this past weekend we went to my parents house for some odds and ends. one of those was going through some of my old stuff and old computers that we had sitting in the basement. there were tons of old video components and random other things, but the main attraction was my old Video toaster computer. man that thing was loaded up! (for 1993). i think it must have had at least 2GB of Hard Drive Space in it! Also the NewTek Video Toaster with which i edited video, animated with Lightwave and a few other things. i also has “personal animation recorder” in there. what that did was record my animations to the hard drive so i could watch them or record them to Video tape (imagine that). the kicker was that i was able to do all this on a 33 MHz processor! amazing!

we plugged it in to see if it would start up. it seemed to but i don’t think the hard drive was spinning properly. so we opened it up and when my dad took out his handy dandy little flashlight to look the top fell off and shorted the computer out. (this was because Miles was playing with the flashlight and has recently learned to unscrew things. needless to say he unscrewed the flashlight). so off to the recycling it went. no worries. i don’t think it worked any more any way.

for the past two years my wife and i have received a gift card to Linder’s Green House from my Grandma.  last year we got a birch tree and tulip magnolia.  this year we got 2 apple trees, a Honey Crisp and a Zestar!  both of which were genetically engineered in Minnesota!  both apples are very good and also a little spendy at the store.  both they are so good.  so after a few years we should have a healthy crop of apples!  this year and next we should only see a few apples, but it will all be worth the wait!

yes that’s right, Miles can use the iPhone. he knows how to turn it on, unlock it, view photos and even answer it. don’t believe me? check out the video.

Well yesterday I canceled my Netflix account. It was not exactly a hard decision to make. We were paying

about $15 a month for 2 DVDs at a time and as many as we could get a month. Sounds great, right? Quite the deal! Well it was for a while, until we get sidetracked or things get in the way of watching movies, like sick kids or just getting too busy. So we ended up keeping some movies for up to 4 weeks at a time. That is an expensive rental at $15 a month and than keeping the same two movies for that time too when we could have had more. It just ended up being a waste of money for us, and when money is tight you gotta cut where you can.

On the other side, we have an Apple TV that we have had since the day the were available. we love it because we can watch out TV Shows and Movies with one box (as long as they are stored on the computer or the Hard Drive of the Apple TV itself). But recently Apple updated the functionality of the Apple TV and now you can rent movies directly from your couch at any time you want to! the other nice thing is that a lot of the movies are available in HD! This is nice because we happen to have an HD TV. The prices are very good too. A Standard Definition movies will run you $2.99 for library titles and $3.99 for new releases and HD title are just $1 more. That is much better than Netflix because you can get anything that is available any time and you don’t have to wait for it to come int he mail or have it sitting around for weeks and weeks while your subscription gets wasted away. So far I have been very pleased with it.

this is just a short little test blog from my iPhone. Looks like wordpress has an ugly mobile posting site. Looks like it works ok.