It's yummy, no it's Del.icio.us!

So I finally got around to setting up my Del.icio.us account after spending a few days trying to remember what my yahoo email address was.

As an aside, who else is annoyed when they have to create an entirely new address just to sign up for one of these things? I can barely remember the user name and password for the e-mail I check everyday; now I have to create a new one on a different provider to sign up for new social networking sites which need yet another user name and password! Ugh!

Ok, back to Del.icio.us...it too me a little bit to get used to it and I was having a hard time figuring out how to tag something with a two-word tag like readers' advisory without it separating the tag into two different words. To let everyone know, you can't use spaces. You either have to smoosh the words together, readersadvisory, or add a hypen between the two words, readers-advisory, or abbreviate it, RA, to get the full effect. And whatever you do, don't use commas - I'm totally good at that! I'm queen of the run-on sentence! Really though, if you use a comma it will show up attached to the word before it so you'll have readers, or advisory, and that's just silly.

It's going to take me some time to get used to Del.icio.us and really feel it out, but I'm guessing it's going to be a good tool to save sites without having to write everything down or clog your favorites buttons in Internet Explorer.

Now I just need to figure out how to make categories so I can separate my whites from my darks...

Grandma: Long Distance Calls - Cell Phones vs. Land Lines

Every Christmas my step-mom bakes and sends the goodies to my family here in NY. When my grandma got the goodie box she wanted to call to say thank you. However, when she tried to call, she couldn't get the call to go through.

When I got home from work that night the first thing she asked me was whether she needed to use an area code when she called Vegas. In my head I was thinking, "Well, since you need to use an area code to call your daughter in Massapequa then yes, you definitely need to use an area code to call your son 20 states away." What I asked instead was which phone she used, the cell or the house phone thinking maybe she used the cell phone and thought the long distance was automatic. When she told me she was using the house phone I told her yes she needed an area code but since we don't have long distance the call wouldn't go through anyway. She asked how she was supposed to call then. Now the thing is, we haven't had long distance in at least 10 years & she's been using 10-10-220 since before I moved here so I'm not sure why she didn't remember that, but ok...

I reminded her about the 10-10-220 thing then said, "You know, you can just use the cell phone Aunt A gave you since long distance is free and it's nighttime so you won't waste your minutes. She said, "Oh, I haven't used that in weeks. I got rid of the cell phone." What? "What do you mean you got rid of the cell phone?" She said, "When Aunt A got me the new phones they replaced the cell phone." Now, if you've read my previous post about the cordless phones, you would know this doesn't make sense. "Grandma, the two phones aren't the same. The house phones are just cordless. They are so you can walk around the house with them and not be trapped by a cord. The cell phone is the one you take with you when you go out so you can call people from the store or mall in case there's a problem, etc." This conversation when on for a few minutes before she finally got that the two phones were completely different.

The cell phone is now charged again and she's been taking it with her when she walks to the supermarket or goes to bingo and she starting using 10-10-220 again for long distance calls, but it was touch and go for a little while there.

Shelfari

I know we were supposed to create a Library Thing account, but since I've been doing Shelfari, an equivalent to Library Thing, for about two years or so now I asked if it was ok to substitute. I have enough accounts, etc. without having to worry about updating one more thing.

I absolutely love Shelfari. I actually put my Shelfari widget on my blog. It allows me to add books that I've read, let people know what I'm currently reading, review and rate the books I've read and keep books in a "want to read" list so I don't have to have a bunch of pieces of scrap paper lying around with a million lists of books.

Since Shelfari is just for reading and there's not really any personal information posted with the exception of the "About Me" blurb, I'm much more liberal with accepting people as friends. If you read and we have similar tastes, I'll let you be my friend. Heck, even if we don't have similar tastes I'll let you be my friend. :)

I highly recommend Shelfari to everyone!

Facebook

Ok, I'm totally addicted to Facebook. When the Myspace craze happened I was the last to jump on board - too much code and crap to go through in order to update your page. Did anyone else think it was hard to find the beginning and end of the code for something you wanted to delete? When I heard about Facebook I thought, "Oh, great, another social networking site..." However, since there wasn't any coding, etc. I totally got into it. I'm now addicted to Farmville where I plant and harvest crops; Cafe World where I make and serve food; Mafia Wars where I do jobs and earn loot; as well as a few other games I play on and off.

I like reading other people's status updates although I don't update my status as much as I used to. Sometimes those status updates worry me though because some of my friends put up exactly where they are and for how long, etc. What if someone is stalking them? Facebook would definitely make that a lot easier. LOL

I also like looking at everyone's pictures although I don't really post any of my own. I mostly just like to play games without putting too much personal information out there.

I have almost 200 friends and it's been nice seeing what people from high school are doing or wondering why someone from high school friended me considering they didn't give me the time of day while we were in high school.

Facebook is like being a voyeur without the skeeviness. You can check in on people without totally getting involved. Plus, there's no peeping in windows.

Twitter

I've had a personal Twitter account for a while. I read about it it Library Journal or School Library Journal, well in one of the catalogs that circulate around the Library. At first I updated once a day then I kind of let it go by the wayside. Periodically I try to update more often, but it never seems to stick.

I also maintain a Twitter for the Library, but we don't have a lot of followers and the people that do ask to follow are usually spammers with lovely porn sites. I'm all for free speech but really, the line has to be drawn somewhere. While I was on vacation the Library Twitter didn't get updated, but I'm going to start updating again today.

I have friends that Twitter all of the time. They leave Twitter on all day and open in periodically to add a new Tweet. I just can't seem to get that dedicated mostly because I can't imagine anyone really caring what I'm doing right now.

YASD

So today was my last meeting as YASD secretary. Although I still have to type the minutes from today's meeting, I have passed the torch to the 2010 secretary Jan Miller from Longwood. Congratulations Jan!

Grandma and the Microrwave

Now one would think micorwaves are pretty easy to use and they've been around for a while so it's not really "new" technology and yet grandma still manages to not be able to use it correctly. Well, not so much that she can't use it correctly, but she doesn't know what to do with it when she's done cooking, but there's still time left on the clock.

On Monday grandma was cooking vegetables in the microwave and decided they'd been in long enough so she opened the microwave, removed the vegetables then proceeded to start the microwave up again. At first I thought she had put the vegetables back in, but when I looked at her and saw them in her hands I said, "Are you cooking something else in the microwave?" She said, "No, there was just extra time on the clock so I turned it back on." I then hopped up and cancelled it out because I didn't want it to break or explode. I said, "Grandma, um, it's not safe to run the microwave when it's empty. There's a button right next to start that says stop/cancel. Just press that when you're all done and want to clear it out. She told me ok, but now I'm wondering how long she's been running the microwave when it's empty and if that's why the old one broke. Hmmm.....