You are viewing ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.6){kind=small}
madavis1's journal
You are viewing madavis1's journal
 |
|
| Tales of an InfoMage 20 most recent entries |
 |
There was an election May 12, 2007 regarding property tax relief to elderly and disabled homeowners. In particular, an email went out urging voters to be sure to show up to vote in this election. (The issue passed by a wide margin.) Trouble was, the email stated that the election was coming up "May 12" but did NOT include the year.
The world has changed so much in the last ten to twenty years, not to mention in the last five years or this past year.
College classes are starting and it's time for students to get their textbooks. Students frequently ask if the library owns the books they need. Public libraries won't, for the most part. Interlibrary Loan is not a good option for students because they really need the books for the entire semester. Another good option is getting e-textbooks. Here are some sites: The third good option is just to buy a used copy of the needed textbook. Here are some sites for that: A lot of students probably don't know that they could rent their textbooks or save money by using e-textbooks. So they will appreciate library staff letting them know about these sites. post a comment
For customers having financial hardship because they have no prescription drug health insurance coverage, here are three sites to help.
It's time to roll up your child's sleeve to get the state-required immunizations to enter school, including preschool or child-care facilities.
Most libraries do not loan audiovisual materials. No DVDs, VHS, CDs, or audiocassettes. Period. Even Harris County Public Library has never lent out DVDs from its own collection.
Just in time for the day after Christmas after you've unwrapped your new computer system and you are ready to recycle your old computer stuff!
What if the League of Women Voter's Guide gave side-by-side comparisons of any two candidates (in the same race) of your choice? That is, what if the LWV Guide were re-imagined for the Web?
A new school year has started. When I was in school (yes, in the 1970's), you went to the college bookstore and bought a used textbook for your class. At the end of the semester, you sold it back. New textbooks can be hideously expensive.
Thinking of opening a small business? Do you really know everything that is involved with starting up & running a successful small business? Help is at hand!
Harris County has now opened the Harris County Household Hazardous Waste Collection Facility at 6900 Hahl (near US 290 & Gessner Road), Houston, TX 77040. This permanent facility replaces the periodic Household Hazardous Waste Collection Events that Harris County had previously held on Saturday mornings at various locations around the county for years now.
EXERCISE ONE 1.FotoFlexer, mentioned in the first post, has effects similar to BeFunky and BigHugeLabs. Choose a photo to edit in FotoFlexer and either BeFunky or BigHugeLabs (Cartoonizer, Warholizer, etc). Compare the two. Were the results the same? Do you have a preference? Here are the photos I made changes to today:  Jigsaw Puzzle Golden Gate Bridge Girls with thoughts of Hitchhiking the Galaxy Golden Gate Bridge as Sketch Whirly Golden GateAll four of these photos were manipulated at BigHugeLabs.com, after I signed up for a free account. These were the same images that I edited in the first post. The results were not the same. Overall, I found FotoFlexer much easier to use than any of the sites in this post. BigHugeLabs had some of the same special effects has FotoFlexer. Here are the FotoFlexer versions of the sketch and caption images:  Bridge Sketch in Black & White Girls with text boxThere are some interesting choices at both sites. I prefer FotoFlexer because I found it easier to use. EXERCISE TWO Use one of the image generators to spiff up a profile picture. You can search Pho.to or FaceInHole for different scenarios - be creative with your search! Share your newly generated image on your blog. I chose FaceInHole. The image I created was posted directly to this blog as its own entry. I did two of them. The first one was my face with the word LOVE. The second one was my face mashed with the Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci. This site took me some time to figure out but I finally was able to put my face in these two images. post a comment
EXERCISE ONE Watch the video for an overview of photosharing. EXERCISE TWO If you aren't familiar with any of these sites, browse through the public areas and their features or tours. SITES: Flickr Photobucket Picasa EXERCISE THREE What features are important to you when sharing your photos? Are privacy or copyright/creative commons options important to you? Which site do you prefer? I would like it to be very easy to share photos to my Facebook account. I also want it to be easy to upload photos and edit them. Privacy is extremely important to me. I have very much enjoyed my family's and friends' photo albums on Facebook. But I would not like to see these open to the general public at large. I think that Creative Commons is a good idea. If someone wants to make a photo available for public use and all the photographer asks in return is an acknowledgment, I don't think that is asking too much. I also am a strong believer in copyright. Flickr needs partnerships with Picnik & Snapfish to do editing & making stuff. Picasa must be downloaded onto your computer first. I liked Photobucket best because you only needed to create a Photobucket free registration and everything was available all on the same Web site. Plus it looked easy to share the photos with my Facebook account (you could see the Share icons on the home page (like looking for the credit card stickers on the door before you enter a physical store). post a comment
EXERCISE ONE Upload a photo to Picnik, Photoshop, or Fotoflexer. [NOTE: Must do a free registration to use Photoshop.] Use at least one editing feature (red-eye fix, cropping, sharpening, resizing, etc.) and one creating feature (framing, adding text, touching up, captions, etc.). Post the edited photo on your blog. Original sample photo on Web site at Picnik  Factory Sign with Clock Same with Visual Effects added Cropped to just the Clock Caption Added Golden Gate Bridge Golden Gate Bridge as cartoon In Honor of Andy Warhol Two girls on a sunny afternoonAttack of the Jelly Beans! Alas, only one girl survived!EXERCISE TWO Which photo editing features are important for your use? Which of the listed sites would best meet your photographic needs? Post your answer in your blog. First, I do very litle photo editing. But here at the library, I try to help people who want to do this. My favorite features are crop and re-size. I have been using Picnik since we learned about it in an earlier module. I have assisted models who needed to get their pictures on model agency Web sites but had to re-size the photos first. Just for fun, I really enjoyed the "insert a face" feature which, as I recall, I found on Fotoflexer. I also really enjoyed the visual effects. I think that it is great that you can have a free Web site that will modify your photos so that you can do some of the same tricks as the professional photographers! I will continue to use Picnik because I find it easy to use for what I need most which is the crop and re-sizing. But I'm very happy to learn about Fotoflexer because it had a lot of the fun applications. So I guess that Picnik best meets my basic needs and Fotoflexer meets my creative & fun needs! (Please note that all of the photos I used in this module were sample photos on the two Web sites. I am using them only for my homework today. So the copyrights belong to the respective Web sites.) post a comment
EXERCISE ONE: How do you think you could use Google Wave or Buzz for collaboration? Do you currently use any online collaboration tools? The thing I liked best about Google Wave is the premise: "What if email were invented today instead of 40 years ago?" I use email and Facebook as online collaboration tools at present. I know people who use Google Chat routinely but I don't. (But I could if I wanted to.) I really liked how Google Wave makes it easy for several people to collaborate and come up with a finished document. I especially liked the Playback feature. That rocked. I don't have any projects at present that require collaborative input to this extent. I do attend a monthly meeting after which a number of folks go to lunch. I can see how someone could open a wave, suggest a type of food such as Chinese or Mexican, others could suggest a restaurant or two, and then the Yes-No-Maybe gadget could be added to see how many people would like to go to which restaurant after that particular meeting. I liked how easy it was to shift from No to Maybe or even Yes on the gadget. Here is what Google Buzz says about itself: "Go beyond status messages. Share updates, photos, videos, and more. " Google Buzz makes it easy to share visually (and not just text) from within Gmail. So far as I can see right now, it doesn't work with Facebook but it directly interfaces with Twitter. So if you have someone who does use Twitter and you don't, to speak of, you can follow their tweets via Google Buzz, within Gmail. I can see that this might be good for people who need to collaborate because not everyone is on Twitter (or Facebook, for that matter). You can let each other know if you have a big deadline on another project which means your part for this project might be a little late or you suddenly have a doctor's appointment which is going to throw your schedule for tomorrow out the window at the last minute, etc. I can see how that might be useful. EXERCISE TWO Read a little about one or two of the Google Mobile apps available for mobile phones. Which ones do you think you would use the most and how? Well, actually, I won't use any of them because I don't have a cel phone. But if I did have a cel phone which had a sizable window (some cel phones are really more just phones, you know), I think I would use: Google Sync For the ability to have calendar reminders, contacts, Gmail itself, etc. work seamlessly on one's phone even though the phone comes with its own versions of these things. This sounds terrific to me. Google Earth For the global satellite & aerial maps, obviously. The 3-D building tours look pretty cool! Google News I was impressed that it is available in 20 regional editions. The Google News Web site lets you put in a city/state or even just a zip code and it will give you local news. I'd likely use these apps, just for starters. If I had a mobile phone. post a comment
"As a refresher, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is used to deliver updated information to a feed reader or aggregator." (from iHCPL module) EXERCISE ONE: Take the tour or sign-up and try the service out. Do you currently use a feed reader? If so which one do you use? Would you switch to Google Reader if you don't already use it? Why or why not? I didn't take the tour but I signed up for Google Reader this morning. I had been using Bloglines since the original iHCPL 23 Things but I'd forget to go login to Bloglines and it wasn't very convenient. I was lucky if I remembered to go check it twice a month. When I found out we were having an iHCPL module on Google I figured this was my chance to make the jump to Google Reader. So this worked out very well for me. Signing up for Google Reader was as easy as I expected. I enjoyed watching the brief video about how to get started adding subscriptions (RSS feeds). I figured that if they wanted to provide a video to show me how to use the site, why not watch it?! EXERCISE TWO Take a look at some of your favorite sites. Do they have feeds? If they do, subscribe to one of the feeds. Hint: Our website has feeds. This was actually a little more of an adventure than I had expected. When I initially went to the HCPL list of newsletters, it ONLY stated that I could get the newsletters by email. Fortunately for me, I happened to know that this was not the case. I opened the first newsletter I wanted - the HCPL Our Space - and started looking for Subscribe via RSS. I ended up doing a combination of being on the Web site saying that I wanted RSS via Google Reader and pasting into Google Reader Add Subscription the URL that had the feed. Between the two methods, I got the feeds that I had been following on Bloglines added like I wanted. During this process, I accidentally added a feed that I didn't want. I examined the Google Reader entire screen closely and found a small link at the very bottom that said Manage Subscriptions. I clicked on it and was not only able to delete the one I added by mistake but I was able to re-name my feeds. I had wanted to subscribe via RSS to HCPL Our Space and the Science Fiction & Fantasy new books page. But Google Reader showed them both as Harris County Public Library... where I couldn't see which one was which. Renaming them shorter names solved the problem. Google Reader offers me more options. I can now share posts on the RSS feed to my Facebook account. What I found distressing about that was how much I had to dig in the Help area before I found out how to add "Send To" to my account and that this is a totally different icon than just "Share". But I was able to do it and I have tested this already. Pretty cool! Thanks, iHCPL team, for including Google Reader in this module! :) post a comment
There will be an election held May 8, 2010 to elect three members of the Lone Star College Board of Trustees. Lone Star College is the community college in north Harris County, in Montgomery County, and a little bit in San Jacinto County.
EXERCISE ONE Create a calendar in Google Calendar and try adding some events or tasks to it. How do you think you would use Google Calendar in the workplace or at home? Do you think you would find it helpful to share calendars with coworkers, friends, or family? I was very surprised to find out that I'm not going to be able to use Google Calendar. I discovered this fairly quickly after I went ahead and set up Google Calendar and tried to add an event. I have used Yahoo! Calendar for a number of years now. Adding Events to the Yahoo! Calendar is much easier. I finally figured out how to add an event for a future day (not today) in Google Calendar. I have three email addresses set up in Yahoo! Calendar. Yahoo! Calendar requires that you prove you can access an email address before it will add it, but that is fairly reasonable. There is no way to add a second email address to the Google Calendar. So it will be of no use to me. Apparently, Google Calendar assumes that you chiefly want to share your calendar with others (I don't) and that you want notifications sent as text messages to your mobile phone (I don't have a cel phone) or that you want your email notifications sent to your Gmail email account. (which is not the email account I have open most of the time, especially at work). I need the email reminders to be sent to my work email account as well as my home email account. Otherwise, the reminders are useless to me. Overall, a very disappointing experience. I will be keeping my Yahoo! calendar. I won't be using the Google Calendar at home or at work. I won't be sharing my personal calendar with coworkers, friends, or family. EXERCISE TWO Try creating a file Google Docs and uploading one from your computer. Can you see yourself using Google Docs in addition to or instead of a desktop office application? Why or why not? I have a friend with whom I am doing a volunteer activity and we need to coordinate some schedules. So I uploaded two Microsoft Excel spreadsheets showing who has already agreed to come volunteer and help us with this activity and the times the people might work. My friend had no difficulty opening the first spreadsheet I sent her. Hopefully she will have no difficulty with the second one either (which I just now sent her). On the first one I made it "view-only" and I made the second one where she could also edit it. I can see that this capability could be really useful in planning large projects/activities when you need to coordinate with other people. I don't see myself dropping the Microsoft Office programs (because I have them and I am used to them) but I can definitely see adding Google Docs when I need to work closely with someone else on a large project. I didn't even ask my friend if she used Microsoft Office or Open Office or whatever. I assume that it doesn't matter because she opened it just fine in Google Docs. post a comment |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
