Rewinding
It’s Alumni Weekend! I’m in Chicago for a few days to commune with my brethren - other nostalgic University of Chicago alumni. I arrived in Hyde Park this afternoon in the middle of a downpour and thought, how lovely! Maybe it’s all the travel this month; maybe it’s my frustrations with the University of Michigan. Whatever the cause(s), I’m happy to be here.
I spent a little over an hour reading Lucy Suchman’s new book – Human-Machine Reconfigurations – in the 4th floor stacks of the Reg (that’s the Regenstein Library to the rest of you). The smell was familiar. The strange turnings on and off of large banks of lighting were familiar. The odd look I got from a student I passed on my way out was familiar. She looked confused, and I’m sure it’s because I was in the stacks for only an hour. Only the weak leave the Reg so soon after their arrivals. The library was teeming with Maroons studying for finals and writing final papers. I’m willing to bet that the average size of the studying-Maroon book stack is a good two times as tall as the studying Michigan undergrad. I see a lot of UMich undergrads in the UGLi, and they don’t seem to carry around nearly as many tomes as the Maroons. The cute peeps in their glasses and rumpled hair with giant stacks of literature and criticism got my blood pumping, that’s for sure. The Reg during finals is like the Red Light District for nerds. Hot!
Why did I leave so soon, you wonder? Well, two reasons really. One is that the wireless network in the stacks is soooo sloooooow. I had to borrow credentials from a current student just to get access, and I wasn’t able to get Travelocity to load in any reasonable amount of time. So, I guess it’ll be another few hours until I can obsess over the price of flights from Detroit to Newark. The real reason I left though is that I was craving Jimmy’s French fries. Leaving the library for French fries may not make much sense to those of you not familiar with the culinary wonders of Hyde Park. Every one else, rest assured, the fries at Jimmy’s are as good as you remember them. I had a gooey grilled cheese (no pickle) and a small order of fries, and it was like I’d traveled six years back in time. I’m holding down the fort in the non-smoking room. I don’t know why more people don’t sit in here; it has the windows and is smoke-free. There’s even a Crown Royal mirror on the wall. What’s not to love?
Tomorrow I’ll be in meetings all day with the University’s admissions staff and other Alumni Schools Committee volunteers. We read anonymized applications in preparation for our mock admissions committee exercises tomorrow. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t get in to the College now, and I’m more sure than ever that my high school did not adequately prepare me for an elite undergraduate education. I’ll likely ruminate on that more later.
Now, it’s back to The Onion. I’d forgotten that one can pick up the Onion and the Reader in the vestibule of the Reynolds Club (Chicago’s student union). Just another thing I liked better about the RC than I do the Michigan Union. Ah. Nostalgia.
The Treo 755p and how it makes me angry
I let a manager at Wireless Toyz talk me into trying a Palm Treo 755p with Sprint. What a stupid mistake. I was perfectly happy with T-Mobile; I just needed a new phone. I should've gone back to the Blackberry Pearl that I had at the beginning of the month and been happy. Instead, I decided to give a full-figured PDA a try, and I've been angry about it every since. Here are some of the reasons the 755p is not for me:
- Sprint doesn't work with SpinVox, and SpinVox may be my favorite thing of 2007
- Treos and Macs do not get along easy (total time to set up syncing: 3.5 hours)
- the 755p is a brick; it's so heavy my pants sag when it's in my pocket
- It takes 2 hands to accomplish most tasks with the 755p
- Sprint is insanely expensive - $105/month for voice, data, text messaging
- You can't download pictures from the Treo to your desktop; you have to go through Sprint Picture Mail
- The default ring tones are all bad.
- Chat help from Palm is not available for Mac users
And those are just the 8 I could think of right away. Argh! Do not buy a 755p if you are a Mac user or value your time. I can't speak to the Windows side, but getting iSync to work took 3.5 hours and a hard reboot of the 755p. I'm exhausted and irritated and still can't tell if my contacts made it over to the device. Boo!
Trip to Bay Area
I returned this morning from a short trip to the Bay Area. My trip was quite fun, despite a minor setback of car sickness on California Highway 175. You can see pics from my trip on Flickr.
I saw the Rockies beat the Giants in 10 innings. Barry Bonds hit home run #746. Go, Barry, go!
One of the highlights of the trip were a day in Lake County with Meggie, Siddhartha, and Christian. Lake County is north of Napa and west of Mendocino. It's very beautiful and has a variety of non-pretentious wineries. We spent some time at Ceago - a biodynamic winery with wonderfu lavendar fields and a great view of Clear Lake. Lake County's pretty far from the Bay Area (3+ hours for first-time visitors), and if you don't know people there, it may not be worth it.
Tuesday I had the day to myself, so I rented a Ford Focus and wandered the area. Lunch with Beth in Mountain View was tasty. I headed to San Jose to check out The Tech Museum of Innovation. It's a pretty cool place, and I wish I'd had more time. I do not recommend the IMAX movie Mystic India. It was kinda boring and didn't have much exciting IMAX footage. I might've learned something about India though; we'll see what I'm able to remember down the road.
I needed to get from San Jose to Redwood City for dinner with Eileen, and I took the scenic route along 280, 92, and Route 1. Yes, it's also the roundabout way. I wanted to see some ocean, so I went through Half Moon Bay and drove up Route 1 through Devil's Slide to Daly City. The ocean smells wonderful and is remarkably calming. It was a great way to wind down from a busy weekend.
Coming soon: a love letter to Anonymous Donor
I just received an email from the President of the University of Chicago announcing that an anonymous donor, an alumnus from the 1980's, has agreed to a $100 million gift to the University in support of undergraduate scholarships for students whose family incomes are less than $75,000. I am floored. To whomever the anonymous donor is, "Thank you!" By providing such a generous and exciting gift, this donor has made a University of Chicago education available to deserving students who need his help. I'm so excited that I'm nearly speechless.
Thank you, anonymous. What a wonderful gift!
Drafts – new section of libbyh.com
This morning I started a new page called "Drafts" that you can access from the right navigation bar. I intend to keep that page updated periodically with drafts of papers on which I'm currently working. Yan Chen rallied a bunch of us to join her at SI North on Friday mornings to sit and write for an hour. This proved to be a very useful practice today, and I hope to attend many more "writer jams." You can expect updates to the drafts section on Fridays, I think.
Back from Connections 2007
I made some notes during the Connections 2007 conference about things I should post to my blog, and I'm just getting around to doing so. The conference was very useful - especially in forcing me to prepare a coherent presentation - and I recommend it to other iSchool doctoral students. Some things I noticed:
Grad students are good speakers
Plenty of people complain about the inability of most academics to give interesting talks or appropriately use PowerPoint or similar tools. The students who presented at Connections were a couple standard deviations above the mean. Their slides had the right amount of text; their diagrams were illustrative. They seemed knowledgeable and prepared and did a thorough and thoughtful job answering questions. I hope we can all keep those presentation skills as we continue into "real" jobs. Even presentations about work far from my own had me paying attention. It was a lovely, welcome change from other conferences I've attended.
Presentation room setup is a pain
I like to move around while I present, and that was just not an option this time. Please, when designing rooms for presentations, use mobile mics (or proper acoustics that don't require mics to reach the back row), put the podium on wheels so it can be turned to accommodate remote controls, and don't require that the speaker be in the dark in order for slides to be visible. I have many other pet peeves about presentation room setup, but these three were the most troublesome during this particular presentation. I'm a Mac owner and Keynote user. I like to use one word per slide. It's important for me to be able to move around and still use my remote. I'm also pretty loud. So a room where people in the back row can't hear me has sound issues.
Keynote rocks
I love Keynote. It's presentation view and rehearse options dominate the competition. It's easy to make slides and to insert pictures and other files. I'm officially switching.
Bendable concrete is not my passion
More on this later. I presented some discussions of diffusion of innovations and identity based on what I'm seeing in the bendable concrete project. While I find those theoretical frameworks interesting, I'm not sure how sustainable my interest in the bendable concrete project really is. I understand that one must wax and wane during a dissertation, but it seems early in the game for me to be waning every time I hear about something more exciting. If you have recommendations for more personally exciting places for me to study innovation, collaboration, communities of practice, and/or identity, please share them. I'm still mad at Bill Frist for making my poker studies impossible. Stupid online gaming finance laws.
Newsflash: Girl beats Word at its own game
Word tries to make my life complicated. I've tried LaTeX, OpenOffice, TextWrangler, and a variety of other Word workarounds, but the network effects dominate, and I always end up back in Word. Today, I won a very small victory.
When one copies text from some other application and then pastes it into Word, by default, the text pastes as it appears. This drives me crazy. You might wonder why. Well, I'm a rigorous "style" user, and I would much prefer that text be pasted to look like the rest of the text rather than to stand out. For example, when I want to put a URL in my notes, Word inevitably pastes it in giant serif font. That looks ridiculous in my small, sans serif notes. I can solve this problem by choosing "Paste Special" from the "Edit" menu, but I don't like to use a touchpad if I don't have to. There's no keyboard shortcut for "Paste Special." Until now!
My small victory was to make a macro that makes "Paste Special" the default rather than the exception. Simply recording a macro didn't work. I had to hack it. It's a 2 line hack, but a hack nonetheless. Here is the code you need to get Word (at least on a Mac) to Paste Special by default:
Sub EditPasteSpecial()
'
' EditPasteSpecial Macro
' Macro recorded 5/19/07 by Libby Hemphill
'
Selection.PasteSpecial Link:=False, DataType:=wdPasteTextEnd Sub
Thanks, Herb Tyson, for the solution.
Drag queens and king sized beds
You may be wondering what those two things have in common. It's simple, really. They are both things that my four days in Philadelphia have that my life in Ann Arbor does not.
I'm in Philadelphia for a few days so I may attend Connections 2007. I'm presenting innovation diffusion research on Saturday morning. I'll post my presentation sometime this weekend so you can see what I had to say. The conference looks pretty interesting, and I'm looking forward to the chance to meet other iSchool grad students.
The drive from Ann Arbor to Philadelphia is not one I'd recommend. Police in Ohio have nothing to do, apparently, and so they set up shop every 500 feet on the turnpike. I drove from Ann Arbor to the Pennsylvania border, and my heart was pounding the whole time. I'm sure you all know how hard it is for me to obey speed limits, and so you must understand. I also drove us from the Lancaster Plaza to the Comfort Inn, and that portion of the trip was enjoyable despite the late rush hour traffic they have here. Traffic makes me feel urban, so I don't mind it in cities outside Ann Arbor. Well, that's not entirely true; the Dan Ryan project makes me pretty cranky.
Our hotel is next to the Ben Franklin bridge, and what a beautiful structure! I'll take a bunch of pictures and post them here next week. It's blue and wonderful. I like to think that I would've liked it even if I didn't study bridge building.
The drag show Jude and I saw was at Bob and Barbara's on South Street. Apparently they host this show every Thursday night. I have to say the drag king was much better than most of the drag queens we saw. Pictures to come. Bob and Babara's has a crazy drink special - a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a shot of Jim Beam for $3. Yes, that's just three American dollars. You may be thinking that such a combination would lead to a night of drunken horribleness. At first, I worried about that too. Then, I drank my Jim Beam and realized that no, such a combination ensured sobriety. Jim Beam burns and does not taste good. PBR is one of my favorite domestics, but I couldn't even finish my can after that shot. It was a cheap night out with decent entertainment. Thanks, Philadelphia!
Now my cheap night is over, and I'm retiring to my king size bed. I should look in to getting one of these. It's quite lovely. Although the folks over at bettersleep.org seem to think a king size bed is for couples and/or people with children (and that single sleepers should get queens), let me speak for all the other single, childless people out there when I say, "We deserve roomy sleeping accommodations too!" Sleep well, all!
Coming full circle
Remember way back in 2000 when I started working at Hubbard Online? They later became Hubbard One, and then eventually were snapped up by Thomson. John Fish, Hubbard's man-in-charge at the time, had a brother who owned some coffee shops in their native SE Michigan. At least, I think it was his brother. Anyway, Bob Fish owned some coffee shops called BEANER'S, and he wanted a website. So, at some point that first year, I was tasked with building him one. It was a bear bones HTML job handed off from the excellent Hubbard designers to the company's newest intern. Beaner's (I'm protesting their egregious use of capital letters) wasn't the first site I worked on, but it was certainly near the beginning of my Hubbard tenure. Now, here we are, 7 years later, and I'm sitting in a Beaner's coffee shop in Ann Arbor, MI, working on my dissertation proposal. Someone at Hubbard, or some other web shop, has updated their site since it was first built, but seeing it and sitting here gave me a bit of nostalgia.
I learned many things while at Hubbard - ASP, .NET, database architecture, how to eat lunch in the loop for less than $5, JavaScript, that project management is enticing, all kinds of things. The skills that have come in most handy lately, though, are those I acquired during breaks and over lunch while I was schooled at the foosball table. During my summer as an intern, I had a bunch of free time during which the other interns and many of the systems guys and developers would beat up on each other at the company foosball table. That poor table endured a lot of abuse, and I'm sure it was a party to more secrets than any other piece of furniture in the place. My favorite foosball memory was Chris yelling, "I love myself!" after making a particularly impressive shot. I think that happened during the last company tournament in which I competed.
Thanks to Microsoft Research, we have a foosball table at SI North as well. This table is much more well-built than the one at Hubbard, but it doesn't see nearly as much action. I'd like to see some revival of the SI North foosball "community." I understand that there are a few of us who rarely, if ever, lose, but that shouldn't prevent anyone from challenging any of us. I'm willing to clear the database and start everyone off with a clean slate in the foosball ladder. Maybe we'll even see a school tournament later in the summer. Until people at SI North start playing again, you can find me schooling cocky wanna-bes at Leopold Bros. and in Bill's basement.
What's my point, you ask? Well, I wanted you all to know that even though summer internships often feel like a waste, they are not. You may get lucky like I did and learn not only how to build web apps but also how to talk smack and score goals on an angle. See you at the tables!