Nearly 12,000 people use library computers per month

Found some info for you! Hope you will enjoy it!

The staff of the Terrebonne Parish Library System and its Board of Control would like to wish Terrebonne Parish residents a Merry Christmas and happy holidays. Thanks for making 2009 successful.

With approximately 60,000 people visiting Terrebonne Parish public libraries monthly, 12,000 people per month using the public computers and 10,000 people per month accessing the Library System’s Web site, the Library System is apparently essential to many people in the parish. The public library is the anchor or heart of a community and the statistics prove that the Library System is vital.

For the residents who haven’t visited the Terrebonne Parish Library System, put a stop on top of your 2010 resolution list. You’re going to be surprised at what today’s library offers. Libraries are not depositories of books any more, but are community centers for learning, recreation and entertainment.

Books are still the primary focus, but books now come in many different formats. The Library System has books-on-CDs, digital books and e-books on the Web site. Technology is only progressing and the library is trying to provide the best for Terrebonne Parish by keeping up with the technology surge.

If reading or listening to a book isn’t your thing, the Library System has DVDs, magazines, public Internet access, computer classes, copy machines, fax services, and approximately 1,500 adult and children’s activities a year.

All Terrebonne Parish library branches have wireless access, so feel free to visit with your lap top to work on business or research. All staff members are trained to help with Internet and computer services.

The Library System also provides outreach services. Every birth mother delivering in a hospital in Terrebonne Parish receives a Learn-Thru-Love package with a children’s book and pamphlets about the Library System and the importance of reading to children. Another service is Baby Bookworm. A book is donated to any library branch in honor of a child being born in this parish. The Library System provides story-telling services to many schools and is working with day-care centers to enrich reading to pre-schoolers.

Assisted-living and nursing-home facilities are visited by library staff with items to check out and programming for the residents.

ACTIVITIES

A family day Christmas is scheduled for 2 p.m. Monday at the Montegut Branch Library, 1135 La. 55. You can listen to a reading of “The Night Before Christmas,” make a tree ornament and have a picture taken with Santa.

A snowmen-making craft workshop is scheduled for 2 p.m Tuesday at the Grand Caillou Branch Library, 200 Badou Drive, Dulac.

The Library System’s second-annual New Year’s Eve Bash for fourth- through sixth-graders is scheduled from 9:30 a.m. to noon Dec. 31 at the Terrebonne Parish Main Library, 151 Library Drive, Houma. To register your child, call 876-58612.

The movie “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” is scheduled to be shown at 4 p.m. Wednesday at the Grand Caillou Branch Library.

LANGUAGE

The Library System subscribes to Mango Language, a database that teaches you a foreign language. Mango Language is located on the Library System’s Web site and can be remotely accessed. The system has added more language instruction. You can learn Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Hebrew, Korean, Vietnamese, Irish, Thai, Hindi and Tagalog. Other languages added include English as a second language, French, Italian, German, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese.

WEB SITE

During the holidays, log onto the site to keep your children entertained. The Tumblebooks database will entertain them with stories read aloud, while at the same time helping them with their reading skills.

One of the databases available on the Library System’s site is Learning Express. When you access the Library System’s Web site, on the left is a list of categories; select online databases, then test preparation. Learning Express is linked on this site. Learning Express can help all school-aged children, from elementary to high school, with math- and reading-improvement tests. The database also has college and vocational school test preparation, along with the citizenship test. There is an area for résumé and cover letter help.

The test-preparation database also has some LEAP tests that can help students prepare for these big tests.

CLOSED

The Library System will be closed Thursday through Dec. 27 in observance of Christmas and to have carpets cleaned. Regular hours will resume Dec. 28. The Library System will be open until 1 p.m. Dec. 31 and closed Jan. 1.

DISPLAYS

Emile Hebert is exhibiting his Pan Handle Pete collection. The collection includes Western paraphernalia of old West, Hollywood West, and an array of model antique and western guns. Holsters, boots, hats, whips and replica rifles are included. The exhibit is on display through the end of the year in the main lobby of the Main Library.

RingCentral changes their site design!

Hi guys!

Got some news for you! Today I found that RingCentral have changed their homepage design!
It is more comfortable and easy to use than the previous one, I think.
Now it is easy to find necessary services and it seems to me that many useless info is gone from the homepage, but maybe it is just correctly placed now?
Due to the new color pallette of the page it became more comfortable to read and orient.
As for the main menu, it was also optimized and made like a dropdown menu, everything was sorted by categories, it allows to find necessary info by simply choosing right category tabs.
Fonts, keys and distance between headers were increased and it also makes the homepage more comfortable to use!
Sign up forms are united now and the sign up button was moved to the right part of the page and increased and is more noticeable now.
Also, I would like to note that the new design is modern and trendy, and it is so important in nowadays due to a huge number of sites.
It is clear that the site design change is the correct and necessary company step, because of the specificity of the product, many potential and existing clients come to the site to find information about the offered services and it is necessary to make the homepage maximally informative and comfortable. I think they achieved it!

You can find new design here. I hope this article will be interesting for you. I will be glad to receive your comments!

Laid-Off Lawyer Decides to Start a Solo Career

Found this story and decided that you will be interested in it. So, enjoy!

My story is not very different than the next one. The difference is that I have chosen to share it. Through this column, I hope to influence at least one person who feels or has felt the same way I did to not only do something about it, but to do something about it today. Now is the right time!

It was early 2009, and I was a young lawyer with a Philadelphia law firm. I had two clients I could call my own, a few thousand dollars saved in the bank, and a lot of experienced people I trusted offering discouraging words about the economy and business. About a month earlier, I had undergone major reconstructive knee surgery on my left knee, which meant that several months of an intense and time-consuming rehabilitative program lay ahead of me. I had been married for eight months, and my wife had just been accepted to a doctorate program that meant she would be in school for the next five to seven years.

I'll never forget the date: March 2, 2009. I showed up to work that day, and was laid off for the first time in my life.

On my drive home, I made a few of the expected phone calls to close friends, family members and colleagues to share the news about my job loss. I was a bit surprised with myself, though -- during these conversations, I really was not feeling all that bad about it.

Granted, I had just lost a cushy, six-figure position at a respectable law firm that impressed friends and family members when I spoke about my job at Thanksgiving dinners. But was it what I really wanted? Was I happy? Did I see a long-term future for myself working in the traditional law firm environment? Basically, was what seemed so impressive to others actually satisfying to me?

I realized I had never really taken the time out of my busy days to think meaningfully and deeply about the answers to these fundamental questions. Now that I was laid off, and for at least the foreseeable days had very little to do, I saw that I had some time to self-reflect on my years of private practice since graduating from law school in 2002. When I arrived home, it really only took a walk of my two dogs for me to make a decision.

I wanted to open my own law firm. I had no idea where to start though. Missing was a business plan, professionally drafted and mapped with a timeline and list of everything that I needed to do. If I was going to do this, I was going to have to learn, and do it on the fly.

Naturally, as I walked the dogs, my immediate thoughts focused on the fun stuff. I thought about what to call my firm and how to format my letterhead. I envisioned my firm logo and business card. I wondered about a Web site and domain name, office space and equipment, and where to hang my proverbial shingle. I know I share these thoughts with many of my friends and colleagues disenchanted by BigLaw or private practice at firms.

But after those initial thoughts, I realized the fun stopped there. I could feel reality begin to set in. Was I ready to do this? Was it the right time? I spent a lot of time on that first dog walk wondering.

I wondered so much that I realized I had forgotten to do something I probably should have done as soon as I was laid off ... call my wife and tell her I lost my job!

Despite the delay, the phone call went much better than I expected. Across the country, both within the legal profession and outside of it, our good friends were falling victim to layoffs, so that made it easier. This was nothing of which to be ashamed.

I also wondered so much about whether now was the right time that I actually wondered myself out of the idea of starting my own firm.

When I got home from walking the dogs and finished the phone call to my wife, I parked myself at a local coffee shop, committed to immediately starting up the old job search again.

I searched job post after job post. I remember thinking everything seemed so familiar and the same to me. However, I continued to go through the motions because searching for a job was comfortable to me, something that I had done before and knew how to do. Detached from the process, I remember I actually applied for a few positions.

After about two hours, I stopped my job search. What made me stop was when I actually read one of the job postings. I felt awkward. This was not what I wanted. Not at all. I could not do this to myself again. I closed my laptop and went home.

Dissatisfaction turned to pride. I sat on my couch and started to think about the fun stuff of opening my own firm again. I went to vista.com and started designing my business card. Of course I had to make up the names and the office location and the phone numbers, but that did not matter at the time. I also read a few blogs and checked out some Web sites of solo practitioners to get some ideas. Professionally, these few hours were more fun than I had had for a really long time.

When my wife came home from work that night she saw my eyes glued to the computer screen. We laugh about this now, but at the time, she thought I was in the midst of an intense job search. I could not help but smile when she asked me how I was doing searching for a new job. I told her it was going well, but my smile gave it away.

She walked over to the computer and saw one of my admittedly lame attempts at designing a business card. We laughed about it together. I will never, ever forget that moment. She knew I had made my decision to go solo, and that there was no turning back, and she supported me completely. I don't think I could have moved forward without that support.

I felt that I would need some structure to the next few days, so I decided to make that list that everyone always tells you to make but you never usually find the time to make -- the list of "all the people you know."

I did not complete the list. After writing down enough names to fill up one sheet of legal-sized paper, I started to make phone calls to some of these people. My plan was to share with them the news that I had lost my job, hint that I wanted to start my own firm, and then see where the conversation led me.

One of the first phone calls I made was to Stuart Leon, a lawyer and neighborhood friend about 15 years older than me whom I know from our days coaching youth basketball. When I think of a happy lawyer, I think of Stu. He started his own firm years ago, and I wanted to pick his brain. I called him the day after my layoff, and that night, he took me out to a local tavern for some sandwiches and stories.

At dinner, Stu wrote down on a napkin six or seven things I needed to do before I opened for business. I don't remember all of them exactly. One was malpractice insurance. Another was finding office space. A third was telephone and fax service. A fourth was a computer and printer. A fifth was clients.

The point was that I needed someone to make it simple for me. I will never forget that napkin -- it made it all seem so much more manageable.

The next day, I looked again at the napkin. In my head, I began some simple calculations. I wanted to see how much rent cost for an office. But first I needed to decide where I wanted office space -- in the suburbs or in the city.

So on day two, I made quite a few phone calls inquiring about all different types of office space options. I learned about virtual office space and shared office space. I then called a few friends with their own offices to see if they had any available space. The most affordable quote was for a space east of Broad Street in Philadelphia at $400 per month. I visited the place so I had a ballpark understanding as to what $400 could get me. I realized this was probably the lowest price I could find.

I went through the same process for malpractice insurance. I called a few colleagues and asked them for information on their carriers. The first call I made was to Minnesota Mutual. One of my friends told me that for first-year firms, their rates were very competitive. The cost of malpractice insurance always scared me, but I was really surprised and pleased when the quote was for about $550 a year. I called a few lawyers to make sure I provided myself adequate coverage.

Now, just the second day after losing my job, I knew that between rent and malpractice insurance alone, I was looking at monthly expenses of around $1,200 to $1,500. I looked at the napkin Stu gave me that night, with so many thoughts swirling in my head about what to do next.

The next morning, I played with some numbers to see what I needed to bring in each month in order to break even with just my two most basic expenses of rent and insurance. I knew that there would be other immediate costs, like a computer and printer, phone and Internet service, business cards, business privilege fees and taxes that I needed to budget for as well.

The daunting and mounting start-up costs did not deter me, however. It made me more creative. I was going to find a way to make this work.

It was then, about a week after the layoff, that I decided to spend the rest of March, my first month unemployed, scheduling lunch dates with friends and colleagues. I was going to put a brief hold on taking steps to open up my doors immediately, and hoped for an open date of April 1.

In the meantime, I wanted to pick as many brains as I possibly could from those who have successfully done this before. I wanted to collect many more napkins like the one that sat on my nightstand from Stu.

Improving Efficiencies with Virtual Fax over IP

Hey! Found this and decided to share with you! Enjoy!

Fax-over-IP, or FoIP, is seeing strong adoption in the enterprise and the SMB, as it helps companies lower their communications costs, boost employee productivity, improve customer service, increase security, adhere to regulatory compliance rules and reduce their carbon footprint.
FoIP helps companies cut their communications costs, as it uses VoIP, or Voice-over-IP technology for transmission of faxed documents. That means companies no longer need to use traditional phone lines to send and receive faxed documents.

Not only does FoIP allow faxes to be sent over the public Internet, or dedicated network, it also greatly reduces transmission time. Anyone who has used traditional fax is aware of how long it can take to scan, send, and then print a multi-page document over regular phone lines.

With FoIP, documents are sent as attachments to recipients’ email inboxes – however unlike regular email these attachments are secure and verifiable. This means users no longer need to get up and down from their desks in order to send and receive faxes (this helps save time and boosts employee productivity). In addition, FoIP enables users to send and receive multiple faxes simultaneously.

Another important advantage of FoIP is security: With traditional fax, documents often sit at the fax machine for all eyes to see – whereas with FoIP, only the intended recipient can open and read the faxed document.

Yet another key advantage of FoIP is that it is a true green solution: Unlike traditional fax, where every page of every document is printed, scanned and printed again, the user decides whether or not to print the received document. This helps companies save considerably on paper and toner costs.

In addition, FoIP helps companies save considerably on energy consumption: Unlike traditional fax, where you need to have a fax machine on every floor, of every office, or perhaps for each and every department, FoIP can be facilitated using single fax server that delivers faxes organization-wide. And because traditional fax machines are more mechanical in nature (they have electric motors, scanners and moving parts), they tend to use much more energy than a server-based system.

For all these reasons, FoIP allows organizations to get more value out of their VoIP infrastructure investment.

During the recent webinar, “Reduce Costs and Improve Efficiencies with Virtual Fax over IP,” sponsored by Biscom and Dialogic, John Lane, VP of technical support for Biscom, and Robert J. Moran Jr., fax product line director for Dialogic Corporation, discussed the many efficiencies FoIP can bring to an organization – and in particular the advantages it brings in virtualized computing environments.

Specifically they discussed how Biscom and Dialogic are helping enterprise customers leverage their VoIP networks in order manage all of their fax communications on a single platform. By turning to virtualization, organizations can make more efficient use of their existing hardware in order to reduce costs and improve efficiency. They also discussed how a virtualized FoIP solution can play an important role an organization’s business continuity plan.

Dialogic is a leading provider of intelligent fax technology that supports corporate networks in various stages of transition, ranging from purely TDM, to hybrid, to pure VoIP networks. Dialogic is a market leader in fax platforms (including its popular Brooktrout line), offering a robust feature set and a broad range of fax and FoIP platforms in both hardware and software configurations.
Biscom, meanwhile, is well-known for its fax server and hosted fax service solutions offering unsurpassed reliability and innovative technology, as well as a highly responsive and knowledgeable in-house customer support staff.

RingCentral's Phone, Fax Services Boost Business for Reservations, Sales Firm

Found this. Hope you will enjoy it!

Being in the reservation and sales services business requires a top-notch communication system. Especially when it comes to phone and fax technology.

When ITS Magellan Services, a company that offers reservation and sales services to more than 700 independent hotels in about 30 countries, needed to streamline its operation, it turned to RingCentral, a San Mateo, Calif.-based provider of Internet phone systems for small businesses.

The company, which has five employees in the United States, one in Italy and three in South America, needed a way to separate the calls it received from hotels, which often have questions about software, and the calls it received from consumers looking to book a room. The company was challenged with sending the calls to the appropriate person.

“Our phone line provider could not give us the services that we wanted—caller attendant, voicemail, e-mail to fax and fax to e-mail—without buying an enormously expensive phone system for $20,000, $30,000 [or] $40,000 and we just didn’t want to do that,” Ed Brill, ITS Magellan’s president, said. “So I did some research, foundRingCentral and we tried it.”

RingCentral officials helped ITS Magellan Services set up separate extensions for each function, including new reservations, hotel support and sales. For example, calls for new reservations now are routed to the company’s Fort Lauderdale offices, while accounting, sales and business development are sent to New York.

In addition, RingCentral’s Internet faxing services help ITS Magellan address high volume of incoming faxes.

“Before, we had paper city,” Brill said. “You hoped nobody would light a cigarette for fear of fire, but the faxes now come as e-mails. We can receive faxes and forward them immediately to the local office that is responsible for that function.

Brill said RingCentral’s fax service has dramatically decreased the need to print material – helping the company to go green - and has helped the firm keep up with its correspondence in a timely way. RingCentral’sInternet fax capability reduces waste of paper and delivers the fax no matter where the person is.

“RingCentral is really a good solution for us because it gave us all the services, all the bells and whistles you would get from a big phone company and a big phone system but without the investment,” Brill said. “It’s working beautifully and we keep adding more services on every month. We’re not the largest account with RingCentral, but we are probably one of the most satisfied.”

Will social networks kill Google? A Facebook founder (naturally) says yes

And what do you think of it? Do you think this is true or false?

When I wrote a post a month ago detailing why I thought Facebook could really hurt Google, lots of readers scoffed at my logic. So I was relieved to see that Sean Parker agrees with me. Parker, a babyfaced wunderkind tech enterpreneur, played key early roles in Facebook and, before that, music filesharing site Napster. He gave the most provocative presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week -- laying out, in broad brushstrokes, how and why he thinks Facebook will kill Google.

Parker believes, in short, that businesses that connect people are worth more than businesses that collect data. Google collects data; Facebook connects people. So network effects will go to Facebook, and not Google.
"Network effects"? Think of the term this way: With every additional member who joins Facebook, the value of Facebook increases to everyone who uses it. Each node on the network brings additional information and additional capabilities. The classic example of this phenomenon, known as Metcalfe's Law, is the fax machine: a worthless device until a critical mass of consumers had them and could make faxing common practice. In an earlier era, the success of the telephone was similarly dependent on the size of the network.

Parker argues that network effects work on the Internet as well. He cites PayPal, eBay, and Skype as network-effects businesses that facilitate connections between users, rather than collecting or sorting information.

Still, none of them have come close to either the revenues or usage of Google. So why would Google fear Facebook?

Two reasons. One, because any given user's switching cost from one search engine to another is close to zero. Google has a great product, but the entire world could switch to Microsoft's Bing search engine in a split-second with little consequence. But Facebook has insanely high switching costs. After you've built a network of friends, uploaded pictures, and used Facebook Connect to sign up for dozens of other sites, the idea of ditching it all for some new service is quite painful.

This is precisely why, even after Google came out with Gmail and a much higher amount of free memory, Yahoo! did not see a significant exodus from its own online email service. Yahoo offered less than Google, but switching from one email provider to another has extremely high costs to users, who loathe the idea of exporting emails, sifting through emails, organizing emails, and praying they haven't deleted emails. But switching from Google's search engine to Yahoo's is neither difficult nor particularly painful.

Another reason to fear Facebook is that search is increasingly a social act. When my wife and I were searching for a new pediatrician, I did a Google search and a Facebook inquiry. Google brought up a bunch of links on sites of varying quality that purported to rank physicians -- fair enough -- but my Facebook query got me some excellent recommendations from people I knew. I was more comfortable with Facebook's suggestions, because they came from people I knew, at least tangentially, and because I knew the information was relatively current. A Google search gives no guarantee of whether the information is current, nor of the motivations behind the strangers who provide it.

Go Green with RingCentral's Eco-Friendly Fax Service

Some news about RingCentral! Enjoy!

At a time when the economic climate is especially tough, the “going green” movement has become the “in” thing for enterprises that both want to spend wisely and lower their impact on the environment.

One technology, in particular, that is growing in popularity is Internet fax services, according to RingCentral, a San Mateo, Calif.-based provider of Internet phone systems for small businesses.With it, companies can send and receive faxes through the Internet without a fax machine. And since users receive documents online, they can read them on from their monitors.

Here’s the best part. Users can decide whether or not to print the fax, helping them save paper, ink, hardware, electricity and the impact on mother Earth.

“Two things really help our customers to not only be eco friendly, but save money and provide and better level of service to their customers,” Praful Shah,RingCentral’s ( News - Alert) vice president of strategy, told TMCnet in an interview. “First, enabling employees to work efficiently from different locations, like home offices, [helps them] avoid necessary travel. Second, our Internet fax capability automatically delivers all incoming faxes as attachments via e-mail that dramatically reduces waste of paper, and at the same time delivers the fax no matter where the person is.”

Beyond the feel-good environmental benefits of Internet fax, the technology offers significant savings, RingCentral said in a recent blog. For example, RingCentral’s most popular service is a hosted cloud-based business phone system plan called "RingCentral Professional, which of offers auto-receptionist, multiple extensions, voice mail boxes and Internet fax starting at $9.99 a month.

Shah said Internet fax is “significantly cost effective” and also helps users improve their efficiency.

“A business does need a separate fax line,” he said. “There is no need to buy a fax machine, no need to buy paper, and most important, faxes get delivered to wherever the recipient may be, rather than near a fax machine.”

RingCentral Fax over Internet service is easy to use. Users compose and send a fax online to any fax machine in the U.S., Canada, or international destination using RingCentral’s Internet fax software interface. Faxes can also be sent from any e-mail account,Microsoft ( News - Alert) Office program, or any Windows program.