Moms Guide to Technology

ELECTRONIC READER:  Shop for price, feel and functionality.   You used to have to consider what the company who makes the reader had on its “bookshelves”, but Google is taking the proprietary out of electronic readers.
While google doesn’t have their own proprietary device, they are launching Google ebooks: over 3 million titles, many of them free, others for sale in EPUB or PDF format so they can be read on most devices with a browser. That means ipad owners don’t have to buy only from itunes or if you have a Nook, you don’t have to buy eclusively from Barnes and Noble. It also means students will be able to purchase textbooks and store them on the same device as articles for the class.
Moms, if you start reading an ebook on your reader and get stuck waiting for a kid’s late practice to end, you can continue reading where you left off, on your phone: iphone or android. Ultimate flexibility.
Competition is a good thing for the consumer. So, make your teen a smart consumer. Ereaders are the future of “books” and now’s a good time to get your young person of any age started.
And here’s a freebie: make sure you and your kids have a library card. Our library loans ebooks, music & movies. I can download the loan at home or anywhere there’s a wireless connection. It’s all free. But you have to have a library card.

Swagger Wagon

Moms need a laugh and the internet is giving us more to laugh about…load of entertainment.  But that mom in the video isn’t me anymore … or not much longer.  With only one teen at home, I have become a long-distance “boo boo kisser”.

Night before last, my son cut his hand opening some plastic packaging.  He’s 5 hours away … a trip to the E.R. and 12 stitches later, he’ll survive.  It’s not easy for a mom “kissin’ boo boos” from a distance.  But if you are a little saavy in your digital life, you can still nurse their ailments, across the miles. 

This morning, halfway across the country, my daughter woke up with an eye infection.  My digital life to the rescue.  She called to ask what she should do; she had to be to work in an hour.  As she got dressed for work, I went online to run the search:  I need a ‘doc in the box’ near her apartment or her workplace. 

This is where  the rubber meets the road.  I had the AOL up and plugged the search there first.  It went like this:  “Urgent care near [address], New York, NY”

AOL returns were so off-base, they need to go out of the search business.  The returns were AOL advertisers & not necessarily related to what I need.  Some of them were not even medical in nature. 

Next, bing.  Bing is Microsoft’s competitor product to ’google’, the search behemoth. I put in my search and it gave me a visually pleasing but limited result.  It had a difficult time with the ‘urgent medical’ portion of the query, more focused on the location.  I tried to adjust my query.  The site crashed.  It said it was working to get back for me.  But the clock was ticking and I needed to move on.

Next, ‘google‘ which is already tracking everything about every site I visit and every interest I express so they can sell to more advertisers.  They understood my query and had a fairly good selection of choices.  But it put more focus on location than subject.  Search results included a drug rehab clinic and a wound care specialist.   They need to stop adjusting their algorhythms in reaction to ‘bing’.  They’re the leader!   With another call to my daughter, we decided to change the query to her work address and found a quick clinic inside a drug store, at her subway stop.  I called and they could take her right away and she’d be to work on time with the prescription, getting it filled, and hardly missing a beat.

With her settled, I tried my original query at ‘ask.com’ .  This one of my favorite search sites.  I consider it intuative.  But I don’t always trust it when I’m in a hurry.  Not its fault.  It doesn’t get the ‘buzz’ of the other sites.  And its not as fancy with the maps.  When I plugged in my query:  the top return on the first try; DrWalkin [the one I ultimately found on google].  So, they’re a winner, in my book.  But the #1 piece of advice I have for you is:

• Don’t Always Use the Same Search Engine.  Here’s an article with a list of different search engines for specific searches.    
• Be As Specific As Possible in Choosing Keywords.  If ‘coffee’ is good, ‘La Casa Del Caffe Tazza D’Oro’ will get you right to the site that sells that great coffee your niece brought back from Italy for you.
• Symbols Help You Get Specific.  ‘Doctor – Chiropractor’ the minus sign excludes certain results. The plus sign is inclusive ‘Doctor+Chiropractor’.  Putting a phrase in quotation marks will return results with the phrase exactly.  And I’m told an asterisk * adds a wild card and extends your search results.  It’s never really worked for me [which usually means operator error]. 
• Try it different ways.  Search engines are not intuitive, though it often seems that way.  They generally work of of what they already know about you and put those results first.  And many keep track of where your computer is and give results nearest you.  This can be very helpful.  But if you are looking out of your area, you’d better be specific about that.   
• Finally, if you are looking for a word or phrase that is included in the URL [name of the site], search like this:  ‘inurl: spinach’.  This can be really helpful, or it can limit your results.  Did I suggest you try it more than one way.

Happy Hunting!  If you are a good searcher, you’re winning at parenthood….Meet the Parents with the Swagger Wagon.

A hazy day on the lake

Here’s a summer project to enhance your relationship with your teens and to enhance their online research and budgeting skills. 

 The fact is, teens’ digital life is dominated by texting & gaming. While more than half share content online, the girls are most likely to post pictures and the boys are more like ly to post videos.  

While teens love the internet, they spend far less time browsing there than adults.  Are they getting as much out of the internet as the time they are putting in?  Do they see the correlation between what they do online [their digital life] and what they can do in their analog life?  Here’s an idea for a practical exercise in how the internet can help them make plans and how you can all enjoy family time together.  Allow your kids to plan a summer family getaway.  Let THEM make the plan, with as few limitations as you are comfortable with and let their imaginations go wild. 

There’s lots of help online to plan a vacation with teens, just search “Teen Travel”.   Or Put it in their hands and let them plan a getaway from scratch.  Some things to consider:

• Pick the weekend, including days & dates, up front.  When you go makes a difference in availability, rates, etc.  This has to be one of the basic guidelines.  For example, you might say, leaving Thursday, July 29^th at 7pm and returning Sunday, August first at 7pm.  Let them know they don’t have to use the whole time [may want to save a night’s hotel stay by leaving Friday morning], but that’s the ‘vacation’ window.
• Give them a budget.  Make it realistic.  This will be the single most important driver to the getaway they choose.  Depending on the age of the ids, you may want to give them clearer guidelines on the budget which can help:
• Is it a competition or a team project.  Decide if you want each person to come up with their own idea to research, budget and present to the group.  The advantages are that you will get more choices and you may want to vote on one for this trip and hold onto the others for future getaways.  Or you may want to use this as a team-building exercise and have each kid assigned a part of the trip to research and report back to the group. In any case, make it THEIR project.  Mom should not be leading the project/assigning tasks. 
• Parents always have veto power.  State that right up front.  It’s still your job to say yeah or nay, considering family finances, safety and your goals as a family.  Use this veto power sparingly. 

 Budgeting  — This is one thing they may never have done before.  They’ll need basic guidance.  The budget will be key in determining whether they choose flying the Concord to France or driving to a nearby lake, or something in between.  Give them an outline like this:

 Walk them through some of the things they’ll need to look up online:

• Mapquest a driving vacation.  How far is it?  What’s the average price of gas?  How many miles to the gallon.  Multiply to find the cost.
• Are pictures available that they can show to the rest of the family when they make their presentation? [If everyone is making their own plan?]
• Activities you can do when you get there.
• What’s the ‘Plan B’?  If they pick an amusement park, what else is there to do in the area if it pours rain that weekend?
• Don’t forget the multiplication.  If the admission to an attraction is $40 and there are 4 people going on the trip, they’ll have to plan for $160 not $40 for the activity.
• Suggest they make notes on additional considerations.  For example, if their plan involves fishing, do you need fishing licenses and what will that cost.  Will you pack the tent or bring the tent?  If they want to rent a lake house, what’s the security deposit? 

 Finally, don’t start the project unless you are willing to follow through.  This is a teaching/learning opportunity with the bonus benefit of some great family time at the conclusion. We recently took an weekend lake trip, which was about 4 hours drive from our house.  We found an inexpensive hotel that took pets, it was clean and had a friendly staff, indoor pool open until 11pm with a free breakfast in the morning.  We stayed 2 nights and rented a pontoon boat one day [no dogs allowed] and stayed out on the lake all day, swimming and fishing, talking and playing cards.  A quick getaway that we all agreed was the best vacation we had in a while.   Enjoy your family.

When the talk around the water cooler or in the school hallways is last night’s TV show, nobody wants to be on the outside of the conversation.

LOST: program finale

That’s why and average of 13.5 million viewers tuned in for the season finale of LOST. Sure, many had followed since the beginning but nobody wanted to be clueless around the lunch table the next day. Staying in the loop is about to get easier.

Tunerfish was announced at TechCrunch Disrupted in New York. It will be a new social network building community around TV viewing. Users post what they’re watching on television.

I tried to do that during LOST on Sunday with facebook. Some of my “friends” complained that they were DVR-ing and didn’t want me to be “the spoiler. I long for the days of my youth when I would sit among my 8 siblings watching a show. TV viewing was not a passive experience in our house. And your teens may like the idea because they’re coming of age in the digital/real-time world. They interact on everything.

This new social network will be both a web site and a mobile app. The application will track trends in viewing. In the world of adolescent angst, they will know if their friends are also watching and maybe what they think. The rebels will know who, if anyone is with them on the show nobody watches. Maybe the will have an easier time mobilizing to save a show set for extinction. I will finally find out if anyone watched “Ru Paul’s Drag Race”.

I have not seen it in action. Early reports say you can recommend shows to your friends, you can share material, through links to youtube, vimeo and my personal favorite, hulu. While there is nothing to see yet, you can go to the Tunerfish site and give them your email address and they’ll let you know when it’s up and running.

“Why?” you ask. I am a TV junkie. I suppose there are enough of us to make it worth doing. More than that, Tunerfish is developed by Plaxo. Plaxo is the online version of the rolodex, so they have basic online networking experience. More importantly, Plaxo is owned by Comcast, the cable, internet phone, television people. It’s a natural fit and potentially a way to get you to spend more money with them. I’m not saying they’ll charge you to join the social network. But don’t be surprised to get there and find they try to entice you to their pay-per-view, watch their shows, and contribute to their own ratings system. Perhaps the holy grail of social networking: gathering information about you so that they can turn it into money.

Readers know I am a big fan of a digital life. And I love a social network. As always, I throw up the caution flag. This gives you another chance to talk to your kids about what information they may want to share.   Blanket prohibitions won’t work with teens, like I have to tell you that.  Try out the site. Pay attention to privacy issues.  Then talk to your kids.

And maybe it’s time to re-evaluate the television watching rules at your house. The kids are getting older and the “No TV on a school night” rule is probably obsolete. The fact is, TV is not a box in the family room anymore. TV plays on their phone, the computer. And they are older. It’s more difficult to control. Perhaps a better course is to talk about the pitfalls and give them tools to make good decisions for themselves.

Some ideas of what to include in your house rules:
• Plug in the phones in a central location each night, away from the bedrooms. Be out of touch during sleep hours.

central location for cell phone charging

• Monitor balance of physical activity with time in front of any box: tv, computer, texting,etc.
• Manners are much the same in digital life as in real life. Don’t play with your phone when others think you are involved in a conversation with them, etc.

Good Manners never go out of Style.

And if you have a few minutes, check out Tech Crunch: for all the latest about what’s happening with technology standard-bearers as well as those breaking new ground. They have all gathered in the Big Apple to launch new tech companies and announce new ideas.
As for what I am watching on TV, I’ll let you know once we hook up on Tunerfish!

If you have a portable scanner, people are generous sharing pictures.

I started researching my family in earnest about 15 years ago.  

Most people have some level of interest in where they come from, we can’t help it.  Rice University biologists published a study of amoebae in 2006 concluding that they could not only recognize their own family members but also discriminate in favor of them.  The drive to find what we are a part of is that natural.   

 If you were to start researching your family today, you would find a third of the information I have now in the first week by researching online.  Technology is changing the way genealogists work and making the process faster for whoever comes next.

 If you are the next person, here’s how to get you started.

Write down everything you know.  Keep it simple.  Write as complete a name as you know [maiden name for women], birth date & location, death date & location. Be organized: Forms can be found online for free.  I’m directing you to the Mormon Church.  I am not Mormon but I have great respect for their contribution to family history research.  When I’ve been stuck, I have visited a Family History Librarian at a Mormon church and they always help with a next step.

 The Mormon Church has the largest genealogical library in the world.  Family history research is fundamental to their belief that a husband and wife, children and parents are bound together for eternity.  They compile and digitizing birth, marriage, death and other records and making them available anyone. For Free.

 Chart the basic information.Family Group Sheet

The most important forms to get started are the Pedigree Chart, which traces the various generations of your family and the Family Group Records, which contains the details of each nuclear family.   Start by filling these out from memory and from the memory of living relatives.  There is free software you can download from the site, as well.  I would hesitate to do this at the early stage.  Start with a printed, handwritten set of papers and write across the top “From Memory” so that you can sort that out from conflicting facts you may find later. 

 Census information is a primary building block.

Genealogists are #1 fans of the Census.  The Census began in 1790 and every ten years, the information is gathered about every person in the country.  The results are currently available through 1930.  The law says census data can not be released to the public for 72 years, to protect the privacy of participants in their natural lifetime. 

By looking at the census reports for various years, you can see how households & families change over time.  Each census asked different questions and you can learn a wider range of information by looking across several census years.

 The Census Bureau gathers and compiles the information; when a census year goes public, it is housed at the National Archives and Records Administration which makes it available to us.  http://www.archives.gov/genealogy/.

 The Census Bureau does have a service: “Age search service”.  You can find it by following this link:  http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/agesearch/index.html

The census will do a search of information from 1910 to 2000 for $65 per person per census.  This can be an expensive way to go because those 65 dollars-es will really add up if you look at multiple years.  You can only request a search of yourself or if you are the heir or legal representative of the person being searched.

 Do all you can for FREE before you start signing up for paid services.

Paid services can give you a lot of information.  Before you starting spend a lot of money, unnecessarily, go back to the Family History site. Using your basic information, you can look for records that substantiate, correct or clarify what you think you know.  You will find details that flesh out the stories, beyond the facts of date and location. 

 Always record the source of your information.

When you find conflicting information, you may need to evaluate the accuracy of each source and corroborate before you have the true story.  A year from now, you may come across something new and if there’s a conflict you need to backtrack easily.

As you become more experienced there are a lot more resources, some of which I have listed further below.  There’s no timeline on these. But there is a clock ticking on the living resources.

 Recollections from people who lived the history are the richest.  As much as you can, set aside time to talk to the oldest relatives about what they know and what they remember. 

• Set aside specific time to talk about the family history.  If you wait for it to happen spontaneously, it never will.  Every family researcher I ever met regrets the person they knew and loved but never asked about the family stories.
• Start by setting a framework.  Ask how old they are now, were they the oldest in their family, etc.  This will set a framework for you and get them talking.  Questions about themselves are easier; they won’t worry so much about ‘getting the answer wrong’.
• Prepare a list of specific questions, generated by your research, if possible.  Ask follow-up questions when the conversation gets rolling.  But first, get the ball rolling.  When you ask someone to tell you the “family history”, they freeze, think they don’t know enough, fear they’ll forget or get it wrong.  Often the reaction is to refer you to someone else.  In fact, everyone has a story.  Frame the questions as if asking for an opinion and provide reference points; “What do you remember about the flood in 1889, it seemed our family moved to the top of the mountain right after that?”
• Put the question in the context of general history; “Do you remember when your family got their first radio?  Where was it in the house?  What were your favorite shows?  Was that a purchase that was difficult for the family to pay for?”  

Other resources:

• Newspaper clippings.  Obituaries have the greatest information.  Once the primary source of local information articles were very detailed.  The library in the town where your family lived should have old newspapers on microfilm.  There’s a move to put some online; these services tend to charge a monthly subscription.  Do your homework first, sign up for a month and search as many as possible in that month. 
• Go to the courthouse.  Old Wills, land & property records and marriage applications can be found here and hold great detail.    
• Religious records.  You may need to know a bit of church history.  When did the congregation form and have churches consolidated since?  Some churches let you go through the records and others do it for you, requiring a written request accompanied by a small fee.    You may also want to save time by finding out how they keep information.  Sometimes it is by date or milestone, rather than name.
• Visit the Cemetery.  Information on headstones is often revealing.  Modern cemeteries have very good, sometimes electronic, recordkeeping.  And more historians visit cemeteries and take the time to put the information online, Like this one: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi.  
• Needle in the haystack.  Finally, just google, bing or yahoo search for free genealogy resources.  Searching individual names can also be revealing.  But this is not the most scientific approach so it is the most time intense with the most limited yield.  

 This is not a project you can finish in a day or a week or a year.  Early ‘finds’ will lay the groundwork for what you find later.  As you start to see who these people were, you may focus on military service or building a health history of the family. 

Like the single-cell amoebae, you will recognize family members and find yourself discriminating in favor of them, for we are all carrying a bit of those who came before us.

My brothers and sisters and I recently went to clean out my aunt’s house following her death. She had no children and our mother was her only sister. So, it was our responsibility and a welcome opportunity to visit a part of the life our mother lived. We found the old cassette tape recorder our mother sent to our grandmother.

Mom would record us and mail the tape to our grandmother, who could play it in her machine.

Long distance phone calls were expensive. The idea was that audio & photos helped her share her children across the miles.

My mother is gone more than 30 years. She was no electronic pioneer but would be excited by today’s video version of sharing her children’s milestones immediately: YouTube. I can hardly believe the video sharing service is only 5 years old.

Look at how much that baby has grown in 5 years. This blog has linked you to youtube to share ideas. I have checked youtube to see what the heck my kids are talking about; they name a performer, movie or band [pop culture when I’m not popping] and I search it on youtube. I hear the music, see what they look like and what they’re wearing [call me old school, I still judge a book partially by its cover]. People post video resumes to get jobs, propose marriage. I’ve used utube for entertainment, to see the Christmas pageant when my niece had the ‘lead” or my nephew’s first steps. After the sudden death of my college-age son, utube kept him alive for us through the web videos he made. Utube has brought laughter into our home, shared ideas we could see & feel and provided comfort in sorrow. In just 5 years, it has become a part of the fabric of our lives. [ I’ve even nicknamed it “utube”; as if the extra 2 letters was too much!]

This is not just a lovefest over youtube. The site still has some growing up to do. Anonymous comments are getting to be a thing of the past online. [Thank goodness!] Most sites now require people to stand behind their comment[s], takes the ‘haters’ out of the process; provides a sense of civil community. Youtube still hasn’t come to that. And they make it harder than I like to flag offensive videos or comments. There’s a lot of trash [but that’s what you get when anyone can post] and that’s the benefit.

On this anniversary of youtube, I encourage you to post video online. You don’t have to become a fancy video producer to share ideas or the moments in your life. Grow your digital life today.

Those ‘flip’ video cameras were all the rage for young moms just a Christmas or two ago. For $150 you could got a pocket-size point & shoot video camera, some could even do HD! [Like you really need that.] 

They were well marketed. Touting plug & play to the internet via youtube. My sister and two sisters-in-law got them. And I waited for their videos to come; which they never did. One of them told me last weekend her camera burned out early and it hadn’t backed up to the laptop as expected so a year’s worth of video was lost.

I resisted the urge to get one and only because I had just bought the latest Sony Handycam (with HD).

1. Any modern video camera will do; video camera, pocket digital camera, even cell phone.
2. If it came with a book, read the book about loading video. Your husband never will. So, you need to do it. But do it right. Directions for electronics are written in step-by-step for even the most basic user. The catch is: don’t just sit with the book. Gather the camera, the laptop, the book and make sure there is a small test video on the camera. Here’s mine:  MOV05688 .  The best way to learn is by doing it, step-by-step.
3. Repeat. The more you do it, the easier it will become. I think Stephen Covey coined the phrase, “21 days to a new habit” and I have always found this to be true. If you post one video a week for a month, even if you don’t post again for 6 months, it will be easy and quick because you’re in the habit.
4. Don’t try to break new ground and learn a new skill at the same time. Don’t try to learn to post with the first ‘flash mob’ video you are choreographing at the preschool. Keep the production simple and focus on learning to post: baby’s first steps in 30 seconds. Waving to Grandma for 30 seconds. A funny little dance.
5. Charge the camera every night, next to your cell phone, so it is always ready to go. I carry mine in my purse all the time.

Let me mention the pocket digital camera, or even your cell phone. What’s the right camera to use? The one you have with you will produce the best results; because it is with you! You don’t need a fancy HD camera, you don’t need to shell out $150 for a special camera. If you use your digital camera, you’ll need the USB cord, if you are using your phone, just email the video to your youtube account.

6. Go to http://www.youtube.comand sign up. They’ll walk you through the basics. But take a few extra steps:
a. Click on our name in the upper right-hand corner.  Then click on “Account”, then “Privacy”.  Adjust.  I set mine so that people can find me by my email address. But you can choose to share only with family & friends. I’m disallowing advertisements but making stats on my videos public. Do what makes you most comfortable; remember their defaults are generally the most public settings.
b. Click on ‘activity sharing’. I chose NOT to connect to my twitter account or facebook page. But you can. I may do it later. This means you post a video and it also shows up on the other social networks you select.
c. Click on ‘mobile Setup’ and they’ll give you a unique email address you can add to the contact list on your phone. This lets you send a video directly from your cell phone. Easy! Just check your cell phone plan to make sure you have data &/or minutes to do this without additional $$.
7. Make a quick video. Don’t shoot something off the TV or radio, etc. This is a copyright violation and Youtube does pretty good job of protecting peoples’ intellectual property. One copyright complaint & they boot it. Email the video to your youtube account or connect the cord & follow the instructions that came with the camera. Upload the video.

Finally, back it up. You can get a little hard drive of 500GB for about $70, if you watch the sale flyers. You should have one dedicated to backing up pictures & videos. If anything happens to the computer, you have not lost all your memories. Do it today. As an engineer friend once told me, “there are two kinds of computers, the one that just crashed and the one about to crash”. Don’t wait until it’s all lost.

Above all, Midwest Moms, do not fear the video. It is the modern-day version of my mom and her cassette recorder chasing after us to “tell Grandma a story”. But now Grandma can see to share the marvel of your progeny. And it will comfort you with those cherished moments into your old age.

13.5 million of you loved Glee on (FOX) Tuesday night.   I loved that same Madonna episode last night.   And if you didn’t see it, it aired again Friday.

I’m not working for GLEE or FOX.  I’m just using it as a sign of the times. Gone are the days when our family would sit down around the television after dinner for a quiet viewing of nightly news followed by a discussion of current events.  Families are much busier and we’re lucky to get everyone together for dinner.

Our kids are growing up watching what they want, when they want it.  Because they don’t feel they have to watch TV on TV.  They don’t care about the size of the screen (Big screen TV, computer or ipod), it’s about what’s convenient for them.

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With the new changes coming to Facebook, there’s a lot of talk about you privacy.  But most people never check their privacy settings to make basic setting available to them.

Here’s a quick and easy way to take some control:

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I never went to Prom back in high school.  So, I remain fascinated with the whole thing.  Now that it’s here, I am jumping on the bandwagon of the Virtual Prom.

Retailers know the bucks are flowing at prom time.  Honestly the cost of things is out of hand.  Retail marketers always use every tool in their toolbox to recruit those prom dollars.  Now, getting kids where they live means going online!

Seventeen, long the magazine to flip through to find the perfect dress, has some JC Penney ‘How To” videos.  JC Penny is also hoping to capture prom shoppers with a Fan Page on Facebook.  It has 810,330 fans.  Why?    JC Penney tips on prom dresses

I didn’t see a coupon or incentive.  It’s the same stuff you would see on their web site, minus the shopping.  It’s stale and stagnant and I can’t imagine how it could draw nearly a million fans, muchless hold their attention.

An impressive & creative approach to getting the prom-goers attention is what Men’s Warehouse is doing at virtualprom.com.  All I can say is, “groovy”.  [Now if that doesn’t get me kicked out of the virtual prom, I don’t know what will!]

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Do your kids have a friend named Anna Creamer?

This Anna Creamer has a lot of Facebook friends: 1233, down from 3k, since Creamer appears to be a fraud.  I would never guess from the profile of a cute little kid, in beauty pageant attire.

Hundreds of Anna Creamer’s friends go to the same high schools and colleges as our kids.  I’ll admit I didn’t know anything about the mystery until I read The Ravine, a high school magazine.   Where the student journalist found she was friends with hundreds of kids in their school, and nobody actually knew her.

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