TheSwirl.org

Pandora - I have a lot of online music and listen constantly. Over the past year I have been listening to new music via Pandora, a music discovery service that utilizes the music genome project to recommend artists, bands and styles of music similar to an known artist. They’ve made the service more Web 2.0′ish. Now you can find shared stations within the Pandora community, see who is listening to what, and search for songs, stations and listener profiles by keyword.

SyncBack - a Freeware backup synchronization program that I use to backup our computers to a network drive as well as backup onto an FTP site.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets - Lately I have been roaming among multiple computers and I have been using Google Docs to draft documentation.

Bloglines is my favorite website for keeping track of blog posts. It’s an application that lives on the web. I like that since I can switch computers and still stay up to date on recently updated blog. I really like the improvements that let me see real time updates.

Dinosaur World - Eric is really into dinosaurs and BBC has one of the best set of educational games. The 3D virtual world offers exploration of three separate worlds discovering dinosaurs and plant life along the way.

Turns out there is a game of Blog-Tag going around the blogosphere in which bloggers are sharing five things about themselves that relatively few people know, and then tagging five other bloggers to be “it.” The idea of blog-tagging is, to ask 5 bloggers to tell 5 things that most people wouldn’t know. Like a kick starting a group with a group dynamics exercise where nobody knows each other. In some cases the blog tag is structured and you are asked 4 things: 4 Jobs I have had, 4 Movies I can watch over and over, 4 TV shows I watch, 4 places I have been on vacation. Famous blogger Mark Cuban refused and equated it to a mindless activity like “doing the wave”. I equate it to receiving a chain letter. I read a number of the blog tag entries and found everything from closet vegans to appearance in movies and childhood bed-wetting. About 30% of the tagged declined to participate. Having said all that and being blog tagged by my friend Alex - five things most people do not know about me:

1. 1. I learned to ride horseback when I was 6 years old.
2. 2. I learned to ride a bicycle as an adult.
3. 3. My 1st computer was batch programming on a Burroughs 3500.
4. 4. My 1st computer related job was building a geospatial data base, including digitizing soils data with the digitizer outputting to an IBM 029 keypunch machine.
5. 5. I have raised and competitively showed American Quarter Horses and Californian Rabbits.

In the afternoon I was taking down some of the outside Christmas lights when I heard a flock of geese. Thinking they were planning on overnighting at my ponds, I started looking for them and instead saw a HUGE flock of Snow Geese just forming up. I estimate 300-500 geese. Talking to some friends on New Year’s Eve - they had seen the flock earlier in the day.

I also had two spottings of a pileated woodpecker in the woods directly across from our house.

Our friend Hobart stopped by on Christmas afternoon to report he had seen a bald eagle just mile and half from our house. Eric had just gone down for a nap, so Hobart house sat while we hopped in the car to run down and take a look. The eagle was sitting on a slender tree overlooking a ravine and appeared to be floating in the air.

As I have been flitting among computers more lately I have been using Google web applications, primarily for documents and calendar functions.  This post has a practical review of ten fully functional virtual operating systems (WebOs) that can run within a browser.  While I have some inertia due to my previous use of Google, I plan to check out the recommendations: YouOS, Goowy and DesktopTwo