New Mobile Broadband!

So, for various reasons I won’t bother listing, I decided it was high time to get a mobile broadband card and service. I’d been thinking about it for quite some time, but the extra monthly expense has kept me merely thinking about it. So yesterday, I was reading Pogue’s Posts and David Pogue reviewed the Sierra/Sprint Wireless Compass 597. I usually read his posts the day they come out, but this was from last month. Not sure how I missed it the first time, but I read it at just the right moment. At lunch today, I went to a local Sprint store and signed up. I’m posting this using my new connection. As you can see, it’s not super duper fast, though I was running a few things at the same time during the connection test - including Google Earth - so I’m not being fair. Either way, I’m already so excited about my new found freedom! And I can hardly wait to answer my 8 year old’s at least weekly question, “Do we have Internet in the car?” She’s going to be thrilled to get onto Webkinz on her way to Nana’s house! And even more thrilled to be AT Nana’s house with access to Webkinz! Nana and Papa don’t even have a computer!

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Flip Video Day Two

My little Flip bubble started to deflate when iMovie ‘08 wouldn’t play nice.I was also able to import with no help into iMovie HD and export for iMovie ‘08 but that wasn’t really what I wanted. But thanks to a few twitter friends, I downloaded Pernian which let me use QuickTime Pro and convert the file. And then was pointed to an Automator application that did this for me. I could have used the Flip software to go straight to the web in a number of formats, but I really wanted to be sure that I could play nice in iMovie ‘08.

I was doing all this playing with software, I forgot about the camera! So this afternoon I handed it to my eight year old showing her three buttons - on, record, and zoom. To say she had a good time is to say the sun’s surface is a little warm. She made 10 short, ridiculous videos. The quality isn’t horrible. Better than my digital point and shoot, I think. I’ll have to take video side by side to be sure. But I’m PRETTY sure. Now that she has 10 videos that she’s noticing she was paying little attention to where the camera was pointing, I have a feeling we’ll see some better work come from her. And I’m excited for it because she’s a creative little girl.

I don’t have high expectations for the Flip. It’s a nice, sturdy, cheap camera with cute accessories (feel free to buy me the underwater casing or the tripod, or even a skin). It’s very easy to copy videos to your computer. The software comes on the camera itself so you don’t actually need anything else unless you want to really edit. I may have over bought, like Bill. I bought the 60 minute and for what I plan to use it for, the 30 may have been plenty. If I were going to video one event longer than 30 minutes, I’d probably be using a “real” camera. But in regards to quality, I found this blog entry very interesting.

And with no further ado, here is one of Meghan’s movies, recorded on the Flip, converted with FlipConverter, imported into iMovie 08 in 16×9 aspect ratio and published to YouTube.

A PS to this post… I’m super excited about my daughter playing with this, because I want her to start doing things like this.

Update: This example was uploaded straight to YouTube from the Flip Video software:

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