Thing 23

The finish line, at last! I don't think I'm alone in my disappointment in not completing in time, but sometimes real life takes over. The deadline was in Easter week, for the whole of which my computer was switched off. I have a young child and had two birthdays, my husband's doctoral graduation, and a house full of guests to contend with. Any other time and I'd have made it, but face to face is still more important than facebook, and Easter is family time.

I've found the programme very useful, to the extent that I've changed the way I do things. I've revisited old friends - welcome back Paint and iGoogle - and am using them on a regular basis. I've been introduced to the mighty Picnik which is a serviceable alternative to Photoshop. I'll have another look at podcasts and ThinkFree Office and use them in the future; I think my mum would find the latter useful since her Office suite is always playing up.

I'm reconsidering some of the things that I've used before and found tiresome; Google Reader and Delicious are so boring it depresses me to go to their pages, but I could feed them into something more useful and attractive using iGoogle widgets.

I'm not sure I've any use for a work-only twitter or Flickr account, or LinkedIn. Flickr is a particular problem because of the conflict with my existing Yahoo ID. Delicious, for some reason, lets you log in with a Yahoo ID but doesn't appear to affect other Yahoo applications. I didn't want to use existing ID for 23 things because it's so public, insisting that you share and publish. Now I find that I have more personas than I can cope with!

My iGoogle sticky note now reads "loose ends - think about what ID you want to use and what for". You might call it thing 24.