New born prep

I'm 6 days into a newborn.  Lots of advice I receive was about getting enough sleep before hand and having lots of sex.  That's really it for advice from the masses.  I think the sex part is good, there's no time or energy for sexy times in the weeks following a baby.  But the sleep advice is pretty bad.

You should be well rested going into delivery.  All nighters and burning the candle at both ends should no longer be in your routine.  But you can't bank sleep.  You can't sleep so well the week before that you can stay up for days afterwards.  Why is this such popular advice?

The best things I did before my boy arrived were to buy and prepare food and freeze it.  A CostCo run a few weeks before means that we have food ready to go without much prep.  My wife made and froze some soup and curry.  Having food on hand is probably the most annoying and difficult to worry about while caring for a newborn.

The other thing we did was all the errands and chores on our list.  We made a couple lists with degrees of criticality:

• Most critical - absolutely had to get done
• Things that really should be done 
• Things that would be nice but not critical 
• Least critical - not important to get done.

Then we started at the top of the list and worked our way down.  So far, having those critical items complete has made the biggest difference. It was challenging to get all that stuff done, some of those things have been waiting to get done for almost 2 years.  This is part of being an adult though, right?

The best preparation I have for this experience comes from a youth spent at UU cons.  Running around all weekend with no sleep, sleeping on any surface and waking up after only an hour or two. These experiences provided the best training I could have. Losing a sleep routine is not new for my body and I'm able to match my boy's a lot better.

Forget traveling the world or pursuing your dreams

The majority of the friends I have from my life in VA do not want kids.   The world is full of kids with indifferent parents, there's no need to feel obligated to have kids if you don't want them.   Having a child that you're not ecstatic about  is doing a disservice to that kid and to the world, so I think it's NBD to not have kids if you're not ready.


The only thing that makes me sad about all my friends that don't want to have kids that I think they'd make excellent parents.  They're smart, capable and fun.   They'd teach adventure and learning. They'd have self confident and lovely children.

Uninstalling applications with GPO that were installed manually or during installation.

I installed applications with MDT during deployment.   I always assumed I could uninstall or update  it easily with a GPO later.  This is not the case. The GPO for software management works for uninstallation but only if it was installed with GPO.

Here's how I removed a few outdated apps.  On a machine with the applications that you want to remove, run:

WMIC product where "name like  '%application name%'" get Name, Version, IdentifyingNumber

The part in bold is the name of your application, run the command for each application.  This will give the product ID.  Use the product ID for a startup script that looks like this:

msiexec /x {XXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX} /qn

The open and close brace are mandatory, this wasn't clear to me in my research.  

Create a GPO in  GPO/computer configuration/Policies/Windows Settings/Scripts (Startup/Shutdown).