Sink or Swim

When planning to travel, you make sure to pack all the necessities from bottles to toys to books to quick snacks. But how can you really keep a toddler happy and content on long drives? There are tons of creative answers that you can find on baby books and baby blogs but mine would be as simple as getting a VCD/DVD player for the car. It won’t be as simple if you don’t have a budget but this is something we’re very much willing to invest on. My daughter just can’t take 1-2 hour drives without her two favorite DVDs – Hi5 and Harry Potter.  Aside from her questions every 10 minutes, it keeps her happy for more than an hour that I can simply lie back, relax and enjoy the drive. This is the reason why she loves riding her grandmother’s car. The mere thought of a trip to the grocery excites her because not only she can get out of the house, but she can also enjoy her movies while at it. So buying one for our car is just inevitable.

I found two portable DVD players within our budget:

Sony DVP-FX820 8″ Portable DVD Player Black
$179.99

8″ LCD Widescreen Monitor
High-Resolution (800 x 480 resolution)
180 Swivel and Flip monitor
Up to 6 Hour of Battery Life
Dual Sensor for Remote Control
Product Dimensions: 1.3 x 8.9 x 6.3 inches ; 2.4 pounds

OR

Philips PET702 7″ Portable DVD Player
$101.50

7″ TFT LCD 16:9 widescreen
Built in stereo speakers for quality sound
Car adapter and remote control.
Up to 2 hour playback on rechargeable built-in battery
Product Dimensions: 6 x 7.8 x 1.5 inches ; 1.5 pounds

Both can play the following formats:DVD, Picture CD, SVCD, Video CD, DVD-R/-RW, MP3-CD, CD-R/CD-RW, DVD+R/+RW, CD. Phillips is so much cheaper and lighter but the playback time is giving me second thoughts.

Now this is something I can’t decide on just by reading online. The reviews will help but a lot but I’d have to see them working firsthand and check warranties and such. At least, I know which items to ask instead of accepting the first expensive item that the salesman will offer.

Have any of you had a bad experience with refurbished Apple products? A friend will be coming home this May so I want to take advantage of the free shipping.

Here is what I’m eyeing:

Refurbished MacBook Pro 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
15.4-inch widescreen display
2GB memory
120GB hard drive
8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 128MB of GDDR3 memory
Built-in iSight Camera

Imagine, you can have a Macbook Pro for only $1499? I wonder how good (or bad) refurbished products are?

I can also go for something cheaper.

Refurbished MacBook 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo – White
13.3-inch glossy widescreen display
1GB memory
80GB hard drive
Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW)
Built-in iSight camera

This one is for only $799.

They are both certified Apple refurbished products and covered by Apple’s one year limited warranty.

Apple Certified Refurbished Products are pre-owned Apple products that undergo Apple’s stringent refurbishment process prior to being offered for sale. These products have been returned under Apple’s Return and Refund Policies. While only some units are returned due to technical issues, all units undergo Apple’s stringent quality refurbishment process

It’s not that I don’t trust Apple. In fact, I love them to bits. I just need to research on what other customers say about refurbished products because even if we’re talking about $800 here, it’s still a huge amount of money.

My recent attempt to customize Boonex wasn’t exactly a success. Still, the experience was rewarding enough that I’m now more confident to try new applications.

Let me tell you a few things about Boonex.

It’s a free, open source software that lets you create dating sites, social networks, content sharing portals and more. It has the basic features every social networking site offers – forums, chats, profile pages, dating events, groups, classifieds, media galleries, blogs, articles. The first time I installed it, I was amazed by my ability to set up my very own social networking website. The wonders stopped there, though.

As a designer, I don’t think you’d encounter a lot of problems if your CSS coding skills range from good to excellent. The documentation is not yet available but there are several sites offering tutorials on how to install, customize, troubleshoot the Boonex app. For programmers though, the application is very problematic. The biggest problem that we had is that our client wanted to add several features that are not part of Boonex. Not only that, the said features needed to be delivered in two weeks time. Even if our programmer could handle these PHP customizations at a short amount of time, the Boonex issues started to make things slower than it already is. One minute the ‘Navigation Builder’ is working, the next minute it will stop loading the changes. The ‘Classifieds area’ won’t accept ads if you assign it to a Category without a Sub-category. The upload media worked on and off the first few days and stopped working completely on the last remaining weeks. There are so many bugs to mention and I will not list them all here. We tried to hire so-called Boonex experts but the guy that we contacted disappeared. We also talked to a few independent companies but it’s either they haven’t heard of Boonex or they just don’t want to touch it.

To cut the long story short, the project was discarded and we didn’t get paid. To think I’ve spent so many sleepless nights worrying about it. To give Boonex credit though, it was pretty easy to setup and use. Maybe if you use the standard features and try not to improve it, it will work just fine. But paying clients don’t waste money on standard features so if you want moolah, might as well go for Joomla. Now, that rhymes! I also heard about PHPizabi from this blog so feel free to explore that. I haven’t personally tried them but given my experience with Boonex, it’s always better to try and lose, than never try at all.

Still want to try? You might want to bookmark the following sites to help you get started
Boonex Website
Boonex Nerd
Expertzzz.com