The only site I'll ever need...

[Kerm]

Anyone have suggestions for a pair of headphones that will actually stay in my ears when I run, yet aren't these?

Just turn the volume on the TV up louder so when you run from the living room the fridge you can still hear everything.  You won't need headphones that way.

Maybe I should get a cordless pair so I can randomly take my shirt off in front of a bunch of dudes.  What kind do you wear when you do that?

[TDubbs]

Anyone have suggestions for a pair of headphones that will actually stay in my ears when I run, yet aren't these?

Just turn the volume on the TV up louder so when you run from the living room the fridge you can still hear everything.  You won't need headphones that way.

Maybe I should get a cordless pair so I can randomly take my shirt off in front of a bunch of dudes.  What kind do you wear when you do that?

A condom.

[Tank]

I'm in uncharted territory here, only site: what do I buy a 4-month-old kid for Christmas?

I will hang up now and listen for your answer.

[flannj]

I'm in uncharted territory here, only site: what do I buy a 4-month-old kid for Christmas?

I will hang up now and listen for your answer.

Dry cleaning bags?


Actually since everyone else is buying clothes and baby stuff how about buying something for when they are older.
Harry Potter or Narnia or something that they can enjoy and will be of much more significance instead of toys that will end up discarded.

[PenFoe]

I'm in uncharted territory here, only site: what do I buy a 4-month-old kid for Christmas?

I will hang up now and listen for your answer.

Why, a 3-month old girl, obviously.

[Brownie]

I'm in uncharted territory here, only site: what do I buy a 4-month-old kid for Christmas?

I will hang up now and listen for your answer.

A good bottle of 18-year-old Scotch.

Or, get a stuffed animal.

[Pre]

I'm in uncharted territory here, only site: what do I buy a 4-month-old kid for Christmas?

I will hang up now and listen for your answer.

For my niece/nephew I always get them a little stuffed animal or some little thing and then put the money I would have spent on a target gift cards.  At that age, parents get way more clothes/toys/etc than the kid will ever use.  The parents can always use the target gift cards on diaper or formulas, or a winter coat or whatever the kid needs and will thank you for it.  Unless they are rich parents.  I don't know what to do then.

[RV]

I'm in uncharted territory here, only site: what do I buy a 4-month-old kid for Christmas?

I will hang up now and listen for your answer.

For my niece/nephew I always get them a little stuffed animal or some little thing and then put the money I would have spent on a target gift cards.  At that age, parents get way more clothes/toys/etc than the kid will ever use.  The parents can always use the target gift cards on diaper or formulas, or a winter coat or whatever the kid needs and will thank you for it.  Unless they are rich parents.  I don't know what to do then.

Do they sell dirigible fuel at Target? Then you'd have the rich parents covered too.

[Quality Start Machine]

Best thing to get any kid for Christmas is respect and fear from others

[Tank]

Seems I should have checked the Amazon reviews before deciding to help start my nephew's personal library off with this apparent piece of trash...

With all the reviews - I bought this book for my son. While the book had some good graphics, I believe the message is all wrong. He talks back to his mother and I think the message to kids is all wrong.

Save your money - there are so many other books that send a positive message.

Bad role model and scary pictures. I should have read the negative reviews before buying this. I'm going to throw it out after one read.

we are huge book readers in our family and we find this book to be painfully poorly written- the illustrations are beautiful, but, in our opinion mr.sendak should have handed over the story writing to someone else- the story is so bland and has no direction it seems- it was almost as if he drew the pictures first and then tried to make a story of them afterwards- in fact, i am certain this is what he did- there is no story really, it makes little sense-
i think he drew each picture separately and then tried to come up with a few sentences that made sense for that particular drawing and because of this, the story doesn't flow-

and he keeps repeating (quite annoyingly) that "the monsters rolled their terrrible eyes and showed their terrible teeth" because i think he couldn't think of anything else to say!- look, we love a variety of book styles and subjects but this one rarely gets picked off the shelf as our kids (and we) are not at all interested in it- it's one thing to have great pictures but if the story isn't there, the kids won't want to read it- this could have been a fabulous book because the illustrations are great, but unfortunately, he chose to write the story too- liken it to great actors being in a lousy movie-

I cannot believe this book is a best seller. Max, the protagonist, is a wild, rude, annoying, little snot-nosed monster. The last thing I want is for my child to model her behavior after him! My daughter received this as a gift and it is now in the trash because I could not bring myself to give it away to another child.

I don't understand how this book is on the best seller's list. The illustrations are scary for young children. The educational value of this book is very negative. Instead of teaching of self discipline and respect for authority, this book promotes disobedience and violence. I know, for years, it has received glowing reviews. I disagree with all of them. This book entered the trash can the day it entered our home.

These people must be awesome parents.

[PenFoe]

Well, thank God you didn't decide on this abomination.

The Cat in the Hat is quite a disturbing book considering how young its audience is. This giant mutant cat shows up at the house while mom is out and proceeds to touch and play with everything while the kids look on in terror. They try to get this strange intruder to leave without success, and the cat proceeds to release two "things" which tear around the house, destroying everything. Sure, the cat cleans up everything in the end, but if you or I did this, we'd be lucky to be arrested and not shot on sight. I would expect children to have nightmares from this story.

I confess I was deeply disturbed by Seuss's parable, which pits the soul-crushing wickedness of a Satanic character ("Cat") against the unspoiled innocence and naivety of two suburban children.

Things come to a head when "Cat" seems on the point of morally subverting the universe itself, in a series of feats so nihilistic that the children are reducing to little more than blubbering idiots.

True, "Cat," in a whimsy, stays his paw at the end. But I can't help wondering if the children were so harrowed by the experience that they were ever after unable to return to the bright world above.

Either that, or those are excellently executed satirical posts on par with some of the best of this time.

[PenFoe]

DPD.

As a soon-to-be-father, figure it's time to get a camcorder.
Looks like the best ones are HD with a 30-60GB hard drive, pricing ranging from $650-$1200 or so.

That's a little steep, so the questions:

1. Is it definitely worth it to get HD?
2. Do I need one that has such a large hard drive, or are the mini-DVDs still viable options?
3. Is this fairly new technology and I can expect to see prices decrease in the immediate future (2-3 months?)

[Tank]

DPD.

As a soon-to-be-father, figure it's time to get a camcorder.
Looks like the best ones are HD with a 30-60GB hard drive, pricing ranging from $650-$1200 or so.

That's a little steep, so the questions:

1. Is it definitely worth it to get HD?
2. Do I need one that has such a large hard drive, or are the mini-DVDs still viable options?
3. Is this fairly new technology and I can expect to see prices decrease in the immediate future (2-3 months?)

My knowledge of camcorders is pretty scant, so take my advice with a grain of salt, but: in my limited experience with them, mini-DVDs suck.

I'd never want to trust precious family memories to such a fragile medium as DVD-RW. Mishandle one of those tiny things enough (and that's easy to do with the double-sided discs) and you may find yourself with video of your new child that's stuck in a proprietary format on a disc that your camera no longer wants to read.

And you get, what, 1.4 GB of storage per side?

If your memory needs are such that mini-DVDs will suffice (ie, that you don't need the sort of storage offered by a camera with a built-in hard drive), go for something that uses flash memory instead. SD cards are pretty durable and, as a bonus, should be directly readable by your computer without the disc finalization usually required for mini-DVDs.

I'm given to understand that my brother will be receiving a Kodak Zi6 for Christmas this year. But all I'll know about it until we open presents Christmas day is what I've read online (Decent, but mixed, reviews.)

[Timmy B]

DPD.

As a soon-to-be-father, figure it's time to get a camcorder.
Looks like the best ones are HD with a 30-60GB hard drive, pricing ranging from $650-$1200 or so.

That's a little steep, so the questions:

1. Is it definitely worth it to get HD?
2. Do I need one that has such a large hard drive, or are the mini-DVDs still viable options?
3. Is this fairly new technology and I can expect to see prices decrease in the immediate future (2-3 months?)

First off, assuming that you're looking for a small model with a flip-out screen, I'd avoid the hard drive-based camcorders. There are many, many camcorders on the market that record straight to an SD or SDHC flash memory card. Really, the fewer moving parts you can get in a camcorder, the better -- with a hard drive, you always have the risk of a platter or spindle going bad, or data getting corrupted. Depending on the camera, you can get two hours of recording onto a single card -- or even more. And flash memory is ridiculously cheap nowadays, too.

As for high-def versus standard-def, a lot of that depends on your computer specs. Modern computers can handle native HD video editing a lot better than they could even two years ago, but it can still be a dog. My 1-year-old MacBook Pro, with a Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM, can still dog sometimes when working with HD video. Just about any jalopy on the market can handle SD video editing, and you still have to consider the delivery method: Sure, you can capture and edit HD video, but do you have an HDTV? Are you going to be putting HD-resolution videos on the Web? Are you writing to Blu-ray Disc?

As for price reductions, I don't think so. Memory prices and CCD / CMOS prices are largely stabilized, for the time being. Prices should be stable for the next 8 - 12 months or so, I would think.

For an SD camcorder, I'd recommend the Canon FS100, FS10 (same as the 100, but with onboard memory in addition to memory cards) or the JVC GZ-MS100 (which has better video quality than those Canons, but a bit of a clunkier interface). All of those are in the $300-$550 range.

For HD, you cannot go wrong with Canon's Vixia HF100. We have two of them in our office for when interns are sent out to grab footage of this, that or the other, and at about $600 each from B&H Photo-Video, they've been ridiculously good investments.

Also, as another note, keep in mind that digital video can get very big very quickly. With a standard tape-based camcorder recording to MiniDV tapes, an hour of raw video is 13.8 GB. Newer compression types with the drive- and memory card-based camcorders reduce that size significantly for the actual capturing / recording, but once they're transferred to a computer and an editing program, the filesizes balloon again. It's a good idea to have an external hard drive or two that are dedicated exclusively to video work. (Ideally, you want one drive for your raw video, and another drive for your scratch / rendering files, to increase efficiency.)

Don't buy a camera from a brick-and-mortar store. Buy from B&H (www.bhphotovideo.com) or Full Compass (www.fullcompass.com). Adorama is good, too.

[Saul Goodman]

DPD.

As a soon-to-be-father, figure it's time to get a camcorder.
Looks like the best ones are HD with a 30-60GB hard drive, pricing ranging from $650-$1200 or so.

That's a little steep, so the questions:

1. Is it definitely worth it to get HD?
2. Do I need one that has such a large hard drive, or are the mini-DVDs still viable options?
3. Is this fairly new technology and I can expect to see prices decrease in the immediate future (2-3 months?)

First off, assuming that you're looking for a small model with a flip-out screen, I'd avoid the hard drive-based camcorders. There are many, many camcorders on the market that record straight to an SD or SDHC flash memory card. Really, the fewer moving parts you can get in a camcorder, the better -- with a hard drive, you always have the risk of a platter or spindle going bad, or data getting corrupted. Depending on the camera, you can get two hours of recording onto a single card -- or even more. And flash memory is ridiculously cheap nowadays, too.

As for high-def versus standard-def, a lot of that depends on your computer specs. Modern computers can handle native HD video editing a lot better than they could even two years ago, but it can still be a dog. My 1-year-old MacBook Pro, with a Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM, can still dog sometimes when working with HD video. Just about any jalopy on the market can handle SD video editing, and you still have to consider the delivery method: Sure, you can capture and edit HD video, but do you have an HDTV? Are you going to be putting HD-resolution videos on the Web? Are you writing to Blu-ray Disc?

As for price reductions, I don't think so. Memory prices and CCD / CMOS prices are largely stabilized, for the time being. Prices should be stable for the next 8 - 12 months or so, I would think.

For an SD camcorder, I'd recommend the Canon FS100, FS10 (same as the 100, but with onboard memory in addition to memory cards) or the JVC GZ-MS100 (which has better video quality than those Canons, but a bit of a clunkier interface). All of those are in the $300-$550 range.

For HD, you cannot go wrong with Canon's Vixia HF100. We have two of them in our office for when interns are sent out to grab footage of this, that or the other, and at about $600 each from B&H Photo-Video, they've been ridiculously good investments.

Also, as another note, keep in mind that digital video can get very big very quickly. With a standard tape-based camcorder recording to MiniDV tapes, an hour of raw video is 13.8 GB. Newer compression types with the drive- and memory card-based camcorders reduce that size significantly for the actual capturing / recording, but once they're transferred to a computer and an editing program, the filesizes balloon again. It's a good idea to have an external hard drive or two that are dedicated exclusively to video work. (Ideally, you want one drive for your raw video, and another drive for your scratch / rendering files, to increase efficiency.)

Don't buy a camera from a brick-and-mortar store. Buy from B&H (www.bhphotovideo.com) or Full Compass (www.fullcompass.com). Adorama is good, too.

I would echo all of that, with this addition.  If all you're going to be doing is shooting home videos of precious moments, and anything more would be overkill, I'd give the Flip Mino a try.  It has competitors that are also worth a look, but I own a Flip Mino and like it.  (They came out with the HD model like a month after I bought mine.)  Plus, it seems to win every review I've read - especially in the audio department.  I was a broadcast journalism major so I'm used to working with ridiculously nice cameras, but for family and personal matters, the Flip is fine.

They also make accessories for it that could be cool for family matters...namely, an underwater case.  It's designed for the larger Flip Ultra so I had to modify it, but I'd expect them to make a Mino version of it fairly soon.



And you didn't mention this, but I'd recommend a Mac with Final Cut Express or Pro for editing.