France and Spain Trip 2007

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Amazing Race 2007 -- Leg 1 Côte d’Azur

I arrived in Nice the night of Friday May 18th. Ming was already there since he arrived two days before I did. From 19th-21th we drove from Nice through Cannes (right when the 60th Cannes Film Festival was going on), Grasse (European perfume capital), Toulon(the famous military port in France) and Marseille (with special highlight in tasting bouillabaisse).










Salad Nicoise & fried smelt (left) Nice Fish Soup (right)
The 60th Cannes Film Festival. And after 1 hour wait, I finally captured a red carpet moment! Hey I think I know one of the actors in that picture. He's a famous movie star from Taiwan and is a lead charater in this Korean film.






Grasse, visiting the Fragonard Perfume Factory. (all right, trust me, that is not an alien base!, it was just an antique equipment on display, something that they used to use to extract the essence out of flowers)






Marseilles Sea Port (left), and the famous bouillabaisse (right), which took a good 2 hours to cook!! At the price of 35 euros per person and 2 persons minumum, it "uh.....starts to be good", the lady at the Tourist Office who recommended the restaurant to us said. It indeed was very tasty, as long as I could avoid the fish's eye! ;) After the soup was done, fish were separated out to be presented to the guests.

Amazing Race 2007

6 more days and we'll be out on our Amazing Race 2007 -- our trip to Southern France and Spain. My husband calls it the Amazing Race because we are too ambitious and plan on going to many places within 18 days. Check out our entire trip which is marked out here on Google Map.


View Larger Map

Hubby leaves the night of May16. He's meeting his professor in Nice to supposedly have some scientific discussion over glasses of red wine (Ha!). Then I will leave here the night of May 18 next Thursday and join hubby to start the official first leg of our Race. We'll start our trip from Nice, France, and will make our way through Cote d'Azur, Marseille, spending about a week in Provence, then move on to Spain and will visit Barcelona and Valencia. Our trip will end with a highlight of the America's Cup, on board of a cruise ship observing the first race of the Louis Vuitton cup final for the cup challengers in Valencia. We have booked most hotels except 2 open nights (wing it!), and rented a car for about 1 week. This will be a great trip and I just can't wait!!! :)

What I bought on Ebay

Thing 23 -- Yeaaahhhh ! I made it !!!

powered by PictureTrail

This has been such a fun journey. Thanks very much, LCPL, for setting it up. There are certainly 'things' that I enjoyed more than others, such as blogging, web2.0 tool, flickr, librarything ... etc. A few are a little bit boring. But that's ok. In the end it was great to be able to do them all. This has been a wonderful learning experience!!

Thing 13 -- Del.icio.us more tagging!

For some reason I don't like Del.icio.us' layout very much. But I finally found my ways around after spending a little time. So here's my Del.icio.us bookmarks. Since I'm donig this from my home PC, I installed the buttons on my Firefox. They are all right. I just don't like the look of the bookmarks. Not sleek enough.
I find it interesting to see the hotlist and what others are tagging. The suggested tags function is very handy because when I bookmark things because I didn't have hand-type it. I don't find the bundle tag feature very useful. I can't seem to view bookmarks under the bundled tag together.

Thing 12 -- Rollyo

Okey dokey. I've created a Rollyo search roll for electronic gadgets on my blog. The results came back very slowly because it searches quite a few sites all at the same time. But they are pretty precise though, if you can provide a very precise search term. We are looking for another digital camera, so I entered "Nikon digital camera L12", and each entry in the result list pretty much took me right to the result page on the specific website. Not bad.
I don't like the Rollyo website itself, though. Find it hard to navigate, it took me a while to get to the places I needed.

Thing 10 -- Image Generator

No! No! This is not for me. This is for our little cute town Berwyn Heights which the Washington Post called the Jewel of P.G.!!!




And this one is for hubby!

Thing 22 -- Audiobooks

I created my NetLibrary account and downloaded an e-audiobook last November. I saved the book on my PC, never got to really listen to it. So today I launched the e-audiobook again, and logged into my NetLibrary account at the prompt, it was surprisingly easy. I "acquired" a new NetLibrary license in no time, and my e-audiobook started playing immediately.
It was the creating account part that was a little cumbersome. We had to go through the LCPL website, first use the library card to log in, then we had to create an account once we reached the NetLibrary site. I wish we didn't have to go through these many processes. However, once one has the account, then it's not too bad.

Thing 21 -- Podcasts

I tried out Podcast.net. Didn't find too many things library-related. I did find a few libraries have set up "Click a story" as podcasts, such as the one from "Thomas Ford Memorial Library Click-A-Story". I had heard about this at conferences. Maybe it's something our YS department could consider doing.
I also found something for my personal interest. We are going on our trip to France and Spain soon, and I found some great French learning podcasts. It's great!! I added it's RSS feed to my blogline account.

Thing 20 -- YouTube

Ok now that I'm on YouTube, does this mean that I'm famous?????? This was shot when we were in Mykonos, Greece, in May 2005.

Petros the Pelican

Thing 19 -- Web 2.0 Tools

I tried out Pageflakes (#1 in the category of Start Page). I think it is COOL! I have added the following "flakes" to my start page: CNN, TV Series schedule, World Clock, a To Do list, photos on Santorini that people have posted to Flickr, Potcast, Stock Portfolio, Weather Channel showing the weather in both College Park and Leesburg, a flake from my Gmail account to show my new emails, Events and maps in DC area based on the categories I specified, and an automatic search in Amazon on books about cooking (it just shows new titles on cooking randomly)
All of these!! on my start page!!!

Although right now the kind of flakes that you can add are limited, but I immediately think that this would be something that our patrons could use. Imagine, we can have flakes on book clubs, online book discussion live chat, story time events, automated search in HIP on the terms the users specified, online book discussion forum, everything about LCPL... Make them "flakes" that people can add to their start page.

Check out the hottest Flakes!! Right now people can only submit ideas on flakes and the developers are the ones who can create them. But maybe one day they'll make it easy enough that everyone can create their own flake (like a widget, I think essentially the widgets are what the flakes are).

Google announces free in-home wireless broadband service

Something definitely worth considering for the branches and even your home office! ;-) Google TiSP Beta

Installation and more!

Thing 18 -- Zoho Document

Thing 18-- I'm a ZOHO writer!! HOOORAYYYYYY!!!!

Thing 17 -- PB Wiki

PB Wiki seems so easy to use! I love it!! Like the cute sandwich logo, too! (sorry!)
I might use this to document our travle plan for our trip to France and Spain this summer. Have to give it some more thoughts... 5 GBs of free space is not bad either.

Thing 16 -- Wiki

I love wiki. I think it's almost a natural for librarians since we love to share what we know and love to work with each other. I like the libraris who use it for online book clubs. I've been asked by patrons before if we have a online book club. Is something like this already at work here? We might be able to use it for our circulation manual or related documentation, too. But in that case, it might be better to have it hosted internally here by DIT, rather than sitting on a outside commercial website such as pbwiki.

Thing 15 -- Library 2.0

Traditional library catalogs have a long way to go from achiving what Library 2.0 is all about. Reading from John Riemer's comment, and looking at what our HIP can do, for example, no relevance ranking, can't suggest spellings, users can't leave comments, tagging... It is frustrating sometimes. There's not even an easy way to add a link to the blank space on the catalog page to promote some other services or databases we have. Wish we have more support and resources to do what we want with the catalog. I really like the endeca interface. I think it's awesome! Wonder what the price tag is now that more and more people are interested in their product.

Thing 14 -- Technorati Tags

All right, here is my post for the technorati tags.
(I'm skipping again, will come back and do the others...)

Uh.... I don't know what to tag this one for....
I guess it's ok once in a while to have something here that has nothing to do with... technology. I bought a slow cooker recently and am looking for good recipes for slow cookers. So here it is...

slow cooker recipe

And I did find some good stuff up there! Cool!!

Thing 11 -- Library Thing

Thing 10 looks like a lot of fun so I am saving it for later when I have more time. So here is Thing 11, and my Library Thing catalog.
I like where you could easily add tags and rate the books in your own collection. It is really neat, easy and user friendly. I like to see other's comments and what other tags people have assigned to the books I am interested in, and what ratings they get from other people. Love it!! Love the display of cover art, too!!

Thing 9 -- Finding RSS Feeds

I don't quite like the search feature on these recommended tools recommended. They look rather basic. Feedster doesn't have an advanced search feature. It has content channels for different subjects but you cannot search within each category.
Topix.net is a little bit better. But I still think that the searches normally return too many results to manage. I like Technorati's interface. It also has an advanced search feature. But again the results are just way too many.
I still prefer to go to my favorite blogs, see if they have feeds that I can subscribe, and learn about other great blogs/feeds from the blogs I like. I mostly just go to the blogs and read them when I have time.

Thing 8 -- RSS feeds

Here is my public Bloglines URL. I actually like Blogexpress' reader interface more. I had to download and installed the client but I think it's a little bit cleaner. I don't find the bloglines' interface very user-friendly. But it's on the web so I can use it on any PC. Most of the time, I don't check the feeds through Bloglines. I just go to a particular blog direclty to see if new posts are up. I enjoy reading them that way.

Thing 7 -- Open Source ILS

Two open source integrated library systems have been getting a lot of attention lately. I think that the concept of open-source is just awesome, and I am so excited to see that open-source ILS such as Koha and Evergreen are made available, free-of-charge to library communites around the world. Evergreen is the system developed by a consortium of 252 public libraries in the state of Georgia. These libraries were actually SirsiDynix customers (and were using Horizon, I believe) before they decided to embark on this grand journey of developing their own ILS. Koha was originally developed by a company for the public libraries in the district of Horowhenua in New Zealand. Koha means gifts or donations in Maori, and decided to make it a free gift to the library communities around the world.

Imagine having full control of your ILS and can tailor it to suit your exact need. New features can be developed and added (if not on a daily basis) in a much faster pace, because you will have full control, rather than waiting for a certain future lease by the vendor (who knows when will come out). This would be what I call heaven for ILS administrators or even, heaven for any users of ILS (including the public).

I also read that some library school is making use of Koha in the classroom, so that their students can get a first-hand experience of operating an integrating library system. This is really great!! A lot of people when attending library school, are not actually working in a library yet. Even for those who are working in a library, they often don't get to access all different modules or get to see the administrative aspects of an ILS. Ah I am so jeaslous... makes me want to go back to school again...

Thing 6 -- This is fun!!

Thing 5 -- CODI2006 70's party

IMG_1559.JPG
Originally uploaded by sylvar.

This was taken while we were attending CODI 2006 in Salt Lake City last October. It was the night of the 70's party, and everybody had great fun!! (check out everybody's outfit!) I think we were doing the Electric Slide here. Who said librarians can't dance!! ;-)
Here's some more photos on Flickr from that night.