Savanna at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge 2007 from Scott Miller on Vimeo.

I finally got Dominica and my first video from our trip to Walt Disney World in 2007 posted up no Vimeo.  I have been meaning to get this done for forever and just have not gotten around to it.  Now that there will be baby videos coming soon it is rather important that I eliminate any potential video processing backlog and get things completed.

This video was shot using our Canon Elura 60 camcorder from the balcony of our hotel room at the Animal Kingdom Lodge where we stayed for a weekend early last year.  If you have a good video player on your computer such as VLC you can download the original 640×480 video in h.264 (m4v) also from Vimeo.  Original h.264 video of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge.  This version should play beautifully on AppleTV as well and is available via the vlog feed for our subscribers.

Dominica, Liesl and Oreo slept in until around ten.  I was in the living room playing some Fable 2 on the XBOX 360 while I had some quiet time to myself.  Today is my relaxing day for the week and I am taking advantage of it.

I spent the bulk of the day playing Fable 2.  What an awesome game.  I am so glad that Dominica decided that we needed to get that as our one game for the XBOX 360 for “Christmas” as a gift to each other.  I am over halfway through the game now playing as the boy and going for “good and pure”.  Dominica is only about an hour or so into the game and is playing as the girl and has decided to go for “evil and corrupt” so that she can get as different of a storyline as possible from mine as she has watched so much of the game as I have played it.

Dominica spent most of the day shopping and surfing the web from the laptop that we have set up in the living room.  Christmas is always a busy shopping time.  We are so thankful that we live in an era when Christmas shopping is an online affair.  There is no way that we could handle going out to the stores looking for things.  We would go crazy.  It would have to be me doing it all as Dominica can’t go out shopping.  We learned that lesson from the grocery store a few days ago, and the grocery store doesn’t have crazy Christmas crowds.

We were both very thankful that today got to be a “do nothing” day for the most part.  Liesl was a little fussy today but not horribly, and today we began switching her over to cloth diapers.  Cloth diapers are cheaper, better for the environment and better for preventing diaper rash and/or contact dermatitis – which I had as a child.  Liesl has a little bit of diaper rash at this point and so Dominica felt that it was the best time to start switching her over before it got any worse.

We did several loads of laundry and two loads of dishes today plus hand cleaning.  We generate so much stuff that needs to be cleaned every day around here I just can’t believe it.  And several loads of garbage too.

This afternoon Oreo started acting strangely.  We first noticed that something was wrong when he went down to the basement all by himself to get away from us.  He wasn’t acting funny beyond that so we didn’t think much of it.  As the day wore on, though, he started spending more time away from is in the basement and started acting more sluggish and sickly.

I took Oreo out for a walk and he didn’t even make it past the front walk before he was sick twice.  Hopefully this is nothing more than a stomach ache.  I brought him back inside and offered him dinner or a bone and he wanted neither.  I went down to the basement (which is when I managed to get the videos uploaded to Vimeo) and spent a few hours with him while he just lay on his pillow feeling sick.

Later in the evening I forced him to go on a little walk just to make sure that “everything was working” since he hadn’t been eating.  Everything was working (you can work out the details there for yourself) and as soon as he was done I scooped him up and ran him back to the house because it is so cold outside and he is so weak.  So at least we believe that there is no blockage and it appears that he just doesn’t feel well like he has a doggy flu.  He went to bed as usual and seemed to be about the same so we will watch him through the night and judge how he is doing in the morning.

We are not aware of him having eaten anything strange in the last twenty four hours.  He was very happy, alert and perky when I took him on his long morning walk around the top of the hill.  He seemed to be in better than usual spirits, in fact.  He was extremely energetic and after his walk demanded his breakfast and then made me play fetch with him for half an hour or more.  It was surprising how healthy he seemed.  I know that he was still feeling okay at two thirty when Dominica and I had our lunch because he cleaned our dishes in the kitchen (we had mac and cheese for lunch.)

The only possibility for him getting into something that he should not have, as I think about it, was on our morning walk he was spending some time sniffing under a boulder (we have a lot of those here) and with his nose burried in some leaves it is possible that he ate something in there of which I was not aware.  I did not think that he did but looking back it is theoretically possible.

We will just have to wait and see tomorrow.  We were all off to bed around midnight.

AppleTV is a versatile device that works in several different modes. It has direct Internet access through YouTube. It can play media files that are loaded onto it. And it can play media files provided to it through an iTunes “server” application running on a host computer. It is these later modes that are of the most interest to parents looking for a “controlled” solution for their children.

The first thing to mention is that the AppleTV has very good parental controls built in. With these control parents can do a range of locks including removing all access to YouTube and Internet direct content, removing the ability to access the iTunes Store to obtain new, external material and can control the ratings of movies and television shows that will be allowed even when access to them is permitted. So right away there are a range of options that make the AppleTV safe and simple for parents to provide.

The true versatility of the AppleTV for youngsters comes from its “one level separation” from being directly connected to the Internet. Because there is a complete separation between the AppleTV and content on the Internet it is far easier and more secure for parental supervision to be enforced.

The AppleTV gets its content from an “iTunes Server” – that is a computer on your home network that is actively running iTunes and is paired with the AppleTV. Because iTunes is used to feed media to the AppleTV there is a level of direct control that does not readily exist in other systems. Here the iTunes can be set to subscribe only to trusted channels or not to have any subscriptions at all. iTunes can be set to allow nothing but audio and video files loaded onto it by the parents. This is an extremely simple and effective means of content control far beyond what is possible with a DVD player since any DVD can be put into the player but the AppleTV can allow only that content that is preapproved.

Content on iTunes can be purchased through the iTunes store, purchased elsewhere online or can be generated locally either as home movies or by using tools like Handbrake to convert purchased legacy media into AppleTV ready h.264 files. AppleTV’s native video format, h.264, makes for some extremely small video files at very good quality. Perfect for storing large collections of childrens’ shows.

If access to your entire media collection hosted on iTunes is still too wide of content access (perhaps you have some PG movies in there and want to limit accessibility to just a select few films or television shows) you can choose to lock iTunes so that only content that you explicitly load onto the AppleTV through iTunes sync mechanism will be available. This makes it simple to load a large amount of media and then to limit it on a very granular level for very exacting control.

No matter which method or group of methods that you choose to limit content access the AppleTV is truly an answered prayer for parents looking to provide content access in a safe and simple manner for their children. The ease with which it can be used and the level of security that it offers is really remarkable. And because the device requires no physical contact to operate it can be installed safely out of reach of young children who can operate all of its functionality using nothing more than its small, plastic remote. This will relieve much of the concern over putting an expensive electronic device into a young child’s room or den where accidents will often happen.

Unlike services which are purely Internet streaming in nature the AppleTV’s local caching makes their device also work even with unstable Internet connection or even in situations where there is no connection at all. This type of media device will operate surprisingly like a DVD jukebox when pre-cached with content. Children could have as much as 160GB of media sitting ready to go at any time for themselves or for watching with their friends without needing intervention from you.

The AppleTV really represents an opportunity to feel confident about having control of children’s content availability in an age of much uncertain access.