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Sending Children to College: Three Don’t(s)

Posted for your edification on August 2, 2011 · Leave a Comment

I’ve sent a total of one child off to col­lege. In blo­gos­phere terms, that makes me an expert in the in’s and out’s of get­ting your kid into col­lege. As such, here are SuburbanWife’s three basic Don’t rules for help­ing your child choose which col­lege to attend:

ONE: Don’t Do It For Them

As over-obvious as this might sound to some of you, this is absolutely my Número Uno not-to-broken rule and the one that a lot of par­ents are going to ignore (at everyone’s peril). No mat­ter how bril­liant lit­tle Johnny is, if he can’t get his stuff together to do the research, write the essays, and fill out the appli­ca­tions him­self, he will not be ready for the rig­ors of college.

Baby­Doll, about to go off for her sopho­more year at col­lege, did all the work of select­ing and apply­ing to schools her­self with very lit­tle input and almost no help from us. … click here to read the other two Col­lege Don’t(s) »

Written from my perspective as a/an: Mommy - and tagged: , , ,

Sharing iTunes Mobile Apps on Multiple Devices

Posted for your edification on June 24, 2011 · Leave a Comment

If your house­hold is any­thing like ours, you’ve got mul­ti­ple “i” devices float­ing around the house. In our house­hold, we’ve man­aged to col­lect an impres­sive num­ber of these App Eaters is the past year.  Baby Doll was the first with the free iPod Touch she received as part of Apple’s Back To School pro­mo­tion last sum­mer when we bought her a MBP as a grad­u­a­tion gift.  Then we gave Ignatz an iPod Touch for Christ­mas.  I scored a first-generation iPad when Ver­i­zon put them on sale a few days after the iPad 2 was released.  And, most recently, Baby Doll finally decided she what she wanted for her 19th birth­day — an iPhone.

Even though we’ve been shar­ing com­put­ers for years, the kids and I have always main­tained our own iTunes accounts.  Nat­u­rally, with this sce­nario of main­tain­ing indi­vid­ual iTunes accounts but shar­ing com­put­ers, we’re well famil­iar with the dif­fer­ent means of shar­ing music. But shar­ing pur­chased apps is a rel­a­tively new issue for us. I’ve known for some time that shar­ing apps within the fam­ily was both tech­ni­cally and legally pos­si­ble but I wasn’t quite sure how to make it hap­pen. … click here for the full tutorial »

Written from my perspective as a/an: Techie - and tagged: , , , , ,

SuburbanWife Gets a Job

Posted for your edification on May 30, 2011 · Leave a Comment

For the past few years I’ve been vol­un­teer­ing more and more of my time to Ignatz’s school (Baby Doll’s for­mer school).

The nature of my vol­un­teer work has ranged from the sim­ple warm-body anyone-could-do-it task (like dri­ving on field trips) that makes up the vast major­ity of school vol­un­teerism to more spe­cial­ized, fairly-skilled IT work (web design, graph­ics, pay­ment inte­gra­tion, and 3rd-party Spe­cial Event soft­ware customization).

Back in March, when we were elbow-deep in cus­tomiz­ing our Spring fundrais­ing event web­site, I was informed that it had been agreed that I should be paid for my more tech­ni­cal endeav­ors. As much as I liked the idea of con­tribut­ing a lit­tle cash to the family’s cof­fers, what really thrilled me was the expla­na­tion of the argu­ment used to con­vince the Board that I should be paid. It was rea­soned that the skills I brought to the table were spe­cial­ized enough that the school could not rea­son­ably expect this job to be filled with vol­un­teer labor.

As a middle-aged middle-class sub­ur­ban house­wife with a self-taught techno-geek alter ego who hasn’t been gain­fully employed for the bet­ter part of 20 years, this was a huge boost to my oth­er­wise sag­ging sense of self-esteem. Oh, and the check was very wel­come boost to my check­ing account.

Written from my perspective as a/an: A Sentient Being, Techie - and tagged: , ,

Amazon “Lend” Restrictions

Posted for your edification on May 3, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Here’s one for the “I’ll be damned! Did you know?” category.…

Did you know that you can lend a book only once?!?

I found this lit­tle gem of info buried deep within the Ama­zon Kin­dle help forums. No where on all of Amazon’s Kin­dle Help pages or their FAQs do they men­tion this par­tic­u­lar fact. No where was this fact men­tioned on the page when I filled in the form to lend my book.

I am not an unin­tel­li­gent per­son. I under­stand that eBooks and eRead­ers (Kin­dles, iPads, and other tablets) are new ter­ri­tory. I under­stand that those in the pub­lish­ing busi­ness need to make a liv­ing and I believe that authors deserve to make a liv­ing. So my shock and dis­may are not nec­es­sar­ily directed at the fact that a book can only be lent once but rather that that infor­ma­tion was not clearly and unequiv­o­cally com­mu­ni­cated to me at the outset.

Written from my perspective as a/an: Informed Consumer - and tagged: , , ,

DODOcase for the iPad 2: Pre-orders & Coupon Code

Posted for your edification on March 9, 2011 · 1 Comment

The antic­i­pa­tion builds. The release date for the much antic­i­pated (by me, at least) iPad 2 has been announced and I’ve found it dif­fi­cult to think of any­thing else since the announce­ment. What size should I get — 16, 32, or 64GB? Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi + 3G? Believe it or not, I’ve actu­ally pon­dered the ques­tion of AT&T or Ver­i­zon (okay, maybe this was a pretty easy choice but I did give it con­sid­er­a­tion). And, of course, the obvi­ous ques­tion: Black or White?

Deci­sions, decisions.

I’ll tell you what though, one deci­sion that was very easy to make was which case? I’m not kid­ding when I say that a major dri­ving fac­tor in my desire for an iPad is my desire to own a DODOcase. If you’re not famil­iar with their flag­ship prod­uct and the company’s back­story, do your­self a favor and take a minute to watch their videos and their “about” stories.

In this morning’s emails I received noti­fi­ca­tion from DODOcase that an iPad 2 ver­sion is avail­able for pre-order. I was all over that! The email arrived at 7:15am. My order was placed at 8:04am. [I had to take a lit­tle time first to research the DODObag by Rick­shaw (yeah, I bought one) and the three char­i­ties to which DODOcase will donate 10% of the pro­ceeds of every pre-sale order.]

In case you’re drawn to the classy, outside-the-box look, feel, and design of the DODOcase, I have a coupon code to share. The code will expire 10 days from now and it’s good for 10% off at check­out (I’m assum­ing it’s good for your entire order but it isn’t clear in the email I received). Click here and use the code dis­played on the site when you check out. [Full dis­clo­sure: if you use this coupon, DODOcase will send me a coupon for $20 off my next DODOcase pur­chase but as I can’t see myself need­ing an addi­tional iPad case any­where in the fore­see­able future, be assured that my ges­ture of shar­ing this code is for your ben­e­fit, not mine. Enjoy!]

Written from my perspective as a/an: Informed Consumer - and tagged: , , , ,

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