Financial Advice

I have to give credit to www.commoncraft.com for finding this great video. I follow their website through an RSS feed. I like their Plain English presentations.

Crane Season

It's that time again. We are surrounded by thousands of cranes in our fields, neighboring fields, and on the North Platte River that borders our farm. They are only here from February to early April and we enjoy every day of their visitation. I'll often open the windows when they are doing their aerials in the sky just to hear their sound or even better, I will step out just to observe and listen. What a marvelous joy of nature! I took these two movies with my digital camera. The second one was on a recent walk down along our cornfield and pasture. The cranes heard our approach and many of them soared into the sky.

Personally...

It's time to turn this blog back into a place to share some thoughts, pictures and more from me and not necessarily about being a librarian. Of course, that means spending more time on my home computer. As more family members have joined Facebook, I find myself heading there to check out pictures and miniature update messages. The pictures make it more entertaining than Twitter. I don't want to forget some of the interesting You-tube movies that have been posted. I just looked at a great one on money issues that was actually in my RSS feeds I have in my outlook mail. I think I will add that to a Facebook msg. as more people follow that. We'll see.

I hadn't realized how fast time has flown in 2009-maybe anticipating Craig and Jen's wedding made the time seem to go slower since we really couldn't wait for the event to happen. We came back from the wedding with two letters waiting for us-neither made us very happy. First, Tim didn't get hired for the full-time job he had interviewed for and second, the Nebraska Dept. of Revenue thought we owed more taxes than we do. The latter just made us mad. We embraced the technology of doing our taxes online using the state of Nebraska's website and it let us file even though the printed copy indicated we needed to submit a copy of our federal return-but nowhere on the site did it say "don't use this if...." Anyway, a phone call to the dept. gave us the satisfaction of telling them that their website needed to be improved and confirmed that we were right-we should get a refund but we had to mail in copies of both of our returns with a letter of explanation. Hopefully they get it right this time.

As far as the job, when Tim later visited with the head of the FSA office (he does some part-time work for them already), Bruce said that he got beat out by someone who had worked in another FSA office for 23 years but the interviewers really debated quite awhile in making their decision. So, Tim isn't really disappointed-he still has quite a few projects to complete on the farm. The old barn is ready for replacement siding in the areas that had been part of the loafing shed. Tim replaced sill plates, and reinforced studs that had rotted from exposure to manure over the years. Then, we need to get chipped paint off, which we hope we can do with the high-pressure washer. A friend agreed to bring his big spraying equipment over to do the actually painting. We plan to paint it red, the original color before it was changed to its current white. We'll still keep an eye on the classifieds for the "perfect job" but my job having benefits lets Tim be patient. We had a nice hay crop last year and sold alot of heifers. Now we only have about 5 heifers to sell. We're toying with getting some other livestock. Tim said today that he likes ruminants so no pigs or poultry! Any suggestions?

The 23rd Thing

I'm writing this on Sunday so my mind starting flying to the 23rd Psalm instead of the 23rd thing. And as my faith is a journey, this too has been a good journey for me. I didn't come into this afraid of technology, instead was truly eager to learn more about library 2.0 and the many things encompassed in that phrase.

I think I enjoyed playing with the Flickr applications the most simply because I like photography and seeing what creative things could be done with pictures I had taken was fun and appealing. To be creative, I need alot of guiding and the applications did that. For true usefulness, I was glad to be reminded of Google Docs and other applications. Timewise, I admit after first working with Delicious and Library Thing, I haven't been back to those websites and I don't explore my RSS feeds on Google Reader much. However, the RSS feeds that come into my Outlook mail get looked at on a regular basis. I also really like having the updates on my blog dashboard of the blogs I follow. Blogging is something I hope to continue and my favorite other blogs are right there on the sidebar of my blog. Learning to develop my blog, expanding the blogposts by adding pictures and video was the goal I set at the beginning of this program. Working through the things forced me to try some of that and I found it to be easy and fun. I think I will continue my blog with personal posts and pictures and use it and Facebook for my social networking.

Tackling the question of take-aways-wow, I feel more connected to other library people through reading their blogposts, profiles, etc. It's been especially great for those who I already know and I want to meet some of these bloggers that I only know through their blog names. How about a Nebraska Learns 2.0 mixer or talk session at NLA next year?

When starting this, I thought I could breeze through the lessons but found I would stop and be so busy exploring one thing that I was reluctant to move onto the next. It was often challenging to fit it all in at work and I spend several hours a day at my computer unlike some library staff. If you were to do it in the future, I think you might want to consider a topic a month for library staff that can't do it in a week.

I would definitely do another discovery program if you offer more. I like the ability to work on it at my own pace somewhat. Just another side note: As library funding gets tighter, we need this type of programs for those of us that can't get away from the library for training. It can be tough getting C.E. credits otherwise. We really appreciate NLC staff coming around the state to provide training too.

Thank you to all that put this together and for those that participated. Now I'm going to go back and read other participants blogs that I haven't had time to read before.

Wordy Podcasts

I explored several of the podcast directories and found one that appealed to me on podcast.com. I liked the dictionary.com Word Explorer. I copied the link to this below. I added the RSS feed to Google Reader. I also tried to add it to My Yahoo page but it only had old content there. Our family has always enjoyed exploring the origin of word meanings. At work, I'm not really able to do podcasts easily because my only desk is in a public area. I don't think I seem as approachable if I'm wearing headphones. I liked these podcasts because they only lasted about 2 minutes. I did share the podcast on my Facebook page.

I'm looking forward to listening to more podcasts in the future.

http://podcast.com/episode/33159339/19468/

YouTube brings back 80's cartoons

After watching an old What's my line episode featuring Sal Mineo, I switched to the 80's and watched a Popples cartoon. My kids had Popples and watched the cartoons as little kids. Karissa even had Popples sheets while Craig had Transformer sheets. The YouTube video is a great way to explain to today's kids what parents watched as kids themselves. I haven't personally uploaded anything to YouTube but my niece uploaded one of the little movies of her son that I made with my digital camera on movie mode. She then embedded it in her blog. Last fall I did watch a library training video produced and uploaded to YouTube by an applicant for a Nebraska library position. It did not enhance the resume and probably was a strong factor in not hiring the person. However, a good video could very easily have added points to getting a face-to-face interview. Just a thought.

Virtually Confused

I enjoyed exploring thing #20. I initially got sidetracked when exploring I'm Cooked under the food category after reading VC's blog post. I use Pandora all the time at home and find myself using that instead of playing CDs at home. You can't completely walk away from your computer when using Pandora because it will stop after awhile and post a little response window to make sure you are still listening. I exploring mapping applications for personal use but felt that besides offering little icons you could add to maps, the weddingplanner maps linked from Community Walk was more tutorial than anything else. I did send a link to that to my son's fiancee.



I wanted to find something that could be of use to people using our public computers for all of their computer needs. I decided to explore virtual computer applications under the category online desktop. The first choice, Zimdesk only opened to a development page for Version 2. I went to G.ho.st and created an account. The application moves pretty slowly. When I finally got to my desktop created by the program, I saw that it did have its own e-mail, links to zoho writer or google docs, google search and more. It seemed like a crowded and almost too colorful desktop, not my cup of tea. I couldn't see the value of the tool when you could access free applications for almost all of these things. Everything had slow response times-even figuring out how to calculator on the desktop was slow. I think I will pass on this tool!