If you are looking for a unique gift for either yourself or your family, then allPopart is a place you need to check out.  They take pictures that you send in and turn them into beautiful pieces of art.  We personally chose the 4 panel Warhol style for the kids pictures.  However, they have so many styles to choose from that you can easily spend an hour or two deciding what you want (trust me, I know from experience).  The next hardest part after deciding what style is deciding what pictures to use!  Once you have those two decisions made, the rest is breeze.  Everybody loves this picture.  Madison thinks it is the coolest thing ever to have this on the wall.  Will just says “see” to everybody, so they look at it.  I am currently waiting for Bill to hand it in the basement.  However, for now, I have it on the ledge:

It loks awesome there too, and it completely goes with the color scheme we have down there.  I have had several people already ask where we got it from!  This is an excellent heirloom to pass down and a great way to mark your children’s youth.  I highly recommend allPopart for their quality and for their customer service.  I am 100% satisfied and have told everyone they need to get some art for their house from allPopart!

Anyone who has any sort of computer needs to get one a SimpleTech Mini Drive.  It is small, but it has a big punch.  You can store up to 250 GB of data on this baby.  Now, I have a lot of pictures and music (and trust me, it is more than I even thought!), and it is not taking up even half of the memory on this!  There are several things I love about my SimpleTech Mini Drive.  The first thing would have to be the size.  It truly is small enough to fit in a pocket (not necessarily your jean pocket per say but a bit larger pocket).  It is also made for my house, because it is durable.  It has a velvety smooth texture to help you grip it, and it was made for travel.  If you drop it, it is not end of the world (though I may have to ground you to your room for the rest of your life).  It comes in different colors, so if they bubblegum color that I have is not your cup of tea you have several to choose from like Espresso, Marshmallow, Kiwi, and Cayenne.  You also get a high speed USB 2.0 “Y” cable that provides power without extra cables (love, love, love that!).  It even gives you backup software and you are able to use their Fabrik Ultimate Backup™ online service (2 GB free).

Want to know how easy this is to use?  Just plug one of the Y cord to the mini drive and the other to your computer.  That’s it!  Bill and I will be spending this afternoon taking the rest of the music off our desktop and saving it to the minidrive.  I then will be able to put all our MP3s on my laptop.  We haven’t done it till now, because over our home network, it takes forever!  I am super excited to be able to finally play music on my laptop!

Like I said, if you know anyone who has a computer, they need a SimpleTech Mini Drive.  You never know when your hard drive will decide to crash and take all of your data with it.

As many of you may know, the majority of my friends and family live about four hours away from me. That means, that it is a long distance phone call for me to talk to them. When I found out about Tokbox, I was pretty excited to try it out.   Now, this is super easy to use.  I tried it out with a few people, and they were all impressed with the clarity of both the image and the audio.  I’ve tried other programs before (**cough**yahoo messenger **cough**) that the video was choppy.  When you’ve got little kids using these programs (which I have Madison talk to her cousins with it), they don’t understand the choppiness.  Mom doesn’t really care for it either.  However, there was no choppiness, no lagging, and really I have no complaints about Tokbox.  It took me less than 5 minutes to sign up for the service and get a chat started with one of my friends.  Now, the coolest part is that you both don’t even need to have a webcam (though the person initiating the call does I think).  Once you have your account set up, all you have to do is hit invite, and it will give you a link to pass onto the person you want to talk to.  You can even put this on your blog and/or social network profiles.  Then your visitors can click “Push To Talk” and connect to you in real time.  I’m not adding it here, because I really don’t think you want to listen to screaming kids which is usually how my day goes.  You can even record a video and email it someone too!

If you are looking to connect online, TokBox is the way to do it.  The clarity of the video and the audio can’t be beat, and it is so easy to use!

I know you’ve all been reading my Christmas gift guide and a lot of the awesome giveaways I’ve been doing.  I’ve got another great giveaway to pass along to you.  I did a post about the Presto printer that I gave to my mom and how much I love it.  Please read my post to see how awesome it is and why you need to get this for any non tech people in your life.  Now, I want to give one of you this same printer with 3 month free service! Yes, I am serious.  Here’s what you need to do:

1. Leave a comment on this post. Check out my Presto post and also Presto’s website.  Why do you want this?  What features appeal to you the most?
2. Twitter about this contest. Please leave me your username so I can verify.
3. Stumble this post. If you don’t know what Stumble Upon is, please read Lori’s post at Blogging Cents. She explains it extremely well.
4. Add this post to other social media sites like Digg, Kirtsy, Blogging Zoom, Reddit, Propeller, Etc. (1 entry for each social network).

For 5 additional entries,

1. Blog about this on your blog. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
2. Add this to any forums you belong too. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
3. Subscribe to this blog using either my email or RSS feed
4. Add my badge to your sidebar:

<a href="http://lisareviews.com"><img src="http://i282.photobucket.com/albums/kk258/blm03_photos/125ad-1.png" border="0" alt="Lisa Reviews" /></a>

This giveaway will end on December 4 at 8:00 pm CST is available to US residents only. Good luck!

Can you believe that Halloween is less than a month away? I know I can’t. Madison wanted to be a fairy with wings or a princess. My mother in law has a princess costume that we can use, so she was easy. However, I had no idea what to make Will. He is in a weird size this year, and it is really hard to find costumes for him. However, I did find a some Halloween costumes at the Halloween Party Store that were super cute and that would fit him.

(Ignore the mess in the background and the pearl necklace he’s holding too).  I just ordered this for him and it came within a couple of days!  It is tad long but besides that it fits awesome.  I love that the toolbelt is attached to the costume, so you don’t have to worry about losing it.  You can also adjust the belt in back and make it tighter too!  This does come with a cute little red hat too, but there is no way I can keep that on a 16 month olds head!  I am impressed with the quality and service from the Halloween Party Store and highly recommend you use them for your Halloween costume needs!