Why I'm not Reading

I haven't been reading much lately, too much going on. And I have been watching a bit of TV. I am loving Rain Shadow, on the ABC. It's finished now, but maybe it will return. The scenery is beautiful and the story line interesting. It presents country Australia struggling with drought, and the performances are wonderful.

One piece of technology I have come to love is the hard disc video recorder, I can set it to record programs I want to watch, and then watch when I have time. This of course results in more TV watching than I should do.

#24 I haven't Stopped Learning!

I have very fond memories of visiting the Botanic Gardens with my mother as a child, and then of taking the boys when they were little. So one recent Sunday morning, Grammy & Grandad took Bram. It turns out you aren't allowed to feed the ducks any more, but it is still a lot of fun.

I uploaded these photos into Picasa and then published them directly into my blog from there. It's taken me an hour - but I'm very pleased with myself for doing it!

I often get inspiration from my colleagues - Chellie suggested visiting the swans. Thanks Chellie, we all had a great time.

More on podcasts

AND I can get podcasts of The Book Show. I love listening to the radio but I often miss out on my favourite show. Now I can just download them, and listen whenever I want to.

#23 Is This the End?

Well, obviously hopefully not!

I have enjoyed this program. I have found out how some things that I was interested in work (youtube, podcasts), found some very useful things that I didn't know about (del.icio.us), and generally had some fun.

I think I will continue to use Flickr and the image generators, Del.icio.us, IGoogle and Bloglines. And let's not forget Library Thang!

I have found that as I have looked into some things, I have been lead down paths towards others. I have found some very interesting blogs (Steve Abraham, James Oppenheim).

Some of my colleagues have found it hard to complete the course. Not everyone has the time or the equipment to do the work at home. I think that I have done more than 90% of the work at home on my own time. I am fortunate that I am able to do that. If I still had children at home, or if I was studying it would be much more difficult. Our lives are already very busy, and it's hard to find the extra time to complete something like this, no matter how interesting and valuable it is.

I have had help, encouragement and inspiration from my colleagues. Maybe we could all get together and swap stories and hints some time!

Photo of the New York Public Library taken by Dr. DeNo.

#21 Podcasts

Again, what fun. I looked through some of these, and then I went to look at two of my favourite radio programs. This American Life and Prairie Home Companion and found that I can download both of these as podcasts. Then (I am reliably informed by my resident computer guru) that I can load them on to my mp3 player and listen to them. There are lots of great radio shows out there, I was aware that I could listen to podcasts (John Faine keeps on telling me), but I didn't know it was actually so easy.

Cool!

I will certainly book mark the podcast sites, and use them to find information about particular authors. Should come in handy for book talks!

#22 Downloadable audio books

I am an enthusiastic audio book user, and have been using Aduible.com for some time. I love listening to audio books, I listen when I'm walking sometimes, when I'm doing boring things around the house and when I'm travelling. Having an audio book on the mp3 player is great when you are in that exhausted state about twenty hours after you have left home, and you're still in the airplane and you can't read, and can't sleep and the movie is stupid.

The Lord of the Rings read by Rob Ingles is truly wonderful - I encourage everyone to listen to it.

A year ago when I was still working in the States downloadable audio books were just starting to become available in public libraries. I'm waiting for them to be available here. Maybe something that Gulliver should look at?

More thoughts on ZOHO writer

It's certainly easy to use, and posting is not a problem, adding tags within ZOHO adds the tags to Technorati, which isn't what I was expecting. I have trouble in getting the formatting the way I want it though. I would like all of my blog posts to look the same and I can't quite figure out how to do that.
O, well back to the drawing board!