Before Ella was born, we did the basics: life insurance, will and trust. Now we’ve put together a new site, iMortuary.com, that can help folks who want to get started with funeral pre-planning. Easily locate cemeteries and funeral homes who can help you with all the arrangements, and access helpful resources including environmentally-friendly ‘green burials’.

Our video was in used in the iPhone commercial promoing YouTube but it went by so fast that I could hardly see it but still thought it was cool.

The super nice lady that did that commercial just emailed me to tell me that it is in a new commercial for the iPhone called “Amazing” and it is very evident…Check it out for yourself!

Thanks Cristie!

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!

So when we realized we wanted to put our video online and didn’t want to get sued by Joan Osborne or Aretha Franklin, we knew we had to choose some royalty free music to do so. We looked around and I found a post on the net that said Stock20.com was a cool one to check out.So I went there with Carlin and we immediately found tons of songs that fit well. It is really nice the way they have music tagged by: Attitude / Tempo (slow, upbeat, etc, Application (wedding, graduation, sports, etc), Genre (Rock, Accoustic, Soft moments, etc) and many more.

Having these different views into the music made it very easy for us to find multiple songs that would fit the bill. We eventually settled on “Hardknoxville: Edgy acoustic rock with a medium pace, a sloppy lead guitar, and a touch of attitude.” The descriptions helped us fiter songs even more so we weren’t playing stuff that we didn’t want to be listening to.

Stock20.comSetting up the account was easy AND the GIVE YOU A GIFT CERTIFICATE SO YOUR FIRST SONG IS FREE!!!

Doesn’t get better than that! If you want this music for your own, go to stock.com and set up an account.

Having royalty free music means that when our video was on Inside Edition and the CBS Early Show, we didn’t have to worry about lawyers suing us. Hurray!!!!

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!

The idea behind Freewaregenius came to me when I was clean-installing Windows on my wife’s laptop. I made a list of all the software categories that I had to install … viruskiller, antispyware, firewall, cd-ripper, dvd player, etc., and realized that for most of these I knew of a competent 100% free option that was often my top pick even when compared with commercial/shareware software. The vision behind Freewaregenius.com is therefore to replace as many retail/shareware programs that I ever need to use with a first rate freeware alternative, such that one day every installed program that I use will be FREE (hence the freewaregenius slogan: one day all software will be free).

Click here to learn more about Freewaregenius, or here to go the Freewaregenius main page.

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