The Amuzing Race

The Amuzing Race is a charity event that the Rochester Public Library hosted this weekend. I was one of the contestants on TEAM BRANDSHE. The event was very succesful. The turn out was great. There were 36 teams competing and each team has four members. You do the math on how many contestants were there. Anyway, we had a total of 16 things or events that we had to complete before having a picnic at the Sport Center at RCTC. The tasks were very tough to do and time consuming. We had to do everything ranging from collecting at least 5 lbs of aluminun cans to wiring an electrical circuit to turn the light on/off. I am very proud to say that we completed the events and made it back on time for the picnic even though we were 21st not the first place I was aiming for. I am very proud to say that our team did everything following the rules that everybody was supposed to follow. It was tempting at times to call for help especially when we cound't find the City's Three Link Shelter anywhere. It is getting late now, I have to go to sleep because I have work early tomorrow. I will post more on this later and will also post pictures later.

Thing 7

Our library and myself are very aware of these web 2.0 tools. I can not imagine our place running effective without email. We use it for communicating with each other, updates on the server, monitoring virus infection on the machines, making appointments, ect. the list is endless. Rochester Public Library currently also has a program to chat live with patron or anybody for an hour every day. The screen name is RPLmnInfo for Yahoo and AIM. One other tool that I notice we use a lot is webinar. There are no surprises here. With the technology age that we are in now aday, this is a very useful tool to communicate to other people far away. Our library will be launching a tutor.com program for our patrons to get help with their homework this fall so we will be utilizing these web 2.0 tools extensively to advertise the program. Youtube.com will be used, email will be used, webinar will be used. The list is endless. How effective we will be using these tools to get the message out is something that we will soon find out.

Some Pictures Created from the Image Generator in Thing #6

Picture was created using the Calendar feature

These pictures were created using the Trading Card feature.

Thing 6

I'm very impress with the image generator. There are so many things you can do with this. I am very sad to say that I have been spending a lot of times in the past two days "playing around" with this image generator. Above is one I created from a picture that my girlfriend and I took in Japan. I have created a lot of pictures like one above in the past two days so I will post more later if my computer does not freeze on me. I see that this program can very extremely useful for our library staffs to do presentation or even create something to put on the library's website. This can also be a good teaching tool to get the kids interested.

Thing 5

I currently have lots of photos saved in Flickr. I have pictures from graduation, Vegas trip, Japan trip, picture of me volunteering in New Orleans and Biloxi for a week after Katrina hit the area. I discovered that this service is very useful. I can store pictures in this account and then open it at any place that has internet. One thing about this account is that we have to pay $24.95 per year to have more pictures stored. We can still use this account but the space is limited for free.

Thing 4

Flickr is an account that I have maintained for quite a while now. Actually I used to use a similar service from yahoo but after yahoo bought Flickr. They closed yahoo photos and forced everybody to transfer their account to Flickr using the same yahoo login names.

Thing 3

I created an RSS account with google reader to monitor some of my favorite websites. Some of them are other people's blog and some are my personal favorite sites. I find this to service to be useful. I will likely utilize it more as time pass by.

Thing 2

Is it just me or there are other people out there that are not excited about library 2.0 yet? It seem to be time consuming. As a technical staff from Rochester Public Library, I hope to pick up some ideas to implement at our library. However, as I spent a lot of time from home going through a lot of these, I have yet to see anything interesting yet. They are either something that we are already well aware of or already have. Of course there will always new things, ideas, and postings that could have some use to our library but it would take a lot of time to "dig it out". Hopefully I will be able to see the some light at the end of the tunnel someday and fully appreciate this.