Just came across a mention of this little baby which is a HD media player. For $130 it will play HD 1080p content to your TV (via HDMI) from a hard drive source ($120 for 320gig). So, for $250 today, I can have a full 1080p HD portable playback kit.

Thats brilliant. I won’t call this a torrent player .. piracy hurts my business and I know plenty of people working in the industry that also feel the hit. I’m not talking Clint Eastwood .. it’s average joe who doesn’t make the mega bucks but piracy devalues what they do.

But .. I’d love to visit my local video store, fill my drive with pre-paid 1080p content and watch when I’m ready. Packed with DRM to limit that watch to a couple of times and prevent me from copying it out? Fine by me. The convenience would be great.

Transporter 3 is due for release this time next month. At CDWOW you can get it for a snap at $41.95, EzyDVD does it for $32.97 and JB for $29.98. Thats a $12 variance from CDWOW to JB! If CDWOW can get away with it .. that’s a huge margin they’ll make. We’re online with price comparisons at our fingertips .. I gotta wonder how many they will sell. On that price check I wouldn’t go back to CDWOW next time. Add to the craziness, within 3 months after it’s release Transporter 3 will most likely drop to $15.

So a new customer tonight told me she heard about us at a dinner at a friends house, one of the guests composed a song on the spot that everyone else joined in on… it was a ditty about APPLEBOX! She assumed it was about apples and was apparently the only one at the gathering not yet in the know. Come out come out where ever you are - we wanna hear that song!

Went to a gig last night at the Wesley Anne to see our Andrew play with The Road to Kilkahlia. Fantastic band, one to look out for most definitely and how proud was mother hen to see Andrew… such talent. I can highly recommend the Wesley Anne as a venue and for their two for one meals on Monday nights too!

Ok .. this might spell trouble for me .. but Mara’s on imdb, Sarah’s also on imdb. Andy’s just made the grade and gets his 6/8 thing on with his band My Lil Tornado on iTunes. Way to go Andy! But Sheeiit … I’ve got a demo tape somewhere I swear it … wonder if iTunes takes demos?

Ok that doesn’t really make sense .. but we made posi 51 in the Anthill Smart 100! Almost in the top 50 .. we’ll keep an eye out to see who we can knee-cap for next year. It was a fun night at Life Labs in Digital Harbour. The event was last Thursday and I’m a bit late blogging about it .. I had hoped to give you a run down on who made the top 10, but I lost my pre-release Anthill mag somewhere in between that glass of red and more beer.

Needless to say .. we’re all stoked here at team APPLEBOX. Well done Sare, Mara and Andrew! We were in esteemed company .. the top spot went to a team that has pioneered early detection of breast cancer through hair analysis (ok ok .. maybe we should have been #2 then).

I had to check another of the top 10, Cone-head, ’cause I couldn’t believe Dan Aykroyd was in the house .. nope .. Cone-head is a new-style shock-absorbent liner for bike helmets. Clearly the health and safety angle was a winner so I think our new APPLEBOX angle is reduction of VE shock. Yes, Video Ezy shock. A coma-like induced state that some experience when visiting their local Video Ezy. Disorientation from endless wandering, flouro-induced memory loss, hearing tinnitus from blaring DVD-loops and a general bad-interior-design-101 induced psychosis. Very horrible and I’m pleased to announce we at APPLEBOX have discovered a cure.

Well done Anthill for putting on the show & congrats also to Colmar Brunton who did the analysis and came up with the rankings. If I had a wee little crit for the night it would be that we weren’t given any info on what the smarts of the top 10 were. As the winners shook hands a two liner on what they did would have been welcome .. we had to hit the mag later and speak to others to work out exactly what they did.

When we get hold of the next edition of Anthill we’ll bring it into the shop for all to see!

So far through loose change our customers has raised about $350, the appeal ends on April the 17th. I want to know why? It seems to me people are still more than happy to put their hands in their pockets and I know it’s going to be a long slow and expensive road to recovery for those communities.

I believe the bush regeneration and wildlife causes are lucking out a bit on the money front so do we really need to stop the fund? The really amazing phenomenon is the kids, they all want to put money in the jar. Truly a cause that crosses all the normal barriers. Who are the 5 people deciding where the money goes and what their processes are? It seems that the community wants to be involved in this one so the accountability needs to be public and available. I hope the red cross and the government keep the cause real and don’t get caught up in politics and bureaucracy as would be easy to do.

Thanks for all that have donated in-store to our Bushfire appeal box. Our efforts though seem small compared to some others around us. Cath Murphy is working on the Portable Cinema Project in which she’s taking cinema to the affected areas. Pete Williams (CEO Deloitte Digital) is on the ground helping the Flowerdale community rebuild. You can follow their amazingly rapid progress here. And now I discover Michael Silver, two doors up at newNorth Printing is part of a group offering photo recovery and other services to those affected by the bushfires. Their offer is here.

There’s of course others doing great things as well, but props to Cath, Pete and Michael.

We went to a great Oscars party last night… the competition was fierce, all our predictions were in on Saturday and the whole party competed for prize money. Simon and I didn’t take the prize but were even on 15 correct predictions out of the 24 categories…. Lots of champagne, popcorn and fun.

For anyone who heard Sean Penn’s acceptance speech and wondered what the reference to the protestors outside the awards was about head to Courage Campaign…. bit scray

One kelpie cross belonging to local DVD store owner starring in a certain Melbourne police drama. Ruby was having her paw sunk into mud setting up a forensics photo to solve a murder case. Ruby was baffled when she was told not to avoid the mud but to sit in it….. and how many people does it take to take a photo! Sarah may not be working in the Art Department any more but her dog has been put to work.