I didn’t really lust after an iPhone, until I watched the 25 minute iPhone Guided Tour on the Apple web site. Now I have joined the cult of iPhone.

Yesterday I discovered that you can expand the storage capacity of a Series 3 TiVo as simply as plugging in an external eSATA drive and pressing a couple of buttons on your TiVo remote. This is amazing in comparison to the steps required to expand a Series 1 or Series 2 TiVo, which required swapping out the internal drive with one that has been “blessed” with special TiVo formatting software. Formatting the disk can’t be done on a Mac so you had to find a Windows machine to do it, or buy a preformatted drive  from a place like weaknees.com.

Now all I need to do is get a Series 3! Wasn’t there a special deal on those recently? No way I can get away with spending $799 on a new TiVo, even if it does record in glorious high definition and expanding the capacity is plug and play. My Series 2 is overflowing with American Girl movies, Saddle Club and Suite Life of Zack and Cody episodes, and more that my daughter won’t allow to be deleted.

Doggone it! The super-special deal to buy a Series 3 TiVo for $499 expired April 30!

Making a backup of your important data is step 1 of any disaster recovery plan. Step 2 is making a copy of that backup and storing it offsite so if something happens to your computer or where it is residing the data is not lost forever. Now that our computers and hard disks are repositories for precious irreplaceable files like digital photos, videos, and correspondence it is more important than ever to follow through on those backup plans that you’ve been putting off for ages.

Mozy has been available for PC users for awhile now and has received many positive reviews. Their Mozy for Mac beta program just launched and I must admit that I am quite impressed. Mozy allows you to download a small application that will upload the files you want to backup to their servers for safe, secure offsite storage. The files are encrypted in transmission and on their servers, and restoring them is done through a very straightforward web-based interface. You simply select the files you want to retrieve from your backups from a hierarchy that mirrors the folder structure of your hard disk, click a button, and Mozy goes to work copying them to a disk image for you to download. Once the image is ready an email notifies you. If you have lots of files and can’t wait for the download to complete you can opt for a DVD delivered via FedEx for a fee.

I tried it out today and although there are a few places where the user interface could be improved to be more intuitive it’s really a very nice Mac application that works smoothly and efficiently. It scans the files on your hard disk and presents a selection window of options for files that most people are interested in backing up (ie, email, photographs, music) as well as file types like “all Excel files.” If you don’t see the file or folder you want to backup in this list you can click on a tab and browse to select them in a standard dialog box. Mozy also incorporates the power of Spotlight, allowing you to create a set that is comprised of files that result from a spotlight search.

The best part about Mozy is the affordable price. You can backup 2 gigabytes of files absolutely free. If you need to back up more data you pay just $4.95 per month for unlimited files. Several other online backup services that I’ve checked charge higher fees based upon each additional gigabyte which provides a disincentive to backing up your data.

Give it a try. If you use this link we’ll both get a little more drive space to store our stuff: https://mozy.com/?ref=DHRG78

Be sure to send feedback to the development team and thank them for bringing Mozy to Mac users.

Last Fall Alison played on a baseball team for the first time and really enjoyed it. She was one of two girls playing for the Diamondbacks of the South Austin Little League (SALSA). SALSA is one of the oldest Little Leagues in Texas

This year SALSA launched their first ever girls’ softball team, and Alison decided to join that team rather than play baseball. The team is called The Swingin’ Bats and is coached by a former Stanford softball player and a current softball player, so the girls are getting first-rate instruction.

Last weekend the Swingin’ Bats played their first game at the home field of the Lake Travis Racers. The offensive showdown ended in a 15-15 tie. You can view pictures of the game here.