Great Cruise 2008 - Cozumel

Cozumel was our beach day. Instead of going on a tour or excursion, Mason and I decided we would do the beach. And we were rather certain we could find the beach ourselves, so we declined the Cruise Ship's offer of taking us there and back. We didn't want to be limited to their schedule. In hindsight, we probably would have been better off going with the ship.






How hard could it be to find a beach in Cozumel? They are known for snorkeling and beaches. And its not that big of an island, so we thought if we just picked a direction and started walking, we'd find one in no time. Not so. After half and hour the most we saw was rocks, some sea side diners, and another dock for more cruise ships. So we turned backed, thinking we could catch the ferry to Cancun and spend some beach time there. Turned out that the ferry schedule wasn't that great. We would only have 30 minutes or so before we'd have to turn around and come back or be left by our ship. Finally, we gave in to one of the many guys calling "Taxi!" and had him drive us to a beach.



Unfortunately this was the coldest day of our trip. The locals were all in coats in hats. Since Cozumel weather is not much different from Texas weather, I was cold. Getting in and out of the water was not a pleasant experience. You know how once you get a lake or a river or something and its cold at first, but then it warms up? The opposite was true for that part of the Caribbean. We did manage to stay floating in the water for about an hour. Then I gave up. After about 20 minutes of watching me shiver on the beach, Mason took pity on me and claimed she was cold too and we spent the rest of the day picking out souvenirs. The sun came out when it was time to leave though.

Just look at those clouds! If you were swimming under that, wouldn't you be cold too?


And just because I haven't shown you yet, here's a shot of our cruise ship, the Norwegian Spirit.

And then we came to the End

This is it. The last post for the 23 Things. Oh how I will miss those furry little numbered Things running around my computer; introducing me to Library 2.0 applications and tools. My favorite Things were Flickr and Downloadable Media. I even created my own Flickr account; and, now that I have a digital camera, I can actually upload images to it. I'm sure I'll continue to use Google Docs and, of course, Blogs.

Speaking of blogs, I just found out from the PLA blog that there's a way to search library catalogs from Facebook. Its some sort of plug in or application. The blogger was talking about how he (or she) was going to learn how to do it at the ALA conference in Denver. I think that would be so cool! Guess I've got some more learning to do.

Proof that I'm a Nerd

Today I was revisiting a series that I had started some time ago and hadn't finished. The book that I stopped at was Voyager. Guess what pops into my mind whenever I see that word?

V'Ger.

And if you're a nerd like I am, you won't have to click on the link. You'll already know what V'ger is.

Almost There

We're at Thing #22. Downloadable media.

Our library uses two different vendors. Overdrive Media and NetLibrary. I really like Overdrive. I think its easy to use. I've never had a problem downloading stuff from Overdrive. I borrowed one of the library's MP3 players and listened to Terry Prachett's WinterSmith during workouts. I must say it is easier to listen to book while running than it is to read a book while running. Sadly enough, I have tried. (Treadmills can get boring, especially if you're by yourself.)

I don't think NetLibrary is as user friendly. At least it isn't with the ebooks. It may just be our setup that's confusing, but when you have to access it differently from outside the library then from inside the library, its not a good start. I know they've been making changes, so I should probably try them out again. And look, they have Le Guin's Powers available. Guess I'll have to check out an MP3 player again.

Podcasts

I think I would enjoy podcast more if I actually had a MP3 player. Sort of hard to download and listen on the go without one. I explored Podcast Alley, which indexes free podcasts from all across the web. You can browse by topic or search using keywords. Although, I'm not sure how accurate their keyword search is. I was searching for some of my guilty pleasures; and, when I tried X-men, I got one called Crochet for Men. I suppose if you say them really fast, they sound alike, but still not sure how it ended up on my search results.

I've been intrigued by podcasting for a while. I think it would be fun to do a book talk/reader's advisory type of podcast for the library. But I have no idea how to start one. I don't mean the technical part. That's pretty easy to find out. I mean convincing other people to do it and getting them to commit. Any suggestions?

You Tube

Oh Cookie Monster in the library.


I've got a whole different perspective on this, now that I work in a library.

Great Cruise 2008 - New Orleans

There will be more about New Orleans, later. (After I tell you about Cozumel.) For now, here is a mosaic of some of the graves we saw in Cemeteries No. 1 and 2.

Great Cruise 2008 - Belize

In Belize we saw more Mayan Ruins. The site was called Altun-ha. This is where a carved head of Jade was found in 1968. According to our tour guide, the head is now on display in a local bank, but we didn't get to stop and see it.

Altun-ha seemed to be more complete than Kohunlich. The buildings were closer together and the jungle farther back. You can't really tell, but the next two pictures are panoramic, taken from the top of one of the buildings.

And this was the building they were taken from. We didn't climb the really steep stairs to the top. I don't think I would have made it if we had to do that. A wooden stairway was built on the side of the ruins, so anyone who wanted to could make it up. Going back down was a little scary, cause you had to take a couple of the original stairs down before the wooden one started up again. But they don't tell you that before you go up.

One more thing about Belize, the port is surrounded reefs, so really large ships, like our cruise ship, aren't able to come into the port. We got do what is a called a "tender port". Smaller boats came up to the cruise ship and we would board them; then they would take us into Belize. Although these boats were much smaller than the cruise ship, they still could carry about 50 -75 people at a time. They had two seating areas, one enclosed and one above open to the air. Going into Belize, I sat up top. We went so fast that my hair came out of my pony tail and created a huge rat's nest on the side of my head. The moment we got off the boat, someone in a dolphin suit grabbed me and someone else took our picture. It later went up in the ship's gallery. I wasn't even tempted to buy that one.

Not only is Belize the only English speaking country in Central America, it also has its own special language. Here are some the words and phrases we learned:

belize it or not

unbelizeable

seeing is belizing

I can't belize it

Great Cruise 2008 - Costa Maya and Guatemala

Well, I finally got all my pictures from the cruise I took in December. So I'm now ready to blog about it. Yeah!

We left from New Orleans on Dec. 7th. Spent a day at sea, and then arrived at Costa Maya on Dec. 9th. On our day at sea we explored the ship, which didn't take as much time as we thought. When we first saw the ship, we thought it was huge! Then we realized most of the ship was devoted to rooms and a casino, so really not that big. They did have a library, which we both needed since after we explored we spent the rest of the day by the pool reading and discovered we did not bring enough books. So I've got a new series to read thanks to the cruise.

Our first landing was Costa Maya. As we were approaching the port, Mason and I went up to the deck to watch. When we made it, I looked over the side and saw dolphins! Three or four dolphins were swimming around the front of the ship. They were kind of hard to see because they kept going too far under the water, so you didn't know where to look for them. So I got to see wild dolphins. Woo hoo!Our visit was first that Costa Maya had in over 2 years. In 2005 it was hit by hurricane Dean and its taken them this long to recover and rebuild enough for tourists. You can still see a lot of dead trees and building skeletons along the cost.

In Costa Maya we took a tour to the Kohunlich Mayan Ruins. I took a lot of pictures here, but here are the best.

This is a coconut tree typical of the area. The coconuts are itty-bitty and grow in clusters.

Bats live in some of the temple ruins.

One of the pools. The ruins are the very top of the mountains, so they have to have pools to collect rain water. Otherwise, it all runs away.

The man in the jaguar mask. There were four carvings like this in one building.

Guatemala was the second county that we visited. The coastline was a bit more like I expected tropical/Caribbean countries to be, with jungle going right down to the sea.

Here we took a very scary bus ride to a jungle park. The bus itself wasn't scary, but the roads were. You know those narrow, twisty little roads you hear about other countries having? Well this was one of these, only going up a mountain, with no guard rail. But the jungle was beautiful.

This is a typical tree found there.

And we got to swim in the river. Yep, I swam in the jungle. And I had little jungle fish nibble on my toes.

We could've stayed there a lot longer than what the tour let us. The water was cool and very beautiful. I loved the way the sun feel on it though the trees. The jungle was nice too. It wasn't too hot or humid, to me at least. Mason later told me she was dying of humidity. But she lives in a desert while I no longer do. It was really very pleasant. And we got our first souvenirs here too. Our guide gave everyone a little worry doll. The dolls are maybe an inch tall and dressed in traditional clothing. You tell them your worries at night and put them under your pillow. In the morning, if the doll is gone, then your worries will be too.

Next post . . Belize.

Web 2.0 award site

For Thing 19 we get explore a Web 2.0 award winning site. The awards comes from SEOmoz.org, which searches for the best of the best in 2.0 web sites. Since I'm going on a trip to Wales this year, I thought I would check out the winner of the travel category, Farecast.com

Farecast predicts when the prices for air travel will be lowest, so you don't have to worry about when the best time to buy is. They will tell you. You just tell them the when and where. At least, this is what its suppose to do. Apparently they can't do this for international flights yet. I still got prices for flights from all the major airlines and air fare sites (they grab the prices listed on Orbitz and Expedia and Hotwire and a whole bunch of other travel sites and compile them for you too) but no predictions on when the best time to buy would be. I may try it again for my Christmas flight this year, just as soon as I figure out which family member I want to visit with in 2009.

Thing 18 - Online Documents

Hey, I remembered a Thing's number. Yeah!

More than just web pages can be created for the Net now. You can create documents online and not have to worry about saving it to a disc or flash drive. You can save them online. Google Docs and Open Office are probably the biggest two providers of this type of service. Since you're saving documents to on online server, you don't have to worry about carrying around discs or drives or going back to the same computer every time you need to work on a document.

Open Office seems to have more features, like drawing, but you have to download the software on every computer you use. So that could be a bit inconvenient. The type of program I use most is Publisher, and Google Docs doesn't really have anything close to it, yet. They're mostly for Word and Excel type documents. Reports and spreadsheets -- they make the business world go round.

My computer still has the Corel Office Suite on it (yes, it's old. I am aware), so I have been using .rtf a lot. I'm always asking what type of file it is that is being sent and always asking them to convert it to .rtf. It's rather annoying. But with online documents, I don't have to worry about such things. I can create, print and/or share my documents without having to worry about whether or not my computer can read it. As long as it can open up the Internet, it can open up the documents. So whenever Google Docs comes up with a Publisher-like program, I'm so there.