but not the way I wanted to) and the kidney issue and stayed going with the program.  This is an important thing to share because it would be pretty easy to go on this type of program without a doctor’s supervision.  But rapid weight loss does have impacts on your body – some different than others.  I talked with some people who had liver issues and one that had problems with gallstones.  I’m not a doctor but I can testify that if you are doing a rapid weight loss you might want to tell your doctor and get a few tests along the way.

Where to Go From Here

I am nervous being out of the program now. I met three people in the program who had been in it before and were back to “try again”.  They warn you getting into the program that the “average person gains half the weight back” but also that “some people keep off the weight and lose more” …. which I heard as saying that “some people gain all the weight back and more” (the law of averages being what they are).  Graduates of the program are encouraged to attend the support classes, weight in, and get the information and support of the community.  I am considering this.  I want to be in regular contact with others working through this and to be accountable to having a plan and sticking to it.  My goal is to reach 100 pounds down for the year by the end of 2011 – about 30 more pounds which would be on track with the pace I have had going.  This will mean more exercise now as you burn less calories each day when you get lighter (just being alive) – which is a good thing, but you need to increase activity to make up for it.  I have some plans for that, but it will be another change.

p.s. Why might you want to take the test? First you can personally get a MCTS Silverlight (which is nice to have a current certification), also if you are a Microsoft Partner, this fulfills part of the Mobility Competency (along with the 70-599: Pro exam for WP7 – which is supposed to be out by now?), and most importantly, you gain depth – I always learn several things when studying for an exam which I am able to use fairly soon afterwards.

The Prometric/Microsoft testing agreement prohibits publishing actual test questions or summaries of the test itself, so I really should have written this yesterday while I was still preparing. I will try to recall the info without sharing anything that would violate the NDA on the test.  Good resources to review:

1) Microsoft’s information - this is a good review of the information and sections of the test

• Laying Out a User Interface (15%) – this is a section on laying out the UI, you should know the XAML for the elements mentioned – this is very “core” stuff, don’t lose any points here
• Enhancing the User Interface (14%) – styles, templates (know the difference), transformations, animations, visual state – again, review the syntax and know what is required and optional
• Implementing Application Logic (16%) – handling events, services, background workers, dependency properties, and the SL 4 ICommand interface
• I was worried that doing so much MVVM would hurt in doing things “old school” on the test, but they did a good job of respecting the pattern without using any of the frameworks outside of stock SL4.
• Also, make sure you are comfortable with setting up event handlers as class methods but also as statement lambdas (i.e.. the ” += (s, args) = > { } ” syntax).
• If you have to learn some anonymous .NET delegates/functions at the same time as writing the test, it could add some complexity.
• I realized that I was using a lot of the shortcuts/helpers in Visual Studio 2010 and ReSharper to help implement dependency properties – which is fine for daily use – but make sure you know how to do it “from scratch” as well.
• Working with Data (17%)  - formatting, data binding, value converters, data validation
• formatting and data binding are fairly common, value converters (especially the annoying boolean-to-visibility converter) are fairly common, but are largely templated (review the templates),
•  and data validation is used but not as common.  The data validation, especially, got a lot of “love” in later versions of Silverlight – review this.
• Interacting with a Host Platform (11%)  - printing, out-of-browser applications, isolated storage, HTML DOM interaction, clipboard, read/write files from the host.
•  Do yourself a favor – set up a quick OOB SL4 application that reads a file from the computer, combines that info with text on the clipboard, and prints out the result from Silverlight – it won’t take long and what you learn will be very helpful (and useful).
• Structuring Applications (13%) – I lost a question here somewhere – probably in the “localization” area (I’ve never done that in production).  Review how to write and merge resource dictionaries, localize/globalize and application, and handle application-level events.
• Deploying Applications (13%) – review the HTML <object> code structure, initparms, etc. how to dynamically load resources (zip file, fonts, etc.) and use what you find, and the client-access policy file (where does it go, what should be in it, etc.)

One of the tasks at Toastmasters is the Timer – this person typically has a stop watch and a set of cards that are Green, Yellow, and Red.  If a particular talk is supposed to be 5 to 7 minutes long, the timer waits until the minimum time (5:00) and then shows the green card (letting the speaker know they have reached the minimum), then at the mid-point of the time (6:00) they show the yellow card (wrap it up), and at (7:00) the red card comes out and you technically have 30 seconds to wrap up (if not, we’re just learning).  Another important point about this position is that you need to record the time for each person during the meeting and report the times at the and of the meeting.

So I wanted to get a quick app done for the Windows Phone 7 app store and I picked this need for my first app.  It is called TalkTimer, it’s free, and has about 250 downloads in the first week (not amazing, but a start – getting some good feedback for a few new features).  Here is the app in a nutshell.

Pick your type of talk – wanted to include Lightening talks, TEDx talks, 5×5 and other formats in addition to Toastmasters

Pick the type of talk (which automatically has the minimum, mid-point, and maximum length)

A nifty digital timer awaits your pushing the “start” arrow.

The countdown timer turns green, yellow, red when your time is running out (only counts the full minutes before the last 30 to minimize distractions).

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Then a you can save the result to a log and list, by ironically clicking an icon that looks like a floppy disk (“What’s a floppy disk daddy?”)

That’s all it does, but it does do it pretty well.

I’m adapting the timer to a Circuit Training app that I may or may not release – there seems to be a need, but getting an app from fun prototype to production-ready is a bit more time than I have free in the next few weeks.

Some interesting stories about getting it released and tested.  The only real hitch was that dialog box in the above image – it didn’t like the “light background” option that the phone user can set if they like white in the background instead of black (for some reason).  All the other controls handled it well.  I had to do a couple backflips in Expression Blend to create a nice template that ignored the color settings and always presented the same – which is a fine resolution.

A good learning experience and a helpful app – now I just need to plan my next speech.  Thinking of bringing back out the Dreyfus Model materials – that might be fun to present.

Getting right to the point, I am very happy with the overall performance and features of the Nook – the size, screen, user experience, format, battery life, price and storage capacity create a great package for casual and serious reading.

Books on my Nook

In the month I have had the Nook, I have read several complete books on the device.  A typical “Nook day” for me will start at 7:00am with some devotions and current events with the family (more on the news feeds and features a little later).  Our summer “book club” has taken us through Penrod by Booth Tarkington, and now mid-way through The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald.  After hearing a lot of chatter online, I “checked out” A Game of Thrones by George R.R Martin from the Kent District Library (KDL) / Midwest Collaborative for Library Services (MCLS).  I also got How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown, and SEAL Team Six by Howard E. Wasdin, mainly because I liked the titles, but also because I was curious about more background of recent events.  I added some PDF study guides made from Word files for some Microsoft certification tests I am studying for as well (more on the lackluster PDF support of the Nook below as well). I added Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin because we were going to see his bluegrass band perform and I thought it would be interesting to go deeper into his life.  And I am 27 weeks into a 44-week study of Systematic Theology, so I bought the Nook version of the book (don’t have to carry the 1,200+ page tome around any more).  Of the 10-12 books on my Nook, I have completed two, skimmed seven or eight, and am in process (and plan to finish) another three – two or three are just pretty book covers on my “Library” screen – so overall pretty typical for me.

Nook Features

I have avoided this round of eReaders like the Kindle and previous Nooks because I thought they lacked some important features.  Now with the new Nook I am going to try it out and see how well it works for me – can it replace print books for the majority of the reading that I do?

Size

The size of the Nook appealed to me, and has served me very well – it is about the size and thickness of a paperback book.  I loaded an eBook reader on the iPod Touch and tried to read through a few chapters of a few books.  The iPod was too small to really be good for text, and it was so thin that it really didn’t fit well in my hand for extended reading.  The Nook has a “rubberized” feel to it, and the back has some ridges in it, that really enable it to be held and read for an extended period of time.

Screen

I’ll admit going back to a black and white screen seemed to be a big negative about the reader – especially when one of the Nook’s predecessors is the Nook Color. But now I am sold.  The black and white contrast ratios (“distance” from black to white) on my old Apple Newton or Palm Pilot (which I brought out for comparison) are about what you’d find on some old dot-matrix printer on newsprint.  These new “Pearl E Ink” displays are much more like a laser printer on nice white bond paper – as good, or better than most paperbacks and close to some hardcovers. I’m told the screen is “only” 167 pixels-per-inch (ppi), and laser printers are more in the 300-1200 dpi, but the resolution is really great to read as it is for an extended period of time, and the contrast ratio makes the text almost black and the background almost white.

User Experience (UX)

By getting rid of the keyboard and bottom button bar on the previous Kindle and Nook and going with a touch screen, the new Nook has maximized the screen for reading and created a very effective user interface. The applications that come with the Nook to help to buy books and read them have big “touchable buttons” and work well with the screen.  You can turn a page by swiping/touching on the side of the page that you want to turn.  Touching in the middle of the screen brings up an option bar at the bottom for more tools

There are six smartly-placed physical buttons on the unit: the on/off button which is on the rear of the unit in the upper middle (no real risk of shutting things off unintentionally - in fact I don’t remember ever turning it off as it sleeps on its own), the “Nook” button in the bottom middle which brings up the main option bar at the bottom that allows you to go to the top-level pages, and four page turning buttons which aren’t as obvious on first look, but are my favorite and I use them constantly.  The four buttons are in two pairs on either side of the unit.  There is a slight ridge line for each button – one from the middle of the unit up and the other from the middle of the unit down.  These are for page turning and are configurable (i.e. top goes to next page or to bottom page – your choice).  For longer reading sessions it is nice to have these buttons there so you can hold the book in one hand and just “squeeze” a bit to turn the page.  There is an inaudible “click” but one that you feel to know that the button has been pressed – just enough to know you did it right and keep from accidentally pushing it, but not enough to be annoying.  I know some people turn pages with the touch screen, but I am all about the side buttons – very nice.

Format

I wanted an eBook reader that I could get access to the host of free eBooks available through the Gutenberg Project and other free eBook services.  I also wanted to be able to “check out” books from our local KDL library.  The Kindle primarily uses the “ePub” book format – as do the 25+ “other” E-book Readers out there – all but the Kindle which uses primarily the “mobi” book format.  So, while the Kindle has many/most of the free eBooks available now in the “mobi” format, and some libraries have started carrying some books for the Kindle, the ePub format is still the most widely supported.  This gap is closing quickly, but it is something that has been really useful to me so far.

The other thing that is attractive about the ePub format is that it has some nice computer programming APIs available for it.  All that means for me is that I can easily create ePub documents by writing computer software, which opens a world of opportunity going forward.

Battery

The claim from Barnes & Noble was that you could get up to two months of battery life with the new Nook.  I did the initial charge of the Nook with the charger to the wall, and it was only after about a month that it started complaining that it wanted a recharge at 20% capacity.  I have, however, plugged the Nook on to the USB cable to load books and news feeds and I know that it does charge while connected, so I am sure it got some non-trivial electrons that way.  I have also left the WiFi radio on continuously since I got the device so I know that drains the battery as well.  My gut feel is that 2 months would really be a stretch, but that 3-4 weeks may be the reality – which is really a huge improvement over tablet and phone type devices.

My one beef about the battery is that it has followed the Apple model of being not easily end-user maintainable.  All batteries lose power and capacity over time so it’d be nice to be able to change the battery fairly easily.  There are kits available online for $15-30 with videos and the tools necessary to complete the “operation” – but it can be uncomfortable for end-users to have to “crack” the case, remove ribbon cables, and see circuit boards/screen in order to change the battery.

Memory / Expansion

The Nook comes with 2 Gb of internal storage, which (ironically) doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that the average ePub book is about 200-400kb so that is thousands of books on the device.  But, just in case there are new and different things to do with the Nook that are an order of magnitude bigger than current eBooks, the Nook also has a mini-SD slot that will take up to 32Gb of additional storage.  This is more books than you have ever read, and ever will read.  The base memory is nice, and the user-enabled expansion is overkill.

Price

The base price of the new reader came out at $139, which had the nice side-effect of sending the smaller Kindle down to this price point as well.  They are still probably marking up this device 50%-75% from the production cost.  I know “value” as perceived by consumers is largely price-based.  So while they could probably sell the Nook at $99 and still make a nice profit, people might perceive it as being a “cheap” eBook and buy a more expensive competitor (strange but true).  If they can get the Nook down to $99 using some deal, or rebate, or coupon for Christmas, I think they could be a run-away bestseller.

Needs To Improve

PDF

I want/need good PDF support on the Nook if I ever hope for it to replace some of the things I do with self-published documents (e.g. agendas, reports, reference materials), and PDF is the dominant formatted document format on the web.  The current rev of the Nook software (1.0.0) has very underwhelming support for PDF.  If the PDF is just basic text, the built-in reader does a fair job of scaling and paging through the content.  If there are full-screen pages with a mixture of text and images it either renders them too small to see (with no easy zoom) or fails to render them completely.  I tried loading some schedules for local art and music festivals onto the device, which I could read fine on my computer at home, and they would not even render on the Nook.

The good news here is that there are better PDF-readers already working on the Nook, but you have to “root’ the device and install an alternative version of Android (the base operating system of the Nook) on the Nook to add other native Android applications (several of which are more full-powered PDF readers).  So this is something that Barnes & Noble could (and should) fix if enough people remind them that they need to do this soon.  The Nook has plenty of horsepower to do a much better job of PDF rendering.

Search Speed

I tried a few times to search for a key word or phrase in the Penrod book during a book club discussion – thinking it would search “close” to the page I was on and show me where the word was used.  Instead the reader took 30+ seconds to search the entire text of the book and show me every usage of the word(s) throughout the entire book.  Not only did this take way too long (having written search algorithms on far bigger sets of data on lesser-powered machines) but it ended up not being helpful at all as I lost the context of the page that I was on and had to page through the search results.  With the extra space on the device, it could index the contents and store the results to provide a “nearest found” search result, much faster, with the option for the complete search as well.

Annotations

Using the touch screen you can put-and-hold your finger on any word to select the word.  Then you have the option to get a quick dictionary definition (works very nice), leave a “highlight” on the word, or add a note (with a surprisingly responsive pop-up keyboard).  But selecting a phrase or sentence is quite difficult. You are supposed to grab one of the “handles” at the end of the highlight and drag it to the end of the content, which inevitably end up with extra letters at the end or too few selected.  It would be nice if there was a way to “draw” on the page and circle and annotate the book for future review and reference.  They could even sell a stylus that would react to the touch-screen technology (like they have for the iPad) that serious markup/annotators could use when reading.

Screen Refresh

The upside of the Nook E Ink screen is that it only really uses battery/energy when the screen is updated – otherwise the image stays put.  To fully update the screen, it looks like the screen is blacked out, and then whited out, and then redrawn with the new text (kind of like erasing an Etch-a-Sketch).  The downside of this is a lot of flicker (which I am told is much better than previous versions, but it is still noticeable and takes away from the experience).  They try to get around this flicker by only fully redrawing the screen every 5-6 screen draws.  What this does is leave a faint “ghosting” of the previous content on the screen - barely noticeable unless the previous page was significantly different, but still there.  This speeds things up but can cause “artifacts” on the screen.  I thought it was more like “burn in” when I saw the faint image of a button from the home screen on some subsequent pages.  But then it went away when I had gone far enough ahead.

Battery

As before, I want to be able to have a spare/charged battery and/or be able to change the battery myself.  My iPod Touch is down to about 3 hours of battery life now and Apple wants $75 to have them change the battery – techno-extortion is not nice.

“In Store Experience”

One of the selling points of the Nook is supposed to be that you can bring it into one of their “brick & mortar” stores and read books for free and get a bunch of incentives.  Another benefit to the store experience is the idea that there would always be someone at the store at the “Nook desk” to help people, give advice, and answer questions.  I must have hit a bad day last week when I swung by the Woodland Barnes & Noble store.  The Nook wouldn’t connect to the in-store network – it would connect to the bar next store, but then the Nook would immediately drop that network because it saw the Barnes & Noble network (I guess the store wireless network gets top priority when it appears – which is unfortunate because the bar network was working but the B&N one was not).  So I went and talked to the “Nook Lady”.  Turns out that they haven’t had any of the new Nooks in stock at the store so she hadn’t really had time to use the new ones (even though there were some demo units on the front of the counter).  She didn’t really know much about the new unit and couldn’t help me get connected.  So this aspect was a bit disappointing, but I will try again if I am in the area.

Missing Features

Text-To-Speech / Audio?

One of the thing my old Newton did with text/books/formatted text was a basic text-to-speech (TTS) (and that was 18 years ago).  Sure it sounded like the Talking Moose but that was OK.  The Kindle has a basic “read a book to you” ability, which is a nearly common set of functionality nowadays.  The Nook has no headphone jack or speaker, and will not play audio books (though it certainly has enough space, enough power, and an operating system that would support it.  So to leave audio and TTS off of the Nook is a design choice – to focus on the readability of books and really very little else.  This is a “missing feature” but I am not sure that I miss it that much.  I have an iPod and a phone that plays MP3s, and I like to read books (which is why I got the Nook).

Color?

If you had a TV that “went back” to black and white that would be quite silly – same with just about any other technology.  The iPad screen and iPhone screens are very nice, and the Nook Color is a great and inexpensive tablet.  They can play games and people do read books on the iPad (even if the eye strain is measurably more intense over a period of time).  I think the problem here is two things: (1) glare/outdoor reading and (2) battery life.  I have read my Nook in direct sunlight with sunglasses on and it works like a charm – other people who stopped to look were really amazed.  Many people couldn’t even see their cell phones in the direct sun.  It is a great screen in all lighting conditions (except dark in bed) and from just about any angle.  Also a backlit and full-color screen uses a great deal of power and causes such devices to need daily recharges – a fact I really appreciate about the Nook.  There are some great E Ink Color Screen like the Mirasol screen, but they aren’t in real production yet.  Maybe when those screens hit prime time we’ll see a nice color E-book Reader.

RSS / News Reader / Browser

There is a “hidden” browser on the nook – just type in something that looks like a web address (e.g. bn.com) and it will open in a browser that works via the wifi connection.  The browser is really bad. There is a reason it isn’t obvious.  If a web site has a functional mobile-formatted web site, then it has a chance of working.  If not, most of the time you get a blank white screen.  I read daily news in the morning and it would sure be nice to have a set of web sites that were set up to work with the Nook browser.  I know the main “point” of the Nook for B&N is to sell books, and even subscriptions, and “free online news” goes against this goal.  But it’d be nice.  In the same vein as the better PDF reader available if you hack/root your Nook.  There are several much better browsers available for Android that could be adapted for the Nook.  I am going to leave the Nook “stock” for a while, but if there isn’t progress on the PDF and Browser / Reader front then I might be tempted to try out some of the alternate operating systems.

Calibre

This will probably be another post entirely – as this review is already 2-3x too long.  But I have to mention the Calibre software for your personal computer.  Calibre handles a bunch of the issues I mentioned in this review and adds an entire new dimension to the Nook (and other E-book Readers).  It will help you to find free books, download them, catalog them, transfer them to your Nook.  It will also subscribe to any syndicated news feed or blog on the internet and will automatically grab them on a scheduled basis (and move them to your Nook).  This has really be a lifesaver for me in the news area and I am using it to catalog the literally hundreds of public domain books that are available online.

Final Thoughts

It is still early to be able to give it a full recommendation, but the first month with the Nook has been really positive.  I want to do some experiments with the ePub library and create some online reports and materials that work well with the Nook.  The Nook has replaced many of my book needs and has great potential.  I look forward to news and updates from Barnes & Noble that might fill in some of the gaps that the 1.0.0 version has.  I’ll keep you updated.

I had a goal to get my blog up and running again by the end of June – so I figured I’d get a head start today

I’ve been away from blogging for a while – first because of a major technical snafu at my previous hosting provider (WebHost4Life – ironic name), but then because of my lack of time and focus regarding blog posts.  Recently there has been so much going on and nowhere to blog, so I decided to start blogging again.

I’ve opted for WordPress this time mainly for two reasons: 1) the previously mentioned “time factor” – WordPress is a two-click install and will automatically update itself when new versions come out (as 3.1.4 did today to handle some security issues), and 2) there are a bunch of really powerful (and mostly free) plugins and themes than those available in the BlogEngine.NET community.  I still operate a few BlogEngine.NET blogs for groups and clients, and where tighter control and easy customization is needed I’ll still go to BlogEngine for that (they have a shiny new version too).  But for my personal blog I am going with WordPress so I can (hopefully) focus more on the content and less on keeping things up to date and up and running.

UPDATE:

The migration is going well – first major hurdles are taken care of.

I have really liked Windows Live Writer as a blogging platform so I wanted to try to continue using that with WordPress.  Got that set up and posted some initial posts for testing – worked well.

Found a helpful resource here: http://merill.net/2009/01/migrating-from-blogenginenet-to-wordpress/ which covers the major points in migration from BlogEngine.NET to WordPress.

#1 Exporting the old blog posts

• Exported using the BlogML format, from the settings in the admin of BlogEngine.NET

#2 Find/replace the image tags

• Moving image links from the .axd in BlogEngine.NET to the wp-content/uploads directory

#3 Importing the BlogML into WordPress

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blogml-importer/
• This crashed midway through the process so I need to find out if there are any missing posts – but the results do look pretty good.

#4 Finding the missing images – my “backup” from WebHost4Life doesn’t look like it has all the images.  I am going to try to track them down on the backup drive and home computer – recreate or remove any I can’t find

Overall pretty seamless – more content soon.

UPDATE 2:

Missed this the first time through:  The blog categories come over from BlogEngine in the BlogML as the long GUIDs (e.g. 74d4ef66-f7ce-4f9f-9286-b32b8e294a4a) what we really want is the human-readable name (e.g. Development).   The easiest way to fix this (looks weird to users and writers otherwise) is to import as normal, and then edit each Category in WordPress.  Copy the GUID and then search the BlogML for the code.  There will be a code element something like this …

    <category id="74d4ef66-f7ce-4f9f-9286-b32b8e294a4a" date-created="0001-01-01T00:00:00" date-modified="0001-01-01T00:00:00" approved="true" parentref="0">
      <title type="text"><![CDATA[Development]]></title>
    </category>

Match the category id to the text inside the CDATA of the Title and you are back in business.