OK…the first thing I need to say is that my wife is smart. 4.0 out of highschool, 3.9 out of college smart. She can assemble IKEA furniture in her sleep and she does Suduko puzzles to relax. Also, I consider myself to be reasonably smart but I know she’s way smarter than me (apptitude tests at our former employer proved it, too)…but she’s nice enough to not mention it.

Anyway, now that I have listed a few of the accolades my wife’s brain has accrued, I feel reasonably safe questioning it’s ability to multitask when harried.

Here is my tale of woe and (partial) amazement:

RING RING

RING RING

Me: What’s up?
Wife: I’m having a bad day!
Me: What happened?
Wife: I RAN OVER THE MACBOOK!
Me: YOU WHAT?!?!?!

My brain kicks into overdrive trying to process what she has said. Did she really just say that she ran over our 5 month old Macbook Pro (17 in)? How could that even be possible? What chain of events could lead to my resposible, smart wife running over the most perfect computer I’ve ever used? I quickly fell in love with the Mac when it came time to edit a DVD of my daughter’s birth. After months of convincing my designer wife that we needed a Mac so she could test and build web sites on both platforms easily and I could finally edit and burn professional looking DVDs for family and posterity, we got THE MACBOOK PRO of my dreams. Sleek. Fast. Ergonomic. Insanely beautiful. I love using iMovie and iDVD and she just ran over the laptop?

Me: HOW DID YOU RUN OVER THE LAPTOP?!?!? How is that even possible?!

At this point, I realize I am standing and talking quite loudly. I don’t remember deciding to stand; maybe my body thought standing would help me absorb the blow. .

Wife: Well, I was coming out of the [health] club after a client meeting and I had Ella [18 months old] and three bags and I was trying to hurry home to feed Ella before she fell asleep!

ME: AND?! [Meaning: How do you run over a laptop? An expensive, beautiful one at that.]
Wife: Well, I put the Macbook against the tire, I put the rest of the bags in the car, and got Ella settled and then drove off. When I left it against the wheel, it fell down when I backed up and then I ran over it with the front wheels.

ME: AAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHAAAGGGHH!!! WHAT?! Why didn’t you put it in with the rest of the bags? Why didn’t you leave your gym clothes outside? How could you forget a $3000 laptop 45 seconds after setting it down? Why against the tire? Didn’t you notice it right there next to your foot? Didn’t you feel like something was missing? Don’t you look around the car before getting in? Why didn’t you put it in the car?

It basically came down to the fact that my wife was coming out of a client meeting, had a cranky daughter, had too much on her mind, and just made a simple mistake…I realize that now but it took me awhile to realize it…I had LOTS of questions.

So dealing with a simple, honest mistake is the woe part.

The amazement comes in the form of the fact that the macbook pro still ran just fine after getting run over by a 3400 pound Subura Outback. The screen has some weird pressure marks / cracks / dead pixels…the case is a bit bent and you’d never be able to get a DVD in or out of the drive but otherwise everything still works just fine. We back up our data pretty religiously but it was nice to be able to fire it up, surf around the drives and transfer stuff off just in case. I’m editing a ton of video from the different TV shows that ran the “Gestation Video” and had I lost some of that work, then I would have been peeved. Thank God, that Macbook took a pretty good hit and kept on a running!

So to all the Mac Fanboys out there, yes, Apple’s kick ass construction has once again shown itself to be awesome.

We’re sending our (once) lovely Mac off to Apple to have them do a body (and screen) swap on it and it is going to cost about $1300 to restore it to it’s former glory. I figure that’s not too bad given that we were able to get our data off and no one actually got hurt in this “catastrophe”. But, heck, I’m not against trying to offset my losses so you liked the story, pics, or vid and feel inclined, I’ll gladly accept donations or your diggs.

Many thanks,
Matt

Take a look at the stylish and funny tee shirts for the pregnant women in your life. There are t-shirts that say: Give me a break, I’m creating Life over here; Watch the love grow…; Bump (with a road sign); I’m not pregnant but my gut thinks I am. There is also a maternity shirt that shows how big baby is in terms of fruit for a given month in a pregnancy. Nothing says I’m pregnant like this merchandise.

There is a lot more than this available at:

www.cafepress.com/yourdigitallife

I’m selling sponsorship on Ebay right now so get over there and bid if you want!

With the GoogleScreenSaver, you can pick and choose directories of images or just specify all your images and then the screen saver randomizes all your images, puts borders on them so they look like old prints and starts throwing the pictures on your desktop in different sizes and angles so that it looks like a table covered in your favorite photos.

When we have parties, we leave the monitors and TVs (hooked up to the computer) on so that our friends can see our favorite pictures and sometimes we even specify pictures from past get togethers to folks can remember the good times from “back in the day”. As a matter of fact, the way we let our friends know Carlin was pregnant was by throwing a party, picking a ton of photos, throwing a couple of pics from her ultrasound, and then just waited for folks to notice. It was great to see all the double takes we got!

I just started a new job not too long ago and I use it there as well as it is a great conversation starter with my new co-workers.

Lastly, I just enjoy seeing photos from my wedding, my family, vacations, etc…It reminds me of all the great things in life.

If you don’t have the GoogleScreenSaver (it comes bundled with Google Pack, which offers a lot of other great functionality), you can download it from the link to the right. Once you have the Google Pack installed, right click on your desktop, go to properties, click the “Screen Saver” tab, select GoogleScreenSaver, click “Settings” to choose your folders and start enjoying the greatest screen saver (in my opinion) out there!

Once Picasa has scanned your drive and found all your pictures, you’ll be treated to a beautiful, easy-to-use interface that lets you easily scroll through your photos in many ways: thumbnails, full-screen galleries, and even in a cool ‘timeline’ layout. You can enhance and correct images, too – there’s even a great ‘I’m feeling lucky’ option that auto-corrects the image. I had pretty good luck with it, but it won’t work on every on (much like the ‘auto levels’ feature in Photoshop if you’re familiar).

Then there are all the great things you can do with your images – email, print, buy prints, add to your blog and more. They’re all just at the click of a button on the lower right of the screen. You can even create a photo collage the print or use as wallpaper on your computer. There’s a simple grid or a layered picture look, much like the google screensaver.

Check it out if you’re looking for a way to organize all those great digital photos of yours – it sure beats sorting old shoeboxes full of prints!

Please to enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EgzTd8jYaM

So just when Carlin and I think this whole thing is dying down (and looking at the stats we were flatlining), the fine folks at Inside Edition (hi Erin!) decided to run our piece.  That same day, YouTube.com makes us the their number one featured video.  I found out because my email got about 300 messages in 5 minutes…I quickly deduced something was up. 

Then, I hear that we have been on CNN, Extra, on the homepage of Wired, in The Daily Mirror over in England, in other unnamed print publications, and we have other news shows and web sites asking to interview us.  This is just insane! 

Since we are trying to collect all this media attention for Ella when she’s old enough to think it’s cool (and we are lame), could you please let us know where you have seen it (we already know about Inside Edition, CBS Early Show, and the Seattle PI)?  I don’t know what day we were on CNN or Extra so if you happen to know or for some reason have it recorded, could you let me know?  Same goes for any other print publication (Daily Mirror anyone?) or TV spot!

You can mail me at: info@EnjoyYourDigitalLife.com

Update:  We have since been on Good Morning America, the video has been viewed over 3 million times, and holds these honors with YouTube (as of 9/28/2006):

#19 – Recently Featured – All
#5 – Recently Featured – Comedy – All
#6 – Most Discussed (All Time) – Comedy – All
#22 – Most Discussed (All Time) – English
#8 – Most Discussed (All Time) – Comedy – English
#15 – Most Viewed (All Time) – Comedy – All
#49 – Most Viewed (All Time) – English
#13 – Most Viewed (All Time) – Comedy – English
#39 – Top Favorites (All Time) – Comedy – All
#87 – Top Favorites (All Time) – English
#35 – Top Favorites (All Time) – Comedy – English
 

I got lucky and found what I think to be is the ISP offering the greatest services and control I’ve ever seen…Their implementation is actually far superior to anything I imagined would be out there. Also, their support has been extremely friendly and fast! Once I dialed in the number and hit 3 for tech support, I’ve gotten someone on the 2nd or 3rd ring so far…and the longest it took for a change to be implemented was like 3 hours.

ANHosting is their name and making website hosting is their game (and boy am I lame).

They have an EXTENSIVE list of software that you can literally install by clicking a couple of buttons: want to have a blog, a forum / discussion board, a content management system, ecommerce package, guestbook, mailing lists, polls, project management tools, photo galleries, wikis, ad server, auctions, webcalendars, and much more? Then, just click away…you generally have at least 4 options for each those things listed. Your software requires a database connection? No problem, the install scripts set the software up for you: it will automatically create a mysql database for you, install the software where you specify, and set up the admin passwords for you. SO EASY!!!! I literally installed my ad server and blog software in 20 seconds a piece.

The have this cool “cPanel” app that allows you to do just about everything you want: configure mail (web or pop3) accounts and passwords, add extra domain names, set up FTP accounts, password protect directories, configure sub domains and MySQL databases (so you can access them from home like I do), set cron jobs, mime types, look at stats, Deny by IP, etc…you don’t really need to use tech support to control your web site (which is very foreign concept to me). However, if you don’t live and breath Internet technology, then tech support could walk you through anything you needed to do as they are up 24×7. I made a couple of calls all bleary eyed at 2am and they totally helped me out.

The level of control, the easy to use admin interfaces, the fact that they give you SSH access as root (for your chained directory), the number of software packages that auto install, and the support system all makes me give ANHosting 5 aardvarks (the highest aardvark rating I can legally make). I was honestly surprised how fast and easy it was…especially when I had as much control as I did or when I was counting on ANHosting to make some change. Because of this Carlin and I were able to turn this site out in just a few days (but worked our asses off doing so).

They give you all that with 3.5 GBs of space, 750,000 MB of transfers, unlimited email accounts (with Spam Assassin) and sub domains, 10 domain names, have PHP, Perl, MySQL, CGI scripts available to do all sorts of form processing, Python, shopping carts, backups, etc…all for the princely sum of $6.95 a month…and the first month is free with no set up. I saw all that and thought it was too good to be true…god, I sound like an infomercial…anyway, they rule! Check them out…you really don’t have anything to lose (no setup fee…first month free).

OK…once you get them set up: log into the CPANEL, go to the Fantastico link at the bottom, click that, select WordPress from the list on the right, and follow the installation steps…I think there are two and the only thing to decide is if you want your blog at the root of your website or in a subdirectory…If it is at the root, it means it is the first thing folks will see when they go to your domain. It’s what we did for this site and you don’t have to type anything if you want that.

Once you have got your WordPress blog set up and running (SUPER SIMPLE, btw), you can go to Google and open an adsense account. Google will give you javascript that you can then embed in your theme (using WP theme editor) to place your ads where you want on the page. The Adsense code is pretty cool as it looks at your content and then puts context sensitive ads on your pages…for example, if I was writing about boats, you’d see google ads about boats…Now that I’ve said boats…are there ads for boats. Damn, I should have said diamond rings…HEY LOOK DIAMOND RING ADS…Who can tell I am writing this late at night? Raise your arm! Oh, crap I just got a deodarant ad to show up…DONE!

Google pays your x amount for each ad clicked…where x amount is pretty small. I’m pretty sure you won’t get rich off them but if you do, will you let me know what you did? I promise not to tell!

If you want to embed your ads in the middle of your content, then you should probably get the Adsense-Deluxe plugin that makes it possible to do so:
http://www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/

If you want to get even more advanced, you can sign up for an affiliate program, log in to their site, choose your ads, and the schedule them into your site. If you want to go that route, use the phpAdsNew piece of software available at ANHosting. It is listed under the Fantastico link again. It is an easy thing to install but get everything configured and running right will take a few hours probably…it did for us at least. But once you have it set up, you can control how often ads are being served out (using either simple or very complex rules), see which ads are getting clicked, which ads are top performers, etc…it is very cool piece of free software. Big thanks to my buddy, Jeremy Fisher, for turning me onto it…saved me a ton of time (I was going to write my own ad randomizer cuz I am a geek and it wouldn’t have done 1/20th of what phpAdsNew does.

Best of luck to you, entrepreneurial blogger!