I wish I was rich enough to afford a Segway and cruel enough to not care if my kid died or not…

… ‘Cause I’m already lazy enough to want to do this.

From BoingBoing comes these great paper laptops designed by 7-year old kids.

Fascinatingly the kids put all kinds of things in there that would not be on a square old conventional keyboard, like Harry Potter Trivia, Friends, a Google button, and Hamster. Some kids put Math buttons and Homework buttons on theirs, and several have iPod and even iPhone buttons. My favorite kid is a little muddle called Alana who has a button specifically for “Firewall” and a little button in the corner for “Love.”

- Zac

For a while I was posting little movies of my kid to YouTube but I ran into a lot of issues.

First of all, their service does not accept .MOV files and that is the file type that my camera outputs, so I had to go through a (lossy) conversion process, then upload the .AVI file to YouTube. Also, YouTube doesn’t have any editing tools, so basically, you’re stuck with the video you took, even if it ends stupidly.

Then I found Jumpcut.



Jumpcut lets you upload .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .avi, .mov, .wmv, .flv, .rm, and 3GP (mobile phone) movies, and once they’re up there on their site, you can add titles, some goofy things like make it black-and-white, or sepiatone, add music, add transitions and all sorts of Señor Spielbergo stuff.

Behold!


This routine home movie of a boy and his dog is now beyond entertaining thanks to some pre-programmed fonts and effects!

It also has a little bit more of an updated feel than YouTube, more user-friendly and community oriented. So it gets my vote, and someday we may be saying “WhoTube?”

- Zac

This company called SomeECards has some pretty awesome e-mailable greeting cards, including cards for suckers who are new parents:

These new movie poster style birth announcements from 5-Star Baby are pretty cute.

I especially like the fact that they try to come up with cool movie titles that incorporate in the kid’s name, and also include the doctors and hospital in the small print at the bottom.

I have to admit though, I don’t envy their task of taking the grainy out of focus photos that new parents send in and make them look like movie posters.

I know I took about a hundred pictures of Hank in his little newborn hat trying to get just the right shot to put on his birth announcement, and even then it was a little dark and fuzzy (trying not to use the flash in the dim light of the nursery was maybe not the best technical choice).

Well done 5-Star Baby!

- Zac

My name is Zac and I am a Baby Photoshopper.

Is it bad to Photoshop the zits and boogers off of your kid’s face before posting photos to the family website? Cropping is probably OK, right? And “Red-Eye Remover?” Where does that fall? I’m not talking about slimming 20 pounds off of Katie Couric’s ass or anything, I’m just blurring, brushing, stamping, and eyedroppering out the unpleasant bits of my kid’s childhood.

Before:

After:

See how the terrifying “DANGER” logo from the car seat is gone? Doesn’t that make for a more aesthetically pleasing image for Grandma to see?

How about this one: Drooly, barfy, but still a cute picture, right?

After:

No more drool or spit-up, cleaned up the eczema on the cheeks, now he doesn’t look like he lives pools of his own fluids every day.

Is that bad? Is it vain? Is it just utilizing of the technology available today? Or is this somehow driven by a deeper Darwinian need to prove to the world that my kid is the best?

If anybody sees Dr. Phil, have him give me a call.