Thing 9: eBooks

Yeah, so, we bought a house in December... and I still don't really have room for all the books.  Not until I can afford to have custom shelving put in the dining room...

I'm one of those people who's not a fan of reading on screens.  I'm sure I'll get there eventually; as much as I love physical books, there's only so much space, and for most of what I read, the content is not format-dependent.  (In my head, I'm imagining what life would be like if I had my Betty Crocker cookbook in e-format, and an e-reader that could pull up, in parallel, the brownie recipe and the frosting recipe on the same screen...)  But, I have no e-reader, and my phone is a Windows Mobile 6.1 Treo that's two years old.

My husband, on the other hand, loves electronic books and has repurposed one of my older laptops (I'm a fan of 10" or smaller laptops for portability) as an ebook reader.  He reads a lot of pulp sci-fi, and he can get titles easily in a format that works on a variety of platforms.  He also reads on his phone, which would drive me nuts - the screen is so small!  He's getting a new Android phone in a couple months, which may or may not expand his options.

Thing 8: Video

This is the first Thing that I couldn't do everything I wanted to on my work computer; the Microsoft Live Movie Maker requires Vista or later, and my work computer is still on XP.  My home desktop and my laptop are both on Windows 7, though, so I still had options.

Once the rain finally let up a bit, I was able to take my camera and wander around my back yard.  Uploading from my camera is pretty easy; it has a USB cable, and Windows will pop up an import wizard for it.

Movie Maker was easy to use for basic functions - I didn't dig into the sub menus much since it was my first time using it.  Browse for a video file, add the music file, add some words.  I minimized the movie sound so that hopefully all you hear is the music.  (It's hard to tell here since my husband has music playing in the room.)