Feliz Navidad

We wish you a Merry Christmas

We wish you a Merry Christmas

We wish you a Merry Christmas

And a Happy New Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I probably won't have time to post on Christmas, and I'd never remember to post this after, so I will wish everyone a Happy Holidays right now.  Here's to a fabulous 2010!

I can't believe I had to do this.

Today I had to put a laminated sign on my door.  It reads:  "This is room 25.1, a student room.  If you are looking for your guest room, please go next door to staircase 24 for room 24.1."

Why did I do this?  Well, on four different occasions this term, college guests have tried to get into my room.  They've either practically followed me in as I was going in myself, or I could hear them sticking the key in the door late at night.  I don't even have to ask what they're doing any more:  I just stick my head out the door and say, "You're looking for the staircase next door."

I wonder why this has happened so often this year.  I lived in this room last year and it never happened.  Maybe it is because we have so many new porters this year?  Are they directing people to the wrong staircase?

Weird.

Catching a (Google) Wave

I got an invite for Google Wave a while ago, and after I joined, I didn't use it that much.  It turns out that if you want to make the most of Google Wave, you have to know other people who are on it as well.  And since I didn't know many people with whom I'd want to "collaborate," I didn't see any real reason for it.

Today I logged on and found out that Google had given me eight invitations for Wave.  I sent out a Twitter/Facebook status asking who wanted them, and was soon bombarded by randoms on Twitter asking for one.

And then it hit me:  if you want Google Wave to be useful, you have to approach it in a way that will make it useful for you.  That means two major things:

1.) Don't look for invites in random places online.  Would you ever get in contact with these random people again?  Instead, ask around to your friends and co-workers to see who might have an invite.  If you're really desperate for an invite and no one you know has one, look for invites in places that have people you might collaborate with.  If you're a blogger, for example, looking for invites from fellow bloggers of the same genre (mommy blogs, sci-fi blogs, academic blogs) might yield you some interesting contacts.  Because otherwise, you're going to log on and see maybe three people you know, and none of them are people who would interact with each other, and then what's the point compared to email?

2.) If you have invites to give out, don't just throw them out to random people.  When I got my eight invitations today, I decided to give priority to people I know and would most likely interact with on Wave.  The first three went out to people I used to work with (and am friends with) and still do contract work with occasionally.  Another one went out to someone the four of us interact with, because we thought he would find it useful.  And the last four went out to friends and fellow bloggers.  Now I actually feel like I have enough contacts to really give it a go and put it to good use.

If you're on Google Wave and have no one to talk to, don't worry - it seems like the number of users is picking up now.  And with mere mortals (read: non-Google employees and non-developers like myself) being allowed to send invites, it's becoming more likely that you'll find someone you know on there.

I'd be interested to hear how people are putting Google Wave to use out there! 

Ch-ch-change

Living between two different countries for the past four or so years has given me a weird perspective on money. Sometimes I think in dollars, sometimes in pounds, sometimes in a weird combination of both. Whenever I travel to a Euro-using country, I never know how much anything costs because I can't remember if the exchange rate in my head is for pounds or dollars. It's kind of confusing.

But sometimes the exchange rate works in my favor in unexpected ways. Earlier this month, I bought a coat online from a British website. The coat cost £69, and I paid with my US credit card. It was too big, so I returned it and got a refund on my card.

The coat cost me $113.86 on my card. The refund was for $114.24.

And to make it even better, they now carry the coat in the local store, and it's £10 cheaper. Huzzah.

A-ha moment

So I'm working on a chapter of my thesis and I discovered a big note to myself: FIX REFERENCE. I look it up and discover that I originally cited an online version of Horace's The Art of Poetry as a placeholder and needed to go back and cite the hard copy instead, meaning I'd have to correct the wording to match my edition.

Here is the passage that I cited:

Poems in the main (I'm speaking to a father and his excellent sons)
are baffled by the outer form of what's right. I strive to be brief,
and become obscure; I try for smoothness, and instantly lose
muscle and spirit; to aim at grandeur invites inflation;
excessive caution or fear of the wind induces grovelling.
The man who brings in marvels to vary a simple theme
is painting a dolphin among trees, a boar in the billows.
Avoiding a fault will lead to error if art is missing.

-Horace, Ars Poetica, in The Satires of Horace and Perseus, trans. by Niall Rudd (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), ll. 24-31, p. 122.

Why do I find this blog-worthy? Because I think it's good advice for how I should approach my thesis. Sometimes I try too hard to meet certain style requirements (length, not citing too much, etc.) and I lose out on actually making a decent point. Style for style's sake doesn't work. It's important, but you also need an argument.

I *knew* I was reading this stuff for a reason!