Google SketchUp

Interesting article about 3D modeling with Google SketchUp and children with Autism spectrum disorders. Some children who find it hard to draw in 2D are able to express their world easily using 3D modeling software. Often with spectacular results. Check it out: http://sketchup.google.com/

Happy 5th Birthday Gmail!

It was five years ago that Gmail launched by giving out a gig. Back then, a typical webmail account could only store about five megabytes of mail -- kind of like our Outlook accounts???????? Hee, hee!

Just wanted to share a bit of spring with you! This is the beautiful Amaryllis which is presently blooming in my office. Enjoy...

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!