Challenge #4 - Google

I was happy to find I was familiar with (and had used in the past) quite a few of Google's search features, especially time, unit conversion, area code, and definition features. I had never tried out the book search feature, so that is a great tool with which to become familiar. Adding the "site" search was new to me and I hope to utilize that more in the future. The general Google search on O'Neill and PP really brought up a mish-mash of stuff making it hard to zero in the the specific information needed. The book search with far fewer results made for an extremely focused search result with the answer literally at your fingertips. I successfully added the Google Blog RSS feed to my blog, now I have to remember to read it and blog about it!

Challenge #3 - Gale Virtual Reference Library

I enjoyed this challenge it. It was a good refresher on all those familiar reference sources that are now web-based. It was excellent the way they could be accessed directly from our public catalog. Of course that feature is not available in Horizon -- and sadly you can't even copy and paste the rather lengthy link. Hopefully all that will be a thing of the past when we migrate to Polaris.

I found things very intuitive and easy to find. Citation and translation tools are nice and easy to use.

VideoHound -- I had a "D'oh" moment when trying to figure out how to search a particular movie in the web product (I kept looking for the title listing in the table of contents) but fortunately soon found the "search within" box on the left hand side of the contents listing. Some habits die hard....

No real life story to tell BUT when I went to the Reference shelves I did discover an older edition of VideoHound which needs to be weeded!!!

Challenge #2 - Digital projector and Laptop presentation

At Brick's December 4 staff meeting I set up the laptop and digital projector did an overview of the OCL Communication Manual and what a valuable resource it is. I also included a refresher and reminder session for using Brick's meeting room calendar to its full potential. Even though I had to log into the public folders using remote Outlook it was still great to be able to demostrate on screen. What was even better off the hardware, software and wireless worked!

NJListens download accomplished

I finally got all the pieces and parts (mp3 player, me, free time, and the pcplus) together in one place and was able to accomplish the NJListens download. Once I got WMPlayer updated and Overdrive downloaded and the security update download, yada, yada, yada it was fairly easy to download the audio book and transfer to the MP3 player. It was a very "cumbersome" process compared to so many other types of downloads I've done over the years. I enjoyed listening to a bit of Jane Austin's Persuasion -- didn't download the whole thing (only part 1) or I still be there waiting!

Here we go again....

Minerva's back in business. Who is Minerva, by the way? Minerva was the Roman name of Greek goddess Athena. She was considered to be the virgin goddess of warriors, poetry, medicine, wisdom, commerce, crafts, and the inventor of music. Probably would have made a great librarian! Matter of fact her statue guarded the door of the university library where I got my MLS!

I'm going to work for a better completetion rate this time around! On to conquer to Challenge #1, when I can get to a PC Plus and find an MP3 player....

Thing #6 - accomplished in #5

Well, turns out I already accomplished #6 in doing #5. The picture of the amaryllis was previously taken with the branch camera and downloaded on my computer. I successfully created my Flickr account and uploaded it, but was not able to get Flickr to communicate with Google.

So this (to left) is what I get when I try to upload the image to my blog using blogger's upload feature. Huh? It links you to Flickr but it ain't very pretty.

Thing #5 I give up!

I uploaded this image to Flickr but no way I could get it to "Blog This" with Google. When I tried to upload it using my Blogger upload all I got was a broken graphic. So I just ended uploading it straight from my computer.

I will now meditate on it and it will calm my irritated nerves.....