Three Year Update

It's been a looooong time! Between 2015 and 2018 I worked for a tourism company and as the increasing responsibilities grew along with my now 9 year old son, I found myself with less time to reflect on the information seeking and organizing aspects of my work and projects. Working for that company gave me loads of opportunities to learn about myself as well as learn how business information is/can be organized. We used a variety of applications for a variety of business operations, such as:

Reservations:
We used Google Calendar to organize the reservations and see what availability we had to meet additional reservation requests. In my 2.5ish years with the company (and the company was 9 years old when I joined), this system gave way to an online reservation system created by Peek Pro. (There was another provider that was considered, Fare Harbor, which from my estimation had a really solid database foundation, but the company went with Peek Pro and Peek was very supportive after the category 5 hurricane Maria struck Vieques, so they are good people over there.) Cool things this did was automate email confirmations, create alerts when over booking a specific tour and eventually easing multi tour reservations, making them much faster by capturing the contact and payment information in a cart. Oh, and allowing bookings to be made from home in the comfort of visitors' pajamas while we were asleep.

Tour Assignments (for the Guides):
At the beginning, this was a spreadsheet and a calendar and a phone. When the company moved to Peek Pro, this quickly morphed to automated text message alerts or app notifications as the manager (me) only had to click a button and the software took care of the rest. For guides with data/wifi capable phones, they only had to open their notifications to receive a link with all the information needed for their assignments.

Equipment and Fleet Inventory and Assignments
For our bicycles, snorkel gear, kayaks, paddleboards, lifevests, scuba gear, paddles, ratchet sets, etc, etc, we used Google Sheets on Google Drive for the longest time. The company was in the process of converting to an online rental procedure after Hurricane Maria, but due to a misunderstanding of how the database worked, it never got off the ground. And then the company sold the business to new owners, so we didn't really get to test the feature prior to the sale. I can say that using Google Sheets served our purpose..., but only if all the staff who processed reservations and checkouts actually used the sheet, so it was good about 75% of the time.

For our vehicles, we used Google Calendar to inform staff of which vehicle was in maintenance, which vehicle was being used by which activity, etc, until Peek came along and allowed us to include vehicle assignments to the tours. Another useful thing about Peek was that it pushed certain information to our Google Calendar, so for staff who were used to reading the Calendar, they could still get a lot of info there.

There was the issue of logging vehicle use and maintenance. We used paper forms. Only by "used," I mean to say that we didn't. I was in the process of converting forms to a Google Doc form that could be filled out in the cell phone, but then Maria struck and we didn't have cellular data for 4 months... or internet for 6ish months.

Communications
As with any company (and we, at our peek, were four locations with forty staff), communication was essential and one of our hardest things to do. We used Skype to send messages to retail staff across the stores. We used email for the managers. We used cell phone calls and texting for guides. Towards the end, I was holding monthly staff meetings, but really, we only had one yearly meeting with the owners, though the managers got together about every 2 months.

Time Sheets
I hate paper time sheets! You are gonna write that down, so that I can then collect it (if I can find it and if you actually submitted it) and enter the data into a spreadsheet, so then I can submit that and the man who holds the purse strings can enter it into another spreadsheet? Yeeeeeaaaaaaah... no thanks. I would have liked to have seen this feature become automated.

Retail
We used Microsoft Dynamics POS, which was installed to one computer at our main store. Being limited to one POS is a horrible way to process transactions. One computer for entering incoming inventory. One computer for printing labels. One computer for ringing up customers. One computer for pulling inventory reports. One computer for tracking staff purchases on accounts. You get the picture.

We were in the process of thinking about converting to another product that was cloud based and allowed a staff member to do inventory on the floor with a hand held device while another staff member was ringing a customer up at the register (and there was an optional register that could move around with a staff member). This service is popping up all over Vieques and I can't for the life of me remember what it is called.

Social Media / Marketing
Facebook, Instagram, Follow Up Emails, TripAdvisor, a website - all the time. YouTube, Yelp - some of the time. Google Ads, Facebook ads - all the time. Print ads in the local Vieques magazine, an airline magazine, the PR Tourism Company magazine, and a monthly newspaper for boaters- all the time.

Data Backup
A structured process for backing up data? Not that I could see.

Other Systems
There were business processes that were above my pay grade.

And that's what I remember at the moment. I hope to use this knowledge for good in the future. I certainly have a respect for organizational processes and flow of information in a large organization, and for the need for them.

Herons, from your calf to your chest

As an amateur birder and interpretive nature guide, I like to include information about the most common and the special birds we can see on my tours in Vieques. When I started studying the local birds a bit more I was surprised to find out that our group of herons range in size from 12 inches to 45 inches give or take a few.

It inspired me to create an info graphic comparing those birds to an "average" height person of 5'6" (66 inches). I collected the height information for the birds from the book Aves de Puerto Rico by Biaggi, published in 1970, and from the Cornell Institute's All About Birds page.

I then took some source photographs (off the Internet) and put them into Inkscape (the open source version of Illustrator) and I silhouetted them by drawing an outline, creating a path from the outline and then filling in the path with black. From there I created a chart, first using Open Office's Write program and overlayed the silhouettes on the chart's bars, proportionally re-sizing them by eye to the appropriate dimensions. I did fact check with my local FWS office regarding how the measuring of birds is done in field guides (from their feet to the crown of their head).

Afterwards I recreated the chart in Inkscape again so that the whole thing could be re-sized to whichever dimensions were needed without the image becoming pixelated (I saved it as a vector file: .SVG-plain so that it could be imported into Illustrator by another graphic designer).

And there you have it!

Feeling Smug b/c My Database Query Works

I'm feeling pretty smug over here!

After three days of reading forum posts about the OpenOffice Base program I finally figured out the correct syntax for a query to select and manipulate information based on a specific date range.

Base is the free, open source version of MS Office's Access.

It was the date range syntax that was throwing me off, because it didn't follow exactly the SQL syntax as espoused by the w3schools tutorials. It didn't follow Access's syntax. The forum post that finally answered my question: https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=72504

Thank you, bhilton for asking your question and all the volunteers for helping her to reach the answer.

The code that I was trying to write:

SELECT "Listing", COUNT("Nights") AS TotalReservation, SUM( "Nights" ) AS TotalNightsSold, AVG( "Nights" ) AS AvgNightsPerRes FROM "Reservations" WHERE "Date" BETWEEN '2014-01-01' AND '2014-12-31' GROUP BY "Listing"

To make a table which grouped info by vacation house rental and showed me the total number of reservations in 2014, the total number of nights booked in 2014, the average number of nights per reservation.

With more data (and really, who doesn't like data?), I could find out the average number of people per reservation and which geographical locations provide the most/least bookings.

This sort of info would be handy in creating projections for future reservations, focusing marketing efforts on types of groups (family vs. 20 somethings traveling together), and focusing marketing efforts on locations (such as either marketing heavily on the east coast to tap into existing infrastructure, or moving into new market areas to expand.

And finally, thank you Drexel professor, whose name I don't remember at this moment, for being such a punk about us perfecting our SQL in the database class. It came in handy.

Distinguishing Fauna by their Sound Waveform

Back in July, my son and I saw this really great episode of SciGirls called Frog Whisperers (#301) (it's embedded at the bottom) where the girls learned various techniques to recall a frog's song and match it to the species. One technique was to look at a visual representation of the call, or its waveform. I'm a visual learner, so it was cool see that.

Fast forward to September and the Vieques National Wildlife Refuge gave a talk titled Anfibios y Reptiles, where among other species, they talked about the three species of coquis that we have in Vieques (out of a total of 17 found in Puerto Rico). The biologist presenting the charla was able to whistle the sounds of the frogs and toads, but I wanted something more permanent for recall purposes.

Below, you'll find my notes for the segment on the coquies in a garbled mix of Spanish and English, along with audio recordings which I found at CoquiPR.com and the waveform for each, which I produced from screenshots of the imported audio files using the open source audio editor Audacity.

Three Species of Coqui in Vieques

1) Coqui Comun- the largest of the three at approximately 1.4", it's named for its call, co-KI

This is what it's call looks like:

Here's what the coqui comun sounds like:

(audio courtesy LJ Villanueva-Rivera under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-Compartir Igual License. See his article on the Common Coqui for more information.)

2) Coqui Churri- almost half the size of the coqui comun at .76" and makes a ki-ki-ki sound as well as a chu-RI, the wave forms of which look like:





Here's what the Churri sounds like (a common coqui can be heard in the back ground):

(audio courtesy LJ Villanueva-Rivera under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-Compartir Igual License. See his article on the Churi Coqui for more information.) 

3) Coqui Pitito- the smallest of the three found in Vieques. It is .6" and is recognized by two curves on its back that look like a pair of parenthesis.

It's call is the least punctuated, but the most constant, kind of a p-riiiiiiiiii. No clue if this waveform represents one coqui, or several overlapping calls made by more than one frog:

And it sounds like:

(audio courtesy LJ Villanueva-Rivera under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-Compartir Igual License. See his article on the Pitito Coqui for more information.) 

So there you have it, three ways- verbal description, visual waveform and audio file- to learn how to distinguish a few fauna of Vieques. A good information professional can help you to find and create all three information sources!

Enjoy the SciGirls video.




(minute 5:32 if you want to jump straight to the part of the sound waves).