Hilarious article – One Week Later, I’m Still Coping – on the Dimmer Switch about a dad purchasing a Bratz doll for his daughter…

Great post about climbing mountains–literally and figuratively–from SteveL at Dad Bloggers.

A thoughtful post by a mother about hand drawn pictures her daughters made for the soliders in Iraq…

Toddling twins’ milestones through their father’s eyes…

If you are like us, magazines pile up quickly. There’s always one article you really like or think you’ll like so you end up keeping the whole issue. Multiple that by every magazine your household receives and there’s no wonder that they are stacked 20 deep on the bedside table.

Spend $60 on a software program called Scanalog and, using any scanner, you can scan your favorites and quickly store them in the program’s files. The program has 11 pre-set categories (like Parenting, Home, etc) and 102 sub-categories. Once you scan and store your files in their correct category, searching and retrieving is easy. Reduce your pile to manageable mouse clicks that won’t clutter your tabletops, desktops, and shelves. Check out www.scanalog.com.

Tired of tracking your life in a Franklin Planner, Palm, Pocket PC or through sticky notes pasted all over? Maybe you should check out Back Pack, a very cool web based organizational tool with some project management and file sharing features. From the company that sells Base Camp software for large-scale project management, Back Pack, allows you to easily create tasks, lists, and easily upload pictures and images.

A really cool feature is the ability to email your webpage from your PC, cell phone, or Blackberry and have the information post to that page. Send your webpage a to-do and it will post on your page with a checkbox. Send an email with an attachment and it will attach the file to your page as well. The other feature that is really useful is the ability to share some of your pages with others—children, spouses, friends, co-workers.

According to the company: ‘Tens of thousands of people use Backpack to… Organize to do lists, notes, images, and photos Plan a personal or business trip Keep track of what your competitors are doing Plan a home improvement project Collaborate on a new business idea Keep track of houses you’re considering buying Gather information for a research project Keep a list of gift ideas for friends Build a For Sale page, Organize and plan a wedding or event, and more…’

The service comes in 4 packages ranging from free (5 pages, 10 reminders) to $19/month for (1000 pages, 500 MB disk space for images/files, 300 reminders). Middle of the range plans are $5 (25 pages, 80 MB disk space for images/files, 100 reminders) and $9 (100 pages, 200 MB disk space for images/files, 200 reminders), respectively.

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Last January at the World Economic Forum, Nicholas Negroponte from MIT’s Media Labs, announced an initiative that is audacious both in scope and the technical challenge it aims to achieve. The One Laptop Per Child foundation, an offshoot of MIT’s Media Lab, wants to design, build and distribute a $100 laptop to 150 million children around the world.

The idea is to distribute these laptops to poor children particularly in the developing world to help with their education. Having a laptop will improve education levels and help link children in remote, impoverished areas with the world around them. Under the plan local governments, aid agencies, and private donors would pick up the tab. Current corporate sponsors include AMD, Google, and NewsCorp.

In November, Negroponte and his team are planning to unveil a prototype laptop featuring a 500MHz processor with a “skinny version” of Linux, 4 USB ports, 1GB of memory and Wi-Fi support. The laptop will be powered via a conventional AC adapter or a wind-up crank for use in areas without a reliable source of electricity.

This is without a doubt an outstanding initiative that, if successful, will bear fruit over several decades or more. Form more information, check out: http://laptop.media.mit.edu.