My Technology Addictions

As we start our independent lives away from our parents we take on more responsibilities and start to gather our worldly goods. Once we have a few things to our names and whether we are single, enter into relationships, have kids we start to think about what or who we would like to have these things and manage our affairs in the unfortunate event of our death. This is where a Will (Last will and testament) comes into play. It is not something that any of use really wants to think about or do but a very necessary evil especially if you want a say in what happens to your belongings, who will care for your children or animal.

So as many of our daily tasks start to move online and we start creating our online presence have you thought about if you will leave access to these accounts and information and if so who will you leave it to? Our online presence can be very personal and not all aspects may be shared or even know about by your friends or family so do we just leave list of account numbers, usernames and passwords as part of your will or leave it all out there in the cloud some of which will be viewable and other locked away.

I have been thinking about this recently as I really need to update my will now my kids are older and just general life situations have changed. I did a quick calculation of how many different online accounts I have including bank accounts, and came to a figure around 50. Well that blew me away and seeing that I use some accounts like gmail as a backup facility also some of these accounts will need to be accessed by other after I have gone. If you have flickr accounts and other media sharing accounts that have family and personal files would you want your family to have account access to these? 

I am just putting this out there for all of us to think about, how I would actually go about leaving this information or if I would actually leave access available to or my accounts is something I will be thinking about. So I ask the question Will you leave your online life to your loved ones?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: Onlinelife, passwords, usernames

Bringing women in technology to the fore

24 March 2009
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless. http://findingada.com/

I signed the pledge to say that I would post an article on my Blog on March 24th about my tech heroine, someone who I think could be a female role model in technology.”In technology” can be interpreted in many ways and I have chosen someone who is leading the way and encouraging others to become involved in using technology in education.

Sue Waters stands out as someone who is dedicated to encouraging others to see the advantages of using “Web 2″ technologies like wiki’s, twitter and blogs in education. She is a mum and wife, works as a TAFE lecturer, posts to two blogs, answers questions in user forums and twitter and runs numerous online sessions on how to use these technologies. She is masterful at engaging people with and through these technologies specifically wiki’s and twitter. By asking conference attendees to tweet what chocolate they like and where they are from she gets responses from people who may have been reluctant to even try twitter. She has found that using the word chocolate is not threatening and everyone has an opinion about it. She is an inspiration to me, a very positive female role model and I am lucky enough to call her my friend. You can find her personal blog here http://aquaculturepda.edublogs.org/

Tags: AdaLovelaceDay09

I seem to have started a few posts saying I can’t believe it is ……. since I posted to my blog and here I go again. Wow haven’t done anything since December ‘07 . I came to have a look at the many many spam comments that have come into my blog and delete them, because of this I have set comments to approval before they are seen. Then I thought I would have a look at what new themes were available and selected one.

After doing this I thought I had better not be so slack and actually create a post so ……. here it is.

I have been so busy over the past term, I have taken on some extra work at TAFE and most of my classes have kids between 16 – 18 who would normally be in the school system but due to one thing or another school has not worked for them. In Western Australia we have a policy where students need to be in full time education or work until the end of the year they turn 17. So if school doesn’t fit they have come to TAFE. Having these kids for 13 hours over three days is full on and this combined with my software development business has not left me much time and as such almost all of my online activities have suffered, until now – school holidays the following images sums things up nicely especially with my recent train trips to Perth and my lack of internet access on my ancient nokia phone.

Geek and Poke Sounds of Silence

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Geek and Poke Twitter Abstinence Syndrome

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I have met some really great people on twitterand facebook and my friends and followers continue to grow. Having these online contacts is good especially when working from home as it stops me feeling isolated. So if you haven’t yet used twitter or facebook have a go and see what you think. As with most things on a computer if you have a use for it whether it is software, online communities or even surfing the internet you will pursue with it if not you may view these things as time wasters but you wont know unless you try them yourself. Anyway enough chat for one night and with lots more thoughts rattling around in my head I will be coming a back a bit more often, hopefully someone will still be reading this.

Tags: CoolStuff, Web 2.0