When I was a kid, a tablet was basically several sheets of paper bound to a stiff cardboard backing by a coating of glue across the top. You could easily use the top sheet then cleanly tear it off and have a fresh unused sheet ready to use.

Even the word notebook was different. I used a notebook to hold multiple sheets of paper in one place. The notebook had a series of clasps inside and the paper would a corresponding number of holes prepunched in it to insert between the rings. You could release the rings and remove or re-order the pages easily. Now the children have to call them binders and a notebook is just another type of computer.

My step son must be trying to find out the answer to this question. At first I thought he was deliberately trying to break it so that he would feel entitled to a new phone and upgrade his. But I’ve watched the clumsy fool and he just drops it a lot.

Even though this condo development is upscale and the construction is high end, there can still be nights where the noise from your neighbor’s TV or sound system creeps into your bedroom and makes sleep difficult. I don’t have a garage band next door, but for some reason the neighbors like to listen to rock and roll ALL night. Now, I like rock and roll, but not at 3:00 in the morning when I’m trying to sleep.

So we’ve come up with a solution other than calling the police and filing noise complaints against the neighbors. We bought a little machine called Sleep Mate, which makes a nice little sound during the night called white noise and you don’t have to listen to that rock and roll or even hubby’s snoring anymore.

I guess this year’s excitement happened last night, as I discovered this morning when I went to get in the car to run a few errands. Sometime after midnight my cars were broken into. Everything that was in the glove compartment and the middle console was pulled out and dumped onto the seats and floorboards. But nothing seems to be missing. I don’t leave anything valuable in the cars anyway. But it is disconcerting to think that someone would violate my property like that.

My neighbor and I are considering putting a video surveillance system in place that would encompass her driveway and mine, and also the front and rear doors of the houses. We are both concerned that whoever broke into my cars might get a little bolder and try to get into our houses.

She’ll be turning the extra bedroom into a home office so she can do more work from home and not have to pay for child care, plus she’ll be saving cash by not having to commute. Of course, setting up the home office will take a bit of cash, but you can’t make money if you don’t spend money.

We’ll be underwriting some of the home office equipment to help her out. Since we are on a tight budget, we are looking for ways to save as much money as we can, yet we can’t always get the cheapest products – there are some quality and reliability issues to consider as well as price.

A great source for money saving coupons is a website I found online. There are a variety of coupons to save significant money on Dell small business computers. We are also going to need some home office furniture, at the very least a computer desk and task chair.

I’m not sure which way to advise her on a printer for her new home office. I haven’t had much luck with the last ones I’ve bought. At the moment I’m using a cheap laser printer that only prints black and white, but it is a workhorse and I can use refilled toner cartridges, which saves a lot of money. I think for the sake of just getting started, she should probably have one like what I’m using, and when she starts making money she can upgrade to a color printer later.

The best one that caught my interest is that the battery is removable and replaceable. Batteries are the bane of my existence and recharging them always seems to be an issue with me.

The Instinct has 3G access for fast downloads and pageviews. It also has expandable memory – aka spend more money to keep more stuff (like video clips and tons of tunes) stored on your phone. And a really nice feature is the “haptic feedback” for the touch screen. Just like your normal keyboard keys click when you type so you know you actually hit the keys, when you touch the Instinct phone’s flatscreen keypad, the keys vibrate slightly. Very cool.

If you travel a lot, the GPS navigation combined with voice commands will be very helpful.

Already in production and revealed at this week’s big CTIA show in Las Vegas, you should be able to find this new phone in stores mid-June.

So I decided to get my own cell phone and signed up with the company that has our home phone service. The phone was free with a 2 year agreement yadda yadda yadda. Well, I can see why the phone was free – it isn’t worth more than $5 in my book. I can’t hear it ring half the time no matter what setting I put it on. When I do talk to someone I can’t hear what they are saying unless I am in a closed room with absolutely no background noise. If I’m in the car or out in the yard, forget about it.

The phone has way too many extra bells and whistles that I’ll never use and don’t even want to have on there – to get to the couple of features I do want it is a long and laborious process clicking through too many menus and scrolling through too many submenus.  Even the voicemail stinks – it does not record the day and time of the voicemail message, so I have no idea when someone called.

My 2 year agreement is up in April – I have yet to decide if I’m even going to keep a cell phone anymore. This one doesn’t meet my needs and it’s an expensive convenience I might be willing to do without.

So I thought it would be good to buy another one just like for the home office and we can give the old PC to our grandson. He has just started school and he loves to play with letters and numbers, he can read a couple hundred “sight words” and he like to play with numbers, too. I’ve shown him how to get online to play a couple of good children’s sites games, like Thomas the Train and Dora the Explorer. He can even play a couple simple card games. We are so proud of him!

So I’ve searched everywhere for this Slimline PC and can’t find it for sale anywhere!

This will be a strategic move to try to regain Motorola’s #2 position in world-wide sales. Multi-faceted Samsung holds the #1 spot and LG is currently in #2.

The invisibleSHIELD case is invisible and invincible – the shield does not scratch and protects your cell phones and MP3 players, digital cameras, etc from getting scratched. It has a “grippy” feel, which even makes it less likely to slip out of your hands or get dropped. There are case designs to fit over 2,000 branded electronics, and if they don’t have exactly what you need they are willing to custom make it for you.

If you are looking for an iphone case you should check out the invisibleSHIELD website and watch the cool online video demo.

I sometimes think that a baby monitor styles device may be most practical, if only for the cost. It may be most practical to have a small security cam viewing device in every room in the house, so having just one expensive unit that can show the video may actually be outwieghed by the convenience (and subsequent more use) of a cheaper, more readily available device.

What do you think?