Facebook, Shmacebook

I finally broke down and created a Facebook page. I am now wondering why. I love my friends, but keeping up with all their doings is already wearing this introvert out.

One of these days, months, years, I may really want to have a way to update the universe on my own doings, but that time has not come.

For now, email works for me.

Picasa Puzzlement

In the spirit of Web 2.0, I wanted to find a way for you to be able to go to Google's Picasa and look at my slide show of our kick-off. However, although I made the photos public, they don't show up when I do a Picasa site search. If anyone knows what to do to make the photos searchable, please let me know.

Happy 90th birthday to Pete Seeger!

Where's his Google doodle?

SeniorBlog

My 79 year old activist mother-in-law now has a blog. Intriguingly, the most current entry talks about her next court appearance. No entries since then… Might she be in the clink?

Perfect Storm

IMHO, a perfect storm delivers enough snow to close the library but not enough to close our street. In fact, the snow plow visited our little two blocks of nowhere before noon (a first) and we were able to pack up the skis and investigate the local rail trail. This is my husband. He took one pic of me in which I look like a nesting doll with a blotch where my nose should be, which would preserve the supposed anonymity of this blog but crush my self esteem, so it's not here. Not visible in the pics are the Easy-Gos which happily stopped short of plowing through our half-mile winter wonderland.

iStockphoto

A friend who recently retired from the county school system has developed a longtime hobby into a little retirement income using iStockphoto. Editors, publicists, and designers can search this website for photos loaded and tagged by digital photographers. Prices for use seem to start at about a dollar, but over time a popular photograph can bring in a nice chunk of change.

There are certainly of few of my fellow bloggers who are wonderful photographers and might want to check the site out. And I actually found one of the photos my friend described to me by searching for the words popcorn foot.

The Human Factor

I wonder how many of you showed up for work this morning? If so, don't be embarrassed or unduly put out. I woke up at 8 a.m. to a bright, sunshiny day and the thought that we might have a delayed opening never crossed my mind. It wasn't until I checked my email two hours later that I saw the message from alerts.com. Had I been on the early shift I bet I would have shown up early. Way too early. The lesson learned from this, I suppose, is to check your email, call your branch, or pull up our website when there's even a slight possibility of a delayed opening.

Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft Office Live inserted itself into my life this weekend while I was trying to update an Excel spreadsheet. This free document sharing program from Microsoft is modeled on Zoho and GoogleDocs, although you need to download Microsoft's program to use it. If the library decides we want it, we'll need ISS to install the software on our staff and/or public computers.

Because Office Live supports Microsoft Office Word and Excel, I think that it might, in the end, be a more attractive option than GoogleDocs. However, right now I can't get rid of the annoying Office Live ad that pops up every time I open a Microsoft document, even when I tell it that I never want to see it again. I would not want to inflict that on the rest of my colleagues.

Musings

I've been wondering recently just what my dad would have done on the web if he'd been born just a little later. Unfortunately, by the time attractive web pages with bells and whistles arrived he was already suffering from Parkinson's disease. Not that he didn't try. We bought my folks a computer. Our first sign that all was not well was when we had to extract my dad's Visa card from the floppy disc drive. Eventually, after we could no longer get the thing to work, he literally took it apart. I had my first look at the insides of a pc.

In his working days, my father was a wonderfully witty book review editor and columnist, and also a talented photographer. Although in general a techno-klutz (he never learned to drive), he did learn to use a word processor. I think he might have enjoyed having a forum beyond the Sunday paper for his take on the world. He would have loved posting his photos. And the man who wrote about one letter to me in his whole life might actually have had a use for e-mail.

Whether I could have turned my dad into a competent computer user I don't know. But every time I help a senior use the library computers I know that nothing they do on them can surprise me.