Flikring

It took me over an hour to download one photo into flikr. I recently returned from vacation so when I read this task I though I would download all my (300+) digital pictures into flikr. Wrong. I kept crashing the system, when I tried to do a block download. Finally, I decided to just download one photo and saw that it took up about 5% of my alloted space. So at that rate, I can only add 20 photos a month to my flikr account. I think I will stick to cd's and flashdrives at this point. I am sure it will take less time now that I've done one, and perhaps I will use this to send pictures to others in the future.

However when I tried to attach the photo directly to this post from flikr, I ended up with the entire page. So I finally just saved the photo in flickr to my computer and then transfered it to here. There must be an easier way....

My own personal Hootenanny

Okay, I am now a convert to Web 2.0. With Pandora and streaming music, I was able to find all the songs and artists from the early 60's folk music that is my fave and #1 music.

They are not easy to find and NEVER on any radio station nowadays. Glenn Yarbrough, the Seekers, the Brothers Four, PP&M, Joan Baez, the list goes on....

This was the easiest and most enjoyable task so far. While working on my 2009 budget, I was able to concentrate on finishing it while listening to my favorite music streaming by, oblivious to all the teens in the library on Friday.

RSS, Science and the Mariners

This has been a frustrating excercise and taking longer than the 1 hour. I signed up with bloglines and went to the sites that I wanted to get the RSS for, I ended up with their RSS's added to my Microsoft Office Outlook and they immediately filled up with unread mail. The next day, I finally figured out how to get them through the bloglines.com, but unless they were on the suggested sites, I would get the message "No feeds were found. Please verify that the website publishes and RSS feed." I checked the site and it did have an RSS feed, and when I clicked on it, you guessed it, it was added to my Office Outlook.
I also discovered, that on closing out, I had several popup screens with advertisement.

However, I did subscribe to the Scientific American suggested site and it made it all worthwhile. The first article that came up was January 9, 2008. Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?
Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not.
By M. Mitchell Waldrop

As a former research scientist in my past lives, I was very interested on how this may be transforming the scientific research fields, in particular, the "Publish or Perish" syndrome and possible effects of plagiarism. They even had a spirited blog developing, with younger vs older scientists.

So far, I would rather scan entire sites periodically, rather than have it "fed" to me, but this task has been interesting venture.

Instant messaging

I've been on vacation, so not only have I fallen behind but now it's hard to find time to catch up. I'm glad we have a few extra weeks to complete all the tasks by the end of the 20.

I have used IM with my msn.com email account for several years. But I've found that my family, friends and I would rather pick up the phone and talk to each other rather than wasting time trying to type everything out.

At the most we will just IM "Is this a good time to call you?"

Since I don't use my gmail account except for these exercises, I probably won't use this IM service either. BUT at least I do know how to use it and can assist patrons on getting to this function. I am glad I learned how to access it through gmail, gmail is a little different from my msn.com account.