Spring Cleaning #30

I went through the files on the drives that I knew would be ok for me to mess around with or delete, which means the ones with my name on them. I created some new folders to better organize the files, which makes the main folder look nice and neat. I did find some really old stuff in the z: drive that I must have put in there. Most of this I just deleted. Anything that looked current was moved into a nice little folder. Or just left in the "open." I really didn't have much on the z: drive. Most of what I created over the years is in the Children's services folder on the p: drive. And I didn't think I should go through that and rearrange or delete stuff. I don't know what is or isn't being used. That's what I did with my stuff. Now, I need to do this on my home computer.

Spring Cleaning #29, Email

Ok, I know that I keep way too much email. I knew this before I started to delete the old. I have spent quite a bit of time getting the inbox down to 200 emails. I am stopping for now, because my head hurts. I will get around to deleting the others that I know I should get rid of. For future emails I will try to get through them more quckly by moving them to the trash or acting on them if need be. I'll try to keep forwarding those I want to keep to a gmail account that I had set up a while back just to keep a backup of this account. I don't want to move the listservs that I'm on to personal accounts, because I know I won't read them at all then. But I don't always read them right away. I usually save them for a later time and then go through them. If I don't read them within a day or two, though, I then just delete them. I will try to keep up with my email for the future and hopefully it won't get as full as it was, over 60% full.

Spring Cleaning #28

I usually use Google calendar to keep track of things, but this is if I remember to add the information to the calendar. The GTD method could work for me, if I could remember to do the steps to keep organized and wrote things down somewhere. I probaby should keep a to do list for home, since that's the place I tend to forget what I need to do first and always forget to do. The system may help keep organized at home. We'll see.

Sound #26

I don't think I'll be signing up for the music sharing sites. They don't really appeal to me. I'm not the type to go online to share my likes. It may be a way to find new music I've not heard before. But if I don't have the time for myspace or facebook, with whom I have accounts, then I probably won't log into one of these.

I did sign up for the Jamstudio just to save the little ditty I created. It was fun to play with. But I don't think I should spend time on this, only because I could see myself spending hours on it, just playing with the sounds. If I had time to just play around on the computer, it might be a fun way to spend it.

Sound #25

Burning a CD - I've done this many times in the past, so I didn't find it hard to do. I liked to create CDs of just the songs I wanted to hear in the past for my car. However, now that I have an ipod and a way to connect it to my car stereo and don't tend to use CDs much anymore. Every once in a while I might burn a CD.

As far as sharing music, I can see the problems free and open sharing can cause for musicians. They may not earn as much as they would have since it is much easier to reach millions of people onlline than in the past when people would pass along their cassette tapes to friends to make copies.

Sound #24

I currently use iTunes, as I have an iMac at home and have downloaded many a song to my iPod. I looked at Napster, Yahoo!, and Rhapsody and just am not willing to sign up for a paid subscription. I am curious about Rhapsody's free program and may try it. I don't listen to music on my computer much and don't see a point to my purchasing a subscription to one of these. I occasionally use Pandora and it works well for me. I will probably stick to iTunes or try Amazon for purchasing and downloading mp3s that are not available through iTunes. Plus, I noticed Amazon has that partnership with Pepsi to get some music with Pepsi points.

As for radio stations I listen to, generally I only listen to a couple and they are available online, but as I said earlier, I don't really use my computer to listen to the radio. Although, I may, on occasion, listen at work in the future. Actually, because of this part of the exercise, I have learned a little more about HD radio and may look into getting recievers for it.

Week 10, #23

I'm done, wow! Overall, this was a good experience. I did learn about a few things I had not heard about, like Zoho. It made me spend more time on a few things that I had started before but never got back to, like flickr. I think the one thing that I may continue to use from all of this, is rss feeds, whether through Bloglines or my Google account (which gets checked more often). As I noted in the post about rss feeds, I already had a Bloglines account because I thought it would be a great way to keep up with information; however, I found that I stopped logging into it and then kind of forgot about it. Luckily, this training got me back into it and, hopefully, now I'll keep up with it. I would like to because I subscribed to one feed that I really like that lets me know about a lot freeware and stuff that I may find very useful for home, fun, etc.

Some of the picture editing sites were pretty cool, too. I think these and the the online document programs will be used a lot in the libraries once we make more patrons aware of them. They can do things now on the computer that used to require additional software not available to them or save without needing some external disc to save to.

As I said, overall this was a good experience. I was aware of much of these technologies; however, was not using them much. I think a lot of staff, including myself, learned about things that may be helpful to patrons who are just getting into these technologies. At least we will have an idea of what they're talking about.