Yes, I was one of those crazy fools who waited in line for the iPhone two years ago. I waited in line and was disappointed because they sold out before I could get one. I ended up driving to two other AT&T stores before coming home empty handed. I did finally receive one about 10 days later, and have been a happy iPhone carrier ever since.

If you have seen me at any point in the past two years, the iPhone has been there. And I’m sure I pulled it out and used it to get directions, find out when a business closes, check the weather radar, access current traffic details, read scripture, retrieve a Spanish translation, get a recipe, compare prices, find the closest gas station/restaurant/store/alternate route, figure out what song we just heard, play scrabble, get/send email, check facebook, take a picture, check my calendar, or just to find the answer to some pointless piece of trivia. And those are mostly just the items on my home screen…

The iPhone has become part of our culture. Recently, my daughter’s elementary school sent home a newsletter that included the phrase “there’s an app for that.” Yup, it’s everywhere.

So, earlier this month, when Apple announced the next iPhone would be available for pre-order on June 15th, I got in line (electronically this time). And yes, it took a bunch of refreshing, but I finally received that confirmation message. And this morning, at 5:45am, I received a message that my iPhone was on the UPS truck and would be delivered today. Ummm… who cares that I have to have surgery at some point today? Thank you Steve Jobs for keeping me distracted from that with my new toy

[Here are some early reviews for the iPhone 4 in case you don't know what all the hype is about.]

A few weeks ago I told you about how desperately my 10-year-old wants a Facebook account (so much so she went to great lengths to obtain one when we told her “not yet”). I hinted that I had come across a possible “Facebook for tweens” – something that might make both parent and tween happy.

Enter FaceChipz.

Many kids begin their journey into social networking as a young elementary school student when they receive a certain stuffed animal called a Webkinz. This furry creature has a special code on its tag that allows the child to create a whole world – online – centered around a two-dimensional version of the pet. While in Webkinz World, pets can interact with other pets and even chat (using predefined phrases and words). Thus starts an addiction to social networking few of us choose to live without.

By age 9 or 10, a lot of kids have lost interest in such an animal-based existence (it’s about the time many of us also decided we no longer wanted to be a vet when we grew up, right? ). In any case, this is when too many kids are jumping to Facebook. Unfortunately, Webkinz and Facebook are vastly different in terms of safety and maturity. In fact, Facebook’s requirements state users must be at least 13 years old to obtain an account, and there is wisdom in that rule.

So what do you do if you’re 10 or 11 and craving some social networking? This is a difficult place for a lot of parents and tweens. A lot of parents break the rules and let their (too-young) kids have Facebook accounts when this happens. Thankfully, a group of parents in California (including a mom and dad to four girls) have been working on another option.

FaceChipz works a lot like Facebook in that users can post photos, chat with friends, and play a few games (the number of games available is growing as the company ramps up the tool). The big difference is in how users make friends online. Similar to how Webkinz users must first purchase a stuffed animal to log on, FaceChipz users trade chips (like those shown right) to connect online. In fact, it’s impossible to “friend” someone on FaceChipz without one of these chips. Good marketing ploy? Maybe, but the real benefit of this is that our kids can’t be friended by 40-year-old-creepy-strangers. The chips cost $1 each so in that regard this is much less expensive than Webkinz (I don’t know about you, but my kids had a ton of those creatures, at $8-14/each).

Also, to set up a FaceChipz account, you need a parent’s credit card. A one-time $1 charge to the card ensures a child has parental permission to create the account (which is a really good thing). There are no maintenance fees (a la Webkinz) and you’ll never be charged more than once, even if you have multiple kids on FaceChipz. The parental features even allow you to temporarily “turn off” a child’s account, should you need to do so as a punishment (not that our kids are ever naughty…).

After the account has been set up, you can buy the chips online or at your local Toys R Us. Then your child can share the chips with friends (in real life) to connect with them in FaceChipz. Once a chip has been activated online, it can no longer be used by someone else (so predators can’t pick these up out of trash cans to connect with our kids).

All in all, I think this is a wonderful safe alternative to letting tweens join Facebook before their time. I look forward to seeing how the people behind FaceChipz grow the site to attract (and keep) more kids.

Our 10-year-old daughter knew we monitored the email on the laptop, so she signed up for a new Gmail account using her iPod Touch over our wireless broadband access. (I must admit I was amazed at just how smart she was to accomplish all this! I see a bright future for her technologically, as long as she uses it for the right purposes.) As I speak to more and more parents about this, I am realizing how many kids trying these types of sneaky tactics… and how many are getting away with it!

Another girl who goes to school with my 5th grader frequently sends us email at 11:30pm… on school nights. When asked, she says she isn’t tired, so she plays on the computer… late at night… in her bedroom. I checked out her Facebook profile. She lied and said she was 16 to get the account. Her picture is cute. Her info says she’s “looking for men.” Her parents have no idea. They don’t have Facebook accounts. They don’t use the Internet much. They don’t realize what their child is doing online, or who she is talking to.

Do you?

I found a “Family Internet Contract” (courtesy of iMom.com) that certainly isn’t going to prevent kids from doing this stuff, but it could help parents have an informed conversation with their kids, hopefully before email and MySpace/Facebook accounts are obtained “on the sly.” Or if you’re like us, and this whole “growing up” thing sort of snuck up on you (i.e., our kids are already heavily online), this contract can be a great way to make sure we’re all on the same page.

All day I could tell something was bugging my oldest daughter, but I didn’t discuss it any further with her. After dinner, she asked my husband what he needed to discuss with her. He said, “I think you know.” She asked, “Does it have the letters g and m in it?” He confirmed her suspicions. She then screamed, “You’re the meanest parents in the whole world” before throwing herself on her bed in tears.

And that’s where I found her about 20 minutes later (still sniffling). She asked me, “so you know all about the stuff I did?” I nodded. Then she said something I wasn’t expecting: “Both things?”

[Here's where I did some really fast thinking so I could act like a responsible parent even though I had no idea what "both things" were.]

I responded, “We log everything on that computer (which is true).” She questioned why it took me three days to talk to her about it. I reminded her that I don’t spend all day reviewing her computer usage, but that I perform spot-checks periodically (this morning being one of those times). Then she proposes: “So tell me what I did.”

I counter with: “No. God knows all our sins, but He still requires us to confess them to him before offering forgiveness. It’s the same here.” (Ohhhh… that was good! Don’t know where I pulled that one from…) It worked, because eventually she said, “Does the second thing start with an f?”

WHAT? My 10-year-old created a Facebook account behind my back?!?!

Inside I am flipping out, but outside I am cool as a cucumber (who knew those acting classes would come in handy for parenting?). I nodded and then told her how she had broken the law by signing up for a Facebook account at age 10. She said, “I didn’t read those statements, I just clicked Agree.” Nice.

[Sidebar: I search Facebook and found the account - she had already uploaded a photo, played Yoville, and gotten 12 friends!]

We then had a good heart-to-heart about peer pressure and picking good friends (friends who don’t tell you to create secret email and Facebook accounts, for example). She just wants “to be cool,” and I get that. I told her this is a good lesson to start learning young, because she’s going to be faced with a whole lot more dangerous suggestions from friends as she grows up. She still doesn’t understand why things like unsupervised email and Facebooking can be dangerous, but that’s OK. She is only 10. I don’t want her to imagine all the horrible things that could happen… at least not yet.

In the end, I guess we all learned something. For starters, she learned we really do monitor her computer usage (in case she was wondering how much she could get away with), and we learned that we really do need to monitor her computer usage (in case we forgot how quickly our kids are growing up). We also started a healthy conversation about friends that will probably continue for the next decade or so.

[Note to self: install keystroke monitor ASAP!]

Ultimately, we decided to set her up with a Verizon account (we use Verizon for Internet access, and have multiple email accounts with our service), because we specifically wanted a desktop-based email solution. Why? Because it forces her to use Microsoft Outlook to check email (you can’t check a Gmail or Yahoo account through Outlook unless you pay an additional fee). Microsoft Outlook has some filtering tools that can be particularly helpful to parents hoping to restrict who is able to send their children messages. (Read more on how to set up Outlook to filter your child’s email.)

The filtering tools mean that I see a copy of all messages going through her account. This has been particularly helpful for me to find out what’s important to 10-year-olds. You know, stuff like whether school will be canceled because of snow, which teachers pick their noses, and which boy has a crush on which girl.

This has worked really well for almost a year. But, our now 10-year-old is a whole year smarter. She’s recently decided she “deserves privacy” in every facet of her life, including her email. Her father and I beg to disagree. We’ve told her that while she’s living in our house, we have a right to monitor any and all communication with the outside world. Lest you think this sounds a little like Big Brother… try reading the news headlines with regard to who’s trying to do what to our kids, then we’ll talk.

Anyway, today I did a spot-check on the email she’s received over the past few days and found a reference to another email account. Apparently, she emailed her friends on Saturday to tell them she had set up her own Gmail account, and that they should only write her at that account, for privacy sake. Ummmmm… have I mentioned she’s 10?!

So I quickly brought the laptop into my office and adjusted the parental controls for her account. I blocked mail.google.com (as well as mail.yahoo.com just in case she gets any bright ideas). Then I left the computer sitting out to wait and see what happens when she tries to access her precious new Gmail account.

To be continued…

Remember: Never use your child’s real name in her email address, and strongly caution her about never revealing personally identifiable information online.

After you’ve set up the email account in Outlook, you can set up some “rules” to let you monitor your child’s account, and also help prevent spam. First, you want to set up a rule to prevent any email that doesn’t come from a list of pre-approved senders from reaching your child. In Outlook Express, select Tools > Message Rules > Mail. When the Message Rules window appears, click the New… button, as shown below.

When the next dialog box appears, place a checkbox in the first option under “1. Select Conditions for the rule.” You want Outlook to start looking at emails to determine whether the From line contains certain email addresses. Now that you’ve made that selection, move down to #2 to specify what should happen to an email that isn’t from anyone on your pre-approved list. Scroll down in the list to locate the option labeled “Do not Download it from the server.” This will cause Outlook to leave any message from unknown senders out on the email servers (and not in your child’s inbox).

Finally, click the link labeled “contains people: in the third text box to identify who is allowed to send your child email. At this point, you can simply type in the email addresses of your child’s friends and family, or you can import them from the address book (if you’ve already set that up). After you’ve identified your approved sender list, don’t click OK yet. We need to make one more customization in this window first. Click the Options button to reveal the follow selections:

By default, Outlook thinks you want to only apply this rule if the message contains the addresses you just selected. But we want to change that. Select the second option titled “Message does not contain the people below” before clicking the OK button to exist the Rule Condition Options.

At this point, you have told Outlook to preview all email messages before downloading them to your child’s computer. Outlook looks at the From line to determine whether the sender is on your pre-approved list. If it is not, Outlook will leave the message on the server.

So what happens to the messages left on the server? That’s up to you, as the parent. I am also checking my daughter’s account, through an email reader on my computer. But I don’t have this message rule on my email program, so I see every single one of my daughter’s incoming email. If a message comes in that she does need to see (such as from a new friend who is not yet on her pre-approved list), I then go into that message rule on Outlook to update the list.

Note: When replying to email, most people leave the previously sent message under the reply. This is true for kids as well, and gives parents a chance to see the whole chain of email correspondence for each message.

What about messages your child is sending (as opposed to receiving)? By default, Outlook saves copies of the sent email in the Sent Items folder. You could simply log on to your child’s computer and review the sent messages periodically, but what if she deletes them? You can set up another Mail Rule to send you copies of that email, so you’ll see every email, even if it’s deleted.

None of this is fool-proof, because a computer-savvy child can edit his own approved senders list once he figures out what you’ve done, or simply delete your rules. However, in my opinion, a child who does that doesn’t deserve to have an email account at all. (Sorry kids!)

So when I came across Rollip, I figured it was worth sharing. Rollip is a tool that offers cool photo effects online, so you don’t have to purchase or learn how to use Photoshop. Instead, you simply select the desired effect and upload your photo. You are then given the option to download a web-quality version, or purchase a high-quality version ($2.99 for 15 photos).

I tried a couple of effects – vintage, line drawing, and so on – to see how it worked. For the average mom playing around with pictures of her kids, I think it would work quite well. Check it out at www.rollip.com. Happy filtering!

I found this tool to be very helpful in quickly locating lots of photos that include a particular person. Of course it’s not perfect, and it makes mistakes fairly often. But, you can “teach” iPhoto by confirming and denying whether each face is the person in question. A particularly fun use of this feature is in identifying who, among your family members, you look like. For example, when I looked for all the photos of me, I was frequently presented with photos of my daughter and my niece.

Double-clicking on those images tells iPhoto the face is not mine, while a single-click confirms the face is mine.

When I ran the tool using one of my daughter’s face, it was fun to see who in the family iPhoto thinks she looks like. In particular, it repeatedly asked me if photos of my husband’s nephew and my niece were in fact my daughter. With my other daughter, iPhoto seems to think she looks a lot like my husband, which many people indeed tell us.

If you have an older version of iPhoto, I encourage you to upgrade and check out “Faces” and the many other new features included.

But over time, the keys became so worn I could no longer read the letters on them. That I could overlook. But when performance slowed down, I found myself wishes for something better. In fact, it eventually got so bad I could fold two loads of laundry in the time it took to perform certain operations in Photoshop.

So in September, I started to have an emotional affair with someone else: a quad-core iMac. At the time, it was mere speculation because Apple had yet to announce such a machine. I was left to only dream about the increased speed, larger hard drive, bigger monitor, and newer operating system.

Then in late October, it happened. Apple made quad-core iMacs available for the first time. Any commitment I had made to my MacBook Pro instantly went out the window. I found my credit card, pointed, and clicked.

Yesterday, my new machine finally arrived. As I pulled it out of the box, my own children and several from the neighborhood watched in wonder. When the screen was revealed – all 27-glorious-inches of it – they all gave an awe-struck “oooo” and “aaaahhh.” When I pulled out the wireless keyboard and mouse, a chorus of amens could be heard out in the street.

Then my 10-year-old called “dibs” on the MacBook and a fight broke out, but I digress.

I spent the rest of the evening setting up my new companion. I used Apple’s Migration Assistant to copy my files and settings from the MacBook to the iMac. I did run into a snag when my user profile was ported over, as apparently the preferences had gotten corrupt on my old machine. [Tip to anyone else who might try to use Migration Assistant: run Disk Utility first on the old machine to fix any corrupted preferences before transferring your files.]

The real test came this morning when I sat down to work. I launched Photoshop and opened a 217 MB client file. What used to take a full two-minutes to load took mere seconds (15 to be exact). I can now say without a doubt that I am in love with this machine… at least for the next 2-3 years .

I did use AltaVista for a long time after many others came on the scene. I guess I felt a bit loyal to the first major search engine. But after Google went big-time, I abandoned the AV ship for good.

Over the past decade, many search engines have come (and gone). Remember Excite? OK, it still exists, but no one really uses it (sorry if any Excite lovers are reading this). But only one has dug in its heals and garnered 84.5% of the market share.

Sometimes clients ask about the benefits of advertising on any other search engine, and I usually say this: what benefits? When one company has 84.5% of the search engine market share, you can usually get a pretty good return on your investment by putting your money in that “basket.”

Yes, I realize that I’m telling you to ignore 15.5% of the market. It might be harder to ignore that portion if there was one other search engine with a larger percentage. But, given that the 15.5% is broken up into several other smaller portions, it just doesn’t make sense to focus energies there… at least not until you’ve “wrapped up” the 84.5% portion.

I’m certainly still rooting for a few of the underdogs (such as Bing), just not putting my money with them… yet.