Some of my favorite tech tools

Flashback to The Sound of Music and imagine that I am frolicking amongst the curtains singing in melodious protest to the thunderstorm raging outside, "Pandora, Picnik, and free Google Reader . . . these are a few of my favorite things!"

Seriously - if you haven't used these free online tools, they're worth checking out.

1. Google Reader I have a handful of blogs that I love to read regularly, but it's cumbersome to keep track of them. Google Reader solves this problem. All you have to do is create an account, list the blogs or other websites you want tracked, and then whenever these sites are updated, Google Reader collects the changes and puts them in an in-box -- similar to email. Whenever I have a minute to read blogs, I go to Google Reader and can see at a glance which blogs have new posts!

2. Picnik This is a great digital photo editing tool. You upload photos and can do all kinds of cool things with your pictures. (If you need to do more complex editing, you can download Gimp -- a free, open source equivalent to PhotoShop.)

3. Pandora Ever wish you could have a radio station that only played music you liked and with no commercials? Pandora does precisely that -- you create your own stations based on musicians you like and Pandora streams music by that artist and others with similar qualities.

4. Image collection Many of the images online are restricted under copyright regulations. But there are thousands of images that do not have such restrictions. This site, for example, is a huge collection of images created by people willing to share their work.

5. Google Calendar Another great Google application. I've never been able to stick to a paper planner, but Google Calendar helps me stay at least slightly organized. A cool feature is that you can create and share multiple calendars for various purposes. For example, spouses can keep individual calendars and then make them available to each other.