[Katrina-IT-Volunteers] Sunday night notes

[Nathan]

Here are my thoughts and observations from working 7-10 last night  
(Sep 18th).

First, I had previously volunteered on Sep 5th and noticed many  
differences since then.  Overall, the feel of the computer area has  
definitely shifted from work to play as others also observed.  There  
were three of us volunteering at the computers, and I think one  
experienced volunteer would've been adequate; I don't know about  
other shifts, but the need for help was very light from 7-10p Sunday.

The bulk of our time (and energy) went to helping younger children  
find games online.  One child repeatedly said "I want action games",  
but didn't know the name of a specific game or website.  We tried  
showing him the action games category at the Cartoon Network site,  
but he didn't want any of those.  (At this point, I felt a  
frustration similar to dealing with the marketing department at my  
work.)  Finally, one of the other volunteers suggested that he find  
someone else playing a game like the one he wanted, and we were able  
to settle on a Dragonball-Z game.

We only had one adult who needed computer help during the shift.  He  
came to us a little after 9:30p for help searching for someone.  The  
browsers are set to open the katrinasafe.org site but it wasn't  
functional (the submit button didn't do anything).  Anyone else have  
more information about this?  I see that the submit button uses  
JavaScript and I've noticed that the machines don't fully support the  
JavaScript functionality on Google Maps, so maybe the Evacuee search  
is broken due to a lack of support for JavaScript on our browsers.   
Anyways I switched to the ICRC Family Links site instead.  (On a side  
note, I saw that ICRC will be transferring their database to the  
American Red Cross on Sep 21st.)  We were eventually able to gather  
and write down some information from other search sites (Yahoo! and  
MSNBC), but one of the police cut the power to the computers as we  
began further searching with the new information.

     Nathan.