thebreens.org

Since moving to Colorado last summer, the kids have been looking forward to some snow. The winter has been really mild (not that we're complaining after the last two winters we spent in South Bend, IN. But last week, we had a cold storm with snow come through. The kids took full advantage of it and spent as much time outside as their bodies could handle. No snow days were called at their school, but they fun nonetheless.

We set up our first wireless network several years ago. But in the last month or so, thanks to an update to Apple's Airport Express (AEX), our wireless network has changed in a pretty neat way. An AEX is a mobile wireless base station. We bought our first one over a year ago and took it with us when we lived in Santiago, Chile. It allowed us to set up a wireless network in our apartment quickly and its compact size made packing it along very easy.

After moving into our new house last summer, we purchased another one to extend our wireless network throughout our house. One feature that the AEX's have is called AirTunes. The AEX units have audio out so you can connect them to an amplifier or powered speakers and have iTunes send your music wirelessly to your home stereo (instead of listening to your music on your computer speakers.) While this is a neat feature, you could only send the music to one AEX at a time so you had to turn up the music loud in order to hear it throughout the house.

With the new firmware update provided by Apple about a month ago, you can now send your music to multiple AEX units. In other words, you can have your music playing throughout your house via your home stereos all in sync with each other. We have one unit in our living room and one in our family room so now the music can be heard throughout the house without having to crank up the stereo.

We've begun to go back into our digital shoebox, a program by Apple called iPhoto that we use to store our digital pictures. We bought our first digital camera in December 2001. Since then our digital photo libray has grown to over 3,000 pictures! We can't show them all here, but we'll be selecting some of them to share with you.

As you go through some of the Photos pages, you will notice that not all of the links are live yet. We'll continue to update them as time permits. We plan on adding a section on videos also and we'll see what else we can come up with.

One note, some of the photo albums (for example, the album called Around Campus) are done as a Flash slideshow. If you don't have it installed, click here to install on it on your computer.

We continue to tweak the website. We should be going up soon, but only time will tell. The plan is to update a couple of times a month, so check back if you like to see the latest happenings with the Breens.

We are almost read to go live with our new website. I am using a program called RapidWeaver to make our family website. If all goes well, it should be live in a week.

In the mean time, feel free to check back often as I will be adding more photos and whatever else I think you may find of interest.