Week 10: #23 Is this really the end?

Well, I can't believe I really completed this program. It was very trying at times but perseverance and persistence paid off...and some help from my coworkers. The program was very eye-opening and I learned so many new things that I never knew existed. Thank you iHCPL for introducing me to all these wonderful tools. There were so many things I discovered that I'm so glad I did this. I am now more confident about learning more new applications. If I can do this, I can probably do anything. I thought the animated picture postings were the cutest things. A lot of other people's blogs were very interesting, entertaining, and informative. I wish I'd had more time to spend on each exercise so my blogs could have been more elaborate. Many of the participants blogs had a real WOW factor. I enjoyed reading other peoples' blogs and learning new things. Good for all the participants and good for iHCPL/HCPL. This is certainly not the end; it is just the beginning.

Week 9: #22 Downloadable Media

HCPL's digital site is very very good. There is so much to choose from...books, music and videos. I will be checking out a lot of stuff now that I'm aware of this. I had no idea that classical music and comedy videos were a part of this. This is the best thing. What a great service this site provides. I located many titles that I would want to check out. The main difference I found between the library site and the free sites is HCPL's site is more user friendly and much easier to manuever through it. Thanks. I love it.

Week 9: #21 Podcasts, Smodcasts!

I looked at Podcast.net and searched health. I found an interesting site Seasonal Health Tips - The 5 Element Way with lots of information on all areas of health based on Oriental medicine which has always caught my attention. I added the RSS feed to my Bloglines account and I was amazed that I actually remembered my login name and password. When I searched under "library" I found many, no make that too many, library podcasts from military to lunar/planetary to whatever you want. There is so much useful information everywhere you look; there is just not enough time.

Week 9: #20 Discover YouTube & other video sharing sites

I briefly explored YouTube and was hard pressed to find a video worth noting. The "First Date" video that was on YouTube's homepage today was not worth watching and it generated nothing but profanity in titles or comments and questionable videos, in my opinion. Is this what everyone that watches YouTube finds entertaining? If so, this would be one explanation for the lack of respect in society today. I'm not a fan of YouTube, to say the least.


For the sake of completing this exercise, I did look around (trying to avoid landmines) and found a Nascargot video that had snails racing with Nascar driver's numbers on their backs that was sort of cute. I wasn't interested in spending a lot of time on YouTube. I think this website has too much trash on it to be of much benefit to anyone. It seems that anything interesting leads to questionable material. The concept of the site might be fun to apply to a library site... if things could be kept "G" rated.

Week 8: #19 Web-based Apps

I created my free account in Zoho Writer. I created two documents and thought this was amazing that I could create a word document when I was not in Microsoft Word. I tried to send the document to by blog but could not get it to cooperate. Maybe Blogspot Blogger is not a default compatible with Zoho without tweaking it. Didn't have time to figure it out right now. I did send it to my email to test this feature of sharing documents by email without sending a document in an attachment. You can send it Read Only or Read/Write. This is very cool and has the potential to be very useful. I will probably be using this a lot. Zoho also has so many features to personalize documents with possibly everything Microsoft Word has. I like this and will be telling others about Zoho, who aren't aware of it. Back to the back-breaking grind here.

Week 8: #18 Social Networking

I looked around several of the social networking sites and my notes of likes and dislikes are as follows:

MySpace -I like the premise of this website but it has gotten a LOT of bad press and rightfully so. The person you could be talking to is probably not the person you think you're talking to. There has been a lot of trouble for a lot of people resulting from using this website. I encouraged my children not to use this website, if they were going to take it seriously and use it seriously.

Facebook -This website seems to be popular with the college-aged group. I have seen this site and it looked very interesting.

Rate My Space -I love to watch HGTV and I have heard of this site from the program. I'm not sure I would use this site, but I might.

Infield Parking -This would be a fun site if I were still interested in NASCAR.

Dogster -This would also be a fun site to show off the cute things your dog does and get information from other dog owners about a particular breed or habit.

My interests in this trivial stuff has been replaced by my granddaughter. She is the cutest and the most entertainment I have seen in a very long time anywhere.

My thoughts about online social networking are this is a good way to connect with people that share the same interests. The sites that appealed to me would be Rate My Space by HGTV and Dogster if I had time to socialize online. It is more important to me to socialize with family and neighbors and friends in person and be entertained by my granddaughter.

Have a great day...it is beautiful today.

Week 7: #17 Blog About Technology

I can remember when I first used a computer in the eighties. I didn't want to give up my electric typewriter. Now I have problems using a typewriter. I have a MP3 player, although I haven't taken it out of the package. I bought it almost a year ago but don't know how to load music yet. I have finally mastered working our DVD player and I know almost all the functions of my cell phone. Technology, what would we do without it?

I commented on other's blogs. That was, by far, a no brainer.

Another beautiful day in Houston.