Like that Idea has been an online associate for Amazon.com for some time. When Bryan, Karen, or their son like a particular product and recommend it for your family…we talk about it here. Because we like the product so much, we often provide a link to it which gives you an easy option to buy a similar product that we have liked so much. Now it’s time for something slightly different!

We are starting something new as associates with Amazon…it’s called aStore. Basically, aStore allows us to have a store at Amazon for those visiting our Website. From Amazon you get the same service and support for your purchases as you always have. At the same time, we can now offer a store that is Amazon plus our own Like that Idea style added to the mix.

Check out our new Like that Idea store at Amazon. We hope it is an idea that you’ll like!

As I mentioned a couple days ago, my two-and-a-half year old son and I are bachelors until my wife returns from two weeks of traveling for work. Well, I decided to start my son right in teaching him how to be a real man. We went to Sears and bought ourselves one of their top 6.5 Horsepower self-propelled lawn mowers. This lawn mower can mulch, rear-bag, or thow from the side discharge the grass 20 feet into the neighbors yard!

Karen has actually been on my case to get a new lawn mower so she’ll be happy we made the purchase due to the fact it is self-propelled. My previous 10-year old push lawn mower was the cheapest lawn mower I could buy at Target. Ironically, that first lawn mower was also the most expensive lawn more I could afford at the time!

To make a long story short, the lawn mower ran like a charm. The mower was so easy to push that even my two-and-half year old son was able to join in on the fun. There was about a 20 foot swath of lawn that he pretty much cut with little assistance by me. I of course was right there next to him making sure he didn’t stray the mower (or himself) in any wrong direction. With safety fully on my mind, eventually we moved him to a lawn mower his own size.

His little bubble mower may not cut the grass so well, but it sure can cut a mean down anything that stands in it’s way on the sidewalk. When the grass was done, we both headed down the side walk with his mower to showoff what a father-son team can accomplish. I only hope the bubbles coming from his bubble mower meets California laws on clean-air emmisions! I have a hard time believing the both of us would have been happy if we bought one of those electric lawn mowers we’ve seen at Amazon. I think my son’s bubble mower has more horse power!

Here at Like that Idea we have spent quite a bit of time talking about Web content management systems, with one of our favorites being Drupal. You may have wondered who actually uses these open source applications and how good could something you download for free really be? Dries Buytaert, the project leader for Drupal, pointed out on is blog that:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is using Drupal for their Academy of Program / Project and Engineering Leadership website (APPEL). Sweet!

Some well known (and not so well known ) Drupal sites also includes: American Idol’s Blog, Mac Geekery, Nashville News, Ringo Starr, Anthropology.net, Fish Fever, and Empire Investor. Ok, to be fair, Empire Investor is a site we did for a client…but if the site’s owner is happy with Drupal why wouldn’t you be happy with the CMS? If you want more examples of Drupal sites, check out DrupalSites.net and Drupal Showcase.

Dora the Explorer ? my son is absolutely enthralled with her! This is his show of choice when he gets to watch TV. It is a very good show ? teaches a number of things to include Spanish! He could count to 10 in Spanish before he could count to 10 in English and that was right around is 2^nd birthday. A very good educational show as well as a main character that I think my son has a crush on (plus he loves Boots the monkey as well)!

Being an avid reader, I read as much as time allows with a 2 year old! I recently read ?Cry Wolf? by Tami Hoag and absolutely could not put it down. It is an excellent murder mystery that draws you in, weaves the characters intricately and keeps you guessing until the very end! A must read for any murder mystery fans out there!

A couple years ago when I heard that they would be doing a remake of Battlestar Galactica, the late 1970’s television series, I didn’t want to get my hopes up to high. As a kid, I treasured that series and I just didn’t want a good show to be ruined by a remake. Then the rumors began to fly. Two of my favorite male characters in the series, Boomer and Star Buck, were now female characters. The look of the Cylons was being changed with a number of them looking like humans not machine. In fact Boomer was no longer human…but one very confused Cylon. On and on these rumors came and went. To make it all worse…the rumors were true! They called this Battlestar Galactica reimagined. How could I enjoy watching this remake trash everything I knew about the original series?

Reimagining the series evidently was the best thing to happen to a television science fiction series in a long time. The show is not only a darker version of the original, but probably a series that better reflects the reality and complications humanity has faced and will always face. You put a group of survivors together and after a short time complications will develop. The reimagined show has made sure the story told has “grown-up” just as much as the series original fans have.

The new Battlestar Galactica is not only better than the original series, it is in my opinion the best science fiction series currently on television. Evidently, I’m not alone as the series has won several awards including a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and rated the number one show in 2005 in Time’s Best of 2005 for Television. If you have already missed the first season and a half I recommend checking out the series on DVD (clicking on pics above will take you to Amazon).

Anybody with a child at reading age knows about Harry Potter. I recently came across an article that discussed how reported children injuries go down by about half on the weekends that a new Harry Potter book is released. It’s not much of a mystery to why this happens; while the kids are reading Harry Potter books they have less chances of falling out of trees or off their bicycles! But the article got me thinking about my own favorite books when I was a child, stories that included Leroy Brown and Henry Reed.

Leroy Brown of course is better known as Encyclopedia Brown. Encyclopedia Brown solved mysteries by talking to the suspects and reviewing the “crime scene”. Best of all, the stories invited you to solve the mystery before reading what actually happned. If you ever wondered what C.S.I’s Gil Grissim might have been like as a child then look no further than Encyclopedia Brown. If you think Grissim has it tough, then you never met Bugs Meany, the meanest kid in Brown’s neighborhood.

Then there was Henry Reed. I can still recall discovering Henry Reed, Inc, the first book in the series, on the shelves of our local public library. I have to admit that I can’t remember all the details of the book. But what I do recall was that Henry was an average kid (though maybe the son of a diplomat isn’t average) that exhibited a lot of interest in science, entrepreneurialism, and friendships. The books are a good read for kids. For myself, I think the Henry Reed series was the first time I considered what I wanted to do when I got older. Thanks Henry.