Cloud computing is something that is very useful and I learned about a few types that I did not know about. I use Google calendar, Doodle, and a little of the Google Docs. I tried Drop Box and am looking forward to working more with it and the Google Docs. I need a little more instruction to answer some of my questions. I also tried the ScribLink. It was fun but I can’t see the applications for my life as much as some of the other products. The thing I most want to further explore is saving my files in the Cloud. This is one of the most useful 23 Things. If you can’t finish all 23, be sure to do this one.

Getting caught up tonight on 23 Things and fighting this assignment. I really don’t want to microblog. I read the material and checked out the sites and I still did not want to microblog. I created a Twitter account, @ATCharlene and posted my first tweet.

I actually did not find it easy to find people on Twitter. I would not have found anyone without the examples. I started following Janelle, Lori, Ruby, Nancy, Denise, Sara, and Diana along with 23thingsks. I just picked people I know for now. Searching is not going well so I will settle for now. I did find some helpful posts. I am not sure if this will be helpful but I am trying to keep an open mind. I am wondering if there is some kind of social networking aggregator so I will not have to sign into so many things.

I created a Delicious account last week and imported my personal bookmarks. I didn’t like that I had to create yet another account, at Yahoo, to have a Delicious account. It is one more account to keep track of or more accurately to lose track of. I can see the usefulness of having a portable source of my bookmarks and somewhat see the point of tagging and sharing bookmarks but I am overwhelmed by setting it all up to use. My work bookmarks are so extensive and I definitely need to go through them and weed so I don’t want to just import them. Also I would have to create yet another Yahoo account. I might create an account and just start from scratch adding but I am going to give the personal account some time to see if it would be worth the time. I did tag a site, share it, make a tag bundle, and did some searches.

Our family treasure is my husband’s great aunt Florence. Aunt Florence is the last of her generation in our family. She is our surrogate grandmother and friend and tomorrow is her 99th birthday. Aunt Florence lives by herself in Pratt, KS. She is still very active; she still drives but not too much anymore, she still reads paperbacks in regular print, crochets even though her fingers are very bent from arthritis, loves to listen to country music, walks regularly, rides her exercise bike, puts together jigsaw puzzles, and watches sports on TV (especially her favorite KU Jayhawks). Aunt Florence is a real joy to be around. She is so aware of what is going on around her and so very caring. She crochets lap blankets for a nursing home and has made us all such beautiful afghans. We will go visit on Saturday and do her tax return, take her a birthday cake, and then take her out for supper. We are so fortunate to have this dear and wonderful lady in our lives.

Great Aunt Florence

I am trying to visit my friend more often now but staying for less time. She is to the point that very little she says is understandable and this is extremely frustrating to her. Over the last 4 months or so, many of her relatives have come and stayed with her for a few days to a few weeks. Her son is in again from Florida. When he leaves on Sunday, they will start having paid help come during the day and her Dodge City son will come at night. I know my friend is not happy with this. She told me last week when she was still understandable part of the time that she would rather go to the nursing home than have a stranger watch her all day. I don’t know if she told her family this and now I fear it is too late for them to ask.

She is talking less now because she knows we can’t understand. She can not do the things in live that she loved doing so much. She can’t read, use her computer, play cards, visit with her friends, or watch TV. Today while I was at the store waiting for my perscription to be filled I went to look at the greeting cards. I found one that was simple and expressed my feelings for my friend. It mentioned thinking about her every day and keeping her in my prayers. When you open the card it plays “Say a little prayer for you” song. I decided to buy it for my friend. When I got home tonight I took the card over to her and read it to her and then she opened up the card. Her face lit up and she showed the card to her son. We visited a few minutes and she continued to open her card and listen to the song, over and over. I left her house with a smile on my face. Guess we can still communicate.

I have used Bloglines feed reader for several years. This week I also took a look at Google Reader and Feed My Inbox. I didn’t see anything in Google Reader that compelled me to change and I am not interested in adding to my e-mail so I decided to stay with Bloglines.  I went through and cleared out of few feeds whose sites were not being updated and added two new feeds, Technology Review RSS Feeds and Libraryman. Both are work related. I am not sure if I will stick with these but will try them out for a time.

My favorite feed is Feel-Good Librarian. She does not write much but when she does it always touches my heart.

I had never done photo sharing before. I found it very easy to load my photos to Flickr and add tags. I was able to post a photo to my blog from my Flickr account but ran into some issues with trying to add a photo from the blog. I will work on this another time. I have loaded some of my photos previously on Facebook but most of my family are not on Facebook (maybe a good thing) so Flickr will allow me to share photos with them. SWKLS has a Flickr account so now I know how to upload photos there. This was a great lesson.

I will share one more of my vacation photos.

View of our cruise ship from the beach

Lake Irene Colorado

Originally uploaded by ed.charlene

This is the beautiful Lake Irene inGrand County, Colorado. My husband and I visited the lake in September, 2009. We walked the perimeter of the lake and enjoyed the solitude. I love pictures of mirrow images.

I am very familiar with OPAL. We use OPAL here at SWKLS for some of our board meetings and for informational meetings the months that we do not have board meetings. We also use online meetings for committee meetings and training.  I did an online meeting last year about how to get statistics for the State Report using VERSO. I archieved the session so people could access on their own time.

For this week I took a look at Wimba. I accessed the Kansas Tax Form webinar that Laura DeBaun did last month. This was great as I was not able to take part on the day of the online meeting. The session was rather long at 2 hours but very helpful for me to know how to help our libraries with the technology they will need to help their patrons. I liked that I was able to log out and return to the point that I had stopped. A special thanks to Laura and Cindi for setting up this meeting and making it available to watch for those of us who missed it.

I think online meetings are a very useful tool. We, here at SWKLS, are searching for a new free or nearly free tool that will allow us to do training and have popups. OPAL does not do popups. Will online meetings be around for 10 years? With technology, most things do not last that long as things change so quickly. I do think some form of online meetings will be around for a while. I think the chat part is particularly good because some people are more apt to participate via chat than they are to speak.

Today when I visited my friend who is dying, I could see the changes in just the last week. The frustration within her is growing. Most of her words just do not make sense and she desparately needs to communicate.  Her eyes were pleading as I left. She just wants to be gone. Her sister from Florida is visiting for a couple of weeks. She called tonight because they needed our help. It was good to be needed and be able to help.

I keep thinking about my friend. I finally decided tonight to do what I do best. I started to research on the web for information about how it might be from here on out until my friend is gone. I needed to know somewhat what to expect. I read things that I have seen happen this week and know that time is growing shorter. I really do hope and pray that she will go to sleep one night soon and wake up in the next world.

I think this time is like when you are fully packed for a trip and then the plane is delayed. You don’t know what to do with yourself and you have already said your goodbyes and what is there left to do? It gets more and more uncomfortable as you wait but you have to just keep on waiting. My friend is waiting. I hope her plane comes soon.