Good (G)reef celebrations!!

Shamelessly plagiarising from Charlie Brown, it was a good event Saturday, in which more than 400 people (adults and children) participated. The talks were all well presented (I thought this was my best talk to date), and covered a wide range of volunteer effort. So much so that our special guests, the crew from the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation ship SV Infinity, were suitably impressed with the enthusiasm and hard work put in by everyone there.

Aside from the interaction with visitors to our booths, I also learned several somethings new today from the conservation and IT guru, Siva – like how to use Twitter, and linking it to my Facebook account; and how to use forms in Google Documents. Siva also introduced me to Posterous, a new blog that accepts email and converts it to a blog entry automatically.

I’m not sure if this old dinosaur wants to be *so* connected … but it was interesting to finally know how to do the stuff that I’d been having difficulty with (like Google Documents). Was a most productive 45mins on the computer next to Siva, before getting back into the fray of the event.

By the end of the day, I was exhausted – my back and feet ached, I was hungry and a headache was starting to build up (probably from not drinking enough water, despite the 4 cans of 100plus, pilfered from Ria’s stash for volunteers).

The dismantling of the hall was much much faster (30-45 minutes) than the setting up (3-4 hours) – it always amazes me how much easier it is to “destroy” something than it is to build it up.

All in all, a good dive … er, I mean … day.

Other resources:
Blue Water Volunteers
Singapore Celebrates the Reef
My Flickr photos of the event