A Visit to The Villages

If you've never heard of The Villages, then you haven't spent much time in Northern Florida. It is a planned community for seniors. With a current population of roughly 140,000, it is the world's largest retirement community. There are approximately 90 miles of golf cart trails. Some residents have even opted to not own a car since they can get to everywhere in their golf cart!

The truly amazing thing is the amount of activities available. We picked up one of their weekly newspapers "The Villages Recreation News" and I counted 610 clubs from A-Z, Acapella Singalong club to Zumba with Mark. There are 3 Town Squares that host music groups every night.There are classes ranging from Cupcake Decorating, to Archery, to Google Photos ... yep! You guessed it! We taught the Google Photos class.

You meet lots of people in the RVing lifestyle, and early on in our travels we met Barb and Gary Resnick thru the computer group within FMCA (Family Motor Coach Ass'n.) At the time they lived in Texas, and Barb learned Picasa from us and started a group for using Picasa at her Sun City Community there. They have since sold their motorhome and retired to The Villages in Florida. She is part of the Sunset Point Photo Club at The Villages and made all the arrangements for us to speak to her group about Google Photos. They had a nice turnout - nearly 100 - and we had a lot of interest in Google Photos.

Here's a little video of our visit - made with Google Photos! (https://youtu.be/IHSAXYXHJ7Y)

Further your computer education**Subscribe to the Free Geeks on Tour Newsletters**

Watch our Weekly Online Show on Learning Smartphones and Tablets!

What Does This Button Do?

Photo Albums for the Blog

I've been doing some work on the way I display our history of pictures on this blog. I have a tab at the top called "Our Photo Albums." That used to be an external link that took you to a page where you could see ALL of our public photo albums using Picasa Web Albums. With the retirement of Picasa Web Albums (if you don't know about that, here's my article on it), it is unclear if that technique is still going to work.
Any individual pictures showing in the blog will not be affected by the retirement. All pictures I've uploaded over the years to Picasa Web Albums are now visible using Google Photos, and Google assures us that the link that make those pictures show up in blog posts will continue to work just fine. But, the full page of ALL public web albums is a feature that they have decided not to continue in Google Photos. They may change their minds - things are always changing at Google - but for now there is no Google Photos link to all public albums. You can get a link to an individual album though, so I have created a page for this blog where I will post those.
To make it look pretty, I take a screen capture (using the Snipping Tool in Windows) of the Album cover. I post that graphic on the blog page, then link it to the Google Photos album. I will do this each month, adding the current month's album to the top of the page.
Check it out, click the "Our Photo Albums" tab at the top of this page. You should see a February album that you can click to see the whole album, a January album, and then a link to all albums before 2016 - using the PWA link to all public albums. I'm trying to get information from Google as to whether that will continue to work.

February Seminars

This has been a busy month of giving seminars - mostly to Computer Clubs. We are on a speaker's bureau of sorts. The Association of Personal Computer User Groups, and more specifically, the Florida Association of Computer User Groups have a variety of clubs. Some of them are independent clubs that have been around for a long time - like the Boca Raton Computer Society. I actually remember visiting the Boca Raton club back in the 80s - I probably spoke on using WordPerfect! That was my specialty back then. This month we were there and spoke on Smartphones and Tablets!

Other clubs are organized by groups who live in a particular retirement community, like Valencia Falls Computer and Technology Club. This is where Sam Wexler presides and he has taken it upon himself to let the other clubs know about us via an email blast. That is how we got booked for 6 presentations in February. Then we also presented at RV parks for 4 more seminars. Add to that our Sunday online shows, and we presented 14 seminars this month from the west coast of Florida to the east, and even one remote presentation in California.

Cascade Lakes

Nice big screens in some communities ballrooms! This is Cacades in Port St. Lucie

The ballroom was our room for the Cascades computer club

Geek Week at Riverside RV Resort.  Check out our new floor-stand banners!

Our most popular topics this month were Smartphone Basics and Google Photos, but it's changing all the time. We spend most of our time learning! We are constantly revising our list seminar topics.

---

Further your computer education**Subscribe to the Free Geeks on Tour Newsletters**

Watch our Weekly Online Show on Learning Smartphones and Tablets!

What Does This Button Do?

Work Across the State and Across the Country, in One Day!

What a day last Tuesday was! We gave two seminars: one at 10am and one at 10pm; the first one in Sarasota, Florida and the second in Laguna Woods, California!

We were staying at the Thousand Trails, Peace River and had to get up and be on the road by 8 in order to get to Sarasota to deliver a 10am presentation to the MiceKTeers computer club. I hate to leave any place that early - but I always hate to leave the beautiful Peace River.

Our parking spot on the Peace River

Had a good group for our Google Photos / Picasa Seminar for the MiceKTeers Computer Club in Sarasota.

Sarasota is on the west coast of Florida. On Wednesday we're booked at a computer club in Port St. Lucie which is on the East Coast of Florida, so, after the Sarasota gig, we got back in the RV and drove across the state. This time of year in Florida, you need reservations if you expect to get a site at an RV park, and we didn't even try. We found an Elks Lodge in Port St. Lucie who said, sure! We have room in the field out back. No hookups, but it was a nice field overlooking a pond and it had GREAT Internet service from a Verizon tower right next door.

Our parking spot at the Elks Lodge in Port St. Lucie

That was important because we were booked to give another Google Photos presentation on Tuesday night ... in California! We used Google Hangouts On Air to deliver the seminar remotely and, it went great. Their meeting was at 7pm - Pacific Time, which meant 10pm our time. Whew! What a Day!

Photos sent to us from the Laguna Woods, CA club where we did a remote seminar on Google Photos

Because we used Google Hangouts On Air, the whole seminar was recorded on Youtube.



It's a good thing we love what we do! And do we ever!

Blast from the Past

We are currently living part-time in my Mother’s townhouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This means I am surrounded by lots of memorabilia. This newsletter that I wrote for our computer training center back in 1987 is so cool. I write how it is so overwhelming to deal with the speed of change in technology. We started this computer training center in 1983. My wish for 1987 is that there be nothing new!!

1987!

And, here’s another of my favorites. An article from WordPerfect magazine in 1989. I was one of the original certified WordPerfect trainers and they published a few of my articles in the WordPerfect magazine.