It's Membership Renewal Time

Yes it is, it is that time of year to kick off the Friends of the Lucy Robbins Welles Library fall membership drive.

While we take membership throughout the year, it is the fall when the major push to have members renew. This year's letter speaks to the savings patrons have been able to enjoy because the Friends purchase 27 Museum and Attraction Passes for lending purposes. With respect to a great tradition of the Friends, it is sponsoring the Summer Reading Program. This past summer, more that 2000 adults, teens and children took part and read thousands of books.

The Friends are an amazing and vibrant group of people - over 900 members strong. Many of them are active in the committees that enable the Friends to meet its mission to support the Library with materials, programs, and events.

We are such a great group. Thank you to each member - YOU make our Library the best.

Social Networks

Last week I was attending a seminar on risk, insurance, malpractice. A room full of accountants - now that can be scary!

This is a repeat session that I attend every few years as part of my risk insurance program. Of course we tell some war stories and hear about new court cases where the suits are just ridiculous. We often can get off on a tangent with lots of discussions on using computers, software, and now this cloud computing and social networks.

Social networks - well known like FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Ning and so many others. Their general purpose is to create and cultivate online communities. So folks join in and begin airing themselves in/on screen of the computer. The point is that this typing out there on these networks is recorded on quite a few servers and backedup on numerous more.

What one danger (there are quite a few) is that stuff you write or the stuff that is written about you and lastly who is in your friends, list, etc can and will probably come back to haunt you.

We are talking about everyone that uses them.... kids not a big deal until they begin to apply to college, now FaceBook account may be looked at to see if you are the 'right' kind of person or who you are likely to be 'hangin' with. Job interviews - another place that your tweets and LinkedIn bits could come under scrunity. As you continue in life, possible public service position, whether it be politics or an appointment to a position, once again what you wrote years ago could be found out without much work and come back to haunt you.

I use them, cautiously. It's nice to get picutres of my friends' kids, hear about some successful event, and share a good thought or two.

I would just say be careful what you write out there in cyberland's social networks.

Thank you Readers

Hi all,

Thank you all for reading my blog. It's celebration time. My counter has exceeded the 3,000 mark. Not that I am counting, (the accountant part of me is ) though with a rough start, learning to write more, and in a fluid fashion, has been a great journey to get to this moment.

It was only back in May 2008, that I wrote my first blog entry here. I had tried it back as far as 2006, though I just couldn't get the writting juices going. I will give credit to my brother Pete's blog and to my niece Taylor's blog1 and blog2 that inspired me to get out there and write.

A friend of mine mentioned the other day, "i don't know how you do it". I can only say is that I tried, practiced, have received 'help' from reading the what and how of other bloggers. The blogging community is amazing group of folks who enjoy writing. I've learned lots about technology, found great reads and some great information that I'll be able to use going forward.

So Thank You Very Much..... see you tomorrow :)

New Nano

Ok, I'll admit that when it comes to this little devices, I'm behind the curve. My brothers will make fun of me when I was just out of college and the only device I had was two clock radios - one for the bedroom and one in the kitchen/dining/livng area. Of course they had to solve that problem and gave me a wonderful tuner. Yes I still have it and it works fine.

When the nanos first came on the market I was a bit impressed. You could rip your music cd to your computer and then load the music onto the device. The only music you could listen to was what you put on it. Hmmmm, I said scratching my head - but what if I wanted to listen to the radio? My old (and still works really well on 2 aa batteries) portable cassett player has a FM tuner in it. By the way I do have a portable CD player but not a portable tv nor a portable DVD player but I do have a laptop. And if I had to carry this stuff all around - not a good thing!

What I didn't like about these little devices is that you needed ear buds to listen. With my ear event, wearing ear buds (plugs) is really not an option and is detrimental to my hearing.

Ok back to this new and improved device. It has a FM radio (been told only good receiption outside), a video camera, a microphone, speaker (yeah!)and some one in the marketing department got them to put a pedometer into the gadgit.

You can click and dial on this little baby, then sync with your computer it will sync with your iTunes account. Now your talking real convenience! There are several versions of iPod MP player.Take a look, I think there is great potential available.