Collab-Or-Ate

I was reading How to Create a Successful Web Site For Nothing (or Almost Nothing) in today’s WSJ, and my jaw dropped at this paragraph:

There’s one more free and easy way to improve the design of your site — using HTML programming code. Fortunately, you don’t need to have programming skills to use HTML. All you need to know is that a block of HTML — essentially, a bunch of gobbledygook words and symbols — can add extra features to your site.

I guess they didn’t have room for the 3 sentences it would take to explain what HTML is, but dismissing it as “gobbledygook” seems a little extreme. The section in the article about how to get your website found by search engines was actually kind of useful. No gobbledygook required.

After three months of no updates and then some concentrated multimedia complaining (phone, email, web, fax), I’ve been informed by British Airways that “the check is in the mail.” I’m being reimbursed for my expenses during my 3 weeks of no luggage. (Except for the $80 phone charger I bought and then left in some hotel. bummer.) Time to plan my next trip (with carry-on)!

Only a month away!

Walking through the Frankfurt airport I couldn’t help but stop in wonder at this advertisement. There is no diversity in age, color, or gender and apparently that should make me want to invest my money with them?


In case you didn’t get a good look at those names and faces…

I just got home from a long trip. It included my passport expiring while I flew over the Atlantic, my luggage vanishing into thin air after 10 days of being told it would arrive “tomorrow,” and a severely delayed Italian train causing me to end up spending the night at an airport motel in Frankfurt, Germany. Although I love to travel, this time I have never been so glad to return home!





A few things I learned on this trip to Europe:

1. Not all airport immigration officers or airline check-in agents check the expiration dates on passports. I got through Boston and Frankfurt and to the UK border (at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5) before anyone noticed that my passport expired the day before. (Technically it was valid when I took off on March 30th, and invalid when I landed March 31st.)




2. Apparently the airline that lets on a passenger with an expired passport gets fined £2000 ($US 4000).




3. You aren’t supposed to travel internationally with a passport expiring within 6 months, but trust me: you can definitely fly like this and no one will make any comments about it.




4. You can get an “emergency passport” made within a day at a US Consulate office. Bring your passport application and passport photos that comply with US passport photo requirements (not the requirements of the country you are in) and a credit card. If you are in this situation, hopefully you are in a country where they are polite and the office is open at a time when you are able to get there. (For me, this was getting to Edinburgh on a Thursday between 9 and noon. And they were very polite about it.) An emergency passport is valid for 1 year.




5. When an airline loses your luggage, the rules about reimbursement are very shady and ever changing. The main thing I’ve learned is there is a limit to how much they will reimburse.




6. Apparently the only items in your luggage the airline will reimburse are clothes and toiletries. Not cameras, electronics or perishables. What’s up with that?? My poor Nikon D40 is what I really care about. I also had 8lbs of Bit O’ Honey in the bag, but that’s another story.




7. Primark, in the UK, is my new favorite store — the clothes are trendy and awesomely inexpensive. It is like H&M, but much cheaper! Have to admit though, my new wardrobe is already falling apart, but it looked cool for that 1 week…




8. It is so much easier to travel when you don’t have luggage! And after living this way for almost 3 weeks, I now believe one does not need more than 2 pairs of pants and 2 pairs of shoes, no matter what the purpose of your trip. I’ve heard that before, but now I will live it.




9. Mainland Europe is so over the shoes and liquids thing. When I went through airport security, all I needed to do was take my laptop out of my bag and take off my coat. What a treat!




10. The rumors are true: Italian trains do not run on time. A 2-hour train trip from Venice to Florence took 4.5 hours and at one point the train was actually moving backwards. I learned this is not considered a good excuse for missing your flight, according to your German airline. So I’ve learned that you should not rely on Italian transportation to get you to your airplane on time. Next time, build in at least a day buffer.




11. After spending much time in UK, Italian and German airports, I have to say the pastries are better in Germany’s, the coffee is better in Italy’s (duh), and mmmm, well, they are good at losing your bags at Heathrow. Another observation is that it is easier to buy a replacement phone charger in Germany, but it is half the price in the UK. I couldn’t find one in Florence’s airport.
    
    

12. The other rumors are true: the Dollar is doing horribly against the British Pound and the Euro. So if you are in the US, I advise you drop what you are doing right now and go shopping! (Now if only we had Primark…)

After all this negativity, I have to say, the trip wasn’t all bad: the first conference was interesting, the second conference was stimulating and fun to see lots of friends, and traveling afterwards in Italy with Mike was exciting as always. I also had fabulous meals throughout Italy.

And I got a camera phone picture of my new favorite store:

If you are like me, during this week between Christmas and New Years, you are spending some time reflecting on the past year and thinking a bit about the next year. If you are, then have I got a website for you! FutureMe.org! FutureMe allows you to write an email to your future self. You write yourself a note, set a delivery date in the future (at least 1 year into the future), and then you promptly forget what you wrote. Then when the date arrives, you get an unexpected blast from the past.

I’ve been using FutureMe.org for years, for all sorts of future-related emails. It is always an excellent surprise to get these messages. I just got an email today that I wrote last Christmas about how nice the holiday with my family had been. My favorite, and most unexpected, email arrived on my PhD graduation day. I had written a note several years beforehand of both congratulations and encouragement, hedging my bets that maybe I was graduating, but maybe I wasn’t, and that was A-O-K.

Happy 2008! And send off a message to the future today!

Do you read as much as you wish you did? Do you pretend that you’ve read more than you have?

I’m not going to hide anymore. I recently, openly confessed that, except for during that rushed last moment before a paper is due and I don’t have any post-millennium “related works” in the related works section, I haven’t read an academic paper this year.

I also haven’t been reading books. A month ago I hauled off a pile of (presumably) wonderful non-fiction books to the used bookstore that I hadn’t touched. I’m in a bookclub, where we read one fiction book a month. I haven’t even purchased the last four books.

(So you don’t think I’m illiterate, I’ll also confess that I read, well skim, the WSJ and the NYTimes everyday, and I justed finished a historical novel, Loving Frank. So it isn’t like I’m totally not reading, it is just that I don’t read nearly as much as I wish I did.)

Last week I read a review of yet-another-book-I-won’t-read called “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.” And since I read the review, I feel qualified to give my opinion on the book without having read it. It sounds great! Apparently the main gist is:

Not to worry, Mr. Bayard counsels. Just because one hasn’t read a book doesn’t mean that one cannot talk about it with the same confidence as someone who has, and perhaps with greater acumen, not having to get bogged down in messy details.

What a relief! I will attend my bookclub this month, with or without having the book, and I will give my opinion!

I know I’m not alone in hiding my non-reading. Particularly in the field of research, where we feel we should be reading everything related to our own research, it is hard to admit we aren’t. The most concrete piece of evidence I have that researchers fake it is at least 50% of the papers that reference my research have significantly misstated my research findings. If those authors are not reading my papers, then oh my gosh, who is??

a Gelaskin for my iPod Nano! (Pictured right and available here.)

Obviously I’m not blogging much and I’m only barely keeping up with my favorite blog, but I have seen some funny posts today. Cameron blogged about the things people hate the most. And Nelson blogged about how exhausting half-day language lessons can be, particularly when you must fit in a nap and a glass of wine all before dinner.

Mike and I just got back from vacation in Brazil, where we spent our time enjoying the sun and water, evaluating the quality of the caipirinhas, and worrying a great deal about where we would find our next brigadeiro. Exhausting. :)

Gender Genie is a genius because it figured out that my blog is written by a female and Josh Simon’s blog is written by a male. Ok, a sample size of 2 probably isn’t sufficient, which is why I’m blogging about it, hoping others will try it out and report back.

I’m fascinated because it just does a simple keyword analysis. I hate over simplifications and gender stereotypes, but apparently women use “with” and men use “around” in their posts.

UPDATE: I can stop the stereotyping! My female friend Andrea’s blog has been rated as male.

This is a very funny post on “Creating Passionate Users” that hits on one of my pet peeves about tech companies and tech conference and the XXL t-shirts they give out. In this age of trying to recruit and support a diverse workforce AND in this age of product specialization and customization, it seems rather backward to hand out t-shirts that only fit the XXL attendees. If you give out a fitted woman’s shirt, the women will not only take note that you consider them valid members of the community, they will also WEAR the darn shirt!

The point is showing us that you care about more than just saving a few bucks on a t-shirt print run. That you care about ALL your users, not just the Big Burly Men. And even if you do not care, you’d think the marketers would get a clue that people aren’t going to be wearing your logo around giving you free advertising if the shirt doesn’t fit. The bar’s been set pretty low on this, so even a MEN’S SMALL would make me happy.

I agree!

www.BostonScienceAndEngineeringLectures.com is a time-sorted list of lectures going on in and around the Boston area. Reading through the list of lectures reminds me how much I miss being on a college campus every day. This site might be good to check out if you happen to be near a campus, particularly MIT, and have some time to indulge in a lecture.

Teaser: Sept 28, 11a-1p. Steve Wozniak will discuss and sign copies of his autobiography, IWoz. MIT: 50, Morss Hall. Details

[Got this link from Josh Simons.]

My mother needs some good old-fashioned linkage to her newly-launched website.

She hosts a radio call-in show on Stanford University's KZSU (90.1 FM) called What Would Your Mother Say?. It airs live on Thursdays, 5-6PM, PST.

If you know any college-aged kids who are looking for motherly advice, but don't really want to ask their own mother for it, tell them to ask my mom! She and her panel of mothers are ready and waiting.

Ever wish you could harness the heat collecting in your car and do something useful with it? You can! You can bake cookies on your dashboard! “When you open the door to that car, it's like, oh, my God. It's a wonderful smell.”

This comes from a very cool blog called Street Use:

This site features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology. Herein a collection of personal modifications, folk innovations, street customization, ad hoc alterations, wear-patterns, home-made versions and indigenous ingenuity. In short — stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As William Gibson said, “The street finds its own uses for things.” I welcome suggestions of links, and contributions from others to include in this compendium. — KK

Another cool blog, in the same creative, yet domestic, vein, is called CRAFT. It is an off-shoot from the new CRAFT Magazine, published by O'Reilly, the makers of MAKE magazine.

The Robot Hall of Fame just inducted their newest class of Robots. The RHF commemorates the contributions of fictional and real robots, and the induction ceremony is a great mix of sci-fi buffs and robotics researchers.

I attended the 2004 induction ceremony and got to shake hands with both C3-PO (Anthony Daniels) and ASIMO. Lots of fun! This year I'm most excited about Gort, because that is the name of my home computer. But AIBO is definitely another worthy inductee.

This article gives a full description of the robots and the ceremony: Robot Hall Of Fame Inducts Gort, Sony's AIBO.

You can nominate your favorite robot for induction here!

The dog of Sun Labs researcher Nicole Yankelovich is responsible for cleaning up Sun.com's website. Pretty funny!

Stale Web Content Sniffed Out by Pet Dog

I think this alone justifies the existence of a corporate research lab!
(joke, joke)