cabbagetown, gpcp, grantpark

Happy Birthday to GPCP

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We marked the birth of the new Cabbagetown campus as well as the 7th birthday of the Grant Park lcoation with the annual Grant Park Cooperative Preschool Birthday Party this Saturday. The party was held this year at the Cabbagetown campus playground where the C-town kids have spent the last couple of days getting to know their new home away from home. There was a wonderful Nigerian drummer ‘Bisi’ who entranced all the kids, collage-making, lots of FOOD, and good company. Click here to see a collection of photos from the event.

Family, sam

All the Kiddies….

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Amy and I spent the Rosh Hashanah weekend with her family in Rochester, and Sam had a grand old time playing with all his cousins. Here’s a quick link to the gallery of photos.

technology

Apple drops a bomb

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So, after suing folks who published ‘rumors’ of upcoming Mac products, his Steveness decided to do some rumor-mongering of his own today with a classic ‘one more thing’ during today’s announcement of iTunes 7 and the new feature films on the ITMS. Flying in the face of the Apple-PR bible, he confirmed the existence of an unreleased product well in advance of release: a Macintosh set-top-box optimized to connect directly to HD tv sets. Codenamed ‘iTV’, (and priced at $299) the new box is due in Q1 2007, and will be 1/2 size of Mac Mini, built-in power supply (no brick!),

  • Networking: 802.11, Ethernet (not sure what flavor of 802.11, though)
  • USB2
  • Video: HDMI connector for the best HD goodness or component RGB
  • Audio: Analog via RCA jacks or optical digital

Steve also shows off the UI, a very slick and more 3-D treatment of the existing Front Row interface for the new device and wows the crowd by playing an HD-quality flick. At root, this completes an ecosystem – rather like ITMS and the iPod did for music, you now have a STB device (the iTV), a storefront (Showtime in ITMS/iTunes7), and a portable outlet. If they can bring more content aboard, this has a good chance of taking a strong foothold.

Problems I see – no TV tuner or information on how this might take incoming video from your existing cable or satellite vendor. It’s also unclear if this is going to have a hard drive at all, or provide any kind of DVR features. And I’d worry about the stability of the wireless connection for HD video content (I know my Windows Media Center and 802.11pre-N network struggles with SD at times). I suspect that the lack of a tuner and possibly of a drive are quite intentional – you’re probably less likely to buy flicks and shows on the ITMS if you have free alternatives like ripping content off the cable and saving it to your drive. That sucks. But if this provides access to HD movies, I’m sure I’ll be buying one as soon as it’s available.

sam

Super Grover at CNN Center

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Heading to lunch at my favorite Asian fast food joint at work on Thursday, blobfetch.asp.jpg I noticed an awful lot of disembodied Elmo heads floating around the CNN Center atrium. Ah, I thought – Sesame Street Live is in town. And, since Sam seems to be infatuated with Grover, Elmo, Cookie Monster and the rest of the clan, I thought he’d just love to head out on Saturday morning – plus that should work as a good way to tire him out since I had baby-duty the rest of the day while Amy played two performances of Beauty and the Beast at the Fox. The storyline featured Grover SuperGrover getting the help of all his buddies in trying to find his lost “superness.” Despite the audio being way too loud, especially for a bunch of kids’ ears, the show was a lot of fun. Sam had a grand old time, could barely stop talking to and pointing at his favorite characters and we (of course) came home with one of those giant-headed Elmo balloons. Forgive the photo quality above – it’s with my VX6700 camera phone, and not all that wonderful. But the subject was too cute to pass up.

Photos, musings and miscellany – New and Improved!