So I said I was going to wait on getting an iPad. Well…I waited 48 hours, and that was only because Best Buy was closed on Easter. Seeing all the cool reviews made it too hard to resist. I have been wanting an ebook reader since the Kindle came out, but the Kindle is only a one-trick-pony. With the iPad I get an ebook reader plus much more.

It’s a great bedroom and couch computer. I can surf the web, read my RSS feeds, play games, or even watch streaming Netflix movies. It’s much easier to use than my laptops in those situations.

I haven’t spend a lot of time reading on it yet. I will be taking it to work tonight and see how my eyes handle reading on it. I am pretty sure it wont be a problem. The screen is beautiful and my eye don’t ever really get sore reading anything else.

Some people are saying their iPad is taking the place of their laptops. I don’t see that for me. It might get me off my computer a little more, but it’s not replacing my laptop at all.

I am really getting tempted to get an iPad, but I still think I am going to fight the urge and wait for version 2. Today Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing, showed off The Elements app. It is based on the book The Elements, by Theodore Gray. I got the book for Christmas, and it’s gorgeous. The iPad app looks even better and brings it to life. You can even look up more info on Wolfram Alpha.

This really could be a great device for books and magazines. I can’t wait to see all the great content to come out for this device. We will see if I can fight the urge, but you know version 2 will be cheaper and better.

I really love my Roku. I am getting a lot more out of my Netflix account now. The downside is the Netflix streaming content is a little thin. There are not many movies that I wold want to see on it, but is does have a good selection of documentaries and TV shows, especially Discovery Channel content. I love documentaries and they were the vast majority of DVDs I was getting anyway.

For some strange reason I never caught Everest: Beyond the Limit on The Discovery Channel. If you haven’t seen it, do. That show is amazing. It’s crazy what people put themselves through just to climb a mountain. I watched the first season in two days, and am now into the second season. The Roku is a great way to watch TV shows. No more waiting a week for the next episode. After they hype what’s coming next week, you can just click and watch it.

I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions. I think if you want to change something, just do it because you want to do it and whenever you want to do it. Who cares what the calendar says.

This year my goal is to change all my online passwords to something different, and impossible to guess. My current passwords are probably better than most people’s, but they aren’t perfect. I have three levels of passwords. I have really strong ones for banking stuff, somewhat strong one for other online stuff, and a crappy one for sites I don’t care about.

The problem with hard to guess passwords for every site is remembering them. You pretty much need a password manager. I have looked at a few in the past, but they weren’t good enough for me. I use many computers with many different browsers on a daily basis, and from time to time am on a family member’s computer. I needed a way to access my passwords anywhere, and I don’t want to have to bring a thumb drive with me everywhere I go (even though I pretty much do).

My solution? LastPass.com. LastPass stores your passwords in the cloud. They have extensions for pretty much every browser. You just have to sign up for an account, and install the extension. From there whenever you enter a password it saves it to your LastPass vault. Next time you go to the site it will auto fill your password. You just have to log into LastPass from the extension, and you can have all your passwords auto fill. I have it set to log off of LastPass when I close my browser to keep it more secure.

The cool part is if you are on someone else’s computer you just have to log into LastPass.com to get your passwords. You can even export your passwords. Just incase something happens to LastPass, I exported my passwords to a csv file and then uploaded then to Google Docs, and my Dropbox account.

LastPass is free unless you want mobile access. If you want to use it on your phone it’s only $1 a month. I’m not using it on my BlackBerry yet, but might soon. Who knew managing your passwords could be so much fun.

So yesterday we put some of our gift cards together and got a blu-ray player. It only costs us $50 after gift cards. Not too bad. Now we can finally watch movies in HD. To me even DVDs look better in the blu-ray player than in the old DVD player. The blu-ray player must upscale our DVDs better than our old DVD player did.

We are also using this time to upgrade our receiver too. It’s sad to retire our old receiver and DVD player that we spent over $600 on, but it would be nice to have HDMI on the receiver.

Sadly the receiver selection at Best Buy is pretty limited, so I had to order it from Amazon. I probably would have ordered one even if Best Buy had it in stock. It was $100 cheaper than it was at BestBuy.com. I wish we didn’t have to pay sales tax at Amazon like most of the country, but oh well, still a pretty good deal.

So I started the ’00s with VHS and ended them with blu-ray. That’s a pretty big transition. I wonder what the next 10 years will bring?

Anybody that knows me knows that I love to learn, especially if it’s fun. I am ok at geography, but could be better. I just spent an hour playing this game. I got up to level 6. I was pretty good at getting the right country, but pretty much sucked at knowing where the city was in each country.