Online Image Generators

Well, this was fun. I have played with Photoshop and Digital Image Suite 10 a lot at home and had fun creating Christmas cards and other fun things. The online images are fun and neat that they have some licensed stuff to manipulate. I can see this will be another thing that I found useful and fun, and will continue to play with in everyday life. I liked especially the magazine covers and the scrap booking pages (although the volume on one of the scrapbook sites was way too high and kept blasting me). The only thing that was not cool was the ways to adjust the photos, I am used to drag and drop with the photomanipulation that I use at home, this was a little harder to move the text and artwork to exactly where I wanted. I still was able to do it, but it took longer. Overall, another cool thing.

Overdrive

Okay, after many attempts by myself and a very helpful Tech and IT having to install the Ovedrive Media Player onto my computer I finally got to play with Overdrive. It was fun to look around and see what was available. There seems to be a fair amount available and I even found one of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Peters, on the always available list and I checked out her book "Crocodile and the Sandbank". This was a fun one. I think that if the installation was easier I would have spent more time playing around with it. I asked around and most people seem to have been able to download the player just fine, so if that was easier I think most people would be glad to know and use this service. It would be very conveinent if you also had a laptop and therefore could play the book where ever go. A very handy and interesting "thing".

Not so Delicious

Well, this was another one that didn't really grab me. I really don't think that it is something that I will use on my own, but it is good to know about it and how it works. I did create an account, but honestly I do not want to post my link to it. I am uncomfortable with some of the social networking stuff especially when associating it with other things about me. I probably sound paranoid, but when I first started doing genealogical research I posted some family tree stuff, and my experience is that once something is out on the Internet, it is out there forever. Others copy it, it gets cached, whatever. I like the concept of some of the social networking stuff as a way to share things that you want to share, but honestly I am a little hesitant about it and what a marketing company could do with it for instance. On the other hand as a place to search, it is a great tool. I tried some searches on genealogy and found some pages that I had not heard of before and did not come up on Google, until way down the list. I think that as a place to look for information links, it is wonderful with all the tags to suggest other keywords to search. Overall, good thing, just not for me.

Wiki Wiki Fun?

Well, I do think the concept of Wikis is a cool one. I have used Wikipedia at home for quite a while and find it very useful and a great jumping off point. I have taught my son to use it with the caveat that (as with most information on the Web) he needs to cross reference with a more reliable source, but it can be a great place to get started. I did like the video about the camping trip, but both myself and a co-worker could not get the embedded video to play and so had to go to YouTube to find a different version that would play without hanging. This part was not "wiki", in fact it was very slow. Anyhow, Wikis=cool and fun, waiting for not very streaming video=frustrating.

Streaming Video

I went to YouTube and searched for Libraries, and found Mr. Bean and the Library http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJeZqqwWEzo that I had not seen before. It was fun to also find videos of Library cart drill teams - I had heard of them, but not seen any. Has Sno-Isle ever had a cart drill team? Then I searched under the key word genealogy and there were some tutorials and the like, but also a video of the Muppets singing "I'm my own Grandpa" which was funny. At Hulu I found things like an episode of House that I missed the last five minutes of, which I will use at home. Also, it had some Chilly Willy and Pink Panther cartoons that I will use at home. However, Fancast seemed better to me. It seems to have as much as Hulu and provides much more information that might be useful to Patrons (and me) like listing the actor/actresses other shows and films, and whether they are on dvd or TV and what is playing in the theaters. Also, it had Jericho episodes which Hulu didn't. Overall, I would wrap this up with: I already use You Tube, and I will probably use Fancast, but Hulu doesn't fit what I am generally looking for. This was a fun "Thing".