Hello from sunny Vancouver - and boy is it sunny. We came expecting autumn weather and have had nothing but blue skies and sunshine. On the left is the central library in Vancouver city and although I didn't have time to visit it, I could see through the windows that they have an incredible selection of material. The languages section covered about fifteen stacks and had every language on the planet from the look of it. The building is very new and impressive.



On the right is one of the local libraries on Vancouver Island. I did have time to visit this one and it was similar to one of our branches. However, their equivalent of our LearnNet consisted of four old computers in a row with plywood partitions, so they seem to be a bit behind as far as technology is concerned. They have a similar system where you can return books at any branch and the libraries cover a few hundred kilometres, so lots of driving for their 'Phil'.

Apart from looking at libraries, we have been to islands and beaches and mountains. If anyone visits Vancouver Island make sure to take the chair-lift to the top of Mount Washington - the views are awesome.

The end - or the beginning

Definitely the beginning - there is so much I didn't have time to explore, especially the image generators which look like a lot of fun. One of the things I've found really interesting is the connections between all the various sites and how easy it is to take stuff from one to the other.

Probably the least impressive for me were Technorati, del.icio.us, and Rollyo - but who knows they may come in handy to help a customer one day. I've also started finding out other ways of bookmarking and have now downloaded Firefox 3 which gives you the option of just tagging your favourites and keeping them as unsorted bookmarks. You can then just search for tags.
The power of blogging was brought home to me by a comment from the support person at Zoho within hours of me mentioning on my blog that I had problems using Zoho Writer!
Kindle really excited me, and I'll be having a look for one in Hong Kong at the end of my holiday - although I think the price will still be prohibitive.
Flickr is now part of my life and I will be loading my holiday photographs on there as we go.
So many things - well 23 things - and most of them really interesting.

The realisation that I have learnt quite a lot came to me when I was chatting to a colleague at the Customer Service course about some of the things we have covered and the facilitator told me I sounded like an expert! I'm not of course, and there's still lots to learn, but at least I sound knowledgeable now. So that was my pat on the back.

Finally, will the learning document still be available after we have finished the exercise? And what about all the good ideas that the participants have thrown up - are these being collated?