Some of you may know that I have been looking for a used car for many months now. In fact, I have visited many dealers of Used Cars locally but have yet to find one that suits my budget and meets my needs. I know I am fussy but then even used cars don’t come cheap enough for me that is why I have to be as discerning as possible when it comes to shopping for sometime as large as a car!

I was told to check online for Used Cars to get a better variety. I wonder why I never thought of it before! A long time ago, I was introduced to Auto Guide so that was where I went to start my search for used cars.

This site is rather comprehensive in its database of used cars. While I have been to a few used cars sites only, I find that Auto Guide is very friendly to search for our dream used cars. You didn’t think that used cars can be our dream cars too, did you?

Through Auto Guide, I was able to quickly narrow down my choices based on my car manufacturer, car model and year it was manufactured and one that fits my budget and also in my vicinity. I did not see a point in looking for a car that suits me only to find out later that it is half a world away, so to speak.

In any case, I would continue to search Auto Guide to see if there are new additions to their used car database before making a final decision.

This morning, I saw this picture on Google Search and don’t really recognise what special day it is. Apparently, it is Google’s ninth birthday. Happy Birthday, Google!

Well, Google wasn’t born yet when I started to get online and it is a surprise to realise that it has been more than nine years since my first foray into the World Wide Web. Has it been this long already? I know you must be thinking that I am quite old but I swear I am not that old! I started young, OK? 😀

Back to the Google art celebrating its ninth birthday, can you make out what the “g” is. I think that it’s a bunch of firecrackers but to me, it totally looks like a bunch of falling candy! Hahaha

I got to know of GroupHug.Us from Patrick Burt, who left me a comment recently at my post One Million Love Messages. I hopped over to Patrick’s blog and he is running a blog for web people. I think I qualify as a web person since I spend the better part of the day and night online 😀

So I went to GroupHug.Us to see what it’s all about. At first, just looking at the name “Group Hug”, I thought that this is another lovey dovey site. In fact, it is an avenue for people to make confessions anonymously. Since this site allows anonymous submissions, I tend to think that half the entries here were made up.

Even so, it’s not easy to tear myself from that site, I tell you. It’s kinda interesting to read people’s private thoughts openly, the love, the hate, the jealousy and other emotions, even though they may not be true.

After reading a few pages, I wonder why the name “Group Hug” was used. It’s like, “Hey, I’ve got this ugly thought about someone!”

AAwww it is ok, nevermind, don’t worry, we still love you. *group hug*

I am in-charged of the employees’ union of my company and I have always wondered if there is a way for me to better manage the membership database. Today, I came across a Member Database Software by Wild Apricot which could be my solution.

According to the website of Wild Apricot, this software allows us to transfer our existing database to this program easily without manual input. What I like about it is that we can specify specific database fields and only have what are relevant to our group activities. The previous one that I tried did not allow me to customize my layout and I ended up with a lot of blank fields which I could not edit or delete.

Another feature that I like is that I can easily search for members because the search results keep narrowing down as I type. This feature helps me a lot since we have a few hundred members and I used to search through my records one by one and it was very tedious.

With Wild Apricot, not only can I search through my records seamlessly, I could also sort them according to membership levels of involvement, groups and branches and send out email to these specific groups or personalized messages to individual members. Also, I can keep the list private and only allow certain key people access it.

Overall, I can see how it could improve the way I have been managing my ever growing list of members and I hope that once I have shown this to my superiors, they will agree that this is what we need to keep track of our members. At least, there’s no more excuse of not being able to track down who hasn’t paid up his membership renewal fee!