How to Tell Your Young Child They Have ADD

My wife came up with this, so all the credit goes to her. This was absolutely awesome and in my opinion a confidence boost rather than a “what’s wrong with me” moment. Our son has ADD, maybe even ADHD. He got it from me, I have ADHD. But instead of being told your too hyper and crazy and the negative remarks of 25 years ago this is what my wife told our six year old.

Son, you have a special kind of energy, a super power. And we must teach you how to use it. So me, daddy, aumma (aka grandma), your teacher and your doctor are going to help teach you how to control your super power.

We will be trying everything possible before medication, so behavior awareness and modification, as well as diet and sleep patterns. But even after two days and being “full of energy” at church he told me, “yes daddy, I know, I was a little crazy, but I have a special kind of energy and I don’t know how to control it yet.” He doesn’t feel bad about being different, he just has something that others don’t, and like Superman, or Ninjago, he must learn how to harness the power and use it for good.

Gift Giving Is Fundamentally Broken

Yes you read my title correctly, gift giving is fundamentally broken. There will be some exceptions, but for the most part the only time a person receives a gift is when they expect to receive a gift, i.e. birthday, Christmas, or hallmark holiday. I’m not saying that we need to get rid of gifts. I’m saying that we need to get rid of expected gifts. No one should for any reason expect a gift. Where’s the fun and joy in it, except maybe if you are five. Let’s consider the last time you bought Susie something because you had to, and you got her the dog thingy, and she opened it. What was her face? “Oh Yes!” or “Oh…. thanks, I think…?” And you felt how, when you saw that is wasn’t something she’d really like? So far gift giving seems to suck really badly. You have the same or better odds playing red\black on the roulette table, and at least that has a favorable return if you win.

Sure it’s fun to buy people gifts, except that it’s not when they are expecting a gift from you. When you know they are expecting something, there is this pressure that creates stress, “Oh I have to find a great gift they’ll really like and I only have 24 hours”, since let’s face it we hate buying people expected gifts so we put it off until the last possible second. Then we stressfully and quickly go through the isle looking for something that is just good enough, “Oh Susie likes dogs and this dog thingy is cute so I’ll get that.” What is the batting percentage on this, maybe 50%. So we are stuck buying something with a 50% likelihood they’ll like it because we have to, even though we don’t really want to. I know not in all cases, but think about buying a gift for your one of your in-laws or co-worker cause you got shamed into a secret santa ordeal, now I’ve just lowered the odds. This is even worse for kids who get unhappy because they didn’t get the gift they wanted most, or maybe it’s fair to say that everyone gets like this. Of course those with kids understand the tantrums and\or tears that will be had to be dealt with.

For adults, even teens, receiving a gift can be difficult as well. Think about the last time Grandma gave you a gift. Was it that sweater you have been dreaming of? Well it was a sweater, or dress shirt, but I’m going to guess you didn’t really want it. But then you have to show the fake smile of happiness, “Oh, thanks Grandma for the shirt.” Or maybe you get money from her, in a card that they put a lot of thought into to pick out just for you, “Oh, thanks Grandma for the card.”

Then there is the whole Christmas debacle of shopping through crowds and trying to find deals because you have to save money to buy everyone a gift and not everyone has money like Bill Gates. Holiday gift giving adds stress and undue financial burden into the mix. So we end up stressing about buying gifts with money we barely have or don’t have, then give someone something that with all honesty, probably gets put in the garage or attic. Maybe it’s clothing they’ll wear, or not and they donate it to Goodwill. Or they return it and get something they “want” or need. So we get pushed around in the store and buy something only to have a less than 50% chance they’ll like it and\or use it. So during Christmas everyone expects to receive gifts from family, and I would venture to guess that over 50% of the time they didn’t really want or need at least 50% of the gifts they received. So we are buying people stuff they don’t want and don’t really like because it’s a day where we are supposed to buy a gift.

My brother and sister-in-law for Christmas take blankets, sweaters and socks to homeless people. The day that most homeless people feel absolutely forgotten about, they actually receive a gift they want and need. And 95% of them are beyond grateful and joyful for the two gifts they just received. Yes two. One was the sweater, but more importantly, two was the fact that someone brought them something on a day they didn’t expect to get anything, and that is the most important part about giving and receiving gifts.

Here’s the joy of gift giving! Remember back to that one time when you bought someone something out of the blue, no special day, just you saw something that Susie would love and bought it for her and gave it to her for no reason, other than you care for Susie and really wanted her to have this thing. I’ll will to guess that Susie loved it and was completely shocked, and that little thing means more to her than the dog thingy you got her for her birthday. The joy in gift giving, and receiving, comes from the completely unexpected.

Maybe Christmas and birthday’s need to go the way of Thanksgiving, more about spending time with one another, having fun and eating. Rather than some stress filled, jacked up day that we are all glad when it is over and done. I know not everyone has a bad time, but if you read any of the holiday health articles, they’re all about managing stress and depression during the holidays. It is bad enough we stress about spending time with family, but to add in additional stress of gifts, expectations and finances is unneeded. So maybe we should start to consider a change to gift giving. Let’s move away from expected gifts and toward unexpected gifts. Plus if you need a holiday, be it hallmark or not, to remind you to give someone something as a gesture that you care about them, then you are doing it wrong. You shouldn’t need a “day” to tell someone you love them with flowers, a toy, jewelry, or anything else. If you care for someone, gift giving should come naturally, not be forced.

Microsoft Search Express vs. Google Mini for Intranet Search

There are two viable search products for an intranet search. One is “free” and another is $4,000. The question is which one suits you best. Well here goes my comparison based on a Microsoft AD network. If you are running something else you’re results will be a little different, mostly based on the authentication side.

Microsoft Search Express
Search Server Express 2010 is built with SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SQL Express 2008. You will need to install the service packs and run the SharePoint configuration wizard after the service packs. Also I would encourage you to install the Dec 2011 CU, which is SP2 beta.
It’s “free”, relatively speaking. I say relative as you will need to acquire hardware and Windows Server 2008 for it to sit on top of. It can index up to 10 million items, which compared to the other is vastly larger. It’s like the Death Star compared to a US Battleship. For $4,000 the Google Mini only gives you 100,000, the other option is the Google Search Appliance which can index 10 million items, but that will run you in the $300,000 range, at least that’s what I’ve been told by someone who has one in a corporate setting.
The install itself is simple enough, though we ran into a weird problem where we had to re-run the prerequsites a few times to get all of the packages installed. Still we didn’t have any errors. The package itself installs and configures the search service. It uses the Network Service account to crawl so if I wanted it to crawl our file server it could do so very easily with little configuration on my part, at least I think so. Which means even less configuration headaches I need worry about to get this up and running.
You can set it to crawl any number of sites, but I’m focused on an Intranet, which is easy enough to configure. You will need to install and configure a few things for it to be able to search and index PDF files (How-to-configure-PDF-iFilter-for-SharePoint-Server
). Otherwise it’s ready to go after you configure your Content Sources and crawl schedule.
If you’ve never used SharePoint before, it’s not that scary. A few mouse clicks and you can set Authenticated Users as part of the Visitors group and you’re good to go. Which if you are stupid, I mean daring enough to do, means users won’t have to login to view the results. On the other hand it might be a good thing for a second login, and you can always set the site to be in the Local Intranet Group in IE through Group Policy. That won’t help users on Chrome, FireFox or Safari but oh well.
You can also customize the look and feel with color templates and logos, should your corporate style guide require it.
The best part for me was the relative quickness and easiness I had setting up the server and crawler. While I’ve worked in SharePoint before it really didn’t require to much prior experience to get the job done. The most difficult part was fine tuning the crawl results. I also edited the master page through SharePoint Designer to remove the SharePoint look and feel, so that users didn’t know it was SharePoint.
Another point is reports. Search Express has okay search reports. However it is all logged, so if you had another SharePoint server you could do some very in-depth analyse.

Google Mini
We’ve had a Google Mini here for 6 years now. That’s $12,000 invested in a search product. Google charges $4,000 for the Mini which comes with a two year support contract. After which you are on your own and they end support completely for it, which in the corporate world means you have to buy a new one.
Setting up the Mini to search is easy for one site. For an intranet it gets a little more complicated. You have to go into Crawler Access and add a user for a matched pattern. Then you have to go into Administration and setup LDAP Access, cause well if it indexes a site that requires authentication, you are required to provide authentication to retrieve results. But where the Microsoft Search Server is part of the domain and can auto authenticate users the Google Mini cannot. And it needs to know where to query credentials passed to it. This process alone is cumbersome and it can be quite difficult depending on your Directory setup (i.e AD vs eDirectory).
Now for look and feel. The Mini use XSLT to transform the results, but it has a very simple editor. It cannot do look and feel. It can add a logo and let you customize how the results look and if it says GOOOOOOGLE or not. Otherwise you have to get into the XSLT editor and program your own look and feel. This is not novice stuff and it can very easily blow up if you aren’t careful.
You don’t have to install any plugins to search any type of files, however might need to comment out the file types in the Do Not Crawl URLs… box.
One thing you MUST know; If you have any dynamic calendars, you MUST add them to the Do Not Crawl URLs… box, otherwise you will hit 100,000 very quickly.
The mini will keep results for 12 months.
The mini cannot crawl file servers by default. An additional plugin is required.

Conclusion, sort of
Microsoft Search Server Express worked out best for us. It was easier to setup and get crawling and retrieve accurate results without hassling our users.
That isn’t to take anything away from the Mini, but it doesn’t work as cleanly as we need it to in our environment. Plus if you have a spare box or a VM box with some extra room you need only a Windows Server license and you’re up in running in one day. It only took me three days to have this R&D’d, production setup & installed and ready for our end users. Google Mini would take at least a week to be delivered then you have to install and configure it and get it crawling.
Another thing we experienced was the Google Mini authentication box caused numerous users to lock out their accounts as they where confused that the box didn’t give the normal domain authentication dialog, it said that they where logging into Google instead of a local domain box.
In the end our TCO was less for Search Express vs. the Mini. If you want to look at it from a pure cost basis Search Express is less expensive, hardware & software combined, allows a high volume for index, can index websites and file servers OOTB, delivers quality results in a professional friendly format and has a faster time to market. When you factor in time, Search Express is ahead by 4-7 days which when including a developers time is huge.

You will come to you own conclusions based on your setup and needs, which I’m sure are different then mine.

Maybe your design isn’t working…

I get a call today, “[user] wants a button to get back to the landing page.” I counter that there isn’t anything useful on the landing page and that it’s only there so the search crawler can find information but users don’t really ever use it. “Well that’s what [user] wants.”

I was forced to analyze my design and the design of the incoming [app]. Clearly something isn’t working. The new [app] had a link already to the landing page. It is easy to find and use.

My landing page didn’t have any information on it that users couldn’t already find elsewhere inside the app. I only added it so the search crawler could index the app correctly, which it can’t really because the links pop open in a css div modal pop up.

Crap maybe my design isn’t working as I thought. Oh well.