Thing #32: Box.net

Hi

Mindful of the pwc report on security, I made sure to upload an innocuous review of a conference on this offsite storage site. It was fun to use Zoho again and I had to smile at the evocative picnic imagery displayed while the picnik editor was loading - I was in the moment with the warm breeze, blossoming flora, chardonnay and pate(I added this one!)...

While, for security reasons, we should avoid using this service, it was easy to use and it could come in handy some time down the track.

Here's the image that I uploaded to Box.net: http://www.box.net/shared/zooi3jx4ck

Looking forward to the next Learning 2.1 activity.

Thing 31: Plaxo

Hi

I set up a calendar on Plaxo and played around with the entries. I tried setting up a schedule for Australian soccer and the tv program, Lost (although the last episode will be screening next week and I am so looking forward to having all the gaps in the story filled but I suspect that that this won't happen!); unfortunately, Plaxo kept reporting errors with finding the calendars on ical.com. I wondered whether the fact that they were created on a mac had anything to do with this. The calendar on Outlook is sufficient for my work needs so, most likely, I won't be using Plaxo for this purpose. Even so, it's a neat tool - very easy to use.

I also set up a list of tasks - I made them all work-related. I'm a big fan of To Do lists - I get a lot of satisfaction out of crossing tasks off the lists as I complete them. Plaxo would enable our library team to set up group/individual lists that we could share. We could have short term (weekly) and longer term (monthly) lists. However, with such a small team, we rely more on verbal communication and email and paper and pen work well for us.

Off to tackle the next thing...

Thing 29: Scrapblogging

Hi

I had a fair bit of fun with this thing. However, I spent some time trying to upload the Photobucket album into my scrapblog and couldn't get this to happen over the desktop or using the standalone. I was able to authorise the use of Photobucket but didn't get to the point where I could upload the actual photos that I'd saved. In the end, I saved the Photobucket photos to My Pictures and then uploaded them to Scrapblog.

I created a scrapblog for Stephen King's Duma Key, his latest release. It's more of a blurb than anything else. I enjoyed creating the page, finding stickers, adding text, playing around with the positioning of the photos, adding tags etc. You can view the Scrapblog at http://www.scrapblog.com/f4df922600/5F799237-381B

That brings me up to date with my Learning 2.1. Whoo hoo!

Thing 27 - Photobucket

Photobucket was very straight forward. There are clearly millions of images on this site as I searched for some very obscure photos to add to my album! After pondering for some time over the matter of my favourite book, I decided to collect images relating to the book that I am reading at the moment - Stephen King's Duma Key (yes, I have a weakness for horror/thriller). I found images for sunsets on the Florida Keys which is where the book is set, green rowing boats, twin girls (actually, I uploaded the twin girls from the Shining movie - it's not the first time that Stephen King has used ghostly twin girls), roses on water, etc. It was all entirely painless but I must make a mental note to be circumspect about the keywords that I use to search for images as the terms, "China dolls" and "twin girls" brought up some risque photos that I wasn't expecting!

Still having fun.

Thing #26 Widgets

Hi

This afternoon, I played with some widgets - I liked the To Do list one as I'm forever writing to do lists on scraps of paper! Some of the widgets had definite work application while others were more fun than anything - couldn't resist adding my favourite Dixie Chicks album cover to my testpad tab. To see my widgets at Yourminis follow this link (I'll type it in as my links often go astray!)
http://www.yourminis.com/yourminis/AmandaKaczmarek/testpad



As the Countdown Widget indicates, it's time for me to go home so it's good night from me...

#25 Pop goes the letter

I started to create my mock up invitation before I'd signed up for Letterpop and discovered that there was a limit to how much I could do without signing up. Once I'd registered, I could upload images, preview etc.

In the end, I wasn't too happy with my creation because I couldn't seem to edit as much as I wanted to - you're confined to the allocated space - any extra text does not appear in the space provided. And I completely lost a column of text (the option to add text completely disappeared). Next time, I would choose a more fancy template as the one I chose was very basic. Anyhow, here it is warts and all: http://letterpop.com/newsletters/?id=86083-e0ecd3


Once I get better at using Letterpop, it will actually be quite a useful tool for publishing invitations for work and otherwise. I'm actually glad that I persevered with it and got as far as I did.

Now, back to the desk...

Zamzar - Shazam!

I've added this tool to my Favourites as it has the potential to be very useful: clients have asked us how to convert files in the past. As long as the files are unclassified, I can see no problem with using Zamzar.

Zamzar was very easy to use (in fact, the hardest part about this session was finding my Blogger password ). I requested a file to be converted from Word to pdf. It took some time for it to be emailed to me - the email was waiting for me when I came into work the next day. It worked - yay Zamzar!

For some reason, when I hear Zamzar, I think of Shazam - a 1970s cartoon about two kids, a camel and a Genie who appeared whenever two halves of a ring were united and the word, Shazam, was yelled victoriously!