Have You Been "Elfed"

We did! We have had so much fun over the last couple of days. Cheryl came home from her Bible Study Tuesday night giggling about a video she had seen and said something about being elfed. Elfed? I wasn't sure if she had gotten into some bad hot chocolate, but she dragged me in to the computer and had me look at this website.

OK. This is funny. It is funny enough watching anyone in an elf costume do a funny dance to peppy Christmas music. But it is REALLY fun to watch yourself! This website allows you to upload a picture of yourself, position your face in a little oval and click GO! Next thing you know, YOU are the star of this little video! Here is our little chorus line:
If you get a chance go to http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1175562436 and see the full video! ... Then, ELF Yourself!

Crossloop is Cool!

I do a fair amount of Tech Support both on and off the job and let me tell you it can be grueling.

• "Are you on the desktop?"
• "Yes."
• "Click the blue button."
• "I can't see any blue button."
• "Are you sure you are on the desktop?"
• "Yes! I'm sitting right here!"
• "You're sitting?"

And so it goes. 90% of my time is spent trying to figure out what they are seeing! If I could see their screen it would be so much easier, but up until now that would have required a significant amount of networked software. Until Now!

I was introduced to a wonderful piece of free software the other day! Crossloop. It is a tiny download. It install in seconds and is brain-dead simple to use. Case Study: Cheryl called me from home at work with an odd question about MS Word. We couldn't figure it out, so I said, "Hey, click the blue & green circle icon and tell me what the numbers are in the box." I opened CL on my machine and typed in the numbers. Bingo! In 5-10 seconds, I'm looking at her screen and controlling her mouse and keyboard and Cheryl is amazed.

If you're a little intimidated about whether you could actually work this, here is the test:

• Can you "double-click" an icon?
• Can you read up to 12 numbers aloud?

If you answer yes to both, you're in good shape! See you on-screen soon!

BTW - this software will now be a mandatory install for any family members calling me for tech support! :-)
Get Crossloop at: http://www.crossloop.com

So Many Blogs

It all started out with one little blog. Maybe this one. Then you started one. And so did your brother/sister/-in-law. Then they all started putting up link to their favorite blogs and you started finding your own. You might have even started returning a particular website to read their headlines! The number of articles and blogs to read just keeps on growing. If this keeps up you'll end up going nuts! We'll find you huddled in a corner of your closet with a laptop you stole from Best Buy strung out on caffine pills mumbling and typing what you mumble into a series of increasingly incoherentblogsthatyoujUSTCAN'TSTOP!!!!! DO YOU WANT THAT?! DO YOU, PUNK!? ...sorry, i think i need a time out from blogs!

Wouldn't it be great if you could go to ONE website and have all the articles and blogs you like to follow posted right there? You can! Recently a friend put me onto a cool service by (who else?) Google ... the Google Reader. It can take all the blogs you read and combine them into one list of articles. (The techie name for this is a "Feed Aggregator".)

If you don't already have a google account (your "blogger" account is one) you can start by setting that up. Then go to http://reader.google.com and start adding subscriptions - click "Add Subscription" and type or paste in the address of a blog you like. Most of the time this works with out a hitch. Give it a shot - you'll be glad you did!

Taggin' in the Bloggerhood

Yo dawg! ... hehe Ok, I know you know that I know you know I'm a lot closer to "nerd-core" than "Hard-core" so I'll spare you my lame attempt at ghetto-speak. I'm going to start blogging a wider range of topics and I'm setting my sites on some blogging related topics up front! Today: Tagging.

If you use "blogger", you've seen the "Labels for this post" blank below the editor window. But, do you use it? Uh, no, What's it do? Glad you asked! The labels are stored with your blog as a list of words that you choose to describe the content. Different internet sites have started using this system to give users yet another way to drill through the ba-zillions of giga-bytes of stuff out there to find what interests them. Sounds simple, but is something to consider before you start tagging: what type of style of tagging do you want to use. There are basically 2.

"Cloud Tagging" (my term) involves tagging every key word or idea in a blog. Every blog is different and you'll quickley end up with a LOT of tags across your blog. This can be good if you want to be able to get really specific on a "search" but bad because the list is too long to really browse. Yahoo does a lot with the cloud style to make it easier to use.

Blogger is friendlier to "Category Tagging" where you pick a defined list of tags and limit yourself to those. Because Blogger lists them (with counts) it makes for a manageable list. It also gives you essentially multiple blogs. When people click on, say, your "pets"category (posts that you tagged "pets"), they see only those posts. It's like a mini blog!

Whatever you choose, stick to it! It is hard to change later! I do the second style - categories. Take a look at my "tags" list on the side for an example. Have fun tagging - don't tell the police I told you how!

Webshots - Pretty Pictures

Knowing that both of my brothers' families have enjoyed photography, I thought I'd share a website that I've really come to like for both posting photos and finding great shots - Webshots. I'm constantly amazed at the gorgeous images I find there, not to mention the great layout of the site - it is pretty amazing, too! Here are a couple of things that make it great:

• FREE! - yep, it's free. For the cheapskates like me, "Eeeet's the oooonly way to fly!"
• Beautiful - the site is great and makes you photos look great!
• Comments - there is a large community there, too. If you participate, it is easy to get great feedback on your shots.
  
• Widgets - the site offers easy access to 'code' snippets allowing you to put webshot on your own site, blog or even in an email. I placed the photo in this post with code from my album in webshots. Also, scroll to the bottom of the blog to see a larger module that displays your photos as an animated slideshow.

Webshots is a great place to have photographic fun! Enjoy!