All I want for Christmas…

The holiday season is a time for family celebrations, traditional food, and Kodak moments — only today’s Kodak moments are more likely to be captured with a digital camera than on film. A major advantage of digital media over film is that you can take unlimited photographs without worrying about running out of film. If your digital memory card fills up, just download the images onto your computer, erase the card, and you are ready to take more pictures.

After the holidays are over, what do you do with all those wonderful family photos? You can make traditional style prints from your inkjet printer; upload the images to an online photo service for sharing and printing; email you photos to family and friends; or you can do something really unique. During the month of January, I will write about digital printing at home and using online photo services; in this column I am going to write about one of the more unique options — creating personal photo books.

In 2001 a company called MyPublisher, Inc. (www.mypublisher.com), unveiled a web site for creating personal photo books. A year later Apple Computer introduced the image-editing program, iPhoto, which included an option for creating hardcover books from groups of selected photographs. Since then, the idea has blossomed, and today photo books are available from a variety of sources. The standard size for the books is 8.5” x 11”, the photographs are printed on heavy weight paper and with a hardcover.

A Google search for “photo books” produced results from www.shutterfly.com, www.snapfish.com, www.imagestation.com, www.kodackgallery.com, www.photoworks.com, www.picaboo.com, www.mypublisher.com, and www.apple.com. The standard book from all of the web sites is the 8.5” x 11” hardcover book, with prices beginning at $29 for a twenty-page, linen covered book. Leather and suede covers, as well as additional pages, are available at additional cost. Several of the services also offer smaller, larger, and soft-cover books.

The book design process is similar in all venues. You choose a book style, cover style, page layouts, and drag and drop photos on the pages. Page layouts can vary from page to page, so a twenty-page book can conceivably contain over 50 photographs. The main difference between the various web sites is the ease of creating the book.

iPhoto, MyPublisher, and Picaboo use software based design. Iphoto comes installed on all Macintosh computers, while MyPublisher and Picaboo offer free, downloadable software that installs on your computer. IPhoto is Macintosh only, and MyPublisher, and Picabhttp://beta.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifoo only work in Windows XP. MyPublisher provides a Macintosh plugin that will allow uploads to their web site from iPhoto. All of the other services require you to upload photos to their server and design your books online.

As a member of the , I recently took advantage of an offer for a free book from the online service Shutterfly. Creating a book online was tedious and I don’t recommend it, even if you are working with a fast and 100% reliable broadband Internet connection. Much easier was the book I designed with iPhoto software directly on my computer — although a high-speed Internet connection is still needed to upload the finished design for publishing.

The book I received from Shutterfly was surprisingly well designed. The quality of the photos was good, and the binding was more than adequate. My only complaint was that the cover cutout was not quite large enough to display the entire cover page photograph.

Since the Shutterfly book was the only one I actually had published, I cannot give an objective review of the results as they compared to books from other companies. However, a recent Wall Street Journal article reviewed the start to finish process from three of the major players in the photo book market: MyPublisher, Apple’s iPhoto, and Eastman Kodak’s Kodakgallery. According to the article, MyPublisher was the best, while iPhoto finished second because it is not available for Windows. Kodak finished a distant third, with the reviewer finding the web-based design process tedious, the design features lacking, and the final product inferior.

If you would like to read the Wall Street Journal article, it is available on the MyPublisher web site.

All Things Google

Google is more than a search engine:

Google Search Pages
www.google.com — click More — then click EVEN MORE: list of what you can do with Google
Put Google in you browser toolbar: toolbar.google.com
Search for blogs on a specific topic: blogsearch.google.com
Search for books titles and text: books.google.com
Search for catalogs: catalogs.google.com
Search for product prices: froogle.google.com
Search for images: images.google.com
Maps & Routing: maps.google.com
Find scholarly research articles: scholar.google.com
Special searches: www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html

Google Tools
Calculator
Currency Conversion
Definitions: define space word OR define: word
Local Search: example — pizza dade city
Movies: type “movies” or a movie title
Q&A: example, type “population of florida”
Search by Numbers:
UPS, FedEx, USPS tracking numbers
Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers
UPC codes
Telephone area codes
Patent numbers (put word patent before number)
FAA airline registration numbers
FCC equipment IDs (put fcc before number)
Stock Quotes
Street Maps: enter address or zip code
Air Travel Information
Delays and weather conditions at a particular airport: type three letter identifier & the word “airport”
Flight status: type airline & flight number
Weather: weather dade city fl
Web page translation

Google Maps Mashups
Directory of Google Maps Mashups: googlemapsmania.blogspot.com
Calculate the distance of a walking, running or cycling route: www.geodistance.com, www.gmap-pedometer.com,
Package Tracking with maps: www.packagemapping.com
Find Starbucks: www.findbyclick.com/coffee_s.html

Google Earth: earth.google.com to download

Blogging 101 — February 24, 2006

Let’s begin this week’s column with a short quiz. Are you aware of the bloggesphere? Do you know what a blog is, or a blogger? Have you ever read a blog?
For those of you who answered no to the above questions, you are missing out on one of the hottest phenomena of the information age. Blogs and bloggers have only been around a short time, but they are being relied upon as a source of information and news by millions of people worldwide.
According to Wikapedia, an online encyclopedia, URL en.wikipedia.org/:
A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called "blogging". Individual articles on a blog are called "blog posts," "posts" or "entries". A person who posts these entries is called a "blogger". A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular "area of interest", such as Washington, D.C.'s political goings-on. Some blogs discuss personal experiences.
Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software on regular web hosting services. In the early 21st Century, blogging has quickly emerged as a popular and important means of communication, effecting public opinion and mass media around the world.
In a nutshell, bloggers today are the equivalent of journal writers and pamphleteers of days gone by. Bloggers can be regular people who want to share personal information, insights, opinions, and/or photos and videos, with friends, family, and strangers, on a regular basis. They can also be journalist, celebrities, or other public figures. In the year leading up to the 2004 election, bloggers gained prominence by covering political news, often spinning the news one way, or the other. During the election, most candidates, or their staffers, kept a daily blog, and some of the flashpoints of the campaign were fueled by blogs written by bloggers on the left and right of the political spectrum.
How do you find blogs that you might be interested in? You can use a blog search engines such as http://www.blogwise.com/, http://www.blogsearchengine.com/, http://blogsearch.google.com/, or http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Weblogs/. Or, you can check a blog directory, such as http://www.blogcatalog.com/ or http://www.blogrankings.com/.
To give you an idea of the number of blogs on the Internet, a search for “senior citizens” in Google’s blogsearch yielded 110,174 results. People who blog, called bloggers, are committed to making entries on their blog on a regular basis, often one or more times a day. Most blogs allow visitors to reply to entries, either by email or by replying to a forum. Being a blogger is actually quiet easy, as there are numerous sites that will host your blog for free.
If you would like to read a blog, check out http://www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/wheellife/, a blog by an avid Rver that many of you will find interesting. For a list of additional blogs for Rvers, go to http://lakeshoreimages.com/rvlinks.html, where there are links to several blogs by and for Rvers.
In next week’s column I describe why you might want to become a blogger, and how to do it for free.

Are You Checked Out On the Blogosphere?

Last week I mentioned the companion blog for this column, which can be accessed at onmouseclick.blogspot.com. I started the blog last season as an example for a seminar I was preparing on Travel Blogs for RVers. When I left TR for the season, I had the intention of updating the blog during the off-season, but you all know what happens to good intentions. This season, I will reprint my columns in the blog, provide links to web sites mentioned in the column, and sometimes, offer additional information than what was presented in the print column. Last February 24, I wrote a column on blogs and blogging titled “Blogging 101.” If you want to learn more about what blogging is, the column is posted on the OnMouseClick blog.

Blogs are generally more laid back in style than traditional journalism, and many are, at times, irreverent in tone. Last spring the Wall Street Journal published an article on blogs dealing with spring-cleaning, featuring blogs on the topic of house cleaning and organization. The three blogs mention in the article offer many worthwhile tips that can be very helpful for us “space challenged” motor home and trailer owners.

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOUR STUFF, at getorganized.blogs.com, is written by a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. If you do visit IT’S NOT ABOUT YOUR STUFF be aware that the author, a true blogger, also writes about a variety of other topics — some having nothing to do with organization.

A more lighthearted, a perhaps useful blog, is THE HAPPY SLOB’S GUIDE TO HOUSECLEANING at happyslob.blogspot.com. To quote the Wall Street Journal, “…this site offers punch posts and frugal shortcuts that can cut cleaning cost—in time and money.” Some recent posts include “Natural Air Freshener Recipe,” Cleaner, Sparking Glasses – How to Clean them Right,” and “A Funny Way to End Procrastination.”

Also featured in the same article is LIFEHACKER at lifehacker.com/software/cleaning. Each post offers a helpful tip on managing and cleaning your home. Some of the tips are a bit far out, like the one from November 30 titled “Turn a radio-controlled car into a dust mop,” and the September 27 tip on poaching salmon in your dishwasher. Other posts are more informative and offer tips that are both time savers and cost effective.

I want to share one more blog on a totally different topic. The New York Times publishes a number of excellent blogs, most by Times writers and columnists. However, they sometimes publish the blogs of American servicemen and women in one of the war zones. Just before Thanksgiving, MISSION IN AFGHANISTAN (http://missionafghanistan.blogs.nytimes.com) was launched. Two Navy enlisted men, an Army officer, and an Afghan translator working for the Army write about their lives in Afghanistan. If you want to feel a connection to our troops serving in the Middle East, it is an interesting, and often poignant read

Instead of linking this column to other blogs I find interesting, I decided you would enjoying finding blogs that interest you. You can search for blogs on specific topics at blogsearch.google.com.

We Begin Again…

Things are gearing up early for the 2007 winter season at Travelers Rest, and now that Eddie and I have settled in after our trip down from New York, I am ready to resume writing my weekly column on technology for the TR Times. For the past two seasons I have written about topics that I thought readers of the paper would find interesting and useful. Often these topics concerned the Internet — both accessing it and using it. I thought I would begin this season’s columns with some suggestions on using the Internet in the kitchen.

For those of us who spend our winters living in an RV, room is at a premium. I enjoy cooking, and one of the things I miss during the winter is my library of cookbooks. I very rarely follow a recipe exactly as written, but I do like to use cookbooks for reference. Often, when I want to make a particular dish, I like to read the recipes by a variety of cookbook authors before deciding which recipe to follow. Enter the Internet and the plethora of web sites for and about culinary arts.

A Google search for gourmet cooking produces over four million hits; cookbooks produces over fifteen million hits; and recipes finds over 126 million hits. It is impossible for one person to visit all of these web sites, but I can recommend a few that I use as my online virtual cookbook library.

Two of my favorites are Teri’s Kitchen and the Food Network. The Food Network site is the companion web site to the cable television Food Network. A recipe search on the site will bring up recipes that were presented on the network programs by various chefs. Enter a recipe title and you will see pages of recipes that match your search criteria. Teri’s Kitchen site is run by Teri R. Foster. I don’t know her résumé, but I can vouch for her recipes — they are comprehensive, well written, easy to follow, and the ones I have tried have turn out very well.

A plus to both of these sites is that you don’t have to register before using them — something that is necessary for too many web sites these days. One well-regarded web site that you do have to register for is www.chefs.com. In addition to recipes, chefs.com offers registered visitors the opportunity to email or chat with a chef.

For general culinary reference, I use www.hintsandthings.co.uk/kitchen/measures.htm, which offers a conversion chart for weights and measures; homecooking.about.com/library/weekly/bloldconvert.htm, which offers unconventional kitchen conversions; and gourmetsleuth.com/equivalents_substitutions.asp for finding ingredient substitutions.

With these web sites, and of course a copy of the recently published TR cookbook, all the cooks in the park will be ready to tackle holiday entertaining. For direct links to the web sites mentioned in this column, and links to additional culinary web sites, visit the OnMouseClick companion blog at onmouseclick.blogspot.com. (For those of you who are not sure what a blog is, I cover the topic in next week’s column.)

MyTripJournal Discount

When I presented information about MyTripJournal, I had wondered why one would subscribe through Woodall's, rather than directly through MyTripJournal.com/. Today I found out the answer. If you are a memeber of Woodall's Diamond Club, you get a 15% off the MyTripJournal subscription prices.

The Diamond club is free, and in addition to the MyTripJournal discount, benefits include a monthly, online newsletter and discount coupons for campgrounds. If you are not a member, click on the heading for this post to go the the Woodall's sign-up page.

When it sounds too good to be true...

In this week's print column I mentioned that finding places to stay in Hawaii did not always go so well. As I said in print, I learned that you have to ask a lot more questions than I initially asked.

We rented a cottage in the small town of Ka'a'a'wa, on the windward (eastern) shore of Oahu. The Web photo of the cottage looked charming, and the conversation I had on the phone with the owners went very well. While I was talking to them, I heard chicken sounds in the background, and the owner said that he wanted us to understand that they were in the country, and that there were chickens in the area. We wanted to the stay in a more rural area, so we said fine. What the owner failed to tell us that the chickens were theirs, and they had the run of the property - and the houses.

When we arrived, we found the cottage looking like it did in the photos, but the structure was not in the best shape — there was a lot of cosmetic work to make it look good. The bedroom had french doors leading out to a small deck, with a view of a backyard pond and waterfall with a mountain behind. That was good. What was not good was the fact that there were no screens in the door, and with no air conditioning, we had to keep the doors open all the time. There was a bamboo shade, but it was not secured at the bottom. On the first morning in the cottage, I went out for a run, and Eddie woke up to find a chicken in the bed with him! When we complained to the owners they were surprised that it bothered us, and told us that most of their guest enjoyed the chickens (they had only been renting since April, and we were there in June).

On the Big Island, the cottage we rented was purported to be in an orchard. In truth, the orchard was a lot on volcanic soil with a few fruit trees. The photos on the Web made it look much nicer than it was.


The condo we rented on Waikiki was fine. It was comfortable, air conditioned, had a lanai with a view of the water, and was very reasonably prices.

The moral of our story is that if you use the Web to find non-traditional lodging, get all the information that you can be for making a deposit.

MyTripJournal

The second of the Blog options I am covering at the Monday, March 13 Computer Club Metting is MyTripJournal, at www.woodalls.com/mytripjournal/ and MyTripJournal directly at www.mytripjournal.com/. These are both essentially the same, only one goes through the Woodall's Web site. You can create a blog/journal with a 30 day free trial. If you decide to go with MyTripJournal, there are two levels of pricing, standard and premium. The cost for the standard package is $19 for 60 days, $39 for 6 months, and $59 for one year. The prices for the premium package are $29, $59, and $89 respectively.
Click on the title of this post, and it will take you to the MyTripJournal home page.

I created a demo on MyTripJournal, at http://woodalls.mytripjournal.com/quinn/. The password to enter is quinn.

Blogspot

One of the Blog options I am covering at the Monday, March 13 Computer Club Metting is Blogspot, at www.blogger.com/. Blogspot was created in the dotcom boom of the 1990's, and was recently purchased by Google, and is free to all users.If you want to create a Blogspot blog (like this one) click on the link to GET YOUR OWN BLOG at the top right of this page, or click on the title of this post, and it will take you to the Blogspot home page.

The blogs I have created on Blogspot are OnMouseClick, which is the companion blog to the TR Times column, and the one you are reading now, and TripDemo at tripdemo.blogspot.com.

More about searching for accommodations online...

It is amazing that when using the most popular Web sites for travel reservations, you can get different prices for the same accommodations - or one site will tell you there are no rooms available, while another will confirm a reservation. If you are researching online, don't be afraid to move past the first screen of information. You can keep "making a reservation", and getting additional information, until you are asked to enter credit card information, and then you can exit without entering the information. And don't be afraid to call the hotel chain with questions, or to confirm a rate. You may even get a lower rate with a phone call. It is also advisable to check for rates for organizations or unions you belong to - these rates may be lower than the AARP/senior rates.

Blogs are posted in chronological order

I created this blog for the readers of the TR Times to learn more about blogging. Blogs show the newest post first - which in this case isn't what I wanted. The first post you will see, after this one, is an example of photos with captions, which I posted a few days after my initial entries. The post after that is the one that describes the process of blogging and is a companion to the column in the TR Times.

Photos with Captions

For this post I wanted to see if I could enter photos with captions - and I did. I just had to do a bit of cutting an pasting to get it right.


Photo of a remote beach on the leeward side of Oahu.


Cliffs meet the sea in a rocky shoreline that makes swimming away from the sandy beach hazardous.

Creating a Blog is Easy

It took about five minutes to set up this blog. The process is very user friendly. First you enter a username, password, and title for your blog. Then you give the blog a URL, which is the Web address. When using www.blogger.com, you put in the first part of the URL (in my case it is "onmouseclick"), and the rest of the URL is ".blogspot.com". That's all there is to it.

You are then presented with a text-box, which works just like a word processor. In the top-left corner of the text-box is an icon for spell-checking (strangely, when I used it, the word "blog" was not recognized), and an icon for adding images. As you can see, I only added one image to this post, but you can add as many as you want. In the top-right corner is the link for previewing your entry. Below the text-box you can edit the time, allow or disallow comments on your post (I allowed comments, so feel free to make comments or ask questions), save as a draft that you can return to later, and publish your post.

You can edit your posts after they have been published — how cool is that? As a blogspot user, you can also maintain more than one blog. So if you want to have journal blog for your family, and a political rant for your friends (and enemies), no problem.

You will notice that I haven't added any information to the right side of my blog Web page. If I decide to stay with this, I may just make some additions. For now, I think I've created a pretty good companion to this week's OnMouseClick column in the TR Times.

Some Photos from Hawaii

I added this post so see what it would be like to add several photos to a post. These photos were taken on the island of Oahu, during our visit to Hawaii last summer. I am going to write a little about our visit to see how the photos and text layout.

We spent five and a half weeks in Hawaii, three weeks on Oahu and the rest of the time on The Big Island. Our son, Brian, is in the Army and stationed in Hawaii, although now both he and his wife are serving in Baghdad. His posting in Hawaii is at Ft. Shafter, which is just outside Honolulu, so our time on Oahu was planned around visiting with him.

The first photo in this post is the view from our condo/apartment on Waikiki. The other photos were taken on the leeward side of the island, which is very remote and unpopulated.