Cleaning up!

I've decided that I like Google Reader better than Bloglines so I just went through and opened up all my Bloglines feeds and decided what to move over to my Reader account and what to just delete. Do I really need Dilbert? No, I didn't think so. I don't need LOL Cats either as cute as it is.
I also read Disabled Kitty's post about Delicious. I have been really bad about putting my bookmarks into Delicious. I have many, many bookmarks on my work computer, and I very rarely take the time to put them into Delicious. The day will come when I will be out with my laptop and I will be cursing myself for this.
My newest goal is to try to figure out how to read things offline, and compose responses and blog posts offline too. I don't think this is going to be easy, but it's a goal. I don't sleep well at night, so maybe I could do a little reading at 2am. That could be nice. A netbook is still on my xmas list as well. :-)

Another thing I did this week was start filtering my Facebook settings so I don't get all the Mafia Wars stuff that my friends post, and other applications too. I enjoy playing games on my lunch break, but I can do without the notifications and status updates from my friends and the applications.

Week 10, #23 Congratulations!- wrapping up

I think my favorites were Facebook, Bloglines, Delicious, and Twitter. Although I haven't really used Delicious enough, it has great potential for when I get serious about it.
As far as lifelong learning goes, Bloglines introduced me to a lot of librarian blogs and now I feel I'm more in the loop on things. Unfortunately, I also have several on Google Reader, so I need to find a way to either merge my lists, or just get more efficient with my time because keeping up with it all can be time consuming. Right now I'm skipping a lot.
I was disappointed by Twitter. I thought there would be more going on there that interested me. I'm still going to keep an eye on it, and see if it gets better in the fall, but so far it's been a disappointment.
If I was to improve something for the course, I'd have something different for #23. :)
I would do another class like this though. I like things that are online and self-paced, it works well for me.

I do plan to continue to follow what others are doing. It was always my goal to finish this before my fall ordering started in August, but I know I rushed through some of the assignments and skipped some details. I'm curious to see what other people come up with, and I will probably back-track a little when I have time, and do some more.

Twitter- New service lets Jews tweet a prayer to God

I haven't gotten as far as learning Twitter yet, but this caught my attention on Bloglines--

New service lets Jews tweet a prayer to God
July 23rd, 2009

The Associated Press – “Judaism’s holiest prayer site has entered the Twitter age. The Western Wall now has its own address on the social networking service, allowing believers around the globe to have their prayers placed between its 2,000 year-old-stones without even leaving their armchairs.”

Week 8, Assignment #15 Online Productivity- A long post!

Week 8, Assignment #15 Online Productivity- this is going to be a LONG post!

"Create a blog post about your discoveries:How does the application you chose compare to word processing software you’re familiar with? What features did you like/dislike the most? Can you think of any ways the application you chose would be useful to you?"

So I am going to attempt to write this in Google docs, and then send it to the blog. We'll see how that goes.

Today I caved and went back to the 45 minute You Tube video of David Allen's "Getting Things Done". I actually took a few notes even. As I said before, there is a lot in this assignment, especially in the Resources and Discovery sides of things. I've taken several handwritten pages of notes, kind of ironic since this is supposed to be an online project.

Anyway for the Top 10 Productivity Sites
1. Tiny URL- I've seen it used by others, but never bothered myself.
2. Google Desktop- I know some people love it, but I never see my desktop so I'm not sure if it'd be useful for me.
3. Backpack- Sounds cool, but can't Google do all that?
4. Remember the Milk- again, I have Google.
5. Calendar Tools- GOOOOOGLLLLE
6. GMAIL- LOVE IT obviously.
7. Bloglines- I was introduced to this by the 23 Things. Still need to check in today. Need to check iGoogle too.
8. Google Docs and Spreadsheets- I've used these before for home and work, and like them a lot.
9. Joe's Goals- Cool! I wish I could find a practical use for them, maybe if I do a "43 things" (we'll get to that later). I think it would be great for someone losing weight, trying to get his/her degree, change jobs, or maybe for teens doing chores or trying to earn some reward from their parents or something.
10. My Stickies- I'm not sold on these. Clicking on "properties" on a bookmark does the same thing I think.

LifeHacker 46 Free thing list
No, I'm not going to list all 46 things!
#1 Firefox, #8 Gmail, #13 Google & #17 Thunderbird-- my lifelines
#4 Open Office- this is what I have on my personal laptop
#11 Picassa- I've used version 2, and finally got version 3. Still learning it.
#15 Gimp, on my list to learn about
#19 Dropbox- could be useful, haven't checked it out yet
Winamp, Google Apps, Google Calendar, Avast Anivirus-- use all of these
My father-in-law has been using Skype for quite a while.
And of course Linux... my husband is a Linux pro, but I refuse to give up Windows on my computers.


Moving on to David Allen and GTD... a lot of common sense in this video, and I won't rehash all my notes here. Interesting to think about though- You lose speed when you are not relaxed. That is so true. You really need to be "in the moment" in order to be productive. My most productive days are days when I have a lot to do and set my personal brain aside, and just focus. When work is slow I tend to work more slowly, and I get distracted more easily.

Onward to Discovery--

I had never heard of "Mind mapping tools" before. I had no idea what that meant so I was curious to check these out. I didn't really understand the Del.ic.ious/mindmapping thing, but maybe I just wasn't relaxed enough to absorb it. I did like Gliffy better than Mindomo. It looked more versatile, and I liked the room diagrams and things like that. Seemed like it would be useful for reorganizing office space, or home furniture. I didn't feel motivated to sign up for either one.

Personal Web Pages- Never used Pageflakes, but it looked easy enough. I do use iGoogle, although I don't check it often, and I have the Yahoo thing set up on one of my pages. Mostly I use it to look at the current headlines in the news and check the weather.

Not much use for the PDF Converters. Goign to skip right over that, and I'm skipping over the Sticky Notes too.

Online Productivity- As I've said repeatedly, I use Google and I'm happy with that. Zoho looked very similar and okay. Basecamp looked interesting for collaboration and Lazybase looked okay too, but I'm not sure if I need them. Maybe if I was in a collaborative project with someone I could, but I like one stop shopping, and Google pretty much has everything.

Going back to Goal Setting- I liked "43 Things". I thought it was just going to be an expanded version of "23 things" but it was different. At first I told myself "maybe later I'll come back and set up an account" but then I started browsing around, and saw other people's things, and decided I could contribute to what others were doing so I set up an account just to do that. Maybe later I'll go back and try to set up a long-term goal. In the process, I dug up some material that makes me want to vent elsewhere. So getting updated on an old interest of mine, is leading me to another thing to put on my "to do" list. Sigh. So many distractions!!!

So getting back to the original questions of the exercise- I like Google and it's many applications. I can be in GMail, and have my calendar and tasks there with me. I can set up iGoogle and have a whole range of things in front of me. Or I can simply click on "Reader" or "Maps" or "Documents" to get to what I need. Read the news, plan activities for the weekend, send a thank you note to a friend, write a grocery list, or itemize what I need to get done at work, I can do it all under a single login if I want to. Easy, convenient, user-friendly, and free. Love it.

Now let's see if I can get this into the blog.... I did, and only had to make some minor edits to the formatting. Yay!!

Week 4, Assignment #8 RSS Feeds and Readers

This assignment seems like a big one. The Discovery Exercise has a dozen steps. So it's no surprise that I've been working on this thing all day.

The Common Craft video is the same one that was shown during the kick-off presentation so I didn't bother watching it again. I wasn't too impressed with Kevin Dixon's thing either. A slideshow with no audio doesn't hold my attention very well. Similarly, Helen Bowers audio thing wasn't effective for me because it lacked video. Moving onward I went to Bloglines. After dealing with some network glitches in my computer (thanks Luke!), I was finally able to register and set up my RSS feeds. I have done RSS feeds with iGoogle and Yahoo before, so I'm not in alien territory here. The hard part with RSS is that it's easy to subscribe to a lot of stuff, way more than I actually have time to read in a reasonable period of time. Weeding through everything took some time, and I hope that the ones I have left are manageable. I am familiar with the Readers, but I am not used to Clipping, and I've never used Bloglines before so these things are new to me at least. I have a few clips to post about. I'll do them in separate posts and see if it works. Hopefully I did it right.