Monthly Archives: June 2010

The folks at Western Digital were kind enough to lend me a TV Live Plus player (WD TV Live). The TV Live Plus Player is an excellent add on for families, particularly families on a budget (that would be most of us, right?).

Here’s what the TV Live Plus is. It’s a little box that you attach to your television. It’s very small actually at 5 in x 4 in x 1.5 in, you could throw it in a bag when you travel.

So what you do is take this little box, plug it into the wall, plug it into your TV with cables or with an HDMI cable (I’d recommend that), and connect it to your router with an ethernet cable (or buy the wifi add-on, but trust me you want the ethernet cable for this). After you’ve done this you go through a very simple set up process with your favorite online entertainment channels, and voila, you’re streaming them all to your TV at Full-HD 1080p.

What’s new and different about the TV Live Plus is that you can actually pick out your Netflix movies from the unit. I know this might not seem revolutionary to you, but other brands and older players did not have a full integration, so in the past if you wanted to order a netflix movie, you’d have to go online to Netflix, add a movie to your queue, and then go back to your device and start streaming it. This is much better, much smarter. I have a competing brand’s player, and I’m enjoying this quite a bit more.

Did I mention it’s small? It’s the silverish device on top of the Playstation.

The TV Live Plus also streams YouTube, Flickr, Pandora, Live365, as well as the MediaFly network which includes daily podcasts from CNN, NBC, MTV, ESPN® and other online content providers. I’m pretty sure those folks at MediaFly must be so embarrassed that they aren’t streaming Momversation… right? (please???) Last night the kids and I watched about a half hour of Annoying Orange webisodes on the family room TV. The orange really is annoying, I’m including an episode here so you can get a good idea of just how much I love my children.

Did you see that? Now imagine watching eight episodes back to back with your son screaming “More! More!” and your daughter imitating the orange for hours thereafter.

I noticed that on Netflix there are tons of cartoons available. If you’re in TV mode with kids, this would save you a fortune, and you don’t have to watch commercials. Woot!

The TV Live Plus retails at $149, and has two USB ports so you can connect your hard drives to it and stream your own content. This is wonderful for home movies, music libraries, photographs or in store advertising.

It is imperfect in that the picture quality is not as good as what I get from my HD DirecTv input. However, I would compare the picture quality of this system to cable television. It’s a nice picture, but it’s not the crazy sharpness that prodded us into getting HD DirecTv. My husband is We are absolute snobs when it comes to watching sports on TV. So long as you have a good, fast internet connection the TV Live Plus will give you a nice high quality picture. If your internet connection drops out your picture will become more pixelated, but you will not experience buffering (you know the delay you sometimes get with online media), so if you’re enjoying a movie you might not notice very much at all. I think a short term drop in picture quality is MUCH better than a buffered movie.

Considering that we spend close to $140 a month to have DirecTv, I think a $149 TV Live Plus would be a great investment. If you couple it with an $8 a month Netflix subscription it’s a high quality, low cost solution.You could get it without netflix and just enjoy the free music services on it, and youtube. I think you can rent a number of movies on YouTube.

As a complete aside, I love that you turn the device off when you’re not using it. Unlike satellite and cable TV, it doesn’t bleed you of power day and night. I get really worked up about devices that run hot when no one’s using them, and this one shuts down completely. I appreciate that.

I’m thinking this could also be a great addition to any dorm room. You know… when the kids aren’t studying… because they’re studying most of the time, right?

If you’re like me, you use Mozilla’s browser Firefox to surf the web. I use Firefox because there are so many fabulous add ons.

Today I found a new great one. Rapportive.

Basically Rapportive takes your gMail account and makes it social. Now, when I get an email from someone Rapportive checks with Gravatar, Rapleaf and Twitter to give you relevant infomation about whomever you are emailing with. Rapportive gives you a right column sidebar with information about your new friend.

If I’m emailing with Stephanie, this is what I see in the right column.

I know that Stephanie is president of a company and all, but to be fair I am a social media expert a maven and a guru. Can you top that?

When you check on your own profile (easiest to do from your sent items folder) you can hover over anything in your profile and update it in two clicks. Rapportive is easy to install if you have firefox, just click here and follow the instructions. If you don’t have Firefox, click here and try browsing like the big kids.

Add ons like Rapportive should be a reminder to keep your LinkedIn profile up to date. Mine isn’t… but gurus and mavens don’t need to worry about things like that.

Hat Tip to James Poling who finds all the good stuff.

Today is Jane’s last day of fifth grade. There will be a culmination ceremony tomorrow, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that the school doesn’t call it a graduation. The change in my daughter and her friends has been remarkable. When they entered fifth grade I remember standing at the school gates, a little breathy. The fifth grade girls were hugging and lifting the first grade kids, cooing at them all the while, “Ooh Dorothy you’re so cute.” I recall looking at them, my daughter and her friends alike, thinking they’re big. This is the moment they become big kids.

But it wasn’t.

When I walk to the morning chapel, and navigate my way through 6th, 7th and 8th grade kids, I realize they are big. I am 5’6″ tall and I find myself looking up a number of kids in the beginning of the year, and even more of them toward the end. The Middle School Kids, those are the big kids. Jane will join them next year. In fact I’ll be buying some of her new uniforms this week, and I know she’s very excited to finally shake the white polo shirt and blue shorts she’s worn for the past three years.

What’s wonderful about my daughter in this moment in time is that she’s changing, and growing, and it’s all so pleasant. She’s excited about new adventures, she’s surrounded by great kids, and she’s joyful. Sometimes we even hold hands in public, but less and less I’m afraid. She needs us less, but wants us more.

Eleven is sweet.

Next week there is a birthday party for one of Jane’s friends.  The party is very close to Jamba Juice. Remember Alexander’s big walk to Jamba Juice?

Well, Jane would like to walk to the party, and she’d like to walk there alone. Two other moms are on board, and the girls will be coming to my house after school, and then the trio will walk the eight tenths of a mile to the birthday party, enjoy the party and then walk back home.

One of the moms said, “I’ll just give my daughter my cell phone so they can check in with us.”

I found myself replying with, “Jane has a cell phone, and I’m pretty sure the moms at the party will be happy to check on them too.”

I found myself worrying that instead of teaching our kids to rely on good judgment, and even better social skills (like asking a store owner to please call home), that we’ve taught our kids to rely on texting and electronic leashes.

I’m pretty sure there’s a lovely balance between the two, but I’m not sure exactly where it is. I know this is all dynamic.

Hopefully we can swing it.

I spent the morning driving with the team from Lexus. I’ll share a lot more detail with you later, but I wanted y’all to know a few safety related items:

When driving make sure your hands are at 9:00 and 3:00. Nine and three is fine for me. Many of us learned to drive with our hands at 10:00 and 2:00, but airbags make that an unsafe habit.

You should just barely see your own car in your side mirrors. My mirrors have been pointed too close to the body of the car. By having the mirrors out to the side a bit more, you reduce your blind spots significantly, almost completely on the passenger side.

Your steering wheel should point at your chest. Heaven forbid you get into an accident where you need those airbags, you don’t want them to deploy in your face. Make sure that wheel is pointed at your body for extra safety.

If your car has ABS brakes (be smart and buy one that has them) you do NOT want to pump the brakes if you are skidding. ABS (anti-lock braking systems) will automatically pump the brakes for you, many times faster than your foot ever could.  The ABS brakes make it so that you can keep control of the car even while braking hard in any condition.

Any car can be popped into neutral at any time. For many of you this will sound basic, but sometimes the basics matter. Every driver should know that without the car in gear it doesn’t matter how hard you press on the gas pedal, it will not accelerate.

There’s a ton more information I’ll share with you later, but I had a great time ruining the transmissions driving with Lexus today. We popped cars into neutral from 45 mph, we applied gas and brake at the same time, we skidded around on slippery surfaces, and we took hard turns braking in the sand.

It was fun, and it kicked the crap out of their cars, but it also made me happy about the way my family buys cars. Basically, we look for cars with five star safety ratings, and then we go shopping. When you get to hang out with a safety engineer you realize two things:

1. Safety engineers are really really really smart.
2. My family deserves to be safe.

Surprise of the day? Their big SUV? You know the LX? Not tippy at all. Which is weird, because I expected that thing to wobble.