Starting Out Savvy » Technology

We Bought a Dyson!!!

Jamie Lee — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 02:22:09 +0000

Yesterday as I was strolling through Target to pick up some decorative tags for my planner, I noticed that Target has its yellow Dyson vacuums on clearance for only $300. At $100 less than its normal price, Peter and I decided to throw together some of our Target gift cards and buy one. It isn’t the animal hair model that we originally registered for, but we decided that the animal hair version was never going to be about $250 better than the yellow one. After taking it home and trying it out on various surfaces, we really love it! Weighing in at almost 20 pounds, it is a bit heavy, but only when you’re carrying it up and down stairs. Despite its weight, the vacuum glides easily across floors.

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Meet Emily

Jamie Lee — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:00:52 +0000

Over the holidays Peter and I drove from Austin, TX to Rockford, IL and back. Let me show you just what that looks like:

We spent 19 long hours over the span of two days (each direction) sitting in our beloved Fit. Why’d we do it? We couldn’t bare to spend the holidays knowing that our two little dogs were stuck in a kennel. When my mom got wind of our trip, she insisted on having an early Christmas. Cue Emily. Still confused? Emily is the name of the female British voice on our brand new Garmin GPS. We decided that her voice was more soothing than the rest.

Throughout our journey, Emily told us exactly where to go and what restaurants and attractions we could stop at along the way. We ran into a few mishaps, like when we decided to go to Mama Josie’s Southern Kitchen somewhere in Oklahoma and it turned out that Mama Josie’s no longer existed (We were on vacation. Bad food choices are totally forgivable!), but all in all she was a huge help. It was an extremely thoughtful gift from my mom and we’re really excited to have Emily as a new addition to our family. If you’re anywhere near as bad as Peter and I are with directions then I recommend that you follow the link below to Amazon and buy one instantly! Does anyone already have a Garmin? If so, what’s your favorite part about it? Have you tried uploading celebrity voices? Tell us everything!

Images courtesy of Google Maps and Amazon.

Early Christmas Presents

Jamie Lee — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:26:23 +0000

This weekend the mailman came to our door and handed me our first Christmas present of the year. My dad was super on top of things and managed to send us a Roku player a couple weeks before Christmas! He had told me about them before, but I never imagined that anything could be so wonderful. We now have Netflix streaming movies straight to the TV, capabilities to rent movies from Amazon instantly, and music from Pandora on demand. (I can see that coming in handy for cocktail parties.) It’s wonderful. I love it because it makes it so much easier to utilize the streaming feature of Netflix, plus I ALWAYS return movies late. It’s so tempting to never leave the house again.

If you’re like Peter and I are and haven’t even begun looking for Christmas presents then keep this gadget in mind. It is perfect for anyone with a Netflix subscription.

Have you received any early Christmas presents?

Image courtesy of EHomeUpgrade.com.

The Importance of Backing Up

Jamie Lee — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:56:29 +0000

If you happened to try to visit our site anytime between late last night and early this morning (yes, I’m giving you the specifics), then you probably noticed that it was down. I tried to make changes to the code so that all of you fabulous readers could see our tweets when, all of a sudden, I killed the site. It was terrifying! I thought that all of our posts were gone forever! I hoped and prayed for an undo button–why doesn’t everything in life have an undo button?– but it was gone. So, I started emailing every technologically savvy person that I know as well as posting on forums asking what to do. I felt like Carrie Bradshaw from Sex in the City when she gets a virus and the everything on her computer is lost forever.

Eventually, my brother, David, was able to get back to us and fix the site. David is our hero today but I’ve realized that, even though we don’t have too much material, back-ups are invaluable. I’m lucky that we’re learning this lesson after only 30 something posts rather than after 130 something. If you don’t know how to backup your WordPress site, then make a quick trip here to find out all the steps.

In tribute to David and his save-the-day move: here’s a picture of the two of us getting rained on at ACL!

Yay David! Thanks again!

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A Shift in Magazine Distribution

Jamie Lee — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:30:10 +0000

Many magazines are talking about shifting away from their traditional format toward digital distribution. How do you feel about this? Are magazines something that should be held in your hands or are you OK with new magazines like Lonny that only exist online?

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Image credit Lonny Magazine.