The wife surprised me with an Apple TV for my birthday. It was an item I had suggested earlier in the year that we check out because we picked up an HD TV for the bedroom on black Friday of last year. This is the first television she’s let into our bedroom since we were newlyweds.

The Apple TV is probably something I never would have bought myself, but now that I have one, I’m really enjoying it. We’ve hooked up our ipod to the TV in the den before and despite the fact that an ipod connection lacks any kind of real interface, watching media off of it was okay. I know friends who have hooked up laptops or mac minis to their sets and used the built in front-row system. I never bothered trying any of that. I’m sure most people won’t.

The Apple TV is really simple to set up. It plugs into your set via component or HDMI cable. I didn’t see anyway to hook this up via RCA cables (even apple’s proprietary set I bought for the ipod). To be honest with you, I don’t know a thing about any of that stuff. I went to Walmart, bought an HDMI cable and bam. Done. It did not come with any cables to hook it up to your set. You need to buy that yourself.

One you hook it up, you have two ways to view your iTunes content on your TV: You can copy files to the Apple TV’s hard drive, or you can stream any music, show or movie via your wi-fi network straight to the set. I was very skeptical that the later would work, I expected streaming an episode of The Office over the network would be spotty at best. Not the case. I watched an entire episode of ENTERPRISE via streaming, while the girls were playing WOW on the same wi-fi signal and it never stopped once to buffer.

I paired up the Apple TV with my laptop’s iTunes library. I let it copy over everything over to the Apple TV hard drive overnight. Movies, TV, music, podcasts, audiobooks…everything. The first sync takes a while but updating new stuff happens seamlessly in the background.

So what don’t I like? Very little, but a couple things nag me: for one, I hate the interface. I saw video of the first Apple TV interface and I liked it better. I’m not sure why. I guess I wanted it to work more like frontrow. It’s a small nit-pick. The other thing I don’t like is how I can’t watch stuff from the hard drive while downloading content from iTunes. If I want to download an episode of House from iTunes, I can’t watch anything while it downloads in the background. Why not? I can do that with my Macbook pro. Why not with Apple TV?

I have not rented a movie yet via iTunes. I think paying $4.99 for a movie I have to watch in 24 hours is pretty dumb. I would rather buy a DVD and own it. If I want, I can use Handbrake to rip the DVD to iTunes and sync it to my Apple TV.

I’ve swapped the site back to my previous version. This is going to please a lot of people and disappoint a couple.

The bottom line was this: I didn’t enjoy the way the site looked anymore. I got more ads “above the fold” but it was making me unhappy and a lot of you unhappy. I was starting to dread calling up the site. I appreciate your feedback. I’m going to spend a little more time trying to figure out how to tweak the site to better strike the delicate equilibrium between art and commerce. In the end I felt that there was too much going on, and NOTHING was getting noticed.

I’ve been very happy with the Project Wonderful ads. The sponsors for those spots have been happy with the results and I’ve been happy with the quality of the ads. That’s the best case scenario for internet advertising and it’s been great to see them do so well for everyone. I’m going to incorporate those PW spots into this current design today so sit tight, they’re coming back.

I’m asking for a time out. I’ll catch up tomorrow on any missed strips.

The two big welts I thought were bug bites turned to be…well…not bug bites. They are, in fact, Staph infections. One was super-bad and required some “handlin.” I recoiled. No these are bug-bites. The baby had one on his stomach too. “He probably passed it to you.” she offered. It’s highly contagious if you don’t realize what it is. This shocked me. I thought technology had advanced us past all the poop-caused-diseases. I wash my ‘effing hands ALL THE TIME. Especially after poopie diapers. I’m not living in 1340’s Europe.

But apparently I’m going to have to start boiling my hands every time I pass a bathroom lest I have to again endure the “excising” of a “problem area” again. No man, woman, child, or beast should have to endure what I saw come out from under my epidermis today.

I was told that the lidocane used to numb the area would soon wear off and that some pain pills were in order. I’ve never tried Vicodin. Maybe this day can be salvaged. Wish me luck. I’m sure any euphoric effects these popular pills provide to thinner clientele will be lost on my massive frame. I’m informed by similarly sized associates I can look forward to only extreme drowsiness.

At this point. I’ll take it.