Holiday decorating

Guest post written by Derick Burks

I love to decorate for the holidays. Every year I try to get my husband to help me do it the day after Thanksgiving, but he always thinks it is too early. I like to get the decorations up early so they can be up for an entire month for us to enjoy. I think our house looks so much cozier with holiday decorations up. Last month we switched internet providers to a company my husband found by searching “wireless internet Nashville”. I am so glad we did because I have found so many great ideas online for decorating our home for the holidays. I usually put lighted garland on our mantle and two vases filled with ball ornaments. This year I hope to make some glittered Christmas trees to put on the mantle as well. I know my husband will not be thrilled that I will have more decorations to add to our attic, but I think I will be pleased with how the decorations will look. Christmas comes and goes so quickly, so I am glad my husband lets me enjoy the one month out of the year that I can have the house decorated.

Adobe Acrobat Allows For Free Professional Online Collaboration

Online collaboration is becoming more and more popular as the Internet grows. Instead of purchasing ten airline tickets, all traveling to Orlando, and collaborating for three days in a conference room, you can use your computer’s webcam. Adobe Acrobat allows you to open a conference room for screen sharing, screen controlling, instant messaging, and file sharing. Adobe Acrobat can be used for sharing files peer to peer or simply helping a friend out with their computer. The program can be found for free at Acrobat.com. All you need to sign up is an Adobe account (which is free, of course).

I have used Adobe Acrobat a couple of times to help people with their computers along with working on a Photoshop project with a peer. When you open up a conference room, you can invite people to join via email or a link. When they enter, you can then share your screen, control their screen, share your webcam, files, microphone, etc. When I helped a client with a Photoshop project, I requested control of their computer and then showed them how to perform different tasks in Photoshop. Adobe Acrobat worked quite well and allowed me to collaborate flawlessly.

Florida Virtual Schools Uses Elluminate Software

Screenshot of Elluminate Live

More and more school districts are coming up with unique ways to bring learning to the Web. Florida Virtual Schools, the website where any Florida student can take classes online, tries to make the online classroom more social and they do that with Elluminate. Elluminate Live is a software that allows the teacher or administrator give interactive slideshows and quizzes to the group of people attending. Students can activate a web camera, microphone, or use the chat box to talk with teachers and other students. Many classes require you to complete at least one “collaboration assignment” with Elluminate.

I think that using online conferencing tools for the online classroom is a wonderful idea, but it’s poorly executed. Taking classes that require collaboration myself, it gets annoying to wait for people’s technical difficulties, everyone to calm down, and for people to behave. Just because it’s not the physical classroom doesn’t mean that no rules apply! Many students draw on the PowerPoint slides, put emoticons in the chat boxes, and use “texting abbreviations.” Online conferencing can be a good thing, but in the hands of teenagers, it can cause more problems that it fixes.

Skype vs Google Voice

Speaking of online voice conferencing I have lately been using Skype and Google Voice to deal with international clients. If my client has a hi speed wifi connection then skype works easiest for me.  I can’t deny the clarity of Skype vs Google voice. While in  London, UK only 1 week ago I was chatting with my wife back home and could not believe how I could so easily hear my daughter playing in the background.

Skype vs Google Voice

It’s like the days of Sprint, when they would advertise, So quiet, you could hear a pin drop.  That’s how Skype is to me. Now if your wifi is sketchy you will get these weird extended sylables and dropped calls.  If you have an iPhone, any inbound phone call screws up your entire connection and you have to dial in again. Of course, using skype on my Dell laptop prevents the whole problem with inbound phone calls from being any issue. Of course, my dell computer can use tethered wifi from my iPhone too.

Now Google voice allows me to call when 3G coverage is sketchy OR when the other user does not have access to wifi.  The international calling rates are actually a little cheaper with Google Voice vs Skype.

Comparison of International Calling rates with Google Voice vs Skype

• Example: Call a landline from the USA to London, UK with Google voice is only 2 cents a minute while Skype would charge 2.3 cents.
• Call a cellphone in the United Kingdom with Google Voice and pay only 10 cents a minute, Skype is 25.9 cents.
• Germany cellphones – Google Voice – 10 cents / Skype 25.3 cents
• India – Google Voice - 2 cents / Skype 9.2 cents

Google Voice is the hands down winner for convenience and price.  Skype is the winner for clarity.  It all depends on what you are looking for and how much money you have in your Google wallet.

Technology moving from the lab to the hospital room

Middlesex’s Hospital’s new critical care unit was reviewed by State Rep. Christie Carpino recently in the UK. This new upgraded technology seeks to improve the quality and efficiency of care through cutting-edge technology that will give doctors and nurses even more time to interact with their patients, and less time wasted digging through charts. I’m sure you have heard of GE’s Smart Patient Room technology before right?

Carpino met with Middlesex administrators for roughly two hours, and they gave her a guided tour of the facility that’s twice the size of the existing unit. The new wing, featuring Smart Room Technology, will open in November.

“The hospital’s latest investment furthers its reputation as a top-notch care provider,” Carpino said in a press release. “To call it state-of-the-art would be an understatement.” Of course, the scrubs they were are basic to say the least – http://www.blueskyscrubs.com/

The new critical care unit will help the hospital’s sickest patients. Among the new features are door scanners that track which hospital staffers enter rooms and when, giving patients and their families more knowledge about who is helping them at any given time. Data mined from various machines in a patient’s room will be collected and analyzed by a new system capable of producing alerts about a patient’s condition hours before a problem could occur. The new system also allows staff to enter data about patients and submit reports from a patient’s room, breaking an inefficient industry model that’s had physicians and nurses spending too much time away from the people who need their help.

Middlesex Hospital, among the nation’s top 100 hospitals, will be the first one in the state to use these technologies. Doctors are also hoping to have waterproof digital devices sewn into their lab coat to keep their hands free to focus on patient care.

“They’ve taken their philosophy of doing more for their patients to a whole new level,” said Carpino, standing in bright sunshine on a new outdoor patio for patients. “Considering what I saw and heard today, families who see their loved ones admitted to this wonderful new facility should feel confident that they’ll be in good hands.”

All Into Sports

Guest post by Jewel Cole

Having a big family means there are a lot of hobbies going on at any given time but one thing we all have in common is a mutual love for sports. AT any given time, someone’s out and about on a field or a court somewhere playing the game that they’re into at the moment. I got us HomeSecurityFamily alarms for the house since there’s hardly ever a time when we’re home and the younger kids often just leave the doors unlocked because they don’t know any better. I guess that’s the plus and the minus of living in a neighborhood where there are tons of other kids trying to play at any moment of the day! I love how active my brothers and sisters are but there’s nothing to say they won’t all burn out their love for the games by the time they hit my age. I used to be really into gymnastics but when I hit 20 I decided I never wanted to have to go to a gym again!

Online Chat Software review – Velaro & BoldChat

I was thinking it was time do a review of 2 main online chat software providers (Velaro & BoldChat) I’ve heard about.  Not only do news organizations like CNN do live chat but Live Chat, as we know, is the most proven communication method to increase sales and conversions on an e-commerce site too.  Live Chat software empowers your web site with all the benefits of a traditional brick and mortar store.  Greet customers when they visit, answer questions, offer advice, ultimately growing sales and customer satisfaction. So here is the quick list of how these guys stack up to each other.

Live chat software reviews of BoldChat & Velaro

• Velaro – COST –

K-12 Education looking to be upgraded with new partnership

Ask a thousand educators to get together and create the describe what the perfect “school” should be like, and some big common themes will emerge: school should be engaging, have a genuine connections to the real world, should nurture different talents, help kids no matter what their strengths and weaknesses and, of course, be safe.

Ed Fish, president of ePals, spends a lot of his time thinking about that beautiful, shimmering image of school—and then all the puzzle pieces that need to fit together to make it possible. ePals has had some stunning success: it boasts that it is the largest online community of educators and students, delivering mail and other communications services to 600,000 classrooms around the world and 25 million students. (About half of those are in the U.S., Fish says.)

ePals partners with Microsoft

Today ePals said it was teaming up with Microsoft to try to create another puzzle or two piece—namely how to shore up the foundations underlying school email and collaboration technologies. There’s a second element of the deal, too: Microsoft took a minority ownership stake in ePals (less than 10%), making it the second outside investor in the privately held, 14-year old firm. (National Geographic made a similar investment 18 months ago.)

Online cameras add to hospitals new medical tools

Yesterday, the intensive care unit at Mercy Medical Center had miniature cameras installed on the ceiling in 12 ICU patient rooms.  Nurses on the floor called them ”another set of eyes”.  The pictures taken from a camera give another tool to hospital-bound doctors with special training in the treatment of critically ill patients, also called intensivists, in the growing practice of “telemedicine.”   Gastric Bypass surgery, on the other hand, is one of many surgeries that will have to be done in person for some time.

Telemedicine on babies

More and more hospitals are adding technology, such as the Sisters of Mercy in St. Louis, Mercy’s parent company, to maximize their in-house resources.  The use of remote technology in intensive care units “is probably one of the newest and fastest areas in telemedicine,” said Jonathan Linkous, chief executive officer of the American Telemedicine Association in Washington.

For the past few years, hospitals have turned to their intensive care units to help save costs and improve access to resources such as the intensivist, Linkous said.  If you look at the budget of a hospital the intensive care unit is always the highest cost one.

The general medical  industry has come to employ more intensivist-trained doctors since numerous studies have shown that these caregivers can improve the quality of care for critically ill patients and their survivability.

That’s “if you have one available,” Linkous said. “A lot of hospitals in remote locations don’t have intensivists.”

Telemedicine helps bridge that specialty doctor gap, especially among health systems with hospitals in less urban environments. More than 60 medical specialty doctors and subspecialists have used telemedicine, the association reports.   The origin of the telemedicine movement can be traced back about 40 years to applications such as transmitting X-rays across phone lines, Linkous said. Now, telemedicine is becoming an accepted diagnostic tool. Rarely to be people trasmit images using the iPhone.  Even though CSI gives the  imporessions that forensic scientists take pictures of fingerprints on their Apple iPhone and send them to the lab, this doesn’t really happen yet.

Online conferencing for Obama’s inauguration – January 20th

Online history being made by Obama

Here’s a quick list of the best spots to watch Obama’s inauguration online on January 20th:

• Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies – closed captioned and flash required. The site has a wealth of information about what happens on Inauguration Day, including a handful of inaugural videos dating back to President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1957 swearing-in ceremony, as well as videos of presidential luncheons dating back to the inauguration of John Kennedy. (It also reveals, for those interested, the recipe for Obama’s luncheon meal, which features a main course of pheasant and duck served with sour cherry chutney.)

•  CBS News will have day-long live coverage January 20 on TV and the Web, starting at 7 a.m. EDT. Katie Couric will also host a special Webcast that night with reporters and punditry, for which viewers can submit questions during the webcast.

•  CBS streaming coverage will also be Webcast on Joost’s Everything Obama page, which also features interviews, campaign highlights, and satire clips.

•  MSNBC will be streaming the historical event on its home page and politics section, and users can embed the video into their own sites and social pages. Its inauguration page also features videos of inaugurations from decades past.

•  If a computer screen seems too small for such a momentous moment, there’s always the option of heading to a movie theater–or a Starbucks. At MSNBCEvents.com, the cable network is distributing free tickets to screenings of the inauguration in movie theaters in 21 cities (what a bargain instead of $10 a ticket for a normal movie). MSNBC is also partnering with Starbucks to