I am a Geek

I think being a Geek means obsessively loving what you do.

I spent the last few days creating our geeksontour.com monthly newsletter.  I've done this every month for ten years. It can be a chore when I'm juggling multiple tasks and just need to get the newsletter out - now! But mostly it is a labor of love.

• I love that I have an outlet for my passion. 
• I love that I have readers who ask questions that lead me to discoveries. 
• I love that I have a partner in this geekdom who indulges me in conversation about all things technology. 
• I love that I have tools that continually improve and give me new things to learn and new ways to be creative.

Not a Creative

I can't draw to save my life.
A stick figure is a challenge.
I have been known to use this fact to say that I didn't have a creative bone in my body. I've come to realize that creativity isn't just about art.  These last few days of writing the newsletter I've felt like I was bubbling over with creativity.

The weather has been gorgeous, a friend suggested we go kayaking, but I wanted to sit at my computer and play with my photos, using Google photos; create graphic images using Canva, and create green screen videos using Camtasia. The newsletter gives me an excuse to play with all this stuff. There was nothing on the calendar this week so I had time to wallow in my technology.

One article I wrote was about using a USB drive in an iPad. Let me tell you how it came about ...

One of our geeks on tour members recently purchased our learning library on USB drive. it contains hundreds of tutorial videos and lots of documents. Actually lots of people bought these last month because we ran a special :-) but this one member wrote to ask how she could play the videos on her iPad.

How (and where)  can I transfer the tutorials from the flash drive so that they can be viewed on my iPad?  Is this even going to be possible? 

She's not the first person to ask us this. The first one was over a year ago and we just said no, you need a computer for the usb port. The next person to ask was someone last summer after we had just done our weekly button show all about wireless thumb drives. We told them they could buy one of those for about $30, copy everything over and then use that with their iPad. Cool. Jim and I even considered stocking some of those, but we never did.

Third time is a charm. This time we took the question to the hot tub. You know we're getting serious about finding a solution when a question becomes a hot tub conversation! A wireless thumb drive is nice, but isn't there some wireless way to use the drive they already bought from us? How about that HooToo device that we taught about on our show 2 years ago? At the time we used it to backup photos from our phones to a usb drive. Could we stick the thumb drive in there and access it with an iPad?

The idea got us so excited, we cut our hot tub session short in order to try it out. Just kidding, we never cut our hot tub soaks short!

When we did get out and dried off, we started hunting for the HooToo. We turned it on, plugged in our thumb drive, connected an iPad, and played a video. Cool! Now we can tell people Yes! you can play our videos from the thumb drive to your iPad. And not just our thumb drive, whatever you got.

Why had we not thought of this before?

Whatever ... Now it's time to tell the world. So I started writing the article for the newsletter. This really needs a video ... Show Me.

With nothing on the calendar this week, and since we're at home where Jim had set up our always-ready recording studio, I decided to take the time to learn more about how Camtasia works with green screen. It took a day and a half to get the video done, a couple of takes and a lot of editing, but I enjoyed every minute.

New Year's Resolution

It may not be quite a resolution,  but I sure do want to post more in this blog.  In December I ordered 3 more years of my blog books from blog2print.com and I love them.  They are beautiful 4 color hard back coffee table books of my life. I now have books for 2004 - 2012. It's noticeable how they keep getting thinner as I write less and less.  I could probably fit 2013-2016 in one book and it will still be smaller than 2004!

I love my Blog Books!

I also have set it up so it's easy to create a post using my phone and just emailing it to the blog.  I wrote about how to do that in an article on geeksontour.com. 

Life has changed a bit this past year because we moved into Mom's townhouse in Fort Lauderdale and are no longer fulltime RVers. We still spent about half the year in the motorhome and loved it as much as ever,  but it feels very different to have a stick and brick home now.  

A walk in closet is such a treat, but I didn't know what to do with it.  When we moved in,  over a year ago now,  I just dumped stuff in there.  I think I was treating it like a storage unit! Yesterday,  New Year's day,  was the day to sort it out. Who knew? A walk in closet is something that you can actually walk into. 

Today I sorted out my online closet of photos!  Check out the "Our Photo Albums" page in the menu above.  All the photos are in Google photos,  but there is no provision to display a group of albums,  so I came up with this design myself.  Google photos allows you to link to individual albums.  I came up with the grid for each month of year,  including a thumbnail picture.  Whaddaya think? 

I created this photo album page for the blog.

Speaking of Google photos,  we ended 2016 with a bang by publishing my Mrs Geek's Guide to Google Photos and promoting it with a launch on our weekly show. We sold nearly 300 copies in all it's formats, setting records for our monthly income!  Merry Christmas to us..

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2016 in Review

.I can't remember anything without my pictures. Here is the complete album of 2016.
And, here's the video I made of the album - using YouTube.



And, here's our map:

2016 is the year we transitioned to living in a "stick and brick." It's Mom's townhouse, and it took me a few years to decide what to do with it while she's in assisted living/dementia care. This year we decided! It's really nice, and sure is convenient. The only problem is there is nowhere to park the big RV. This coming year, we might just downsize to a camper van.  All in all, we spent our time about 50/50 between the townhouse and the RV.

Business-wise, we also transitioned a bit. We "pivoted" from focusing on live presentations at RV rallies and computer clubs to our weekly show online. And, we're considering book sales as a more substantial income stream, instead of just a sideline. Our website memberships are still, by far, our primary source of income, but we have high hopes for book sales.

Having Google fly me out to California for the Top Contributors meetup was a highlight for this year. It was only 2 days, but we view it as a turning point. Rather than focusing on teaching RVers, our primary topic is now Google Photos. Google photos is certainly very useful for RVers, but not just RVers. We are broadening our market and narrowing our topics.

We were disappointed that we didn't do any international travel this year, or a dive trip. Our exotic travel was to our back yard with our new hot tub instead! We DO love our hot tub. And, quiet time at home was good for our diet. We'd put on a few pounds since the weight loss a couple years ago. This year we took that off, plus some! At our annual doctor appointments, they are amazed that neither of us are taking any meds. We feel great!

So next year, we've already booked an international trip - Italy in May for Chris to attend Cary Tennis' Writing workshop. And, since we don't have a gig until mid July, we plan to stay in Europe thru June. Jim's ancestors are from Croatia, so we might explore that area a bit. We don't have a dive trip booked yet, but it is considered an essential!

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Fwd: Still RVing After All These Years

We are really enjoying the townhouse in Fort Lauderdale, but we still love RVing too. This week we are booked to give a seminar in the Orlando area at central Florida computer society ccfcs.org, so we booked a week at Orlando thousand trails.

It's quiet, beautiful, and nothing to do but work on our projects: Mrs Geek's Guide to Google Photos, and our monthly newsletter. We have a good Verizon internet connection here, so we got a lot of work done.

You can now buy our book, along with a special deal to get our entire learning library on usb drive, for$49. See geeksontour.com/store.

So we took a day off today and went to nearby Lakeridge 🍷. It's been on our list for years. We had no idea today was the wine and chocolate festival! 

Fun.

They did a great job at moving hundreds of people thru the wine and chocolate tasting line. We enjoyed it thoroughly.

And, what a gorgeous day we had! 

With music! 

And, just fyi, I created this post just by writing an email to my blog and sending. I wrote about how to do this in our latest newsletter. Unfortunately, the email posting process is limited in the amount of photos that can be included. The maximum size for all photos is 10MB, meaning about 3 pictures. So I still need to come in to the Blogger.com interface to add more. It still helps a lot to compose the post using my phone and email.

Geeks go to Google: Part 2 - Top Contributor Meetup and Google Photos

by Chris Guld

When Google Photos first came out, I knew I wanted to become expert in it. I specialize in helping people manage their digital photos. I had been using, and teaching, Picasa (Google’s free photo management software)  for over 10 years – and I loved it. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of other people were using Picasa and loving it because I taught them. But, the writing was on the wall that change was inevitable. Picasa was built for the world of digital cameras and computers – it only used the web occasionally, just for sharing your best photos. The world of photos was migrating to smartphones and web, no computer necessary.

There are plenty of people today who take lots of photos with their phones and don’t even have a computer! Google understands this trend more than anyone. Google doesn’t just see the future, they invent it! So when they announced Google Photos as a brand new product, re-engineered from scratch, to handle all of today's digital photo needs – I wanted in! I immediately started using it in May 2015. Then I jumped in on the user help forums. I wanted to become expert in this product because I knew it was going to be good. I started reading everything I could find, and then answering people’s questions in the forum. It didn’t take long before the Google community manager for Photos noticed and invited me to join the Top Contributors program. Here is a 2 minute clip from our Button Show Episode 95 where we discuss how to get help on Google products. In this clip, I tell why I became a Top Contributor.



This is a volunteer program. People become Top Contributors because they have a passion for the product, and a passion for helping people learn. Google then gives us perks. The primary perk is recognition of our expert status. The next is open lines of communication to Google and our other product experts. I am on a team that includes people from the Philippines, Germany, Ghana, UK, and of course Mountain View, California – Google Headquarters.

Top Contributors Meetup

Every year Google recognizes it’s Top Contributors for all products and gives us the biggest perk – a trip to Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA for a meetup. So this is what we were doing in California. Google paid for my flight  and 2 nights in a hotel. Jim and I decided to make a week of it, sandwiching the meetup between teaching at a computer club north of San Francisco, and visiting friends south of San Francisco. The main event, for me anyway, was the meetup. The first night was a reception right in the hotel, so Jim got to attend this part, and he’s glad he did! The first person to come up saying, “I know you!” was referring to Jim! It was Michael Daniels who, with Jim, was very active in the Google Hangouts help with Ronnie Bincer.
The only person there that I had ever met in person before was Brenna. She was our host on our first Google visit in 2009, now she is apparently in charge of this whole program. It was great to see her again.

The main event began the next day and I was thrilled to meet the community manager for the Google Photos Top Contributors, Ben. He's kind of our "handler," acting as liaison between us and the product development team. He communicates with us at least weekly ,and sets up a monthly video call with all of us. 

Google Photos wasn't the only product represented - there were Top Contributors for Google Hangouts, Google Voice, Google Blogger, Gmail, Calendar, Android, Nexus, Search, Maps, Youtube, and many more! We heard presentations from several "Googlers" - that's what you're called if you work for Google! And, I got to get definitive answers on some Blogger questions and Google Voice questions I had - yes, I am a geek!

They also facilitated several icebreaker activities, and of course meals. I think my favorite part was sitting with Googlers on the product development team for Google Photos - I had some questions of them, but they had even more questions for me! It was also wonderful to get to meet many of my team face-to-face. I not only have team members now, but also some new friends!