coming home

Pippa and Lily-Anna are coming home today. Very excited about this and both Pip and I are slightly apprehensive. So far there have been people down the hall (i.e. the midwives at the hospital) anytime we have wanted to check anything etc. Now it's just going to be the two of us sharing our ignorance. Please remember the three of us in your prayers!

iPhone or iFlop

I've just finished watching Steve Job's keynote address at Macworld, San Francisco (had to watch it in 3 goes cos it was sooo long). And there was at least one moment where it's similarity to a Benny Hinn crusade was quite freaky (the moment where Jobs announced the iPhone - there was whooping and hollering, hands in the air and Jobs on the stage had them eating out of the palm of his hand...I'm sure if he'd have done an altar call then people would have signed up to whatever he wanted them to!)

Anyway, here's a few thoughts on the products:
I'm slightly disappointed with Apple TV (or iTV as it was previously known) - it seems like it's just a box to enable you to watch your iTunes content on your TV instead of on your computer. Which is fine - and it's got a nice user interface as you would expect from an Apple product - but if it had also incorporated a genuine PVR hard disk recorder (like TiVo or Sky+) then it would really have been something. Apple TV has just 40GB of hard disk space - used to store movies and other content which you have sent to it. I've just bought a hard disk PVR with 160GB of disk space on it, and it can record 2 channels at once while you are watching playback of another recording as well as a whole host of other features, and it cost considerably less than what I imagine Apple TV will sell for.

Secondly, the iPhone. Now this does look good, really good. And I'm sure it's going to give my Blackberry a real run for it's money. A couple of questions though:
1. I'm not sure about the touch screen when it comes to inputting text. One of the reasons I switched to Blackberry was that I really went off my last smartphone because it only had a touch screen. Over time the screen became increasingly unresponsive and letter recognition became more and more inaccurate. I really like the 'plasticky little keys' on my Blackberry that Steve Jobs was ridiculing and have found them to be a much faster way of typing than the touch screen.
2. The memory size. 4GB or 8GB are the iPhone options. When it was first announced I seriously thought it would mean I could upgrade both my phone and my iPod at the same time (I have an 'old' black and white, non-photo, non-video iPod). But if the maximum memory I can get on it is 8GB then I'm not sure it will work for me as an iPod. I would have hoped they could have found a way to fit 30GB of memory in but they are using flash memory so perhaps it's just impossible to offer that much space with flash.
I still want one though!!!

Lily-Anna Rees

I am very proud to announce the birth of our daughter Lily-Anna, born Sunday evening at 7.50pm weighing 8lb 7oz. Mother and baby are both doing really well. Here are a few photos from when she was about 17 hours old courtesy of Suzie who came to visit yesterday (I'm not as freaked out as I look, honest!). She has posted a whole set on flickr for all those who are interested here.