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Bet Ya Can’t Download Just One!

2/16/2005

By Terry Calhoun

The tri-annual board meetings of my employer-association, the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) are often intense, exhausting affairs with elaborate preparation – reports, charts, graphs – and all-day meetings with working lunches, and so forth. But there can be times when they are actually quite enjoyable, too.

One of those times happened during a recent weekend when I mentioned Picasa, a new, free, software from Google. SCUP has academic planners, budget planners, IT planners, and campus planners–all sorts of folks who aren’t even ‘planners’ per se but who do planning as part of their work—in its membership. When I off-handedly mentioned how Picasa was on its way to solving my problems with storing, accessing, and using images, pens were whipped out of purses and pockets and everyone was writing down as I spoke.

They were all paying attention to me and excited about what I was saying. What a feeling of power!

So, this week I am urging you, if you already haven’t, to try out one of three nifty pieces of software that have been making my life easier/more productive. They are Mozilla Firefox, Picasa, and Skype.

Mozilla Firefox

You’ve all read about Firefox, I am sure. It’s “The Little Browser that Could” and is indeed taking some market share away from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

It’s a powerful browser with lots of features such as tabbed windows and the like, but I have particularly enjoyed being free from pop-ups since I started using it. And, it is apparently free of many of the security issues that plaque MSIE, so much so that some institutions have recommended their students, faculty, and staff switch–to save IT staff time in the long run coping with as many security issues.

Skype

Ryhmes with hype–but it’s worth the hype. We have one former SCUP board member who lives in Lithuania and I frequently hear from him early on a weekday morning, asking how things are back here in the states since he retired to Eastern Europe. I don’t think I’d get those calls without Skype.

Skype is a free download that turns any computer that has speakers and a microphone into a VOIP telephone–which can call any other Skype user in the world, for free, and with truly excellent sound quality. Skype also has the ability, for a small fee, to call land lines and cell phones, but so far I am only using it with people I know have Skype; and I am actively engaged in persuading my more remote friends and colleagues to get it. The widespread international, state, and local leadership of the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA), of which I am a board member, is beginning to put it to use and promote it for cost-savings.

If my laptop were a bit smaller I’d be tempted to try using it as my only telephone. (I’ve already cut the land line at my home and all of my phones, no matter where or for what, currently come in to my Treo – which I also highly recommend.)

Picasa

If you have a lot of digital images, you want to get Picasa. This is the software my board of directors was getting excited about.

I have saved the best for last. I haven’t purchased film or paid for film development in nearly a decade, it might actually be over a decade now. One consequence of that is that at last count I had more than 25,000 jpg files on my laptop. (As you know, one of the things you can do with digital is take a lot of photographs.) I love using images of people in newsletters and on websites, but it had gotten to the point where I felt constant frustration at my inability to effectively find and use the appropriate images.

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