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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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!

Live chat software reviews of BoldChat & Velaro

• Velaro – COST - 1 Operator $49/monthly – 5 operators $259/monthly - 10 Day Free Trial -
  * List of Features
  1. » Agent E-Mail Transcripts – Agents can E-mail transcripts during and after a chat.
     » Agent to Agent Chat – View other agents who are online, and chat with them at any time.
     » Alert Notifications – Completely configure ring tones, sounds and visual alerts for new visitors and chats.
     » Auto-Away/Return – Never miss a live customer support session. Automatically set your status to unavailable after you computer has been idle. Return to available when you move your mouse or press a key.
     » Availability Status – Set your status to available or unavailable to accept or block new live customer support requests.
     » Chat Transfer – Transfer a chat to a different agent.
     » Control Your Live Help Option – Display text or image as your customer support link. Place your text or chat images several times on the page.
     » E-Mail / E-Bay Compatible – Put your live help offer in e-mail messages and on your e-Bay pages.
     » Join Chat – Proactively join any live customer support session in progress.
     » No Applets to Download – The chat window used by your visitors is pure HTML and JavaScript. No Java applets or custom applications are necessary.
     » Online And Offline Buttons – Display live help on your pages at all times, or only when someone is available to chat. Display different text or a different image when support representatives are unavailable. Upload your custom buttons and use any image you desire.
     » Push Page – Push web pages to a visitor. If the visitor has a pop-up blocker, the push page is also sent as a clickable link.
     » Script Generation Wizard – Simply run our wizard and paste the resulting code into your website. With Velaro you don’t have to learn anything about HTML or JavaScript.
     » Shadow Chat – Silently monitor other agents’ chats. Add hidden text to a chat. This feature is useful to create notes in the chat log or to communicate with other agents supporting the same chat.
     » Spell Checker – Check your spelling real-time as you support your visitor.
     » Typing Notification – See when a visitor is typing in the chat window.
     » Typing Notification – See when an agent is typing in the chat window.
     » Unmatched Browser Compatibility – Velaro actively supports Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox, Opera and Safari. We constantly work to ensure that our service works with over 99.99% of the active browsers on PC and Mac platforms.
     » Visitor E-Mail Transcripts – Visitors can have their chat transcripts e-mailed to them.
• BoldChat - COST - 2 Operators $29/monthly – 5 operators $220/monthly - Free Trial -

List of features
* Answer & Greet
* Advanced HTML Support
* Auto-Switch Chat Buttons
* Answer Chat Timeout
* Assign Chats
* Auto-Browser
* Block Visitor from Chats
* Block Auto-Browser URL’s
* Customize Row Formatting Rules
* Customizable Logo
* Colors, and Fonts
* Customizable Alerts
* Canned Messages
* Canned Message Folders
* Customizable Chat Buttons
* Email Chats to Visitors
* Email Chats to Operators
* Filtering
* Flag Chats
* Grouping
* Join Chat
* Multiple Language Support
* Online Chat History
* Pre-Chat Survey
* Push Link
* Print Chats
* Setup Chat Rules
* Sign-In as Away
* Spell Checker
* Typing Indicator
* User Defined Folders
* Unavailable Email Form
* Variables for Canned Messages

Test – As you can see, the more you pay for, the more you get.  I’ve also heard that customer service for technical support problems happens quicker with the premium company over other smaller more inexpensive type vendors.  Of course that’s probably why LG, University of Florida, & Century 21 use a trusted company like Velaro.  You can feel free to check out other live chat websites like – liveperson, zazachat, whoson, ngenera, sightmax, live2support, clickandchat, helponclick and many others…

Feel free to leave feedback on what you think of any of these systems – good and bad!!

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.)

Microsoft Corp. and ePals Inc. today announced they have signed a strategic technical collaboration agreement to develop and deliver communications, collaboration and digital learning technologies to the global education market. Under the agreement, ePals will offer Microsoft Live@edu e-mail and calendaring platform and other capabilities to millions of its users, expanding ePals’ services with enterprise-grade collaboration tools. In the future, ePals and Microsoft will work together to incorporate Microsoft Office Web Apps, a Web-based version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite, and features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Online, Microsoft’s cloud-based collaboration solution.

“We chose to partner with Microsoft because it is clearly committed to education and Live@edu is a tried and tested reliable solution that complements our market-leading capabilities,” said Ed Fish, president of ePals. “While the cornerstone of school-based communication and collaboration systems must be the protection of user identity and data and implementation of sophisticated policy management, it is Web-based collaboration and assessment that can truly transform learning globally. The powerful features and extensible platform delivered by Live@edu enhances ePals’ own platform and leading solutions for the K–12 market.”

ePals has built the world’s largest K–12 learning network, a communications and collaboration platform linking 600,000 educators and reaching more than 25 million teachers, students and parents in 200 countries and territories. ePals LearningSpace provides safe and secure virtual workspaces for schools, including e-mail, blogs, wikis, shared portfolios, media galleries and language translation in 35 languages.

I hope ePals and Microsoft are a success. Schools—and teachers—do need great controls to make communications fully a part of the classroom to make that bright and shining picture of schools a reality. I’ve got my version of that picture pinned on my wall. Far more important–so do millions of kids.

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.

“Pretty soon we’re not going to think a thing about going to a hospital that uses telemedicine,”  Linkous said.  “I’m confident the concept is going to catch on at a rate similar to the adoption of automated teller machines in the banking industry decades ago. “

In Arkansas, telemedicine has been used to treat premature births and intensive care patients. Telemedicine has been conducted through the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, Arkansas’ only teaching hospital and it’s affiliated with a children’s hospital, as well as through Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock.   A great way to offer expert care and cut costs.

Linkous said the expansion of electronic ICUs has been in tandem with the growth of intensivists.

About 35 hospitals nationwide have electronic intensive care units, according to a Baltimorebased technology company called VISICU Inc.

In a demonstration Wednesday, a faint doorbell sound clued an ill patient that “back-up” care was summoned. A friendly female voice gave further identification about the technology that can allow health systems to maximize their information technology infrastructure.

Deibert fiddled with the onscreen prompts to improve the image of the patient and her caregiver in an ICU room.

Flat-panel computer monitors stacked three across and two deep in the break room at the 200-bed Catholic hospital were a duplication of a set-up 340 miles away in St. Louis, she said.

Other monitors showed the “real-time” patient vital information such as blood pressure, pulse and respiration.

Nightshift ICU nurses typically use SafeWatch more frequently than the day-shift nurses because doctors are harder to find in the middle of the night, said Carla Terrell, the director of Mercy Medical Center’s ICU.

SafeWatch can help caregivers in many ways, from actual intervention with the care of a distressed patient to electronic charting duties, she said.

In a recent example, a Mercy specialist needed the help of an intensivist in St. Louis, Terrell said, “and there were two physicians present. One here and one in St. Louis.”

The future of telemedicine is bright and we will look forward to it’s numerous advances.

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

simulcast the its coverage in 650 coffee shops in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle.

•  Fox News will provide live streaming coverage via Hulu beginning at noon for about two hours. After the live stream, Hulu will provide on-demand access to the ceremony. The live stream is embeddable, as is an inauguration countdown from Hulu (wonder what companies will pay for commercials on Hulu, could be a wonderful way to get some cheap branding). The video site’s Obama Presidency page also features related content like speeches, commentary, satire, and past inaugural speeches.

•  C-SPAN will debut its Inauguration Hub on January 20, featuring an online “control room”–a multichannel grid designed by Mogulus with Webcasts of inauguration activities. Visitors will be able to choose from one of four live feeds featuring events like the swearing in at the Capitol, the parade, and a number of inaugural balls.

•  CNN is partnering with Facebook to provide live streaming of the swearing in and Obama’s speech. Viewers can “RSVP” for the event on Facebook, and as they watch, they will be able to provide status updates with their thoughts on the events. A Facebook window on the CNN.com Live channel will show viewers their friends’ relevant status updates.

•  Current TV and Twitter are teaming up, as they did during the election, to add real-time tweets to Current’s broadcast and Webcast of the swearing in, which starts at 11:30 a.m. EDT and will be replayed throughout the day.

•  The New York Times, the AP’s online video network, the Online NewsHour, and ABCNews.com will also live stream inauguration coverage.

•  Livestation, the peer-to-peer Internet video site, is featuring coverage from news outlets such as Al Jazeera English, BBC World News, Euronews, and France 24. Viewers will not only be able to skip through the different channels on the Livestation desktop player, but also chat with other viewers and program producers, I think these guys are really entering new territorty and this could be pretty interesting.  This is what I plan on checking out.

•  The Washington Post has a comprehensive online Inauguration guide that is particularly useful for Washington residents trying to keep track of everything happening in the city now through January 20. Visitors to the site will find some interactive features such as a video discussion on the question of “How historic is Obama’s inauguration?”

If you want to record one of these live webcasts check out these guys for a listing of software that can capture online video.  If we could only learn to paint or do artwork through online video it sure would help the artistic community.  Seems like plenty of colleges are out there hoping you get an online degree but how useful is it really?  Anyway, I digress…

If you know of any other websites where coverage will be held let me know.  Also would love to hear feedback on which websites did the best coverage.